Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

We know how the story of the Roman Empire ended with the "triumph" of Christianity and the eventual Christianization of the Roman Mediterranean. But how would religious life have appeared to an observer at a time when the conversion of the emperor was only a Christian pipe dream? And how would it have appeared in one particular city, rather than in the Roman Empire as a whole?

This volume takes a detailed look at the religious dimension of life in one particular Roman city Caesarea Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. Caesarea was marked by a complex religious identity from the outset. Over time, other religious groups, including Christianity, Mithraism and Samaritanism, found a home in the city, where they jostled with each other, and with those already present, for position, influence and the means of survival.

Written by a team of seasoned scholars and promising newcomers, this book brings a new perspective to the study of religion in antiquity. Along with the deliberate goal to understand religion as an urban phenomenon, Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima studies religious groups as part of the dynamic process of social interaction, spanning a spectrum from coexistence, through competition and rivalry, to open conflict. The cumulative result is a fresh and fascinating look at one of antiquity’s most interesting cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: May 11, 2000
• ISBN: 9781554586707

Book preview

Studies in Christianity

and Judaism / Études sur le

christianisme et le judaïsme : 8

Studies in Christianity and Judaism/

Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme

Studies in Christianity and Judaism / Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme publishes monographs on Christianity and Judaism in the last two centuries before the common era and the first six centuries of the common era, with a special interest in studies of their interrelationship or the cultural and social context in which they developed.

STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM /

ÉTUDES SUR LE CHRISTIANISME

ET LE JUDAÏSME

Number 8

RELIGIOUS RIVALRIES AND

THE STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESS

IN CAESAREA MARITIMA

Edited by

Terence L. Donaldson

Published for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in

Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses

by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

2000

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Religious rivalries and the struggle for success in Caesarea Maritima

(Studies in Christianity and Judaism = Études sur le christianisme

et le judaïsme ESCJ; v. 8)

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0-88920-348-2

1. Caesarea (Israel) – Religion. I. Donaldson, Terence L. II. Canadian

Corporation for Studies in Religion. III. Series.

BL1640.R44 2000           200’.933             C99-932480-2

Printed in Canada

© 2000 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion /

             Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses

Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Cover image from photo by Professor Kenneth G. Holum, University of Maryland, Co-director of the Combined Caesarea Expedition. Photo is of a sixth-century mosaic from the Imperial Revenue Office.

Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima has been produced from a manuscript supplied in camera-ready form by the editors.

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Order from:

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Wilfrid Laurier University

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Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Contributors

Maps

1.   Introduction

Terence L. Donaldson

EVIDENCE

2.   Archaeological Evidence for Religion

and Urbanism in Caesarea Maritima

Peter Richardson

3.   A Literary Guide to Caesarea

Maritima

Lee A. Johnson

4.   Epigraphical Evidence in

Caesarea Maritima

Bradley H. McLean

5.   Archaeological Study of Caesarea Maritima:

An Annotated Bibliography

Elaine A. Myers

RELIGION

6.   Greco-Roman Religion

in Caesarea Maritima

R. Jackson Painter

7.   Jews and Judaism in Caesarea Maritima

Michele Murray

8.   Christianity in Caesarea Maritima

Richard S. Ascough

9.   Samaritanism in Caesarea Maritima

Reinhard Pummer

PERSPECTIVES

10.  The Origins and Social Context

of Mithraism at Caesarea Maritima

R. Jackson Painter

11.  Ethnic and Political Factors

in the Conflict at Caesarea Maritima

John S. Kloppenborg

12.  The Conflict over Isopoliteia:

An Alexandrian Perspective

Dorothy I. Sly

13.  Architecture and Conflict in

Caesarea Maritima

Stephen Fai

14.  Cornelius, the Roman Army

and Religion

Wendy Cotter, C.S.J.

15.  Origen’s Hexapla and Christian-Jewish Encounter

in the Second and Third Centuries

Ruth A. Clements

16.  Concluding Reflections

Terence L. Donaldson

Works Cited

Index of Ancient Texts

Index of Modern Authors

Preface

This volume is the fruit of a multi-year seminar conducted within the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. The seminar (entitled Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success: Jews, Christians and Other Religious Groups in Local Urban Settings in the First Two Centuries) will be described more fully in the Introduction. Here, however, one should observe that it stands in a lively tradition of CSBS seminars stretching back to the mid-1970s. These seminars have dealt with a variety of significant topics (anti-Judaism and early Christianity; Torah/nomos traditions; voluntary associations) and have made significant contributions to scholarship, through the publication both of seminar volumes and of papers and monographs produced by members in conjunction with the various seminar projects. The present volume is the latest—but by no means the last—contribution to this scholarly tradition.

