Dan Snow's History Hit - King Herod

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual behaviour which may not be suitable for children.Appointed by the Romans as king of Judaea, King Herod's reign was defined by great architectural projects and canny diplomacy. But he could also be cruel and paranoid, with scandal and family intrigue marring his rule. King Herod even appears as an unlikely and unlikeable character in the Christmas tale; the king who ordered the execution of children in an effort to kill Jesus. But did this really happen?Dan is joined by Seth Schwartz, professor of Classical Jewish Civilisation at Columbia University, to explore the life of this ancient king, and the Hellenistic world in which he ruled.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was a time of violent upheaval in the Levant, what we call today the Middle East, in Syria, in Palestine. It was the first century BC. The Greek Hellenistic kingdom, who had ruled over the area since Alexander the Great conquered it from the Persians, lost out to the invading armies of the Roman Republic. The Romans in turn were driven out by the Parthians. Through that period, what we might call Judah today, which sits in modern Israel and the West Bank, had been ruled over by the Hasmoneans. They'd managed the area on behalf

of various overlords, empires that had come and gone. Among the retainers of the Hasmoneans, a figure emerged. His name was Herod. Following the conquest of this area by the Parthians, Herod convinced the Romans to back him, supply him with troops, and he would reconquer it, rule over a reconstituted kingdom under Rome's auspices. He succeeded and was crowned King Herod, infamous now in the Christian tradition as the unlikely, unlikable minor character in the Christmas tale, in which he allegedly massacres the innocents, killed all the children in Bethlehem in an effort to kill the baby Jesus after he heard that the future king of the Jews had been born in the area. But did that happen?

Or is it just a story that reflects his wider cruelty, his violence towards his own family and his enemies? We're doing a deep dive right here on the podcast, getting all about King Herod, the life and times. We're going to talk to Seth Schwartz. He's a professor of classical Jewish civilization in the Department of History at Columbia University. And Seth is going to tell us all about Herod, including whether or not he practiced necrophilia. We weren't expecting that. This is a story of a strange man trying to balance the impossibly complex politics of his kingdom with the need to stay in Rome's good books. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I've always been a bit confused about the status of the Kingdom of Judea.

How does it fit into the politics of the Mediterranean at the time? Okay, well, if we're talking about the time of Herod, the period of the kingship of Herod, the kingdom of Judea, I don't know if it actually had a name as such, but let's call it Judea for the sake of brevity. The kingdom of Judea was a creation of the Roman Senate in the period immediately before the end of the Roman civil wars and the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31. So Herod was named king in the year 40 BCE. The interesting thing about the year 40 is that the year 40 BCE was the year when the Parthians conquered Syria. That is, the Romans had been ruling Syria since 63 BCE, which marks the end of the Hellenistic period when the great General' chief competitor to the east across the Euphrates, conquered Syria. Herod fled to Rome and was welcomed into the Senate by Mark Antony and Octavian, who were running the show after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44. And he was named king. They gave him the title of king, and they didn't assign him a territory.

The reason they didn't assign him a territory was because the Romans didn't control the territory that Herod could have possibly ruled. So what they were really doing is they were giving him a task. They were saying, go home to the central southern Levant, conquer what you can, and it's yours. That's kind of empire on the cheap, right? They're outsourcing a little bit. and it's yours. That's kind of empire on the cheap, right? They're outsourcing a little bit. People often think that when it comes to the granular details, the Romans had a sort of grand plan of imperial expansion. And certainly if you pull the camera back far enough, they did in the aggregate have such a strongly expansionist orientation that it looks as if there was a grand plan. But in the facts on the ground,

things were very improvisatory. And it took at least a century, in fact, a little bit more from that point until the East, what was going to become the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. There isn't a Roman Empire yet. The Roman Empire is still in the future. The east of the Roman Empire was going to be transformed into a kind of standardized province governor responsible to the emperor in Rome, that kind of setup, which was basically imposed on most of the Roman West from the very beginning. In the Roman East, the trouble for the Romans was that they were coming to rule over these people whom they themselves regarded as more or less, in the Greek sense, political, civilized is the Latin equivalent of political. That is, people who already had pre-existing political organizations. They didn't recognize the so-called

