pillared Sebaste, the sea-washed Cæsarea he went up to the temples of Zeus and Artemis. The people knew all his ways. They told each other in the gateway, that the prince whom many Jews called their Messiah, had raised a shrine to Apollo in the Isle of Rhodes, and in the city of Antioch had revived the Olympic games; and they learned to curse him in their hearts, as a man who put strangers on a level with the holy race.

In like manner, this spirit of Pagan courtesy and conciliation failed between the Jewish sects, just as it failed between Jew and Greek. While he was rebuilding the great Temple on Moriah, Herod had given orders to rebuild the Samaritan temple in Gerizim. When he had married Mariamne, daughter of the popular high priest in Jerusalem, he offered his hand and throne to Malthace, one of the noblest maidens of Sebaste. These efforts to heal the great feud of ages only ended in vexing his friends and maddening his foes. The Samaritan priests could not forgive his being a Jew; the Jewish priests could not endure his Gerizim temple and his Samaritan wife.

Thus, a man who read Homer and Hesiod more than Micah and Jeremiah, and who was blind to many of the subtleties and distinctions of the Jewish faith, though he made himself master of the land by force, exhausted his genius in the vain attempt to make Syria into a nation on the principles of a cultured and liberal Greek.

Beyond the weaknesses which had their source in this tolerant condition of Herod's mind, his perThe Holy Land. I.

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sonal life was such as to estrange from him the sympathies of all good and honest men. In freedom of living, not less than in genius, valour, and success, he reproduced in Syria the image of an old Greek tyrant. Some writers have perceived a reflex of Herod in our own Henry the Eighth. That a few points of character and fortune may be found in the two men is not to be denied; but Henry had passed through a clean and winsome youth; while no part of the great Arab's life had ever been pure. If Herod had nine wives, all living at the same time, or near it, he had also a far greater number of favourites who were not his wives. The most famous of his many queens was Mariamne, the Maccabean; of his many concubines, Cleopatra, queen of Egypt: he murdered the first in his rage, and he coldly designed to betray the second to death. In his love affairs he was Egyptian rather than Jewish; for he took to his bed more than one woman who was nearer of kin to him than the Oral Law allowed. One of his wives was his brother's child, another was his sister's child.

One of his earliest crimes was that massacre of priests and nobles, seventy in number, on which he based his power. His private murders were uncounted; but it is matter of record that he caused his brother-in-law, Aristobulus, to be drowned; that he slew his wife's grandfather, Hyrcanus; that he killed his uncle Joseph and his sister's husband, Cortobanus; that he put Antipater, his own first-born son, to death. Household murder stained his hearth to the last. He not only took away the life of his

proud queen Mariamne, but strangled the two princes, Alexander and Aristobulus, his sons by her. He killed their aged grandmother, Alexandra. Some of his nearest friends and companions Dosetheus, Gadias, Lysimachus he either strangled or clove in twain. As age grew heavy upon him, and the dream of empire faded away, his indolent ferocity. increased, and the lightest fear that fell upon his heart provoked an order to shed blood. As he neared the grave, life seemed to have lost all beauty in his eyes. In every part of Palestine, aged men, unoffending women, young children, were put to the sword. Among other tragedies caused by his rage and fear, that swoop of soldiers on the city of Bethlehem, though it was one of the least, is the best remembered of all his crimes.

In the very year of that massacre of innocents, this splendid and wicked prince perished like a dog; dying in the great palace which he had built for himself in Jericho; not of old age, but of putrid sores; not in the midst of honour and respect, in the presence of wife and child, but surrounded by quarrelling kinsmen and conspiring slaves. One slave, named Simon, declaring himself the Jewish Messiah, placed the dead man's crown upon his brow, listed a troop of Arabs from Perea, plundered the royal palace of its treasures, and burnt the magnificent pile to its foundations. Many of the people hailed this slave as Christ and King; until Valerius Gratus, the Roman general, marching against him, overthrew his forces, and struck off his head.

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The great kingdom of Herod, recovered from a

slave and his gang of marauders by the Roman arms, was not destined to outlive him. Antipas Herod, his eldest son by his Samaritan queen, Malthace, got Galilee and Perea, with the Greek title of Tetrarch, ruler of a fourth part. Archelaus, a younger son of the same queen, had Samaria and Judea, with the Greek title of Ethnarch, ruler of a nation, and a promise from Cæsar, never to be redeemed, of the royal rank. Philip, one of his sons by his wife Cleopatra, received Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, all beyond Jordan, and some parts of Sharon near Jaffa, with the title of Tetrarch. Salome, sister of the great king, obtained Jamnia and Ashdod in the Plain of Sharon, with Phasaelus, a new city built by Herod in the Plain of Jericho. To make these rents and fissures in the kingdom more complete, the strong Greek cities of Gaza, Hippos, and Gadara were detached from the Jewish provinces in which they stood and which they held in check. Valerius Gratus, while appearing to be only zealous for Herod's kin, took care to arrange his kingdom so that its provinces could be annexed to the empire whenever it might suit the plans of his masters in Rome.

Genius, valour, courtesy, eloquence, and taste, had come to nothing, to worse than nothing, in Herod's hands. He had crushed the nobles, but he had not raised the multitude. In fighting against the intolerant spirit of the Oral Law, he had toiled to a noble end; but the means to that end were beyond his reach and perhaps beyond his conception. The way to unite a crowd of hostile sects into one

people, is not by pandering to every passion and delusion in its turn, but by kindling in the whole body of rivals a new spiritual passion hot enough to consume the old. Herod provided games, rites, comedies, architecture, for a society too much corrupted ever to become a nation except by being born afresh. To become one in heart, the Jew and the Greek required, not old shows, but a new spiritual life. But this new life of the spirit is a gift which kings and governors have not to give.