Original subtitles

On the coastline of modern Israel,

in the ruins of an ancient city...

a team of investigators prepares to head underground.

Okay, I think I'm set.

At the bottom of this shaft...

could lie clues to the truth...

Oh, wow.

...about one of the Bible's biggest villains.

Oh, this is pretty wild.

King Herod.

What's happening down there?

The stories in the Bible

are famous across the world.

The New Testament tells the life story of Jesus Christ.

It's a story spanning the Middle East,

containing drama, miracles, and danger.

And at its start,

is one of the most villainous characters of the Bible.

King Herod, the ruler of Judea.

The Bible tells how shortly after the birth of Jesus,

Herod rages at the prophecy of a new-born King of the Jews.

Anxious to keep power,

he orders his soldiers to kill every child under the age of 2.

It is known as the Massacre of the Innocents.

When you have someone like Herod,

murder can be part of politics. Absolutely.

But while the Bible portrays him

as a diabolical villain,

history books refer to him as Herod the Great.

Today, archaeologists and historians

across the region are making fresh discoveries...

Oh, wow. Interesting.

...and exploring new depths

to reveal the truth about King Herod.

On the coast of modern Israel lies the ancient port of Caesarea,

once a great city in Herod's kingdom of Judea.

King Herod built this metropolis in the first century BCE.

Remarkably, giant structures still survive.

Marine geoarchaeologist Beverly Goodman has spent her career exploring them.

Caesarea, to me,

it's just... it's home. It's a place that's...

become such a part of me

over my career and over my life,

and the amount of time that I've spent thinking about the place...

I guess it might be called an obsession.

Today, Beverly and her team

are on a mission to discover the true extent

of this city in its prime

and what the architecture Herod left behind

might reveal about the true character of the infamous king.

They start with Herod's palace and one of its grandest features.

This is the pool of Herod's palace.

This is part of a palace complex that would've been his residence

at the time that he built the whole city.

The palace sits right on the edge

of the modern shoreline.

More than 2,000 years of time and tide

have taken their toll on this 100-foot long pool,

but signs of its original grandeur remain.

It's about 45 thick.

Giant slabs of dressed stone lie beneath the surface.

- Okay, 250 in length there. - Yep.

Here, can you get a photograph?

And there are bases of huge columns

that may have supported upper stories.

We have column, column, column, in a line here.

A column base.

Let's get this cleared out.

The archaeologists make a start

on clearing some of the tons of debris filling this pool.

But far more work is needed to explore all corners of this site.

Even in this state, through the silt and seaweed,

Beverly glimpses architectural splendor.

You can picture this pleasure pool,

with gardens, with all of the luxuries

that you would expect from someone that has the status of Herod.

This pool was once covered by exquisite mosaics.

It stretched 115 feet long and 60 feet wide.

Around it stood fine pillars and containers for exotic plants,

and the walls of a magnificent villa that rose two stories high.

It was the jewel in the crown of Herod's brainchild,

Caesarea Maritima.

A major city with a theater,

a hippodrome, and a busy port.

When I think about how quickly the city was originally built...

...honestly, it seems outrageous, really,

because the entire project was more or less inaugurated

in about two decades,

which might sound like a lot, but it really isn't

when you consider the scale of the city.

At Caesarea, Herod embarked

on a grand project unlike anything else in Judea.

What drove him to build on such a scale?

A clue could lie in King Herod's surprising family history.

150 miles south of Caesarea, in modern-day Jordan,

lies the ancient city of Petra.

2,000 years ago, at the time of Herod,

this was the capital of the Nabataeans, neighbors of the Judeans,

and a people that controlled trade routes

through the desert.

Sami al-Hasanat has guided people around

Petra's world-famous rock-cut architecture for over 30 years.

Petra is, is my world.

And I'm part of it.

Sami counts himself as related to the Nabataeans.

Something he shares with Herod.

Herod wasn't a Judean.

His father was a nobleman from Idumea,

a people who had converted to Judaism.

And on his mother's side,

he was descended from Petra's royal family.

His mother was a Nabataean princess.

Her name was Cypros.

Neither of his parents were from Judea originally.

Sami wants to explore the city that Herod spent time in as a boy,

to uncover the roots of Herod's great ambitions.

This is the very heart of the real Petra

and the true Nabataean architecture.

Many of Petra's rock-cut structures

are tombs for the city's elite.

Early Western explorers labeled this one the Urn Tomb,

after the magnificent carvings on its façade.

These remarkable structures are a testament

to the wealth of Petra's rulers.

We can see that there are holes on both sides.

They are opposite to each other.

That's to show that there was another level

or another story on top of it.

And if you see how all the lines of the chiseling,

scratching the sandstone walls,

they plastered all the interior part

and painted it with fresco as permanent colors.

Herod's parents' marriage

helped to cement relations between neighboring peoples.

So, when a father marries

a princess from another tribe or another kingdom,

it is for political reasons, for social reasons,

to establish connections,

healthy and useful connections

at the same time with the neighbors.

Herod's father used these connections

to earn himself the role of advisor

to the Judean royal household.

Then, when Herod was just 10 years old,

the rise of a new people changed the course of his life.

In 63 BCE, Rome conquered Judea,

and went on to appoint Herod's father as ruler

in all but name.

Herod helped to run part of Judea,

but disaster struck when he turned 30

and a jealous rival poisoned his father.

This was a perilous moment for Herod.

Like his father, he wasn't popular.

His family background made him an outsider to many Judeans,

even though he was Jewish by religion.

What legitimizes a leader is the support of his people.

Therefore, when you think of a person

born in Nabatea, for example,

has ethnic origins from this part of the world,

then you might not be accepted.

Herod was viewed as merely a puppet of Rome.

How did he survive to outdo his father

and become not just a Roman official but King Herod the Great?

At his height, King Herod had palaces across Judea,

including one on the spectacular hilltop of Masada.

Its steep sides make it the perfect stronghold,

and its location in southern Judea beside the Dead Sea

was especially significant to Herod.

Masada is towards the very corner of Judea,

a junction between Idumea and Nabatea.

Basically, this was his homeland.

That was his place of support,

and he felt, I think, more secure in that environment.

Archaeologist Guy Stiebel investigates the life of Herod

through the thousands of objects

he's excavated at the palace on top of Masada.

He wants to explore how an outsider rose

to the position of King of Judea.

This coin is well dated to the time of Herod the Great.

Coinage was the way to symbolize

him being the king of Judea, king of the Jews.

Herod's connection with Masada

dates back to a time before he was king.

When Masada was home to a small fort.

In 40 BCE, an army raised by Judean rebels

laid siege to Jerusalem,

determined to throw off their Roman overlords

and Herod's family.

Herod retreated with his followers

to the stronghold of Masada,

and then he raced on to Rome.

Herod threw himself at the mercy of the Senate

and was made king with the backing of his friend

Marc Anthony.

But, in 31 BCE, Herod lost his powerful sponsor,

when Marc Antony was defeated by his rival the mighty Octavian,

who became the first Roman Emperor,

Caesar Augustus.

Herod had been a loyal servant of the Roman state,

and, in return, was made king.

Now, his fate was in the hands of one man.

How would Herod endear himself to Caesar Augustus,

and keep his throne in Judea?

Back in Caesarea,

Beverly and her team believe Herod's monuments could hold clues

to how he remained an ally of Rome.

Herod is definitely known as a great builder.

In fact, much of the archaeological remains

that you find from that period, in fact,

almost all of them that managed to last are his doing.

They head into the bowels of Caesarea's most recognizable structure.

The Roman Theater.

We're under the stage right now.

This is sort of the green room.

One of these tunnels is undocumented,

and Beverly wants to find out where it goes

and what it was for.

This end, we don't actually know where it goes out.

What I wanna do is document this, go in, photograph, scan the whole thing,

get to the end, and see how much further we have

until we'd actually get to the ocean.

The passage is only two feet wide

with barely enough room to turn around.

I think it does, I think it connects.

So, this part of the channel that we're able to get into

is about 40 feet.

We can see at the end that there's a continuation

to the next part of it through here.

Okay. This is gonna be tight.

Let's see here.

Real light.

The tunnel gets even narrower...

Feeling a little claustrophobic.

You alright?

...as they approach the end.

Oh wow, that is actually real light.

What do you see?

There's a channel here that goes up.

I mean, it's open to the surface.

So it'll be draining something from the surface?

It's clear the tunnel wasn't for people,

but for water.

Part of a system that drained it from the Roman street above

into underground channels like this one.