A word of thanks is owing to a number of individuals who have helped bring this project to completion: to the authors themselves, for lending their expertise to the project and for engaging in the editorial process with generosity and good humour; to Peter Richardson, the general editor of the series, whose enthusiasm for the project has more than once kept it on track; to Margaret MacDonald and Stephen Wilson, who read the manuscript and helped to improve it by spotting errors and suggesting refinements; to Richard Ascough and Wendy Cotter, who worked to secure a publication grant from their institution (Loyola University of Chicago); to Brian Irwin, for his careful efficiency in producing the indices and list of abbreviations; to Prof. Kenneth Holum, Director of the Combined Caesarea Expeditions, who very generously provided the photo that adorns the cover of the volume and who helped make available several maps from the Caesarea Graphics Archive; to the directors of the Caesarea Graphics Archive (Kenneth Holum, Kathryn Gleason, Joseph Patrich, Avner Raban) who gave permission to use the maps appearing on pages xii-xiv and to Anna Iamim, the Archive curator, who produced them. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge financial support provided by the University of Saskatchewan and Loyola University of Chicago, both of which provided grants towards the costs of publication, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided the editor with a research grant that helped to facilitate the project.

Abbreviations

Contributors

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Terence L. Donaldson

Among the archaeological discoveries at Caesarea Maritima is a mosaic containing a portion of Rom 13:3: Do you wish to have no reason to fear the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval. The mosaic formed part of the floor of a public building dating from the Byzantine period (sixth century) that was apparently used as an imperial revenue office.¹ The irony is to be savoured. Just 500 m to the south stand the remains of Herod’s Promontory Palace, almost certainly the place where the author of the text, the apostle Paul himself, had been imprisoned by the Roman authority (Acts 23:35) and where he had appeared before the Roman procurators Felix and Festus (Acts 24:1–2; 25:6). Here we have a text, written by one whose religious beliefs and activity were perceived as a threat to the good order of the state, being used sometime later to bolster the authority of the same state which had now come to espouse those very beliefs. Paul may have failed to make much headway with the imperial appointees Felix and Festus (Acts 26:24!), but his successors and co-religionists eventually won over not only the emperor but the empire as a whole.

Of course, evidence for the triumph of Christianity is richly apparent at Caesarea, nowhere more so than the site just 150 m to the north where we find the remains of a sixth-century Byzantine church built on the foundation of Herod’s Temple of Roma and Augustus. In fact, in the history of Caesarea as it unfolded between the construction of these two religious edifices—Herodian temple and Byzantine church—we can see in miniature the whole process of the Christianization of the empire. Here we have a city founded to honour the emperor and to provide a visible embodiment of the Roman reality; here we find a full complement of Greco-Roman cults and growing Christian and Jewish minorities, striving to maintain themselves and jostling for position in a crowded and often competitive environment; here, thanks to native son Eusebius, we can see as clearly as anywhere the final (as it turned out) confrontation between the state and the burgeoning Christian movement in the Diocletian persecutions, followed in quick succession by the dizzying reversal of Christian fortunes under Constantine; here we can see the increasingly Christian character of the empire’s new clothes, as the triumph of Christianity led gradually but inexorably to a reshaping of the institutions and architecture of the Roman world.

As these initial comments demonstrate, the language of competition and victory comes readily to hand when one speaks of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. From Gibbon to Harnack to Stark,² the conversion of Constantine and its aftermath are regularly described in terms of struggle and triumph. But such language needs to be used with caution when one moves back behind the Constantinian era to look at the attitudes and activities of religious groups in earlier centuries. The fact that Christianity, of the various religious groups in the empire, ended up victorious in the fourth century should not be taken to mean that there was necessarily a conscious competition for the soul of the empire in the second. The nature of the outcome should not be taken as evidence for the nature of the process. Post-Constantinian triumphalism provides no sure index as to how religious groups viewed each other and what their stance towards the larger social order might have been, at a point in the process when the outcome was by no means predictable.

Still, there is plenty of evidence for conscious competition and conflict, and even where it might be more appropriate to speak of religious coexistence, there was nevertheless a kind of implicit competition at work wherever a multiplicity of religious groups attempted to maintain an existence in the same locale. In order to maintain themselves successfully, groups needed a variety of subsistence items that were in limited supply: replenishment of membership; space in which to meet; the support of patrons; a degree of honour and status; the goodwill, or at least tolerance, of the civic authorities; and so on. Even where such a struggle for success did not take the form of overt rivalry, there was nevertheless a competitive element to the social realities of religious life in antiquity.

The purpose of this volume is to examine the relationships and rivalries among Jews, Christians and other Greco-Roman religious groups, as they struggled to establish themselves and to maintain their existence in one particular locale—Caesarea Maritima, the city founded by Herod the Great on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. The volume has emerged out of the Religious Rivalries Seminar, a multi-year seminar operating within the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Begun in 1995 with an initial term of five years, the seminar was established to explore Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success: Jews, Christians and Other Religious Groups in Local Urban Settings in the First Two Centuries, to use the title of the seminar’s prospectus. As this title indicates, the broad area of the seminar’s interest—religion in Roman antiquity—has been given focus and momentum by two more specific considerations, one having to do with the urban context, the other with the element of interaction among religious groups. These considerations were first articulated in a programmatic paper by Leif Vaage, a revised version of which will appear in a companion volume (Vaage, forthcoming). But since these considerations shape the present study as well, it is appropriate to describe them here in more detail.

First, we are interested in seeing religious groups not as isolated or self-contained entities, but as social and, more particularly, urban phenomena. While religion was by no means restricted to the city, the development, spread and interaction of religious movements took place primarily in urban settings in the Greco-Roman world, as in preindustrial societies generally (Sjoberg 1960: 256–84). It was in the city that one found the necessary concentration of people and resources to support a religious infrastructure; here the major shrines, temples and synagogues were located; here was the social space that made religious diversity and innovation possible. As nodal points in the networks of trade and transportation, cities not only facilitated the distribution of material commodities but provided opportunities for the spread of religious commodities as well.

As urban phenomena, then, religious groups cannot be understood apart from the cities in which they are embedded, nor can the relationships between and among them be understood without an understanding of the social dynamic of their urban matrix. Thus we have attempted to immerse ourselves in the concrete realities of city life–architecture, production, trade, government, politics, status, patronage, benefaction and so on—and to see the various religious groups of interest to us as another aspect of this complex social reality.

Our interest has been directed, however, not simply to the city in general but to specific cities in particular; for its first three years the seminar concentrated on Caesarea Maritima, shifting its attention to Sardis and Smyrna more recently. This concentration of focus is not simply a matter of convenience, an approach chosen simply because the Roman Empire is too large to study all at once. Rather, it arises from the conviction that there was considerable local variation from city to city in the Roman world, religious life and activity included. The mix of religious groups, the nature of their interaction, even to a certain extent the nature of the individual groups themselves—these were not uniform across the cities of the empire but displayed considerable variety. Larger patterns, of course, are not to be ignored; to be unaware of the ways in which preindustrial cities as a group differed from modern cities, for example, is to run the risk of allowing modern assumptions to shape the interpretation of ancient data (Rohrbaugh 1996). Still, history is the domain of the particular and the unique, and this study of religion in Caesarea Maritima wants to give due recognition to the unique features of this particular locale.

One goal of the seminar on which this volume is based, then, has been to study religious groups as integral aspects of urban life in particular Greco-Roman cities. The project has been shaped by a second consideration, however, having to do with the relationships between and among the various groups in their particular urban contexts. As has already been observed, one fact looms large over any discussion of religion in late antiquity: the triumph of Christianity. Of all the groups that proliferated throughout the cities of the Mediterranean basin, one of them—Christianity—became dominant and emerged as the official religion of the empire (or should the order of these two predicates be inverted, dominance the result rather than the grounds of official recognition?).

Here the historian needs to proceed with a great deal of care. On the one hand, any account of religious life and interaction in the earlier centuries needs to be consistent with such an outcome. The conversion of the emperor may have been an unpredictable event, one that introduced new and unforeseen factors into the religious equation. Still, it was not disconnected from social realities; Christianity had already experienced a striking degree of growth and diffusion, which would have had its own historical consequences in any case.

Yet on the other hand, as has already been observed, the stunning reality of the Christian triumph can easily skew our scholarly reconstructions of religious interaction in the earlier period. We are not to assume that religious groups in the early centuries of the Christian era (not even our chronological indicators are immune!) saw themselves as engaged in a competition whose prize was the empire itself. Goodman complains about an unconscious Christianization of the study of ancient religions, by which he means the assumption that other religious groups were just as interested in winning converts and in engaging in organized proselytizing efforts as (he assumes) were the Christians (Goodman 1994:3). But even within Christianity it is difficult to find evidence for the kind of deliberate, coordinated, worldwide mission that is often taken for granted (MacMullen 1984: 33–35). Perhaps we need to recognize an unconscious Christianization of the study of early Christianity itself!

What is required, then, is an interpretive model more appropriate to the situation than that of competition and victory (an athletic image) or of conflict and triumph (military). The answer is not to be found at the opposite extreme, however, emphasizing peaceful coexistence and benign interaction;³ our evidence reflects the full spectrum of possible interrelationships, from peaceful coexistence, through competition implicit and explicit, to confrontation and conflict. A more helpful model emerges from the work of Lieu, North and Rajak (1992), especially the essay by John North. North argues that any account of the development of religion in the Roman Empire needs to begin not with the individual religious movements themselves but with a recognition of a fundamental change in the whole social environment in which religion functioned. The change has to do with the emergence of religious pluralism in the Hellenistic and, especially, the Roman eras, a change

from religion as embedded in the city-state to religion as choice of differentiated groups offering different qualities of religious doctrine, different experiences, insights, or just different myths and stories to make sense of the absurdity of human experience (North 1992: 178).

In earlier society, North reminds us, religion was a given part of a person’s life in family, clan and city. To use the language of cultural anthropology, religion was embedded in other domains, specifically kinship and politics (Hanson and Oakman 1998: 8–10, 20). That is, religious institutions and associations were totally incorporated into family and civic life; there were no separate, differentiated religious institutions to which one might choose to give one’s allegiance or which operated independently of the dominant social structures.

With the development of the Hellenistic and, later, the Roman empires, however, came a shift in the social location of religion. Toleration of local tradition on the part of the conquerors, mobility, migration, trade, the emergence of ethnic diasporas—all served to create a new situation of religious pluralism. While cities still had their local gods and civic religions, these existed alongside a whole array of other religious groups, now differentiated from the structures of the polis and no longer embedded in kinship and political domains. With this development in the direction of pluralism came the possibility of choice, where religious involvement was not necessarily determined by one’s ethnic or civic identity, where religious groups were distinct entities to which one could become an adherent.

This shift from embedded religion to religious pluralism created a situation where religious groups were, at least potentially, in competition with each other—for members, status, honour, patronage, physical resources and so on. For this reason North suggests that the marketplace might provide a more appropriate model for thinking about religious interaction in the Roman Empire—a situation where no one any longer held a monopoly, but where various religious groups existed side by side and offered their wares for public sale. As North readily acknowledges, the model has its limitations. The various merchants had quite different understandings of the market, for example, and of their place in it. Not everyone was as aggressive in hawking their wares as were the Christians; some, undoubtedly, were not even consciously seeking customers at all. Still, there was an implicitly competitive nature to the situation itself, independent of the conscious awareness and intentions of the various groups. The Christians might have been more attuned to it but they did not create it; they simply were the first to take advantage of it. Indeed, their very success perhaps made it necessary for Judaism and, later, paganism to develop a more aggressively competitive spirit themselves (Goodman 1994: 129–53; North 1992: 187–92).

In any case, despite its limitations the marketplace analogy provides a fruitful model for the investigation of local religious interaction. It captures the situation of pluralism that was present in Caesarea and elsewhere, with its resultant atmosphere of (at least implicit) competition. But at the same time, it allows for a much broader spectrum of interaction—coexistence, implicit competition, overt competition, confrontation, conflict—than is the case with a model based simply on conflict.

In the chapters to follow, then, we will investigate religious coexistence, competition and conflict in Caesarea Maritima. While the description of the seminar cited above indicated an interest in the first two centuries, it should be clear from the preceding discussion that our interests are not restricted to this period in any rigid way. While the interests and expertise of the seminar members as a whole might tend towards this earlier period, we are interested in placing our study within the whole process of religious interaction that results in what MacMullen describes as the Christianizing of the Roman empire (MacMullen 1984). The level of our direct interest might attenuate the more we move into the third and fourth centuries, but these later centuries are by no means beyond the range of our investigation. Indeed, in the case of Caesarea, where second-century evidence is sparse, it is necessary to include later material in order to get a sense of the earlier process of development.

