Roman Theatre of Caesarea

The theatre stands at the southern end of the national park and has its own gate. The parks authority describes the park as two entrances and three main complexes, and this is the theatre and palace complex: the theatre itself, the archaeological finds garden, the reef palace on its promontory, the prison and the seaside hippodrome. The harbour, the visitor centre and the Crusader walls sit at the other end, reached along the sea promenade. There is a car park outside the southern gate, which matters if the theatre is the point of the trip rather than an afterthought.

The plan is the standard Roman one and the parks authority sets it out in those terms: the semicircle of seating, the blocks of seats divided by passages, the flat arena at the foot of the tiers, the orchestra, the stage wall that has gone, and underground rooms that served as dressing rooms for the actors. Under the stage building was a hyposcaenium, a space for keeping props. The seating and the stage building were designed as a single architectural unit rather than as two structures facing each other.

Between the theatre and the sea, the finds garden holds columns, capitals, tombs and statuary gathered from across the park, most of it architectural. Beside it the parks authority has put up a map showing where the raw materials for building the theatre were brought in from. It takes two minutes and it makes the same point the harbour makes: this was a building assembled out of a shipping network, not out of the quarry over the road.

Herod rebuilt Caesarea between roughly 22 and 10/9 BCE, and the theatre went up inside that programme. Building an auditorium on level sand meant raising the whole bowl on artificial substructures, and the parks authority credits the solution to Roman vaulting technology. It also says Herod came back to the building later and added several more blocks of seating, enlarging it.

The finishes were upgraded as the city got richer. The orchestra floor was originally coloured plaster, decorated in the Pompeian manner; excavation found it beneath a later floor of polychrome marble laid in opus sectile, which the theatre database of the Rhineland-Palatinate heritage directorate assigns to the middle imperial period. Marble decoration of the second century CE is among the ancient material still on show at the site.

What happened here was never only drama. Josephus has Herod founding games at Caesarea every fifth year in honour of Augustus, and putting up the largest prizes for them himself. A Greek inscription from the theatre records a comic actor and lead speaker, Quintus Caecillius of Antioch by Daphne, paying for a dedication. Late antique writers describe theatre days that ran from morning to dusk and took in boxers, wrestlers, acrobats and animal fights alongside the plays.

In 44 CE, on Josephus's account, Agrippa I came into the theatre at Caesarea early in the morning in a garment woven wholly of silver. The sun caught it, his flatterers shouted that he was a god, he neither rebuked them nor rejected the flattery, and a violent pain took him in the belly; he was carried to the palace and died. The Acts of the Apostles tells the same episode at Caesarea without naming the building it happened in.

The second man arrived by accident, seventeen centuries late. In June 1961, in its third season, the Italian expedition turned over a limestone block reused as a step in the theatre's stairs and found a damaged Latin dedication of a Tiberieum by Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judaea. It is the only surviving inscription naming a Roman governor of Judaea from before the Jewish revolts, and it gives Pilate's rank as prefect where later writers routinely call the governors of Judaea procurators.

The theatre database notes that the block was reused during the late alterations that fitted the orchestra out as a water basin, which is a dry way of saying that the only contemporary record of Pilate survived because somebody needed a step. What stands at the theatre now is a cast. The original is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The honest answer is that the bottom of the building is old and most of what an audience sits on is not. Israeli reporting on the excavation is explicit: only the first tier of stone seats was there when the Italians finished, and the second tier was rebuilt on the foundation remains of the destroyed original. The parks authority says a visitor can still pick out several of the original seats, along with marble decoration of the second century CE, and that nothing whatever survives of the stage wall.

The later chronology is genuinely contested, and the contradiction runs between the two bodies that share the site. The parks authority's Hebrew page says flatly that the theatre was ruined in the third century. The Caesarea Development Corporation says the orchestra was converted into a pool for water games at the end of the Byzantine period. The architectural literature has the stage building pulled down in a late phase, the orchestra completed into a full circle so the space could take amphitheatre-style shows, and a water reservoir laid in during the fourth century for water displays. Hebrew Wikipedia has the building working until the sixth century, when it stopped under Justinian and was partly turned into a fortress.

Those accounts cannot all be right, and no visitor needs them to be. What is on the ground is a theatre that was remodelled repeatedly, converted to uses it was not designed for, fortified, buried, dug out in the middle of the twentieth century and then partly rebuilt so that people could sit in it again.

• Ancient: the vaulted substructures under the seating, some seats in the lowest tier, second-century marble decoration and the buried plaster and opus sectile orchestra floors
• Rebuilt: the upper tier of seating, raised on the ancient foundations after the excavation of 1959 to 1964
• Gone entirely: the scaenae frons, the high stage wall that once shut out the sea
• Modern: everything that makes it a working venue, from the stage platform to the audience seating installed on the tiers

Performances resumed in September 1961, when the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals played the restored theatre without amplification. Israeli reporting on the excavation adds a detail from before that: an amateur archaeologist from the neighbouring kibbutz, who had photographed the dig and joined the Italian team, tested the acoustics by putting a kibbutz child on the stage with a violin and listening from the far rows.

The venue trades as Caesarea Amphitheatre, and Hebrew Wikipedia points out the problem with the name. This is a theatre: a semicircle facing a stage. An amphitheatre is an oval enclosing an arena, seen from all round. The genuinely oval structure at Caesarea is the seaside hippodrome a short walk north, which the parks authority says was later adapted for gladiatorial contests, with the animals housed beneath the arena.

Capacity is the other figure to handle carefully, because the operator publishes two. The Caesarea Development Corporation's music page gives about 4,000 seats. Its own page on the theatre complex gives about 6,000. The Rhineland-Palatinate theatre database puts the ancient audience at 4,000 and the cavea at about 100 metres across, with an orchestra of about 30 metres; Hebrew Wikipedia gives the overall diameter as 90 metres. No reconciled number is published anywhere.

Concerts are ticketed separately from the national park, and the park entrance fee does not cover a performance. The Caesarea Development Corporation, which also runs the harbour front, publishes the schedule and describes the theatre as a milestone that artists count in their careers.