heless, his work was incomplete, and could not be continued.
Profanely ambitious, and lost in a maze of religious controversies,
this astute Idumean had the advantage which coolness and judgment,
stripped of morality, give over passionate fanatics. But his idea of a
secular kingdom of Israel, even if it had not been an anachronism in
the state of the world in which it was conceived, would inevitably
have miscarried, like the similar project which Solomon formed, owing
to the difficulties proceeding from the character of the nation. His
three sons were only lieutenants of the Romans, analogous to the
rajahs of India under the English dominion. Antipater, or Antipas,
tetrarch of Galilee and of Peraea, of whom Jesus was a subject all his
life, was an idle and useless prince,[1] a favorite and flatterer of
Tiberius,[2] and too often misled by the bad influence of his second
wife, Herodias.[3] Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanea, into
whose dominions Jesus made frequent journeys, was a much better
sovereign.[4] As to Archelaus, ethnarch of Jerusalem, Jesus could not
know him, for he was about ten years old when this man, who was weak
and without character, though sometimes violent, was deposed by
Augustus.[5] The last trace of self-government was thus lost to
Jerusalem. United to Samaria and Idumea, Judea formed a kind of
dependency of the province of Syria, in which the senator Publius
Sulpicius Quirinus, well known as consul,[6] was the imperial legate.
A series of Roman procurators, subordinate in important matters to
the imperial legate of Syria--Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Annius Rufus,
Valerius Gratus, and lastly (in the twenty-sixth year of our era),
Pontius Pilate[7]--followed each other, and were constantly occupied
in extinguishing the volcano which was seething beneath their feet.

[Footnote 1: Jos., _Ant._, VIII. v. 1, vii. 1 and 2; Luke iii. 19.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., XVIII. ii. 3, iv. 5, v. 1.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid., XVIII. vii. 2.]

[Footnote 4: Ibid., XVIII. iv. 6.]

[Footnote 5: Ibid., XVII. xii. 2; and _B.J._, II. vii. 3.]

[Footnote 6: Orelli, _Inscr. Lat._, No. 3693; Henzen, _Suppl._, No.
7041; _Fasti praenestini_, on the 6th of March, and on the 28th of
April (in the _Corpus Inscr. Lat._, i. 314, 317); Borghesi, _Fastes
Consulaires_ (yet unedited), in the year 742; R. Bergmann, _De Inscr.
Lat. ad. P.S. Quirinium, ut videtur, referenda_ (Berlin, 1851). Cf.
Tac., _Ann._, ii. 30, iii. 48; Strabo, X