Ever since the age of the pharaohs, great leaders have always understood the importance of architecture in the civic life of their nations. Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Louis XIV turned a modest hunting lodge into Versailles, a stage on which the Sun King could display the order of his realm. Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to proclaim the glory of France in the language of imperial Rome. Thomas Jefferson, writing to Pierre Charles L’Enfant as the federal city was being planned, urged that the Capitol be based on “the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years.” Even Herod, a ruler the sages of the Talmud regarded with deep suspicion, expanded the Temple in Jerusalem so magnificently that they proclaimed that “One who has not seen Herod’s building has never seen a beautiful building in his life.”