He beheld an amazing palace; under the shade of its domes of giddy height, tropical trees and flowers were planted by tepid pools; monkeys sported there, hanging in bunches to the boughs, while long-drawn, insinuating melodies were scraped on stringed instruments, and the rattle of tambourines made the eyed plumes quiver in the peacocks' outspread tails.
In this strange hot-bed, filled with clumps of flowers and of women, this immense harem where his seven hundred princesses and his three hundred concubines disported themselves, Solomon watched the whirl of dances, gazed at the living hedge of women, seen against the background of gold-plated walls, their bodies clothed only in the transparent veil of vapour rising from resins burning on tripods.
He appeared as a typical Eastern monarch, a sort of Khalif or Sultan, or fairy-tale Rajah--the prodigious king at once polygamous, unbridled, insatiable by luxury, and learned, artistic, peace-loving, the wisest among men.

In advance of the ideas of his time, he was the great builder in Israel, and the commerce of the country was of his making.

He left such a reputation for wisdom and justice that he came at last to be regarded as an enchanter and wizard.

Even Josephus tells us that he wrote a book of Magic, of incantations for laying evil spirits; in the Middle Ages he was said to have owned a magic ring, charms, forms of evocation, secrets for exorcism; and in all these legends the image of the king becomes confused.
And he would remain to this day a figure out of the Thousand and One Nights, were it not that in the decline of his glory we see him as a grandiose image of the mournfulness of life, the vanity of joy, the nothingness of man.
His old age was melancholy.

Exhausted and governed by women, he denied God and sacrificed to idols.