For 2000 years Herod has been called great, yet very little is known, though much has been recorded, of this strange historic character. Herod was born as a younger son of an obscure Arab civil servant on the very edge of the Levant, but went on to become one of the most glittering figures of one of the most colourful periods of human history. He was to be the friend and enemy of Anthony, of Cleopatra, of Augustus' great minister Vipsanius Agrippa, indeed of Augustus himself. A familiar and popular figure in Rome and Athens, Herod was the ruler of the kingdom into which Jesus of Nazareth was born. Rather than depicting Herod as the merciless author of the Massacre of the Innocents, Stewart Perowne shows him to be a giant of a man who has many claims to greatness: as the protector of his people, as a soldier and diplomat and as the passionate builder of cities throughout Palestine and the magnificent Temple at Jerusalem. The author lays before us the landscape of the Mediterranean in the first century BC, with its political and religious dissensions.