King Herod, rightly reviled by Jews and Christians alike, sponsored magnificent construction projects throughout the land of Israel—including the renovation of the Second Temple and the construction of the city of Caesarea and palace-fortresses at Jericho and Herodium. Of the last-named, David Laskin writes:
Halfway up an artificial mountain that the king had conjured from the desert for his final resting place, I stood gazing at what was left of the royal mausoleum: a couple of courses of limestone blocks as exquisitely faceted as jewels. Below, the arcing rows of a Roman theater descended in diminishing semicircles to the disc of the stage. Everything around me, even the contours of the earth itself, had been altered at the decree of this ancient ruler. Time has toppled the columns and blurred the carvings, but the majesty (and hubris) of this place remain intact.
Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem may be more transcendent and his mesa-top retreat at Masada more spectacular, but Herodium (about ten miles south of Jerusalem) was where I channeled the spirit of the man. I was also channeling the spirit of a monster. From 37 to 4 BCE, Herod the Great (not to be confused with a slew of lesser heirs and successors who shared his name) ruled Judea with a bloody, iron fist. Though the account by the Gospel writer Matthew of an “exceeding wroth” Herod slaughtering the innocents of Bethlehem is probably apocryphal, the king did murder a wife, a mother-in-law, and three sons, along with untold numbers of enemies and rivals.
Yet he was one of the world’s great builders—an instinctive architectural genius who planned, sited, sourced and landscaped magnificent structures of classical antiquity. Epic was his preferred scale. No project was too ambitious or daring, whether it was throwing up a city from scratch or replacing Judaism’s holiest site from the ground up. Judea rejoiced when Herod died, but I found myself breathless with admiration after a week spent tracking his footsteps.
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/travel/herod-the-greats-israel.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0