The fanatical Jews at home meanwhile continued to help themselves; the Roman garrison, which was stationed in the temple, was assailed with violence, and pious bands of brigands filled the land; Varus had to call out the legions and to restore quiet with the sword. It was a warning for the suzerain, a supplementary justification of king Herod’s violent but effective government. But Augustus, with all the weakness which he so often showed, particularly in later years, while dismissing, no doubt, the representatives of those fanatical masses and their request, yet executed in the main the testament of Herod, and gave over the rule in Jerusalem to Archelaus shorn of the kingly title, which Augustus preferred for a time not to concede to the untried young man; shorn, moreover, of the northern territories, and reduced also in military status by the taking away of the defence of the frontier. The circumstance that at the instigation of Augustus the taxes raised to a high pitch under Herod were lowered, could but little better the position of the tetrarch. The personal incapacity and worthlessness of Archelaus were hardly needed, in addition, to make him impossible; a few years later (A.D. 6) Augustus saw himself compelled to depose him. Now he did at length the will of those mutineers; the monarchy was abolished, and while on the one hand the land was taken into direct Roman administration, on the other hand, so far as an internal government was allowed by the side of this, it was given over to the senate of Jerusalem. This procedure may certainly have been determined in part by assurances given earlier by Augustus to Herod as regards the succession, in part by the more and more apparent, and in general doubtless justifiable, disinclination of the imperial government to larger client-states possessing some measure of independent self-movement. What took place shortly before or soon after in Galatia, in Cappadocia, in Mauretania, explains why in Palestine also the kingdom of Herod hardly survived himself. But, as the immediate government was organised in Palestine, it was even administratively a bad retrograde step as compared with the Herodian; and above all the circumstances here were so peculiar and so difficult, that the immediate contact between the governing Romans and the governed Jews--which certainly had been obstinately striven for by the priestly party itself and ultimately obtained--redounded to the benefit neither of the one nor of the other. [Sidenote: Provincial organisation.]