Titus and Berenice

In 1670, Henriette d’Anglaterre, daughter of the lamented Charles I of England, staged a bloodless fight in Paris: France’s two greatest dramatists were to write and stage within a week two competing plays on the subject of a Jewish queen and her love affair with the son of the pretender to the Roman imperial throne. The event sparked tens of thousands of European works: drama, painting, poetry, sculpture. But who was Berenice, and who was Titus? What world did they inhabit? What values guided them, what dilemmas troubled them?  See the panorama of the ancient world at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple.