[Sidenote:  Jos.  Jew.  War, I, 21:13] Now Herod had a body suited to his soul and was ever a most excellent hunter, in which sport he generally had great success owing to his skill in riding, for in one day he once captured forty wild beasts.  He was also a warrior such as could not be withstood.  Many also marvelled at his skill in his exercises when they saw him throwing the javelin and shooting the arrow straight to the mark.  In addition to these advantages of mind and body, fortune was also very favorable to him, for he seldom failed in war, and when he failed, he was not himself the cause, but it happened either through the treachery of some one or else through the rashness of his own soldiers.

[Sidenote:  Jos.  Jew.  War, I, 21:1b, 4a] Herod also built for himself at Jerusalem in the upper city a palace, which contained two very large and most beautiful apartments to which not even the temple could be compared.  One apartment he named Caesareum and the other Agrippeum [after his friends Caesar Augustus and Agrippa].  But he did not preserve their memory by particular buildings only and the names given them, but his generosity also went as far as entire cities.  For when he had built a most beautiful wall over two miles long about a city in the district of Samaria and had brought six thousand inhabitants into it and had allotted to them a most fertile territory and in the midst of this city had erected a large temple to Augustus, he called the city Sebaste [from Sebastus, the Greek of Augustus].  And when Augustus had bestowed upon him additional territory, he built there also a temple of white marble in his honor near the fountains of the Jordan.  The place is called Panium.  The king erected other buildings at Jericho and named them after the same friends.  In general there was not any place in his kingdom suited to the purpose that was allowed to remain without something in Augustus’s honor.

[Sidenote:  Jos.  Jew.  War, I, 21:6a-8a] And when he observed that there was a city by the seaside that was much decayed, called Straton’s Tower, and that the place, because of its fair situation, was capable of great improvements, through his love of honor he rebuilt it all of white stone and adorned it with magnificent palaces and in it showed his natural munificence.  For all the seashore between Dora and Egypt (between which places the city is situated) had no good harbor, so that every one who sailed to Phoenicia from Egypt was obliged to toss about in the sea because of the south wind that threatened them.  But the king by great expense and liberality overcame nature and built a harbor larger than was the Piraeus, and in its recesses built other deep roadsteads.  He let down stones into one hundred and twenty-one feet of water.  And when the part below the sea was filled up, he extended the wall which was already above the sea until it was two hundred feet long.  The entrance to the harbor was on the north, because