And so to Caesarea Maritima, Herod’s spectacular construction on the Mediterranean coast. Situated on the edge of Herod’s realm, in territory never an integral part of Judea, and built both to honour Augustus Caesar and to control trade and communication with the rest of the Mediterranean basin, the city functioned from the outset as one of the most significant channels of interaction between Judean life and the wider Roman world. Ships docking in the busy harbour of Sebastos carried wine and oil, silk and spices, kings and prefects, merchants, civil servants, soldiers and—more than once—the spoils of war. The city itself provided the infrastructure not only for this commerce in goods and government, produce and politics, but also for commodities of a less tangible, but nevertheless highly valued, sort—philosophies, teachings, mysteries, religions. Evidence literary, archaeological and epigraphical suggests the presence of a wide variety of goods on offer in the religious marketplace—Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity; the official religions of the great Temple of Roma and Augustus, or of the city’s Tyche; traditional Greco-Roman cults associated with Artemis, Apollo and Demeter; the more innovative oriental religions of Isis, Sarapis and Mithras.

In the first section of this volume we survey the various types of evidence for religion in Caesarea, with special attention to the evidence for religious coexistence, competition and conflict. We begin on the ground, with the archaeological evidence (chap. 2). Here Peter Richardson describes not only the religiously significant archaeological remains, but also the influence of religious factors in both the original plan and the adaptive development of the city. Chapter 3, by Lee Johnson, provides us with a guide to the literary evidence for Caesarea—rather sparse in Roman sources but rich and variegated in both Jewish and Christian literature. Then, Bradley McLean selects from his larger collection of Caesarean inscriptions (McLean 1997, 1999) those that bear on the religious life of the city (chap. 4). Finally, Elaine Myers provides us with a classified and annotated bibliography on Caesarea, with particular emphasis on archaeological studies (chap. 5).

The second section contains surveys of the various religious groups whose existence in the city can be documented: various Greco-Roman religions (Jackson Painter; chap. 6); Judaism (Michele Murray; chap. 7); Christianity (Richard Ascough; chap. 8); Samaritanism (Reinhard Pummer; chap. 9). In each case we are provided not only with a history of the various groups (such as can be reconstructed), but also with a discussion of how factors of religious interaction in the urban context have played into this history.

The third section contains a variety of case studies—treatments of individual situations or themes that bear on the issue of religious coexistence, competition and conflict. In chapter 10 Jackson Painter investigates the rise and spread of Mithraism; he shows how Caesarea provides us with evidence for the way in which Mithraism was able to penetrate the upper echelons of urban society, and he suggests that Caesarea, in its role as centre of military operations in the Judean war (66–70 C.E.), might have been an important conduit for the spread of the cult to the west, as military units moved on after the war. Of course, the most conspicuous example of religious conflict—or, at least, of conflict with an important religious dimension—is that between the city’s Jewish and Gentile inhabitants in the years leading up to the war. John Kloppenborg investigates this conflict over isopoliteia in chapter 11, setting it firmly in its political and economic context. To provide some perspective on the Caesarean situation, Dorothy Sly compares it with a similar conflict over citizenship rights in Alexandria (chap. 12). In chapter 13 Stephen Fai draws on the Roman architect Vitruvius, along with other relevant material, to demonstrate how architecture and popular assumptions about the role of a city’s founder affected the struggle over citizenship in Caesarea. The story in Acts 10 of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who was first a Jewish sympathizer and then the first Gentile convert to Christianity, is obviously relevant to the concerns of this volume. In chapter 14 Wendy Cotter sets this story against the background of piety in the Roman military, asking how probable it was that Christianity would have been attractive to a person like Cornelius. A similar triangle of religious interaction (Christian/Jewish/pagan) is present in the career of Origen, especially his years in Caesarea. In chapter 15 Ruth Clements looks at the Hexapla—one of Origen’s most significant achievements—and sets it in the context of his encounters with Judaism in Caesarea.

In a concluding chapter, we will attempt to draw together some recurring threads, identify some significant findings and make some suggestions for further study.