The tunnel was most likely for drainage and plumbing,

so this looks a lot like other areas of water infrastructure,

whether it's the aqueduct channels

or other channels throughout Caesarea.

This is super useful information

for us that we can use to continue forward.

Herod's Caesarea was Roman in its scale

and in its public buildings,

like the theater and hippodrome.

But, Beverly's work reveals that Herod's new-build project

was not just mimicking the Roman look.

He had built a place to be lived in.

A working Roman city right down to its plumbing and sewers.

Herod sort of had

this prefab Roman city idea.

So, he made sure that the city had

all of the standard features of a Roman city.

Beverly believes Herod's drive

to expand Judean infrastructure on a Roman model

was part of a master plan targeted at the Roman Emperor,

Caesar Augustus.

Herod named Caesarea after Caesar Augustus.

He wanted to create a tribute to him.

So, the city that has a theater and has a hippodrome

and has a palace and has a harbor,

all of these fingerprints of Rome

in honor of Caesar Augustus.

Rome had put Herod in power.

Without Caesar Augustus' support, he could lose his throne.

Writers at the time said that Herod's pandering to Rome was so great,

that he even defiled the Temple in Jerusalem.

In his capital city,

Herod expanded the mount around the Temple

with thousands of giant limestone blocks.

He covered the innermost shrine with gold,

carried out by trained priests instead of craftsmen,

to preserve the shrine's sanctity.

But later accounts say he also broke sacred Jewish law,

by placing a Roman imperial eagle over a temple gateway.

Enraged, Jewish citizens cut down the eagle

and Herod had them burnt alive in his Jericho amphitheater.

The story shows Herod stamping out threats to his power

just as violently as the Bible's infamous

Massacre of the Innocents.

And although he was meant to be an observant Jew,

Beverly thinks his motives for renovating

the Temple weren't wholly pure.

Herod is building a Roman temple

for Caesar Augustus,

at the same time that he's building a temple for the Jews.

So, having the two different temples

was also a way that Herod could be king in both of those realms.

Herod was a sharp political operator

who also built great things for his people.

So, why did his name become a byword for the ultimate villain?

The hilltop palace of Masada

is a great source of Herodian finds.

At Guy's laboratory, he scours the stores for clues

that could reveal what Herod did with all the power of a king,

now that he had Judea under his control.

One of the nice things about Masada

is that you don't need to imagine.

You see the artifacts.

And one of the finest example

of the contribution of King Herod the Great

is actually the introduction of new materials

and new technologies.

You can see here stone tiles that we call them in Latin,

opus sectile, a technique of flooring

that is typical to that period of time, the time of Augustus.

But, you find it in Judea only in the palaces of Herod.

This luxury tiling

was not something reserved for a small inner sanctum.

It covered the floor of a large bathhouse.

Herod even made sure

this expensive tiling was of a unique design.

What is really interesting

is that this triangle is typical only to Herod.

So, this is like a marker that may identify it with Herod.

Herod imported Roman engineering

as well as Roman style.

If I turn it over,

you can actually see the binding material.

And this is actually cement, what we call opus caementicium.

This is the first time we have, in Judea,

this Italian or Roman innovation.

And it was brought from Naples

and allowed people to do nearly everything.

The Romans were master builders.

This was the start of an age of emperors,

that would see incredible luxury and architecture

in grand imperial villas across Italy.

Herod created a palace to rival any of them,

bringing the latest building innovations to the harshest of environments.

It's amazing. Herod was so up-to-date with the new technologies,

and he was the first ambassador to bring this tradition over.

We have a spa in the middle of the desert.

And again, we are in the Judean desert.

It's scorching hot.

And still, you have three bathhouses.

Masada was once witness

to a desperately dangerous time in Herod's rise to power.

Now, it was a symbol of comfort and opulence,

advertising a total command of his realm.

He created something new,

created an island of paradise,

and I think this is another fine demonstration

of the ability of Herod,

of harnessing and using architecture

to make a political statement. "I am the king."

Herod was lord of all he surveyed.

His palaces were as fine as any king's.

How much more ambitious would his buildings get?

In Caesarea,

Beverly prepares to head underground,

on her mission to chart more of Herod's grandest creation.

There is an opening to a well buried here in the undergrowth.

This would've been in the original city.

So 2,000 years ago, this area was built up

with all of the Roman features, with the hippodrome,

with the temple, with the harbor.

