Yet Josephus's account of Herod's funeral procession suggests the respect, even the reverence, that his subjects still felt for him. In Jericho, where Herod died in 4 B.C., his body was placed on a golden bier studded with gemstones and draped in royal purple, with a scepter in his right hand and a gold crown on his head. His numerous family ranged themselves around the bier, together with his army dressed in full battle array and 500 servants and freed slaves carrying spices. Together they escorted Herod 25 long, hot miles southwest, to a cone-shaped hill at the edge of the desert that gleamed with white stonework. Here they laid him to rest.

Two thousand years later, I visited Herodium with Ehud Netzer on a cold, blustery February morning. Netzer is a compact man of 74, with steel gray hair, a slight paunch, a prominent jaw, and thin lips set in a straight line in what could be shyness, taciturnity, or even truculence, though now and then his sternness melts away in a broad smile.

We parked near the foot of the hill, at the edge of a village of cinder block houses belonging to Bedouin of the Taamra people, where a six-foot sign declared that Israeli citizens were forbidden by law to enter. "I used to have dinner and take tea here, in people's homes," Netzer said. "Village children would come and play in the excavations. The first intifada in 1987 cooled all that."

Netzer's work at Herodium, like his career and his life, has been cadenced by politics, violence, and war. He grew up in Jerusalem, where his house was shelled by Arab forces when they took the eastern part of the city in 1948, shortly before the founding of Israel. Originally trained as an architect, Netzer started taking part in archaeological investigations in the summers while still a student in the 1950s. He continued to practice the two activities side by side, keeping his excavations running by using the business skills developed as an independent architect, raising much of the money for the digs himself, employing students when he couldn't afford to hire outside help, and ferrying equipment to and from sites in his station wagon, loading four mud-caked wheelbarrows into the back and strapping five more to the roof.

His first encounter with Herod came in 1963, when he began a three-year stint as team architect of the landmark excavations of Masa­da, the fortified compound built by Herod on a mesa top overlooking the Dead Sea. In 1967, when the Six Day War and the subsequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank made a number of Herodian sites accessible to Israeli archaeologists, Netzer began excavating two of the richest of them, at Jericho and Herodium, and later several others. "I encountered so many unique architectural designs and solutions that I gradually came to the conclusion that there was one mind behind them all—that Herod had a profound understanding of architecture and urban planning, and took an active role in the erection of many of his buildings."