The Seventh Veil of Salome

Historically, Salome was a princess of the Herodean dynasty, the daughter of Herod II and Herodias. Salome’s grandfather, Herod the Great, and her stepfather, Herod Antipas (a significant character in The Seventh Veil of Salome, referred to as King Herod) both figures in the Christian Bible. Herod the Great was the ruling king at the time of Jesus’s birth, and Herod Antipas was the ruling king while John the Baptist was active as a prophet. Salome is mentioned in the Christian Bible (although not named) and also in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus.

Herod the Great was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in approximately 40 BCE; although his family had converted to Judaism, he was not ethnically Jewish. Herod the Great held his position because of the support he received from Rome (Roman forces had conquered Judea’s capital city, Jerusalem, in 63 BCE, rendering Judea a client kingdom of the Roman Republic). Herod the Great ruled until his death in 4 BCE, maintaining power despite a tumultuous political climate and volatile family dynamics. During his reign, Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire, and when Herod the Great died, Augustus (the first Roman emperor) was on the throne.

Herod the Great’s territory was divided between three of his sons: Philip, Herod Antipas, and Archelaus. Herod Antipas (the Herod who appears in The Seventh Veil of Salome) was granted territory including the region of Galilee (in present-day Israel and Lebanon). Herod Antipas also controversially divorced his first wife to marry Herodias, who had previously been married to his half-brother, Herod II (one of Herod the Great’s many other sons). Meanwhile Archelaus was granted territory including Jerusalem. Archelaus failed to successfully manage the populous and politically volatile city, leading Rome to appoint a procurator (a Roman administrative position) to manage the region. In the novel, Salome is depicted as the daughter of Archelaus rather than Herod II, who predeceased his father and thus did not inherit anything. This shift heightens the narrative tension and potential for rivalry between brothers as co-inheritors and romantic rivals when Herodias and Herod Antipas left their respective spouses to be together. It also furnishes the novel’s version of Salome with greater reason to feel she deserves to rule—an ambition Agrippa exploits.

The plot events depicted in The Seventh Veil of Salome take place around 30 CE, at which time Herod Antipas was ruling as a client king in Galilee, with a Roman procurator controlling Jerusalem, and Tiberius (Augustus’s successor) ruling as emperor in Rome. Historically, Herod Antipas ruled until 39 CE, when his nephew, Herod Agrippa (who appears in the novel under the name Agrippa), colluded to accuse him of conspiracy against Tiberius’s successor, Caligula. Both of Agrippa’s parents had been executed during his childhood due to political scheming and betrayals at the royal court, and he had largely grown up in Rome, where he developed close ties to important men within the Roman imperial family, including the Tiberius (who ruled from 14 CE to 37 CE) and Caligula (who ruled from 37 CE to 41 CE). As a result of Herod Agrippa’s actions, Herod Antipas was sent into exile, while Herod Agrippa leveraged his connections to the Roman imperial family to receive his territory in Galilee; he expanded his power further still after the Emperor Claudius came to the throne in 41 CE.

In her novel, Moreno-Garcia draws on some of these events by depicting Agrippa conspiring against his uncle, although historically this conflict took place significantly later than the execution of John the Baptist, and Salome was not involved in them. Historically, Agrippa and Salome were not married; she was married twice, first to her uncle Philip, and then to her cousin, a king named Aristobulus. She seems to have had sons with her second husband and lived alongside him as queen of a region known as Lesser Armenia. The historical Agrippa, meanwhile, married a woman named Cypros around 26 CE. The plotline around Agrippa and Salome working together to further their ambitions reflects how historical fiction allows for the historical record to be expanded, reimagined, or altered.