Beverly plans to climb down

more than 30 feet, into the past

to the very roots of Caesarea.

She's looking for evidence in the structure,

and the undisturbed soil at the bottom,

that might date this well to Herod's reign.

There's always this excitement,

this anticipation, this hope also.

We don't really know the period of time it's gonna get us to,

but we should be seeing the entire 2,000 years

of history of Caesarea in this well.

Okay, I think I'm set.

I will bring you the oxygen sensor,

and you check the oxygen level.

There are multiple dangers in Beverly's way.

She will need to measure air quality as she descends

to ensure there is enough oxygen for her to breathe.

The well, it's a bit deep, okay?

If the rope is not reaching to the ground, talk to me.

And she also doesn't know how safe the ground is at the bottom.

Again?

In Caesarea,

Beverly nears the bottom of the shaft

in her search for more of Herod the Great's city.

It's cooler down here.

The air that has settled in the well

contain dangerous levels of gases such as methane.

- What's happening down there? - Wait a second.

Everything good? What is the oxygen level?

Oxygen's fine.

Inch by inch,

Beverly finally makes it down with rope to spare.

She begins testing the depth of the deposits at her feet.

So here, I think we're hitting wood.

See, you hear that dull sound?

When we hit stone, it should ping a little.

Oh, that might be stone.

So we're at some kind of bottom,

so I'ma go ahead and take a sample from there.

Trying to take a core of the sediment

that has built up inside the well.

This'll be in part to kinda get some dates on it.

Then, checking the walls of the well itself,

she spots something.

Oh wow. This is pretty wild.

So, we do have this gap.

In ancient masonry

that has dozens of tons of stone

pressing down on it from above,

there is a horizontal gap going all the way around the well.

Question is whether this is a building gap,

which is kinda doubtful,

or it could be if we've got an earthquake

that caused this to shift down like that.

Here, we've got some pretty amazing layers

that I'm guessing this probably represents a slightly earlier phase of building.

It's as though the entire bottom section

of the well structure has dropped three inches.

- Nice job. - Oh, that was fun!

Wow! Well...

That was amazing. That was absolutely amazing.

The team bags up the samples

and will analyze them to date the loose soil filling the well.

For Beverly, the biggest finding

is the structural damage at the bottom of the well.

It's a little bit curious

because you can see the changes in the building types.

So, the top is the most recent.

And then, you've got another sequence

where the shape of the stones changes a bit.

And then, the stones get much bigger,

which is sort of a calling card of some of the earliest phases.

The layers of grander, larger stone blocks

correspond to Herod's city-building.

Beverly is looking for the beginnings of Herod's Caesarea,

but she has stumbled across signs of a strange event

that happened after the city's construction.

Archaeologically speaking, we have a lot of work.

That we're gonna have a lot of layers and a lot of history

to be able to investigate as we excavate in that same area.

The bizarre gaps in the Herodian layers

suggest a huge natural disaster.

What did this mean for Herod's grand mega-project?

The drop at the bottom of the well

reminds Beverly of another puzzling feature at Caesarea.

Its steep beach.

This area is right between the hippodrome and the harbor,

and there's this entire complex

that was used for warehouses. It became stores.

But, one of the theories is that this is actually

the area of the original ship sheds.

Ancient ships were hauled out of the sea

when not in use,

and dragged up long shallow beaches into ship-sheds.

The sheds protected the vessels

from wood-eating pests in the water.

But, how in the world did they get the boats

from there, all the way up to here,

if we have a cliff here today?

You can see really clearly how short this beach is

and how much further down the sea level is.

So, this is a very difficult distance to take ships up.

Lifting 30-feet-long boats so abruptly out of the water

and over the step in the beach

would have been almost impossible for their crews.

To understand what might be going on...

Notebook secured.

...Beverly heads into the water.

One of the main goals of my research

is surveying and tracking different points

along the coast and finding evidence

for where the coastline was in the past.

Beverly and her colleague Jeremy

descend into the choppy waves.

The pair struggle with the low visibility as they head out from the coast.

But they quickly begin finding what look like

man-made blocks along the sea floor.

300 feet off the shore of Caesarea,

Beverly and Jeremy are finding signs

of submerged ancient buildings.

Then, instantly recognizable

as they loom out of the murky water...

stone columns.

Beverly and her colleague take photographs

and log the dimensions,

before heading back to the surface.

