The Games at Caesarea

About this time Caesarea Sebaste, which Herod had built, was finished. The whole building was completed in the tenth year, and its dedication fell in the twenty-eighth year of Herod’s reign, in the hundred and ninety-second Olympiad. So there was a great festival at once, and the most lavish preparations were made for the dedication. He had announced a contest in music and athletic games performed naked. He had also gotten ready a great number of gladiators, and of wild beasts for the same purpose, along with horse races and the most costly of the sports and shows that were customarily put on at Rome and in other places. He dedicated this contest to Caesar and ordered it to be celebrated every fifth year. Caesar, for his part, sent him all the equipment for such shows from his own household, adding to the splendor of Herod’s ambition; and Julia, Caesar’s wife, on her own account sent a great many of her most valuable things from Rome, so that he lacked nothing at all. The whole was valued at five hundred talents. When a great crowd had come to the city to see the shows, together with the envoys whom other peoples sent because of the benefits they had received from Herod, he entertained them all in public lodgings, at public tables, and with continual feasts. By day the festival offered the entertainment of the contests, and by night merry gatherings that cost vast sums of money and showed publicly how generous he was; for in everything he undertook he was ambitious to outdo whatever had been done before of the same kind. It is said that Caesar and Agrippa often remarked that Herod’s dominions were too small for the greatness of his spirit, and that he deserved to have the whole kingdom of Syria, and Egypt as well. [a]

After this festival and its celebrations were over, Herod built another city in the plain called Capharsaba. He chose a fitting site, with plenty of water and good soil, suited to whatever was planted there; a river flowed around the city itself, and a grove of very large trees surrounded it. He named it Antipatris after his father Antipater. On another site above Jericho he also built a place named after his mother, very secure and very pleasant to live in, and called it Cypros. To his brother Phasaelus he dedicated the finest memorials, because of the great natural affection there had been between them. In Jerusalem itself he raised a tower no smaller than the tower of Pharos and named it Phasaelus. It was at once part of the city’s strong defenses and a memorial to the dead man, since it bore his name. He also built a city of the same name in the valley of Jericho, as you go north from it, and by the farming its settlers brought in he made the surrounding country, which had been barren, more fruitful; this too he called Phasaelis. [f]

As for his other benefactions, it is impossible to list them all: those he bestowed on cities in Syria and in Greece, and in every place he came to on his voyages. For he seems to have supplied, and that most generously, much that met many needs. He paid for public buildings, and he gave money to works that lacked it, to keep them going when their other revenues failed. But the greatest and most famous of all his works was this: he built the temple of Apollo at Rhodes at his own expense, and gave the Rhodians a great many talents of silver for building ships. He also built most of the public buildings for the people of Nicopolis at Actium, which Caesar had founded. For the people of Antioch, the chief city of Syria, where a broad street runs the length of the city, he built colonnades along both sides of it and paved the open roadway with polished stone, which greatly adorned the city and was of very great benefit to the inhabitants. As for the Olympic games, which had sunk very low because their revenues had failed, he restored their reputation, endowed them with revenues for their upkeep, and made the festival more venerable in its sacrifices and its other adornments. For this vast generosity the people of Elis recorded him as perpetual president of the games. [h]

Now some people are amazed at the contradictions in Herod’s nature and aims. When we look at his magnificence and the benefits he bestowed on all humankind, there is no way that even those who thought least of him could deny, or fail to admit openly, that he had a nature that was exceedingly generous. But when anyone looks at the punishments he inflicted and the wrongs he did, not only to his subjects but to his closest relatives, and notices how harsh and unrelenting he was there, he will be forced to grant that he was brutal and a stranger to all moderation. So these people suppose that his nature was divided, and at times at war with itself. I am of another opinion myself, and I think both kinds of action had one and the same cause. Being a man who loved honor and was wholly mastered by that passion, he was moved to be magnificent wherever there appeared any hope of being remembered in the future or of reputation in the present. And since his spending was beyond his means, he was forced to be harsh to his subjects; for the people he spent his money on were so many that they made him a wicked collector of it. And knowing that he was hated by those under him for the wrongs he did them, he thought it no easy thing to mend his offenses, since that would hurt his revenue; so he set himself, on the other side, to turn their ill will into a source of gain. As for his own circle, if anyone was not thoroughly servile to him in speech and would not confess himself his slave, or merely seemed to be thinking of some change in his government, he could not contain himself, but prosecuted even his own relatives and friends and punished them as if they were enemies. This wickedness he committed out of a desire that he alone might be honored. The greatest evidence for what I say about this passion of his is what he did to honor Caesar and Agrippa and his other friends: the very honors he paid to those above him he wanted paid to himself, and whatever he thought the finest gift he could give another, he showed that he wished to have given to himself. But the Jewish nation is by its law a stranger to all such things, and accustomed to prefer righteousness to glory. For this reason the nation was not to his liking, because it was not in their power to flatter the king’s ambition with statues or temples or anything of that kind. And this, it seems to me, was at once the cause of Herod’s crimes against his own family and counselors, and of his benefactions to foreigners and to those who had no connection with him. [k]