Herod the Great
Herod the Great was made king of the Jews by a vote of the Roman Senate, took his kingdom with Roman legions, kept it for thirty-three years by pleasing whichever Roman won, rebuilt the Temple on a scale that its ruins still show, and killed his wife, her mother, her brother and three of his sons. He was born about 72 BC, the son of Antipater, the Idumaean who had made himself the indispensable minister of the Hasmonean high priest Hyrcanus II and the friend of Caesar, and was governor of Galilee at twenty-five, where he hanged bandits without trial and was summoned before the Sanhedrin for it. When the Parthians overran Syria in 40 BC and installed Hyrcanus's nephew Antigonus in Jerusalem, Herod fled to Rome, where Antony and Octavian had the Senate name him king of a country he did not hold; he took it in 37 BC after a five-month siege of Jerusalem with the legions of Sosius, and Antony had Antigonus beheaded, the first king Rome executed. He married the Hasmonean princess Mariamne for the legitimacy and had her executed in 29 BC on a jealousy his sister fed. He was Antony's man until Actium, went to Octavian at Rhodes in 30 BC, told him he had been loyal to Antony and would be as loyal to him, and was confirmed with more territory. Then he built. Caesarea came first, with its harbour of poured concrete, the fortresses of Masada and Herodium, Samaria refounded as Sebaste for Augustus, temples to the emperor in the Greek cities, and from 20 BC the Temple in Jerusalem on a platform that doubled the mount, of which the Western Wall is a retaining wall. He fed the country in the famine of 25 BC from his own silver. The last decade was his household's war. He executed Mariamne's two sons in 7 BC and his eldest son Antipater in 4 BC, five days before his own death at Jericho, and Augustus is reported to have said he would rather be Herod's pig than his son. The massacre of the infants at Bethlehem is in Matthew and nowhere else. Augustus divided the kingdom among three surviving sons, and Judea became a Roman province within a decade.
- Lived: 72 BCE – 4 BCE
- Nationality: Idumaean
- Roles: king, monarch, builder
