of Jerusalem to open the gates to the enemy; for this service they were treated with the highest honour by Herod.  He made it part of his general policy to favour the Pharisees (as also the sect of the Essenes, insignificant though it was), it being his purpose to restrict the national life again within those purely ecclesiastical channels of activity which it had abandoned since the Maccabaean wars.  However reckless his conduct in other respects, he was always scrupulously careful to avoid wounding religious susceptibilities (Antiquities, xiv. 16, 3).  But although the Pharisees might be quite pleased that the high-priesthood and the kingship were no longer united in one and the same person, and that interest in the law again overshadowed interest in politics, the populace for their part could never forgive Herod for overthrowing the old dynasty.  That he himself, at least in religious profession, was a Jew did not improve his position, but rather made it worse.  It was not easy for him to stifle the national feeling after it had once been revived among the Jews; they could not forget the recent past, and objected to being thrust back into the time when foreign domination was endured by them as a matter of course.  The Romans were regarded in quite a different light from that in which the Persians and the Greeks had been viewed, and Herod was only the client of the Romans.

His greatest danger seemed to arise from the still surviving members of the Hasmonaean family, to whom, as is easily understood, the national hopes clung.  In the course of the earlier years of his reign he removed every one of them from his path, beginning with his youthful brother-in-law Aristobulus (35), after whom came his old patron Hyrcanus II. (30), then Mariamne his wife (29), and finally his stepmother Alexandra (28), the daughter of Hyrcanus and the widow of Alexander Aristobuli.  Subsequently, in 25, he caused Costobarus and the sons of Babas to be executed.  While thus occupied with domestic affairs, Herod had constant trouble also in his external relations, and each new phase in his political position immediately made itself felt at home.  In the first instance he had much to suffer from Cleopatra, who would willingly have seen Palestine reduced under Egyptian domination once more, and who actually succeeded in inducing Antony to take from Herod several fair and valuable provinces of his realm.  Next, his whole position was imperilled by the result of the battle of Actium; he had once more ranged himself upon the wrong side.  But his tact did not fail him in winning Octavianus, as before it had made Antony his friend.  In fact he reaped nothing but advantage from the great overturn which took place in Roman affairs; it rid him of Cleopatra, a dangerous enemy, and gave him in the new imperator a much better master than before.