tribal organizations of the people in the West as political. So they felt absolutely free to impose their political will on them and totally new patterns of organization. That is, they provincialized those places right away. In the East, they didn't provincialize right away. It took a century and more, really a century and a half of tinkering. And really, it looks up close, it's tinkering. They're just doing it on the fly. They're figuring out new arrangements. And where do they find this guy, Herod? Where's he from? And why do they choose him to be their agent of imperialism in this part of the world? Well, the Romans often chose people to rule in the eastern areas, which they had conquered, who were close to previous ruling

dynasties, but not identical with the previous ruling dynasties. So Herod came from, as far as we can tell, a very distinguished, presumably landowning family in what was called Idumea. Idumea was the southern part of what had once upon a time been the kingdom of Judah. But it had been in the course of the 6th century BC and the 5th century BC, it had gradually been taken over by an influx of what in the Bible are called Edomites. So, Herod was an Edomite. His grandfather or great-grandfather, or probably multiple great-grandparents, were among those who had, whatever precisely this would have entailed, were among those who had, whatever precisely this would have entailed, become Jewish in the last decade of the second century BCE, when the previous ruling dynasty of Judea, that is the

Hasmoneans, conquered Edomia, the southern half of old Judah, and according to our sources, made a deal with the inhabitants. You know, you can become Jewish or you can leave. It might have been helpful for the Edomites that, you know, one way for a man to become Jewish is to be circumcised. The Edomites were circumcised on their own. They already practiced male circumcision. So it was relatively pain-free. However problematic it may have been in other ways, at least it didn't involve that. So Herod was a descendant of one of the leading families in this district who had been allies and friends of the Hasmonean kings for a few generations by the time Herod came along. And that area, the Edomites roughly fit what sort of a little bit today, if we're looking

at today, a little bit of the West Bank, a little bit of Israel, a little bit of Jordan. Yeah. So Edomia started surprisingly far north, 67 miles south of Bethlehem. Erumia started surprisingly far north, 67 miles south of Bethlehem. So you didn't even have to walk a full day from Jerusalem, in effect, to reach Edomite territory. The fortress which marked the boundary was a little bit south of Bethlehem. And then it extended down. Initially, it extended down into the desert, into the Negev Desert.

But then a few centuries later, the Nabateans came on the scene and took over the southern part of what had once been Edomite territory. That's another story. Seth, this is such an interesting point of view or time to look at the Roman Empire because we wrongly, I guess, kind of assumed that it was a rough upward trajectory and Pompey conquers what we would today call the Middle East, perhaps we'd call it the Levant, Syria, Palestine, all that kind of stuff. And then that's it. That's the beginning of the Roman story there. But this is a period when it feels like this Roman Empire territory is sort of collapsing. It feels like the picture in the East is disintegrating. Well, it didn't have a clearly defined trajectory at first. Pompey conquers it. He tries to introduce

some new standards of political organization and Palestine as a whole. It doesn't take, you know, it doesn't work out for whatever reason. His successors kind of don't know what to do. The Hasmoneans are still, to some extent, in partial control, but they're no longer independent monarchs. And they themselves were, as soon as Pompey arrived on the scene, they were already bursting out into an internal dynastic war among themselves. Herod was aligned with one of the parties in that dynastic war, Herod and his family. So they originated as creatures in the entourage of one of the combating brothers, Hyrcanus II. Now, our main source, the Jewish historian who wrote in Greek, who lived at the end of the first century CE, describes Hyrcanus as a kind of retiring, shy, unenergetic person, so that Herod's father basically could sort of stomp all over him and legitimately take over because of his uselessness. Other sources give a completely different picture of Hyrcanus II. When Julius Caesar invaded Egypt in the year 47 and was involved in the Alexandrian War and he needed more troops, he called on his allies in the region who included Hyrcanus II.

And it was this guy and not Herod or Herod's father who Julius Caesar thanked. So clearly there's some sense in which, as far as the Romans were concerned, before Caesar's assassination and before the Parthian invasion of Syria, the family of Herod was nothing. They were just retainers of the guy who really had the power, who was the Hasmonean heir. So then, you know, the Parthians invade, the Parthians are expelled. The Romans don't know what to do with Palestine. So Herod leaves Rome. They say, go and conquer whatever you can. Is he successful against the Parthians? Yes, he does have the help of a Roman legion. He has one Roman legion, it doesn't hurt. One Roman legion is 5,000 to 6,000 troops, but Herod actually raises troops locally.

