Uri was made conscious by his companions’ shouts that they were now able to see it. They were all assembled on the port side of the ship. What they could pick out in the distance was already big enough for Uri to make out if he screwed up his eyes: a huge, round, gleaming white building on a hilltop.
“The Temple of Augustus,” said Matthew. “In front of it stand statues of Augustus and the Roman wolves. A colonnade all around! And dazzling inside as welclass="underline" it’s vast, gets its light through round apertures from above. That too was built by Herod the Great, when Augustus forgave him for having earlier been in Mark Antony’s service.”
The harbor looked big. Plotius estimated that it was exactly the same size as that of Piraeus. “No, bigger!” insisted Valerius. He also noted that the harbor area was known separately as Sebastos, which was the Greek for Caesar Augustus.
Matthew chuckled: he had met some Jews from Rome who mixed up the harbor area of Caesarea with the town of Sebaste in Galilee, little knowing that Herod the Great had rebuilt the latter on the site of the town of Samaria, which had been razed to the ground by the Jews.
The harbor was truly capacious, suitable for accommodating an entire flotilla. The entrance to the harbor faced north, as in Caesarea northerly winds were the most uncommon. There was a continuous, high stone ledge that protected it somewhat from the African southerlies, which carried sand that covered everything.
On reaching the port, they saw to the port side a large, round tower, set on a wide rectangular pedestal; this was the Caesarea lighthouse and could only be approached by sea in a small boat. As it was daytime, no fire was burning on the uppermost level. The mole was two hundred feet wide, Matthew told them. Herod the Great had built it, as he had the whole town, in just twelve years. It had cost a horrendous amount, with the construction materials — the stone and marble — being brought from far off, along with the engineers. The mole rested on gigantic blocks of rock sunk twenty cubits deep and were on average fifty feet long by eighteen feet wide by nine feet high. The southern breakwater, a stone wall interrupted periodically by towers, ran off as far as they could see to starboard. Before either of the breakwaters was built, Herod had the bay dredged, so that the sandbanks disappeared and no longer presented a danger to shipping, though the dredging still had to be carried out again at intervals.
The tallest and most splendid tower was a scaled-down copy of the Pharos of Alexandria. It bore the name of Augustus’s son, Drusus, who had died young, and was known as the Druseion, Matthew explained. They were able to wonder at this truly impressive edifice as they drew nearer. It was square and comprised thirteen plus three levels. Seamen coming from far overseas would be put up in the Druseion, said Matthew. He had never resided there, sad to say, but he had visited it many times. It had four separate staircases, one on each face, and in the atrium there was a garden, and shops selling anything imaginable. The prostitutes were installed on the eighth floor, though women were very pricey there — at least that was what foreign sailors had told him. The Pharos in Alexandria also has thirteen floors in its lower block, Matthew went on, but its upper is even taller, of six floors, and above that there is yet another tower in which the light burns. It may well be that Herod had intended to copy the whole thing, but ran out of money by the time he had gotten around to constructing the upper levels of the Druseion. The tower marked the start, on the shore, of a long and broad promenade, visible even from where they were, which was bordered by palaces, all built from polished marble, above which stands the temple of Augustus with its two statues, visible from much farther away and to which a long, broad set of steps led from the harbor.
“When the Druseion was opened,” said Matthew, “Herod the Great tried to persuade Augustus to make the trip here, but all to no avail.”
“It’s also worth having a look at what’s belowground,” said Plotius. “The sewers are so wide and tall, and the chambers that have been fashioned within them are so big that one could hold banquets in them when the tide is out. They have been built in parallel with an interconnecting cross-passage so that rainwater and sewage can flow easily; the sea comes in at high water and on the ebb all the filth is washed away. There is no need for power to clean it.
Alexandros displayed a lively interest in the sewage canals; he wished to see them if that were possible.
Plotius told them that the Romans had completed the system, doubling the width of a section of the aqueduct constructed by Herod because the population had grown and there was a growing demand for water. The seven-mile aqueduct was an incredible engineering feat; it rested on arches that were something like five hundred feet high, and at one place a tunnel bored through a hill and into the city. Over the entire seven miles from spring to city, unobservable to the eye, it sloped slightly downward, without a single hitch; it could hardly be believed that Herod had been able to get this constructed in the first place, and that the Romans were later able to double its capacity, also without a hitch.
Uri noted that when it came down to it, in the end, all aqueducts worked on the same principle, and there were some in Rome that ran even higher aboveground.
“Sure,” Plotius retorted angrily, “but those were not built in the lethargic and imprecise East!”
A devil got into Uri:
“But the pyramids are said to be incredibly precise in their construction. Doesn’t Egypt count as the East?”
Plotius waved that aside in annoyance.
Just opposite the harbor entrance, and thus at its southernmost point, at the foot of the stadium, there was an enormous theater that opened northward, toward the sea, Matthew said, and from its highest point it was possible to see a long way, so there was no barge that would not be spotted from at least twenty or thirty stadia away. It held fifteen thousand people. Pilate had recently replaced its old plaster flooring with marble.
“That’s exactly how Ostia should be built,” Matthew sighed. “Herod the Great had the money; Augustus and Tiberius didn’t…”
“But Herod the Great murdered and robbed on an unimaginable scale,” Alexandros observed. “That is how he got the money. I have no wish for the Romans to get a splendid harbor at that sort of price.”
“All the same, it’s ridiculous,” said Matthew.
Uri did quietly wonder to himself whether Herod the Great had actually murdered any more than Tiberius was said to have. To start with, he had done his murdering through the Praetorian prefect Sejanus, then he had gotten a new Praetorian prefect, Macro, to murder Sejanus and his followers. It was said that Tiberius used force to induce the wealthy to draw up their last will and testament in his favor, so it was more than likely that he had enough money to build a harbor if he wanted.
Matthew outlined that he was putting his trust in Pilate receiving them in Herod’s palace; it might be a matter of luck, but Pilate had already received one delegation that he’d led some six years ago. He had rarely met a Roman who was more agreeable, polite, tactful, or knowledgeable about Jewish affairs, but the important thing was the palace: an immense and glittering building that stood at the southern end of the city on a promontory that ran into the sea, directly above it. It was 240 cubits in length by 130 in breadth, and in the middle it had a pool surrounded by splendid colonnades, one of the columns bearing the names of all the Roman prefects to date, in Greek as well as Latin, and a list of their merits. That was the residence of all the prefects, Pilate too, and he seldom went to Jerusalem; it was a truly marvelous building. It would be nice to see it again inside.