In the foremost ranks of classic claimants may be placed the false Alexander, who claimed the Jewish crown under the pretence of being a son of Herod Antipas. Herod, although tributary to the Roman empire, raised the Jewish kingdom to a higher pitch of grandeur than it had reached since the days of Solomon. Great, however, as were his military successes, and extraordinary the pomp and magnificence of his court, his tyranny and cruelty render the annals of his lengthy reign almost unreadable. The record of his crimes, as detailed by Josephus, equals in enormity the worst page of Roman history.
Amongst the relatives whom he singled out to inflict death upon were three of his own sons. Having accused his two sons by his second wife, the beautiful Marianne, of having plotted against his crown, he had them both arrested and condemned to death. After the barbarous execution of an old soldier, Tero, who had nobly pleaded the cause of the imprisoned princes, he sent them both--Alexander and Aristobulus--to Sebaste, a city in the vicinity of Caesarea, and caused them to be there strangled. After the execution of his sons, whose lives Herod had so embittered that, guilty or not of the terrible accusation made against them, their fate was deplored by many of their countrymen, he had their dead bodies brought to Alexandrium, and buried by the side of their maternal grandfather, Alexander.
About twelve years after the tragic death of the princely brothers, and when Herod himself had died in the horrible manner described by Josephus, the Hebrew nation, subdivided by its Roman lord, and infested by hordes of robbers, afforded a good opening for a royal claimant; and accordingly one appeared.
A Jew resident in Sidon, greatly resembling Alexander, the elder of the deceased brothers, in features, was persuaded by a Roman freedman, with whom he had been brought up, to personate the late prince. Before airing his pretensions, the claimant obtained the assistance of a countryman of his who was well versed in the affairs of the kingdom, and under his instructions the pseudo Alexander came forth from his obscurity with a plausible story of how the persons commissioned to execute him and his brother Aristobulus had compassion upon them, and putting dead bodies in their place, had allowed them to escape. As usual, a credulous multitude believed in the impostor, and from the Cretan Jews he and his fellow plotters reaped a rich harvest. Furnished with money, he next sailed to Mitylene, where he obtained a further supply of cash, and persuaded some of the believers in his identity to accompany him to Rome, where he probably expected the Emperor Augustus would assist him to obtain possession of the kingdom of Judea; although Josephus strangely asserts that he went to Rome in hopes of avoiding detection.