Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/198

i So A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud.ea. as possible ; since it should be borne in mind that the Jews who returned from Babylon were poor and few in number. 1 Be this as it may, the second temple was consecrated in 516 b.c. 2 In its long existence of five hundred years, it does not seem to have been materially altered, nor to have suffered at the hands of the Greeks (Seleucidse), or the Romans under Pompey, who succeeded each other in the ownership of Syria. The last great transformation of the temple occurred under Herod. He was hated by his new subjects for his cruelties, his foreign origin, and for having caused the death of the last de- scendants of the Maccabees. To ingratiate himself with the Jews, and attach them to his family, he not only rebuilt the temple, but like his Roman patrons of this period, he seems to have been possessed with architectural fever, and to have filled Jerusalem, Palestine, and his own province of Idumsea with monumental buildings, many of which still exist. Tradition, and the religious feeling of the people, forbade the area proper to be added to or taken from ; but there was no such restriction against the outer area or circular court. By taking in the site of the palace of Solomon, and a small piece of ground on the south face of the valley, he brought it to nearly twice the size it was before. He raised it some two feet above its former level, and increased its length from north to south ; so that instead of being a square it was now a parallelogram, measuring on the smaller side, one stadium (185 m.), and two on the next to it (370 m.). 3 These measurements, given from memory, have no claim to be con- sidered strictly accurate. In point of fact, they would be much within reality if we suppose him not to have used the Olympian stadium as his standard measure. But even so the relative pro- portions were preserved, since roughly speaking, they are those of the present haram. 1 Esdras vi. 3, 4. a Loc. cit. In the speech Josephus puts in the mouth of Herod, when addressing the Jews (Ant.Jud., XV. xi. 1), he is made to say, that the post exillic house was in height sixty cubits less than the first had been. A little further he states : " Our fathers were unable to build a temple in size and splendour equal to that of Solomon." Haggai, too (ii. 4), writes of the painful contrast the aspect of the new edifice pro- duced on the beholders. 3 Josephus, Ant. Jud., XV. xi. 1 ; Bell., I. xxi. 1 ; V. v. 2. Josephus* measure- ment for the wall of enclosure is four stadia. See De Vogué, Le Temple, p. 19, note 8, upon the real meaning of this passage.