The columns are solid evidence

that this area, well away from the current shoreline,

was once dry land.

We were able to see the extension of some of these features

at least 75 meters, 100 meters off of the shore today.

Their findings under water leave no doubt in Beverly's mind.

There's no way that area could've been underwater.

There's nothing there that's part of a harbor.

She believes such a huge change

to the city's coastline

hints at an enormously destructive force.

It could be something caused by a rapid event, like a tsunami.

Or it could be something that's a slow process,

but most likely it's a combination of all of these things.

One of the things that we've learned over the past two decades

is the extent and the magnitude that a tsunami can change a coastline.

A tsunami could've been powerful enough

to create drops in the coastline

and break underground structures like the well.

Beverly's discoveries support a radical new take,

depicting a Caesarea that was very different in Herod's day.

If what we're seeing is true,

and the coastline of Caesarea is this much bigger,

it means that there's a lot of areas

that are now lost or only partially preserved.

But more importantly, it means

that the city itself looked very different.

That there were huge areas that were between,

say, the hippodrome and the water,

and next to the harbor, and near the palace,

and entire areas of Caesarea that have been lost to the waves.

Beverly's work has revealed that in Herod's age,

the city was much larger than today.

Next to the hippodrome,

the land stretched 300 feet further out to sea,

creating easy access to the ship sheds

and space for more buildings.

Overall, Caesarea may have been twice as big

as previously thought.

And the port's three huge basins

stretching for one and a half million square feet

may have been built within the ancient shoreline

making it one of the biggest ports in the Roman empire.

Beverly returns to the ship sheds

and finds her new data completely changes

how she sees Herod's city.

If we have more coastline,

then we actually can have the right distance

and the right slope to make it more realistic

that these were used as ship sheds.

This place that has helped Beverly

to understand the true extent of Caesarea

was where she began her career over 20 years ago.

This place is where I would say

I was born as an archaeologist.

This is actually the place

where I worked on, as a student,

as a volunteer in my first excavation ever.

At the time, I didn't realize what the significance was.

For nearly 2,000 years,

Herod's greatest architectural legacy lay half-hidden by the waves.

With this new information,

the scale and ambition of Herod's incredible mega-project

becomes all the more impressive.

Creating a huge deep-water port where no natural bay existed.

Herod had his engineers dig a huge hole down to the bedrock

large enough to hold a few hundred jumbo jets.

They built a huge ring of wood and concrete

to support a solid pier and breakwater...

before they finally let in the sea.

Herod likely built a military dock,

where Roman battleships laid ready to police his port.

And he erected a grand temple dedicated to Augustus and Rome

to prove his loyalty to the empire and cement his power in the region.

When Herod completed the port in 15 BCE,

he had control of all trade in and out of Judea.

The taxes that it generated earned him staggering wealth.

What could bring him down?

The arid hilltop palace at Masada

has preserved a treasure trove of objects

belonging to Herod the Great.

Guy believes some of these items

could shed light on the level of decadence and opulence

reached by Herod's luxury living.

This particular amphora held more than just wine.

Here, you can see here

the inscription of an M,

which stands for Mala, Mala Cumana,

which are apples from Cumae,

in south Italy, north of Naples.

And you can see here the beta.

The B stands for basileus.

In Greek, it's "king."

So, this is a shipment

of several dozens of apples from Cumae.

Picked only at midnight on a full moon,

then shipped for 1,500 miles,

these were considered the finest apples money could buy.

The apples were conserved

in wine with honey and spices...

And my lip's becoming wet, just describing how marvelous it was.

Expensive imported delicacies like this

would've graced the table of even

the most esteemed guests at Herod's hilltop oasis.

So, just imagine we can actually

demonstrate that the table of King Herod the Great

contained the best dessert in the Roman world.

It was imported from Italy all the way to Masada.

And that's one example of how prestigious life were

and why it was good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once said.

While Herod was importing Roman architecture, culture, and cuisine,

he made sure plenty of his great wealth flowed in the other direction.

He never forgot who was in charge.

From a Roman point of view, he developed

the eastern corner of the Mediterranean,

building the harbor, controlling the highways

that brought all the goods from the east and from the south.

So, economy flourished.

He was paying taxes,

but he was also using his money to boost Augustus,

to build Temple Caesarea to honor Augustus,

and elsewhere throughout Judea.

Herod had his kingdom under control.