You know, Herod had played some sort of role in the administration of Galilee in the mid-40s BC, actually even before Caesar's assassination. And he had clearly used the opportunity to ingratiate himself with various local parties, not least of whom was the Roman governor of Syria, Sextus Caesar, who was Gaius Julius Caesar's cousin. So when he returned, he was able to raise troops. And also, depending on his still strong, apparently still strong family ties in his home district of Idumea, so he had an army which consisted of Galileans and Arameans, both of whom were Jewish, kind of. And then there was the Roman Legion along with him. So he was successful. It took him three years.

The Parthians had installed on the throne the last Asminian king named Antigonus. They had carted off Antigonus' uncle, who was Herod's patron, Hyrcanus, and sent him to Mesopotamia as a prisoner. Kings or royal figures were usually treated fairly well when they were taken captive, as he was, so he suffered no harm as a result. Well, except for one thing, which I don't maybe need to mention right now. But, well, the one thing was that before he was carted off his nephew, whom the Parthians had crowned king, is reported in one source to have bitten off his ear, bit off his uncle's ear. It happens. But, you know, you lost a kingdom, you lost an ear.

At least there's worse. You could lose worse. You couldn't lose worse. At least it wasn't his nose. But that was to render him unfit to serve as priest in the Jerusalem temple. Someone with a physical blemish of that sort could not fulfill his priestly functions in the temple of Jerusalem. And Hyrcanus was the high priest of the Jerusalem temple. So, he was put out of business in that respect. Anyway, Herod does reconquer much of Palestine, not all of it, but he does manage to reconquer much of it. He reconquers

Galilee, Samaria, Judea, Edomia, which is the main central spine of the country. And he also conquers most but not all of the Greek cities along the coast. Some of those cities are actually the private property of Cleopatra VII, and they can't really be touched. So he doesn't touch those, but he does reconquer the country. So it's a great investment by the Romans. So as the Romans are busy with their own internal struggles, you know, Octavius is going to fall out with Mark Antony and all this kind of stuff. They've sent one legion and managed to restore the entire Roman position in the Eastern Mediterranean with the help of these local... Well, most of it.

There were other Roman armies fighting in Syria, but at least they managed to get back a chunk of it fairly easily. And contrary to what people often think, it was a part of the world. I don't mean the east coast of the Mediterranean as a whole, but I mean specifically the lower part of it, which was not of tremendous strategic interest to anyone. It was a shame to lose it, but they probably felt that it was okay to take a risk and they might've been willing to commit more if it had been necessary, but it probably would have come at the expense of Herod's future if that had happened.

But Herod delivered it to them. So yeah, so Herod delivers. So he gets to sit on the throne of a kingdom that he's sort of created. But is it clear he's a client? What's his relationship like with Rome? Well, I would say that fundamentally, it's fearful. He's become king at a moment of exquisite tension at the very point of the crumbling of the Roman Republic. It's true that the initial stages of the civil war, see, the Caesareans against Pompeians had ended successfully for the Caesareans,

but now the Caesarean party was grumbling. Octavian and Antony were on the verge of war against each other. Antony was the ruler of the East. So at this particular moment, Herod only really had to worry about Antony. He didn't really have to worry about Octavian at all. I think that the first six or seven years of his reign were characterized by one kind of tension, which centered on pleasing Antony and pleasing Cleopatra, but also trying to keep track of the growing hostility between Antony and Octavian. And the following period, when Octavian takes over and starting 27 becomes the Emperor Augustus, is characterized by a different kind of tension, where he's dealing with someone who actually is far more powerful and has an unlimited ability to do him harm. he was put in his position by Rome. He had good local connections. He tried to exploit them, and he probably wasn't totally unsuccessful, despite what one is accustomed to thinking

about it. But it was really the leading Roman senators at first, and then the Roman emperor, who were the ones that he really had to struggle to please, while still keeping his kingdom, which was incredibly diverse and complex, in one piece. And then a profitable state, not because he was paying tribute to Rome. It's actually not clear that he was paying tribute to Rome in any direct way. He was showering everyone with gifts all the time, but it's actually not known that he was paying a regular tribute. But he had to do it for his own sake because he had his own army that he needed to support. He had a private legion, basically, which needed to be fed. And he also kept first Antony and then Augustus on his side if he did that. They didn't want too much chaos. But as you say, he's got a very diverse kingdom

