The life and work of St. Paul

A MARTYRDOM AND A BETKIBUTION. 179
Why should not he accept the apotheosis BO abjectly obtruded on a Caligula
or a Claudius P He accepted the blasphemous adulation, which, as a King of
the Jews, he ought to have rejected with indignant horror. At that very
moment his doom was sealed. It was a fresh instance of that irony of
heaven which often seems to place men in positions of superlative gorgeousness
at the very moment when the fiat is uttered which consigns them to the
most pitiable and irrecoverable fall. 1
There was no visible intervention. No awful voice sounded in the ears
of the trembling listeners. No awful hand wrote fiery letters upon the wall.
St. Luke says merely that the angel of God smote him. Josephus introduces
the grotesque incident of an owl seated above him on one of the cords which
ran across the theatre, which Agrippa saw, and recognised in it the predicted
omen of impending death. 2 Whether he saw an owl or not, he was carried
from the theatre to his palace a stricken man stricken by the hand of God.
In five days from that time five days of internal anguish and vain despair, 8
in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and the fourth of his reign over the entire
dominion of his grandfather Agrippa died. And whatever may be the
extent to which he had won the goodwill of the Jews by his lavish benefactions,
the Gentiles hated him all the more because he was not only a Jew but
an apostate. A consistent Jew they could in some measure tolerate, even
but for these hybrid renegades they always express an
while they hated him ;
unmitigated contempt. The news of Agrippa's death was received by the
population, and especially by the soldiers, both at Csesarea and Sebaste with
feastings, carousals, and every indication of indecent joy. Not content with
crowning themselves with garlands, and pouring libations to the ferryman of
the Styx, they tore down from the palace the statues of Agrippa's daughters,
and subjected them to the most infamous indignities. The foolish inertness
of Claudius left the insult unpunished, and these violent and dissolute soldiers
contributed in no small degree to the evils which not many years afterwards
burst over Judaea with a storm of fire and sword.*
1 See Bishop Thirlwall's Essay on the Irony of Sophocles.
2 He says that an owl was sitting on a tree on the day of Agrippa's arrest at Capreae,
and that a German soothsayer had foretold that he should become a king, hut should bo
near his death when he saw that owl again. See also Euseb. H.E. ii. 10, who substitutes
the angel for the owl.
8 JOS. Antt. xix. 8, $ 2, ynorpoj oAyiJ/otao-i 8i*pya