“The Antonia was placed at the angle made by the meeting of two colonnades of the outer temple, the western and the northern. It was built upon a rock, fifty cubits high, and precipitous on all sides. It was the work of king Herod, in which, most of all, he showed himself a man of exalted conceptions.” Section 8. * * * * * In speaking of Solomon’s foundation, he also says, (Antiquities book VIII. chapter iii. section 9,) “But he made the outside of the temple wonderful beyond account, both in description and to sight. For having piled up huge terraces, from which, on account of their immense depth, it was hardly possible to look down, and reared them to the highth of four hundred cubits, (six hundred feet!) he made them on the same level with the hill’s top on which the _shrine_ (ναος) was built, and thus the open floor of the _temple_ (ἱερον, or the outer court’s inclosure) was level with the _shrine_.” * * * * * I have drawn thus largely from the rich descriptions of this noble and faithful describer of the old glories of the Holy Land, because this very literal translation gives the exact naked detail of the temple’s aspect, in language as gorgeous as the most high-wrought in which it could be presented in a mere fancy picture of the same scene; and because it will prove that my conception of its glory, as it appeared to Christ and the four disciples who “sat _over against_ it upon the Mount of Olives,” is not overdrawn, since it is thus supported by the blameless and invaluable testimony of him who saw all this splendor in its most splendid day, and afterwards in its unequaled beauty and with all its polished gold and marble, shining and sinking amid the flames, which swept it utterly away from his saddening eyes forever, to a ruin the most absolute and irretrievable that ever fell upon the works of man. This was the temple on which the sons of Jonah and Zebedee gazed, with the awful denunciation of its utter ruin falling from their Lord’s lips, and such was the desolation to which those terrible words devoted it. This full description of its location shows the manner in which its terraced foundations descended with their vast fronts, six hundred feet into the valley of Kedron, over which they looked. To give as clear an idea of the place where they sat, and its relations to the rest of the scene, I extract from Conder’s Modern Traveler the following description of Mount Olivet.