One other matter was easier for Romans to comprehend, and that was the inviolable sanctity of certain things and places. It was a common enough conception that certain places were unapproachable to all but a few, ἄδυτα; and that certain things, like the Palladium, suffered profanation from the slightest touch. They submitted accordingly with a good grace to exclusion from most of the temple precincts, and Nero[293] readily gave his consent to the building of the wall that prevented Agrippa II from turning the temple ceremonies into a show for his courtiers. The punishment of a Roman soldier, who tore a scroll of the Pentateuch, is another case in point. The soldier may have been a Syrian enrolled from the section in which he served, and not properly a Roman at all. None the less an arbitrary and distinctly unsympathetic procurator felt his responsibility for threatened disorders keenly enough to make this drastic example.[294] Herod had kept order. He had done so with a high hand, and had met with frequent rebellions. Himself wholly inclined to complete Hellenization, he had made many efforts to conciliate his Jewish subjects. His lust for building he gratified only in the pagan cities subject to him. His coins bear no device except the inanimate objects and vegetable forms allowed by law and tradition. With cautious regard to certain openly expressed fears on the part of the Jews, he rebuilt the temple on a magnificent scale. He spoke of the Israelites as “our ancestors.”[295] As has been said, he did not wholly want adherents among priests and people. That he died as an embittered and vindictive despot, conscious of being generally detested, and contriving fiendish plots to make his death deplored, is probable enough, and is amply explained by the domestic difficulties with which he had to contend all his life.[296] In some cases at least, it was his zeal for orderly administration that caused friction with the people. His law sentencing burglars to foreign slavery is an instance (Jos. Ant. XVI. i. 1). In general, however, the mere suppression of more or less organized brigandage was a task that took all his attention, but this “brigandage” was often a real attempt at revolution, in which popular teachers were suspected of being implicated, and every such suppression carried with it in its train a series of executions that did not increase the king’s popularity.