¹ A photograph of the mosaic appears on the cover of this volume. Prof. Holum has indicated in private correspondence that imperial revenue office is a better designation than archives building (used earlier, e.g., in Holum et al. 1988: 169–71).

² Gibbon: Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth (Gibbon: 1.383 [book 1, chap. 15]); Harnack: The literary sources … permit us to understand the reasons why this religion triumphed in the Roman empire, and how the triumph was achieved (Harnack 1904: xii); Stark: How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers—no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity (Stark 1996: 3).

³ Taylor’s attempt to interpret the adversus Judaeos tradition as a manifestation of the inner theological needs of the Christian movement rather than as reflective of any social tensions between Christians and Jews is a case in point (Taylor 1995).

Evidence

CHAPTER TWO

Archaeological Evidence for Religion

and Urbanism in Caesarea Maritima

Peter Richardson

1. Introduction

Most cities develop organically. Even planned cities such as Caesarea Maritima did not in the long view remain planned cities throughout their functional life, but developed—sometimes fairly quickly—in ways unintended by the original planners. This was especially true of the facilities for religious activities in such a city, for the religious life of a city, in all its official and unofficial forms, had an impact on the developing urban landscape. Caesarea presents us with an instructive case study of the way in which religious life has helped to shape a city’s organic development.¹ Having begun life as a Hellenistic polls, it was replaced with a strikingly planned city by Herod the Great. It was refounded by Vespasian after the Jewish revolt,² commemorated by Trajan on a coin of 115–17 C.E., commemorated again by Hadrian, and converted into the Metropolis of Syria by Trebonianus Gallus (251–53 C.E.).³ It reached its maximum extent in the early Byzantine period and gradually declined thereafter. There were radical transformations in the Muslim period and in the Crusader period.⁴ Since its destruction in 1265, its history has been largely desolate. In the period covered by this chapter, roughly from the city’s founding as Strato’s Tower to about 200 C.E., with the emphasis on the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E., there is one sharp break—between the Hellenistic polls and the planned city of Herod—and longer periods of gradual change. My major concerns are the planned city and how this planned city moved away from the original planners’ vision.⁵ One key to weighing these changes is the evidence of religion and cult.

Herod signalled the religious character of the city in its name:⁶ this Caesarea, like other Caesareas at about the same time, honoured Augustus, and the harbour was separately named Sebastos, the Greek equivalent of the name Augustus that was bestowed on Octavian in 27 B.C.E.⁷ Both constructions pointed to Herod’s debt to Octavian, the youth who had been adopted into the family of Julius Caesar and had emerged victorious in the civil wars. He, along with Mark Antony, the senior person in the triumvirate then in force, had persuaded the Senate to name Herod king of Judea in late 40 B.C.E. Antony’s and Octavian’s growing animosity had culminated in the battle of Actium (2 September 31 B.C.E.), when Octavian’s forces had decisively outwitted and outmanoeuvred Antony’s; Antony and Cleopatra fled to Alexandria where they committed suicide. Though Herod had supported Antony, whose power base included Judea, he missed being on the losing side at Actium because Antony wanted him to engage the Nabateans. In late winter or early spring (30 B.C.E.), Herod went to Rhodes to offer Octavian the same loyalty he had shown Antony. Octavian accepted, and unexpectedly gave Herod new territories to add to his royal domain, including Strato’s Tower. Herod never wavered from total loyalty to Octavian’s and Rome’s interests.

Herod expressed his obligation to Octavian in the enormously costly conversion of a small late-Hellenistic seaport into a showpiece of Roman urban design and maritime engineering, beginning five years after Octavian became Augustus. The project occupied the years 22–10 B.C.E.,⁸ and was formally dedicated in the 192d Olympiad (10/9 B.C.E.) with flamboyant celebrations paying tribute to Augustus.⁹ Its exciting urbanism can be seen in the archaeology and sensed in Josephus’s long descriptions that rely on firsthand observations and on descriptions by Nicolas of Damascus, Herod’s historian.¹⁰