But, the calculation and ruthlessness that got him to power

descended into paranoia and horror

in his old age.

In the Bible's stories,

Herod orders the murder of his subject's children.

In reality, he killed his own.

Convinced his own sons were plotting against him,

the elderly Herod charged them with treason

and sentenced them to death.

He ordered high-ranking Judeans to be killed following his death,

to make it look like his people were mourning for him.

Herod would not be chosen to be the father of the year.

Augustus was quoted dozens of years thereafter,

translated into English,

"One would be better off being the pig of Herod

rather than being one of his sons."

When Herod did die,

a military procession marched his body from Jericho to Jerusalem,

but the national mourning was muted.

With Herod gone, the true authority in Judea was revealed.

Augustus stepped in to split up Herod's kingdom.

And eventually, Rome assumed direct control of it all.

If the real power always lay with Rome,

why is Herod painted as the ultimate villain

in the Bible?

At Caesarea,

Beverly heads inland to explore the parts of the city

that survived a devastating tsunami.

She's at the Temple of Augustus to search for evidence

of what became of Herod's city and his legacy,

after the bible's greatest villain was gone.

One of the most significant buildings

that Herod built was the temple.

According to the descriptions of this temple,

it was entirely grandiose.

It had massive columns.

So, we know that, in fact, there was a very, very large

and impressive temple that stood here.

Now, the site is merely ruins,

but Beverly believes there is still a lot to learn

from what remains.

One of the ways that the different phases of building

can tell us about what happened in the past

is not only the buildings themselves and the shape and the stones,

but also even the material that was used to stick them together.

We can actually see the heavy amounts of shell.

And research has shown that these specific species,

we actually know that they're from offshore,

and they're brought to the coastline during tsunamis.

Materials carried by tsunamis,

like the seashells, are mixed in with this cement.

It means the wall was built after the tsunami,

and long after Herod.

This isn't Herod's temple, but a much later structure.

Within the cement,

we have a story of the history of this coastline.

With games at the hippodrome,

and public bathhouses and theater,

Herod had created an ideal of Roman life.

But it wasn't to last.

On the 13th of December, 115 CE,

a catastrophic tsunami devastated the city.

Further inland, it seems Herod's architectural legacy

suffered a different attack.

This large structure covers the original temple,

completely overwriting Herod's grand homage

to Caesar Augustus.

This large wall is actually part of the foundations of a church

that was built on top of the foundations of the Roman temple.

In the centuries after the supposed Massacre of the Innocents,

when the Bible claims

Herod tried to kill the infant Jesus,

Christianity grew and became established.

In 313 CE, Rome's first Christian emperor

made the religion legal and revolutionized the empire.

Once this place is established with the temple,

it basically becomes the holy place of Caesarea.

So, after Rome becomes Christian,

the temple is dismantled and a church is built.

This was a land Herod the Great

once ruled with an iron fist,

and the Gospel writers drew on the memory of his violent reign

to create drama in their storytelling.

If you see the way Christianity

look at Herod as the murderer of the innocent,

it was a natural linkage, him being

not always very popular, to say the least.

Not inside and not outside.

Herod had been one of Rome's

most loyal and effective servants.

But, for the empire's 50 million citizens,

the Christian gospel turned him into a two-dimensional character.

A necessary villain in Christ's origin story.

At the end of the day,

I think it's more to do with the newly born religion,

Christianity, creating a mythology,

choosing, if you like, the ultimate villain,

which is Herod, putting that together.

Hence the tradition we're familiar with.

Now, across the region,

new archaeological discoveries reveal the truth

behind the title of Herod the Great.

We love great heroes, and we love great villains.

His ability, his pragmatism,

and the fact that he was a juggler,

the fact that he managed to overcome

all those obstacles, inside and outside.

Someone referred to him, in ancient times,

as a fox and a lion in one person.

And you may decide which is which.

He defeated local opposition

and juggled his nation's interests

at the edges of a conquering superpower.

He built vast temples and incredible palaces,

and transformed the cultural landscape

by championing Roman arts and games.

He established a huge port to increase trade,

and his kingdom flourished under his control.

But, he also ruled with ruthless violence,

immortalized in the stories of the Bible.

The legends of Herod's cruelty

have outlasted even his grandest monuments,

obscuring his legacy,

and leaving one of the most complex

and successful rulers of his time

to be remembered as the villain in someone else's story.