Herod, king of Judea (part of Palestine): What do we know about the famed king who has been accused through the ages of slaughtering 'all male children, two years and younger'? What would have driven a grown man to send soldiers to commit such an atrocity? What could have been his mental profile? If he chose to use his position of power to kill without remorse, could he have done it before? If so, whom else did he kill? How many could he have killed?Herod is hardly remembered for the great building projects he had undertaken, his hippodromes, his amphitheaters, his great harbor on shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which till today is considered an engineering marvel of his days...How did the mind of someone capable of creating such beauty and yet also so much bloodshed in his own family, work?
Attribute it all to the most basic nature of all creatures - survival and the instinct to survive.
ReplyDeleteKilling off your own family would not attribute to survival, but suicide of the family line, one would think.
ReplyDeleteThe need to create things of beauty must have come from an impulse to gain immortality, and the need to leave behind a more permanenet legacy than mere human flesh; flesh who though called by his name, was, in Herod's opnion,not to be trusted.
I think he was a schizo; like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A great warrior and a great madman !
ReplyDeletePrakash Java
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDear Prakash,
ReplyDeleteHerod had delusional paranoia, I think. He saw a threat in every action and everyone. From my research, I gather that it was more than a mere rumor that Herod saw his wife's ghost and bitterly craved her forgiveness and who knows, Shakespeare could have used this in Hamlet.