and he spends a lot of money. He does some extraordinary building projects. You can see he's trying to keep various different religions and groups satisfied and his own legitimacy underpinned? Yes, he has an immense problem with legitimacy. People think that the preceding dynasty, the Hasmonean dynasty, had sort of untrammeled legitimacy, but it's worth remembering that they were usurpers from the outside just like him. And actually, the Jews never forgot that. No one ever forgot that they were usurpers. It's just that when Herod came along, he seemed like a more brazen usurper, you know, and they had gotten used, some people had gotten used to the Hasmoneans. Not everyone. I mean, an interesting illustration of this, the story is probably true. It has the

kind of grit of real experience to it. The last episode in Herod's conquest of Judea is he and his troops are besieging Jerusalem and they're his troops. They're not the Roman troops under Gaius Oceus. They're besieging Jerusalem and the city's about to fall. And when the city falls and, you know, the Hasmonean king is still inside, so he's carted off and executed. But when the city falls, Josephus says that Herod's troops had to be restrained, you know, by force, by pleading, by Herod himself, from committing a great massacre in the city. Now, remember that Herod's troops are Jews, but they're Jews from Galilee and from Edomia. In other words, they were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who had been converted to Judaism under the Hasmoneans. And even though there's plenty of

evidence that some of them were quite dedicated to the central institutions of Judaism, including the Jerusalem temple, there were also great stores of inherited and actual resentment and hostility, which came out on this occasion. They were happy to wipe Jerusalem off the map. And Herod had to hold them back because Herod didn't think it would be a good idea to wipe Jerusalem off the map, even though his Jewish troops did. So there was still resentment out there towards the Hasmoneans. Not everyone appreciated them. And when Herod came along, there may have been significant portions of the population of Palestine who actually, including among the Jews, who actually really preferred Herod.

They thought he was a man after their own hearts, unlike the Hasmoneans. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. More on King Herod coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And tell me about Temple Mount, because that's one area in which Herod's legacy lives on. Yeah, so that was one of his many construction projects, but probably the greatest of them was, I mean, we don't know much about what the pre-Herodian temple looked like. We get the impression that it was pretty small and that it occupied about a third of what we now think of as the Temple Mount of the Haram al-Sharif, that it was much smaller. We know that that platform is artificial and that it was constructed under Herod and that the idea was to massively increase the size of the temple compound, which it did. So he started building from scratch.

He knocked down the old building. He created a completely new artificial platform surrounded by a set of retaining walls. That's what you see if you go and visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That's a retaining wall for the artificial platform of the Temple Mount. He built a massive, very ornate structure on it and also did a tremendous amount of construction around it to enable access to the new Temple Mount. So this was a massive project. And it's not clear whether we can really always attribute strategic thought to Herod. Was Herod doing this in order to please the Jews? Well, I don't know. He might have been doing it to please himself.

Josephus says that all of Herod's building was done to aggrandize himself. Maybe that's true. We don't really know. But viewed from a certain distance, we can see that it was functional, that he's building the city of Sebaste on the ruins of the very ancient city of Samaria, which is there to serve as a base for Roman auxiliary troops of local origin in 50 miles, 80, 90 kilometers north of Jerusalem. And then he's building Caesarea Maritima, which is shared uneasily by Greeks or Syrians or whatever they are, and Jews, but which is clearly also a great kiss on the ass of Augustus. The city is named after him.

In the harbor, overlooking the harbor, was a great temple dedicated to Augustus and Rome. In the east, Augustus was worshipped while still alive, which wasn't done in the west, but he built in the temple of Augustus in Rome. So at the same time, he's building a huge Jewish temple on Temple Mount. He's also building a new gigantic harbor for trade with, well, presumably, points West, and building this giant pagan temple there as well. That's extraordinary. Yes, exactly. And he also funded all sorts of construction projects in cities in the vicinity, basically cities in the

old Hellenistic world. So in Antioch and northern Syria, and then a few places in Asia Minor, and then Greece. It was a long list of his contributions. Rhodes, I think he gave a lot of money to Rhodes. Not so long ago, someone discovered a statue there with a partly preserved inscribed base, which seemed to be a statue of a member of the Herodian family. So, you know, usually you got a statue if you made a donation to a place, they would erect a statue in your honor. There were probably many other statues of Herod and his family floating around the eastern part of the Roman Empire. So, Herod was trying to behave like a benefactor to every place, but within his kingdom,

