Herod and Mariamne

A story of failed redemption and failed love, Mariamne is the tale of an unresolved passion between two opposites. A son of the desert, the great king Herod bears within himself the mark of that land where Sodom and Gomorrah once stood, its solitude and its savage primordial nature. Only in the excesses of pleasure, the fury of battle, the "lust of killing and the ensuing intoxication of feeling alive," in possessing and dominating, does he find temporary satisfaction for his restless thirst for life. But one day, "on the road to Damascus," Herod meets Mariamne, and from that moment on, for him, "nothing will ever be the same again. "The beautiful, fragile, gentle Mariamne, "dressed in silver," the embodiment of goodness in a cruel world, and of an innate harmony of life that is not humanly inherited ("she was like a tree"), will agree to become his wife out of compassion, driven by the illusion of being able to do good, and by that "need to sacrifice" that pity inspires in her. But she will never be able to love him: although somehow attracted by Herod's furious passion, her very purity, her invulnerability to evil, does not allow her to undergo the metamorphosis that only love could bring about. Mariamne remains for him only the intuition of a different dimension, like that temple "more splendid than Solomon's" that he has built to a God in whom he does not believe. And when a comet appears in the sky of Judea, Herod will be able to see nothing but the infinite desolation of the starry night.

A story of failed redemption and failed love, Mariamne is the tale of an unresolved passion between two opposites. A son of the desert, the great king Herod bears within himself the mark of that land where Sodom and Gomorrah once stood, its solitude and its savage primordial nature. Only in the excesses of pleasure, the fury of battle, the "lust of killing and the ensuing intoxication of feeling alive," in possessing and dominating, does he find temporary satisfaction for his restless thirst for life. But one day, "on the road to Damascus," Herod meets Mariamne, and from that moment on, for him, "nothing will ever be the same again. "The beautiful, fragile, gentle Mariamne, "dressed in silver," the embodiment of goodness in a cruel world, and of an innate harmony of life that is not humanly inherited ("she was like a tree"), will agree to become his wife out of compassion, driven by the illusion of being able to do good, and by that "need to sacrifice" that pity inspires in her. But she will never be able to love him: although somehow attracted by Herod's furious passion, her very purity, her invulnerability to evil, does not allow her to undergo the metamorphosis that only love could bring about. Mariamne remains for him only the intuition of a different dimension, like that temple "more splendid than Solomon's" that he has built to a God in whom he does not believe. And when a comet appears in the sky of Judea, Herod will be able to see nothing but the infinite desolation of the starry night.