The Politics of Perfume

Roman had a problem. A huge city, people living on top of people, crowded streets and alleys. People who eat, sleep, and well get rid of what they ate through natural processes.

People who live in rural settings have space and fields and can bury today’s problem one place and tomorrow’s another. But city dwellers have no where to put their waste. In Rome, citizens emptied their chamber post out the window to the street. Streets were washed with water from the top down. But water is a precious commodity and doesn’t always cover the smell. No wonder the higher off the street living quarters always cost more money.

Something is needed to counteract odor. Perfume. Perfume in the ancient world became as precious as gold, maybe more.

The best source of perfume was in Yemen, down the Arabian Peninsula from Israel. Traders brought perfume up the road of the kings, across the Edomite kingdom, past Petra, past the Dead Sea, and north to the ports.

He who controlled the route of the perfume controlled the economy. Herod the Great was brutal, braggadocios, and brilliant. He was also the most outstanding architect of antiquity.

It was Herod who built a huge seaport at Caesarea where there was no natural harbor. It was Herod who took the top off one mountain and put it on another to build his Herodium. It was Herod who took the stronghold in the desert and built the fortress that is called Masada. Put a ruler on the map and these architectural wonders lie in a straight line from the source of perfume to the seaport.

Was Masada built originally to control the perfume trade? Who knows? It stands in the wilderness as a stronghold with many stories – the most famous happening long after Herod’s death. The final rebellion of the Jews was squelched by Rome at Masada in the early ‘70’s AD. It is at Masada that the Roman forces seiged for almost two years, finally breaking through the ramparts to find that the rebels had taken their own lives freely to escape slavery. There was food and water left in abundance, but Rome was cheated out of victory. Herod was long gone when this happened.

Power is a strange idol. Herod definitely worshiped power and perhaps controlling the perfume trace was one of his power plays. However the story is told, Herod, like the Roman forces, was cheated out of a victory.

He heard there was a king of the Jews born in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem, smack beside his Herodium fortress. He told the kings from the east to go find the king and come back to tell him where he was so that he “could go and worship also.”

The kings found the young king, worshipped, and left by another route without telling Herod anything. Infuriated, Herod ordered the massacre of all the little boys under two and the mothers of Bethlehem wept in bitterness.

But the little king and his parents had slipped away to Egypt. They financed the escape with perfume.