he was doing more or less the same thing, but in a much more intensive way. And it looks like it was an attempt to please all constituents. Now, we could ask, and I'm sure the question was floating around in Herod's time also, whether it wasn't a zero-sum game. In other words, if you're supporting the Greeks, you can'tsum game. In other words, if you're supporting the Greeks, you can't be supporting the Jews, really, even if you're pretending to. And conversely, if you're supporting the Jews, you can't really be supporting the Greeks. And I'm not even mentioning the fact that there were whole areas on the edge of the Syrian desert in the northeastern part of Herod's kingdom, which were neither Greek nor Jewish, but which were inhabited by

partly nomadic tribes who would probably emerge from the Arabian Peninsula. The people have Arabic names, but the writing is in either Aramaic or Greek, people similar to the Nabataeans in that respect. So there's more, there's also those people. And those areas are actually, there are temples and inscriptions dedicated to the Herodian family up there. And in some sense, that was probably the part of the kingdom where the support for Herod and his family was the least complicated. Whereas in the Greek part of the kingdom and in the Jewish part of the kingdom, I'm not even discussing the Samaritan part of the kingdom, it was more complicated. It seemed to be more tension

producing. We hear that he married many different women. Do you think that's partly diplomatic, partly trying to keep this disparate kingdom together? Yes. You know, Josephus says explicitly that he married his wives for their beauty and not for their family. That's what he says. And since Herod had 10 wives, it's not at all unlikely that that's true of even a fairly large percentage of them. You know, Maybe 50% of them he married for their beauty. But there were still the cases where it's clear that he's marrying into constituencies. He has an old wife from before he was king, who seems to have been an Edomian woman. He may or may not split with her. She actually returns later on. They still kind of seem to be married. But then he marries a 100% Hasmonean princess, which is a very fraught relationship, probably

towards the beginning of his kingship in the year 36 or so. He marries this Hasmonean princess. Of course, at the same time, he's systematically extirpating the Hasmonean family, which clearly adds to the tension of the relationship. The way Josephus presents it is that Mariame, which was her name, the weak spelling of Miriam, was a very noble person who loathed Herod and also despised him. She looked down on him because he was a commoner. So she hated him, but also because he killed her grandfather. So she hated him, but also because he killed her grandfather. And then he had her brother drowned and eventually killed her mother and then eventually killed her.

But Herod was desperately in love with her, according to Josephus. You know, he was just irrationally, wildly in love with her. And even though he suspected her of infidelity, which was untrue, but he also had really good reason to suspect that she was plotting against him. He held off because he couldn't bring himself to do what needed to be done. And then he had five children with her also, but then he did within a few years, he actually had her tried and executed as well. And then eventually executed her two sons towards the end of his reign. So he had his dealings with legitimacy problems, problems with attracting constituencies. He thought it would help him to marry into the leading Hasmonean family, but it actually, personally, it seems to have harmed him. I think we can be a little bit more hardheaded about things than Josephus is.

Josephus is trying, is part of a literary tradition, which is trying to present Herod as a victim of his passions and not as a victimizer. I think we could say that he married Mariame because she was an important person for him to marry. And the main thing was to have children by her. Once that task was completed, she was gone together with the rest of her family. It took another 25 years to execute the sons. The New Testament would suggest that Herod was particularly cruel, murderous, and it sounds like he wasn't above killing relatives. Do you think you would have ordered the murder of children

trying to get to Jesus? What is the historicity of this part of the story? Well, I wouldn't, not to be controversial, but the season, but I wouldn't take that story too literally. You know, on the other hand, the sources do kind of agree that in his last year, he had gone off the rails and he was really behaving with markedly more cruel way. I mean, he was always cruel to his family. He had never hesitated to execute or assassinate members of his family. But towards the end, the cruelty spread. He was killing a lot of people for not always the most convincing reasons. You know, whatever one thinks of that story, there are no problems with it. You know, for example, Jesus and his family being from Bethlehem is one of them. Also, Herod conducting a sort of investigation. Well, the story has a legendary feeling to it, for sure, but you can see where

