Executing John the Baptist

[Jona Lendering]

if he needed to make explanation, something like "It was to keep order, and the king told me to do it, etc., etc." would be plenty sufficient. Heck, any soldier who was attacked in any way was already authorized to defend himself with deadly force if needed, right?

I'm not quite convinced, yet. In the first place, our man was not attacked. In the second place, the use of violence was restricted: Pilate was pensioned off after he had attacked the disciples of the Samaritan prophet. When a prefect had to accept limitations to his powers, a speculator can not have been above the law either.

In the third place, his obeying the order was not in Rome's interest. Antipas was acting like a drunkard: no father in Antiquity would have allowed his daughter -a girl of six or seven years old!- to dance in front of strangers. Refusing the king's order would have been acceptable, and -as the events were to show- smarter: the masses became restless, something that will not have pleased the Roman governor in Syria.

I think that the man in Damascus, whose successor was to pension off Pilate for a lesser mistake, may have regretted what had happened, and I think that it is possible that he said to the speculator: "Please think twice before you accept orders from a foreigner".

Knowing the Roman fondness for legal subtilities (Pliny's letters to Trajan are full of them), I think it is not too bizarre to assume that the man who killed the Baptist was reprimanded for accepting orders from a foreign (and possible drunken) foreigner. But it would be nice if we had parallel sources about Roman soldiers attached to foreign courts.