New Releases by Michael Grant

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The Herod of popular tradition is the tyrannical King of Judaea who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents and died a terrible death in 4 BC as the judgment of God. But this biography paints a much more complex picture of this contemporary of Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and the Emperor Augustus. Herod devoted his life to the task of keeping the Jews prosperous and racially intact. To judge by the two disastrous Jewish rebellions that occurred within a hundred and fifty years of his death -- those the Jews called the First and Second Roman Wars -- he was not, in the long run, completely successful. For forty years Herod walked the most precarious of political tightropes. For he had to be enough of a Jew to retain control of his Jewish subjects, and enough of a pro-Roman to preserve the confidence of Rome, within whose territory his kingdom fell. For more than a quarter of a century he was one of the chief bulwarks of Augustus'' empire in the east. He made Judaea a large and prosperous country. He founded cities and built public works on a scale never seen before: of these, recently excavated Masada is a spectacular example. And he did all this in spite of a continuous undercurrent of protest and underground resistance. The numerous illustrations presents portraits and coins, buildings and articles of everyday use, landscapes and fortresses, and subsequent generations'' interpretations of the more famous events, actual and mythical, of Herod''s career.

In this 1968 study, Michael Grant examines the varied ways in which Rome used currency to inform direct or deceive public opinion and also considers results of this exploitation. Cunning historians can read in the coins matters of art politics, religion, economics - even personalities not to be found in surviving books: or if found, can set what the books say against what the coins say. Professor Grant astutely masters his difficult and complex subject matter, producing a brief exposition of it in words which the general reader and specialist alike can understand and profit from. Complemented by a series of half-tone plates, Professor Grant''s book is an excellent introduction for students of history to the value of coins as evidence for their subject.