it came from. It's not that hard to figure out where it came from. It reflects the sense that it must have been very widespread in Judea towards the end of Herod's reign, that he had gone off the rails and that it was increasingly unsafe to be around him. He lives a long time, especially in that neighborhood. Sounds like it was a tricky business. What did he leave behind and how soon do the Romans just come in and take more direct control over this part of the world? Well, the Romans asserted control pretty much immediately. A lot of the turbulence in the last 10 years or so of Herod's life concerned the question of who would succeed him. So you had the different sons plotting

against each other and fighting with each other. And this is what led to the execution of almost all of them. Herod's oldest son from his first wife made a pitch for his own candidacy to succeed Herod. And Herod actually felt more kinship with him. He wasn't as jealous of this oldest son, but then the two sons of Mariamae, who were named Alexander and Aristobulus, also assumed that as the leading sons in terms of their inheritance. And also, you know, they could make a claim for a certain kind of popularity because they were also Hasunians. They were also plotting. They were also Hasmoneans. They were also plotting. They were plotting against Antipater. I don't know if they were plotting against each other,

but they were definitely engaged in some sort of shenanigans. It would have been wise just to wait for Herod to die, but they wanted Herod to change his will. And they were fighting over Herod's will and over who was going to be named successor. When push came to shove, Herod did not get the chance to decide who would succeed him. In about 7 BCE, he, and this was a trial actually conducted in the presence of the emperor, he successfully accused Alexander and Aristobulus of plotting against him, and they were executed. And then shortly after that, he began to get suspicious of his oldest son, Antipater also, and he had him executed too. So there were none of the leading candidates left. And in the end, Augustus simply divided up his kingdom among a few of the remaining sons, who were the children of minor wives.

And there was mixed success there. So in a way, Rome just sort of asserted itself right away. And two of those rulers, Antipas, known in the New Testament as Herod Antipas, but Antipas and Galilee and Philip in that northeastern corner of Herod's old kingdom, lasted a very long time and they were very successful, apparently. Philip lasted until the year 39, starting in the year 4 BCE, had an immensely long reign. Antipas lasted until the year 34, and he didn't die. He was removed from office and sent off to a dreadful and fearsome exile in the south of France. And they were very successful. But the one who was appointed to rule that central core of the country, Samaria, Judea, and Edomia, named Archelaus, was cruel and incompetent or

whatever, and he was removed by Augustus after nine or ten years. And at that point, the country was ruled not by a proper Roman governor, but by a prefect that is a personal representative of the emperor. The status of the country was temporary. How authority was divided within the area is a French scholar a few years ago published an over 1,000-page book trying to figure out how the country worked in the period after the deposition of Archelaus. Without success, there are all these centers of authority because the Herodian family, who were no longer ruling Judea, still had authority. The high priest of the Jerusalem

temple had some sort of authority. The city councils in places where there were cities along the coast had some sort of authority. The Roman governor of Syria, who controlled three legions and was the grandest Roman personage in the vicinity, also had some kind of authority. And exactly whose jurisdiction ended where and how was very problematic. Is it a curiosity how Herod is remembered today in the Christian tradition, which is for this moment that probably didn't happen when he ordered the death of all the children hoping to kill Jesus? Given he is an important historical figure of this century, it's strange that that's how he's remembered. Well, you know, not without reason. And it has to be said that it's not only

in Christian tradition that he's remembered in terms like that. The later Jewish tradition also, you know, had a fairly similar picture of him. They also regarded him as evil and cruel. There is no story in rabbinic literature about Herod as a second pharaoh. I don't think it reaches quite that point. But there is the notorious tale, which is, it really comes kind of straight from the spirit of Josephus, in a way. Josephus says that after he had his wife Mariame, the Hasmonean princess, executed, he was overcome by longing for her. He was in mental and spiritual disarray because of his great love for her and what had happened. There's a story in rabbinic literature that, and this is actually, there are stories in other classical sources which actually are similar to this, but that Herod had her corpse preserved in honey.

