The next year, B.C. 54, the prefect was recalled to Rome, where numerous charges of rapacity and extortion were preferred against him, and though defended by Cicero he was ignominiously banished[68]. The celebrated triumvir Marcus Crassus now succeeded to the prefecture of Syria, a man of mean abilities, but enormous wealth, and unbounded avarice. Armed like Pompeius with proconsular authority for five years, and empowered to maintain as large a force as he might see fit, and to carry on wars without consulting the senate and people of Rome, Crassus resolved on entering upon a war with Parthia. Hurrying to his province, with some of the troops he had already collected, he entered Jerusalem, attracted by the well-known fact that the treasury of its Temple contained 2,000 talents, equivalent to nearly £2,000,000 sterling, besides vessels of gold and silver to an almost equal amount. The Jews were powerless to resist his intentions, but Eleazar, the guardian of the Temple, offered him a solid bar of gold weighing nearly 1000 pounds, concealed in a beam of wood, on condition that he left the rest of the treasures untouched. Crassus solemnly promised to be satisfied with this huge ingot, took it, and then, in defiance of his plighted faith, robbed the Temple of all the treasures he could lay his hands on, not sparing even the sacred vessels. The total amount he carried off is said to have been worth upwards of 10,000 Attic talents, and consisted of the gifts and offerings which during a hundred years the annual contributions of Jews from well-nigh every quarter of the world had amassed[69]. He then set out against the Parthians, crossed the Euphrates, and plunged into the sandy deserts of Mesopotamia, to be defeated with the loss of nearly his entire army at the disastrous battle of Carrhæ, B.C. 53.
_ANTIPATER AND HEROD; JULIUS CÆSAR AND ANTONIUS._ B.C. 53–41.
MISFORTUNE seemed to follow in the footsteps of every Roman general that interfered in the affairs of Judæa. Gabinius was ignominiously exiled, Crassus perished miserably in a foreign land, and now the disastrous issue of the battle of Pharsalia, B.C. 48, drove Pompeius to the shores of Egypt, there to perish by the blow of an assassin.