ABSTRACT
. When the Roman army marched away with Antigonus as a prisoner, Herod’s title of “King” was no longer empty. He was “the master of a city in ruins and the king of a nation that hated him.” His long, eventful reign was a complex of brilliant achiever ments and fearful crimes. His hands were never free from the stain of blood, and yet those hands made Jerusalem glorious in the architecture of palace and temple, and changed the face of the land by many a costly improvement. The very Hellenism which, in its extreme form, Antiochus Epiphanes had tried to force upon the nation, was in all its secular features established by Herod in various parts of the land, and that, too, without a single uprising. The theatre and amphitheatre formed a part of the attractions of the capital, whose court life and interests kept the city in touch with the outside world. Almost within sound of the solemn service of worship, in the temple, took place furious chariot races and the cruel, demoralizing fights of foreign gladiators; while heathen temples at Paneas and Cæsarea showed how like in faith to the mad Antiochus this” Idumean slave,” as the Jews called him, really was. Indeed, the sharp contrasts that might be seen in the life of Jerusalem were but symbolical of the contrasts in the character of Herod himself. He was intensely selfish and yet could be splendidly generous; he was strong in purpose, and yet the easy victim of weakening suspicions; he loved the means of culture and yet revealed the revengeful cruelty of a veritable barbarian.