2. History of Settlement

1. Strato’s Tower

Strato’s Tower was founded (possibly by Strato I of Sidon in the fourth century B.C.E.) as a southern outpost of the Phoenician city, an ancillary harbour for ships needing shelter or provisions, and a centre for exports, particularly grain from the Sharon Plain.¹¹ It appears in the historical record first when Zenon, assistant to Egypt’s treasurer under Ptolemy II (285–46 B.C.E.), visited it in 259 B.C.E., alluding to the anchorage and the food.¹² About 103 B.C.E., during Hasmonean expansionism, the city was acquired by Alexander Jannaeus, ousting the local tyrant, Zoilus. When Pompey intervened in Hasmonean affairs (63 B.C.E.)—as he had in Syria a year earlier, in both cases because of dynastic in-fighting—he gave Strato’s Tower autonomy (Ant. 14.76). A generation later Octavian handed the city with its territory to Herod; this gift was crucial for Herod’s economic program, for it gave him a port, not very large or important but one that, with vision and resources, could be expanded. Caesarea remained Herodian territory until 6 C.E., then became a part of the province of Judea throughout the Roman period.

Thus Caesarea was first a Hellenistic city spun off from an originally Phoenician city, Sidon; then a city under Egyptian control, Syrian control and Jewish control; then an autonomous city from 63 B.C.E.; then part of the Judean homeland under Herod and Archelaus; and finally the centre of Roman rule in Judea/Palestine from 6 C.E. onwards. To reduce the ethnic complexity to Greek/Syrian and Jewish, related to events at the onset of the First Revolt, cannot be adequate.¹³ The checkered history shows through in the archaeological record to some extent, though two closely related facts limit the evidence severely: first, the underlying city of Strato’s Tower has not been a primary focus of the excavations, and, second, Herod’s planned city of Caesarea has obliterated some of what might have remained for examination.

The site offered relatively little to set it apart as a harbour. Three small hills rose above the general level of the dunes, and a few rocky promontories gave barely enough shelter for a harbour. Significant remains of installations associated with the harbours of Strato’s Tower have been identified at two locations: a northern harbour close to the point where the city wall met the shoreline (a quay, evidence of industrial or commercial activity), and a southern harbour below the inner harbour of Herod’s Sebastos (a quay, a mooring stone, foundations of a round tower).¹⁴ These two harbours anchor the relatively modest Hellenistic city to the area between them.¹⁵ It was a small fraction of Herod’s city.¹⁶

The walls and extent of Strato’s Tower are still disputed. Two competing views are held by the archaeologists. One group holds that Strato’s Tower was walled in such a way as to embrace both north and south harbours;¹⁷ the other holds that Strato’s Tower was unwalled and that Herod fortified the city.¹⁸ The solution to this problem is important for understanding urban developments. If the former view is correct, as I think more likely, Strato’s Tower was a well-defined small city that had not yet expanded into all the areas within its walls, as the absence of any evidence of occupation in its southern and northeastern sections suggests. The negligible pre-Roman evidence under the temple platform area would support this, since most of that platform was outside Strato’s Tower, as conjectured by the Caesarea Ancient Harbor Excavation Project (CAHEP). For our purposes, the importance is that—attractive as the idea may be—there was probably no earlier temple on the site of Herod’s Temple of Roma and Augustus.¹⁹

Earlier excavations found synagogue remains north of the Crusader wall, sitting on remains of a Hellenistic house, confirming the early occupancy of that area.²⁰ It is unclear how far back the synagogue occupancy went, but it was not early enough to attest to a Jewish community within Strato’s Tower. The connections between the later strata, the pre-70 C.E. stratum and the Hellenistic house have not been clarified; it remains an intriguing possibility—but only a possibility—that the late-Hellenistic house was the origin of the synagogue.²¹

2. Caesarea under Herod

Filled with enthusiasm for all things Roman, Herod brought Roman entertainment, Roman gods, and even Roman concrete into his kingdom (Holum et al. 1988: 105). He deliberately shifted the religious and cultural focus of the town, from Greece to Rome.²² His plans for Caesarea showcased better than any other project his commitment to Rome, and in some respects he outdid Rome—in the size and embellishments of the harbour, technological advances, commercial provisions, drama of his royal palace, planning of the southern quarter and impact of the imperial cult building. Excavations to date have demonstrated that Josephus’s description is not over-enthusiastic (War 1.408–15; Ant. 15.331–41)—indeed, in some respects it is exceeded by the findings—though at the same time the excavations have tended to reduce the amount of construction attributed to Herod (fewer warehouses, less housing, no amphitheatre).

