Salome, daughter of Herodias, is known for dancing seductively for her stepfather Herod Antipas and requesting the head of John the Baptist as a reward. Her story has been portrayed in various works of art and literature, with different interpretations of her motives.
Salome was the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee and Perea, around the end of the 1st century AD. She appears in the New Testament in Matthew 14:6-8 and Mark 6:22, although she is not named. In the Bible, as in most scholarly literature of the time, she is referred to as the Daughter of Herodias.
Salome’s mother Herodias displaced and alienated many of her subjects by divorcing Salome’s father Herod II and marrying her brother Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee. Such an act was prohibited under the Jewish marriage law of the time and considered by some to be incest. According to the Gospels, John the Baptist was one of Herodias’ most vocal critics. Herodias then persuaded Salome to dance seductively for Antipas and to ask for the head of John the Baptist as a reward.
The story of the girl who could dance so captivatingly that she carried out an execution as her reward has captured the imagination of many artists and writers over the years. Many have also used fiction to speculate about Salome’s true motives, as she appears in the Bible as nothing more than a pawn in his mothering scheme. In Massenet’s 1881 work Herodias, based on a novella by Gustave Flaubert, Salome is portrayed as an innocent follower of John the Baptist who commits suicide after his death. In his 1891 French play Salome, Oscar Wilde attributes Salome’s request to her unrequited lust for John the Baptist.
Salome’s dance has also received extensive treatment in art, from paintings by Titian, Moreau, and Klimt, among others, to the famous dance scene in Strauss’ opera Salome, based on Wilde’s play. Salome is said to have won her father-in-law’s heart with the Dance of the Seven Veils, in which he wore seven veils which were removed one by one during the course of the dance. Tom Robbin’s novel Lean Legs and All also uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as a theme and includes a memorable dance scene.
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