And he used to visit her and sleep with her and engage in necrophilia while she was preserved in honey. So it's not exactly the same as the mass murder of infants, but it doesn't paint him in a very positive light either. So Herod had very bad press. He really got very bad press, and it was deserved. You know, the fact that he was a great institution after the destruction of the Herodian temple in the year 70, after the Jewish rebellion, the first rabbinic text is 150 years later, and they're looking back on the period of the second temple, the temple that they think of is not the temple which had stood for maybe three or 400 years before Herod came along with its modest proportions and everything like that. They idealized the Herodian temple. Idealized in a way which made it clear that they knew that it was the Herodian temple. So there was some, it's not that they were expressed gratitude to Herod for having constructed it. It was part of this sort of, oh, you know, how wonderful things were for us in the olden days. And part of that wonderfulness was this massive piece of Herodian construction. Is there any sense in which Herod becomes

seen as the last time a reasonably powerful Jewish kingdom, a Jewish entity existed in that space? This idea had to wait for the 20th century. It was actually the view of several influential scholars who were, I mean, one in particular, Abraham Shalit, who played up this angle, you know, that he may not have been imperfect, but he was, you know, great, and he was a tremendous leader and powerful and everything like that. Yeah, so that's not something that I think that you can find in any ancient source, except possibly in the earlier work of Josephus. That is Josephus himself writing in the 70s

or early 80s in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem when he's writing about Herod in his earlier work from that period. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. There's kind of the idea that this is, despite all the personal problems, which were not irrelevant because the ancients were very concerned about character and intellectuals worried about the character of their leaders. And Herod clearly had a bad character. Nevertheless, it was clear that he was also in some respects an effective leader and that there were ways in which the things that

he did while king, especially in relationship to Rome, could be deployed as a model for effective relations between some Jewish polity and the Roman state. That's the line that Josephus seems to be largely by implication pushing in his earlier work. So yes, Josephus actually has the germ of that idea in his history of the Jewish war, and he abandons it in his later work. In a world of Roman hegemony, he does a decent job of carving out some kind of autonomous place for the Jewish people of this kingdom. Yes, I think that's kind of what Josephus wants us to think. And I think there's actually, it's not necessarily the worst analysis either. Herod did things that no previous

Jewish ruler would have ever had the temerity to do. You know, in the year 167 BCE, the Hasmonean revolt broke out against the Seleucids, in part, not the only thing, but in part because the Seleucids had built a gymnasium or had given permission for the construction of a gymnasium at Jerusalem. Herod took the initiative and built both a theater and an amphitheater at Jerusalem, which is roughly the same thing in terms of its cultural baggage. And he kind of got away with it. I mean, partly times have changed. The fact is that after Herod's time, we don't hear another word about these buildings, and there's no archaeological trace of them. So it doesn't look as if they completely survived very long. They might have been built of wood or something. But he's doing things in an effort to kind of claim Jerusalem

as a proper Eastern Roman city, and to claim his kingdom as a proper client kingdom of the Romans, interested in playing the political game that the Romans want them to play. He's taking fairly drastic steps. And there are steps which actually seem to have displeased many of his subjects. I mean, not all of them, but they seem to have displeased many of them. But what Herod, I think, was trying to do, maybe partly by instinct, was just to try to thread the needle, to try to give the Romans enough to keep them happy and to give his various constituents enough to keep them happy. With all the internal zero-sum games within his kingdom, possibly a zero-sum game between Jews and Romans on the broader international stage.

It may have been a losing proposition, but he was part of the Romans' tinkering in the East. That is, Herod is doing the tinkering himself. And he almost gets it, but he doesn't quite get it. And maybe if he hadn't been such an awful person as a human being, he might have been more successful. I mean, by the way, there's an interesting distinction in Jewish tradition between the reception of Herod and the reception of his grandson, who for a brief period ruled the entire Herodian kingdom. King Agrippa I, who in the year 41 inherited the entirety of his grandfather's kingdom, which was given to him by the newly crowned emperor Claudius as an act of gratitude for his friendship. There is no way to spot any political difference

between Herod and Agrippa and his grandson. They seem to be doing exactly the same things to try to please the exact same constituencies. But there was something about him, something maybe slightly intangible. Josephus himself said that Herod was widely reputed to have favored the Greeks over the Jews, and Agrippa was widely understood to have favored the Jews over the Greeks. And this is confirmed in the way rabbinic literature receives King Agrippa, because they regard him as someone who is of tainted ancestry, but nevertheless, he's a member of the team. He's a good guy. The fact that he was like the moon companion of the future emperor Caligula and all of these

things, they didn't even know that. But Josephus did, but he still writes what he writes. I mean, that's clearly a correct description of the memory of Agrippa compared to the memory of Herod. So there was just something about him. He was a better actor than his grandfather had been. He figured it out, but it was probably too late. That's politics for you. Seth Schwartz, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Your book is The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad. Go out and get it, everybody. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thanks for having me. you