Herod laid the city out with insulae on a Hippodamian plan (perhaps modified in the areas around the temple platform). There was ample provision for Herod’s own needs (especially the Promontory Palace); for the amenities that citizens would expect (structures for municipal administration, support for commerce and trade, recreation facilities,²³ temples, running water and sewers,²⁴ streets, walls and gates, territory around the polls for food production); and for a substantial population of Greeks, Romans (including demobilized veterans), Jews and Samaritans.²⁵ The Temple of Roma and Augustus, which tied harbour and city together, was the main cult centre of the polis; the dedication of the city to Augustus and the attention to the imperial family in the city’s main temple were reflected at the harbour mouth by statues of family members, notably Drusus, who died in 9 B.C.E. (Holum et al. 1988: 90, 98). The Drusion tower probably functioned as the lighthouse, and may have contained royal apartments, like several of Herod’s other towers (Netzer 1996: 201–202).

The city’s south end was occupied by three related structures: the Promontory Palace, hippodrome and theatre.²⁶ They constituted a secondary focus in the urban design of Caesarea, emphasizing Rome’s athletic and cultural influence through the combined structures that revolved around the residence of the client king of Judea. Precisely why Herod decided to locate these facilities in one place cannot be known, but Gleason has brilliantly conjectured, perhaps correctly, that he was influenced by the examples of his friends Augustus and Marcus Agrippa, and particularly by their architectural projects in Rome, seen in his visits of 40 and 17 B.C.E.²⁷ She suggests that much of this influence came from Agrippa, and precisely in the period during which Caesarea and other important projects were under construction. There was a calculated effect—in part an axial relationship—among the buildings, felt as one moved from palace to hippodrome through gardens or sat in the theatre’s cavea focused on the palace.

But none of these buildings individually is remarkable within Herod’s larger development program. Rather, the greater contribution to our understanding of Caesarea lies in assessing Herod’s creation of a quarter of the city devoted to those buildings that in the Hellenistic traditions had expressed the fruits of peace and empire within palace districts … Yet in the larger context of Judea, many such Hellenistic structures and activities were unwelcome and represent Herod’s attempt to balance his Hellenizing ambitions with his desire to rule his country independently … Herod was not simply following the models of the Hasmonaeans or of the Romans.²⁸

Apart from the harbour Sebastos, the areas of Herod’s Caesarea that are best known now are the temple platform in the centre and the southern quarter of the city. Of the rest of the city proper the indications are still scant. It is clear that Herod walled the city, perhaps utilizing some of the earlier walls of Strato’s Tower, along the line of the so-called inner wall. There was an agora, though it has not yet been found, and a tetrapylon. There may have been other religious structures, though how many were a part of his plan cannot yet be determined. Some areas of the city, especially the southeast quarter, were unoccupied. Nevertheless, over the last decade Herod’s Caesarea has become his best-known city and one of the best-excavated cities of the ancient Mediterranean world.

3. Caesarea Maritima in the Early Roman Period

Following Herod, the city continued to receive imperial attention and patronage, especially as a result of the city’s new role as the capital of Judea from 6 C.E. onwards. Not only was it the centre of trade and commerce, it was now the centre of power and authority. Jerusalem retained its role within the religious sphere until 70 C.E., but even for the period 6–70 C.E. it had been effectively sidelined. Herod’s Promontory Palace became the Roman praetorium, a role it played from 6 C.E. until the seventh century; modest modifications were made, most notably introducing an apse into the triclinium.²⁹ In the early first century C.E., Caesarea’s still-empty southeast area was built over, utilizing fill that brought its level up to the top of the east cavea of the hippodrome (Porath 1996: 110–11), and a new amphitheatre was added in the northeast part of the city. At a later point the temple platform was modified by adding a Nymphaeum and additional warehouses. In the second century there was a new demand for games, and a new hippodrome was built further to the east,³⁰ so that the original hippodrome became partially unused and was altered into something like an amphitheatre. The theatre was regularly improved, altered and adapted, with a major change to its scaenae frons in the Severan period and the inclusion of numerous statue bases for decorative effect (Turnheim and Ovadiah 1996).

Caesarea also continued to develop religiously. In addition to the original cult centre dedicated to Roma and Augustus, a Tiberieum was dedicated by Pontius Pilate to Augustus’s adopted son Tiberius. Later still, a Hadrianeum was built (circa 130 C.E.), the cult statue of which may have been the impressive porphyry statue found in a reused Byzantine