Roman Port City
Caesarea Maritima
sess-uh-REE-uh mar-ih-TEE-muh · Modern Caesarea, Israel · Also called Caesarea · 32.5000° N, 34.8917° E
Caesarea Maritima was a monumental Roman port city built by Herod the Great (c. 22–10/9 BC) and later served as the administrative capital of Roman Judea, home to the Roman prefects including Pontius Pilate. Paul was imprisoned here for two years and stood trial before the Roman governors Felix and Festus (Acts 23–26), and it was here that Peter first baptized the Gentile centurion Cornelius (Acts 10).
Archaeology
Excavation has been more or less continuous since the 1950s and has uncovered the Roman theater, a hippodrome, Herod's seaside palace, a monumental aqueduct, and the harbour. The harbour is the extraordinary part. Herod built Sebastos between about 22 and 15 BC on an open coast with no natural shelter, enclosing roughly 100,000 square metres behind two breakwaters, the southern one running some 500 metres out. To do it his engineers used hydraulic concrete, which sets under water, and imported the volcanic ash it needs - pozzolana - from Puteoli in Italy by the shipload. Underwater survey from the 1980s, above all the Caesarea Ancient Harbour Excavation Project associated with A. Raban and K. Holum, mapped what is left of it. It did not last: the breakwaters were built across a geological fault, the concrete bonded poorly to the local kurkar rubble, and the moles tilted and settled into the seabed. The jetties now lie several metres under water and the harbour was unusable long before the Byzantine period. The most cited find here is the Pilate Stone, a limestone block reused in the theater and recovered in 1961 by A. Frova's Italian expedition, carrying a damaged Latin dedication naming Pontius Pilatus as prefect of Judea. It is the only inscription naming him from his own lifetime, and it is what corrected the record on his title. It should be said as carefully as the stone deserves: it places a man of that name in that office in that province under Tiberius, and it does not speak to a single event in the Gospels. Caesarea is also where Paul was held for two years and heard by Felix and Festus, and where Peter was sent to the household of Cornelius - the administrative capital of the province, and the port Acts uses more than any other.
On a modern map
Further reading
Reflect
Here Peter crossed a deep cultural line to reach Cornelius. Who feels like an outsider to you — and what would crossing that line look like this week?
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