CESAREA MARITTIMA. – A city of Palestine built between 25 and 12 B.C. by Herod the Great, who dedicated it to Caesar Augustus. There, 38 km south of Carmel, the Tower of Strato had previously stood. Herod dedicated the harbor to Augustus, calling it Sebastos, and built a temple in honor of the emperor and the goddess Roma, an amphitheater, and other pagan buildings, of which imposing ruins remain. When Judea came under the direct rule of Rome, C. became the seat of the procurators, who established themselves in Herod’s palace (Act. 23, 35).
Christianity entered it very early. The deacon Philip resided there with his prophetess daughters (Act. 8, 40; 21, 18). St. Peter baptized Cornelius there, a centurion of the Italian cohort (Act. 10), the first uncircumcised man to enter the Church. King Herod Agrippa I, who had himself proudly proclaimed a god there, suffered an ignominious death (Act. 12, 19-22; cf. Fl. Giuseppe, Antiq. Ind., XIX, 8, 2). St. Paul, who had passed through it on his way from Jerusalem to Tarsus, landed there on his return from the second and third apostolic journeys and, after being arrested in Jerusalem, was held there as a prisoner for two years (from 58 to 60), under the procurators Felix and Festus: there he appealed to Caesar and, after also defending himself before Agrippa II and Berenice, embarked for Rome (Act. 9, 30; 18, 22; 21, 8; 23, 23-27, 2).
It was therefore an episcopal see from the earliest times. In 195 a synod was held there which established that Easter was to be celebrated on a Sunday. Around 231, Origen, exiled from Alexandria, transferred his celebrated school there; many disciples studied there, among them St. Gregory the Wonderworker. One may therefore also speak of a school of C. that always remained faithful to the memory of Origen. Toward the end of the third century, the bishop St. Pamphilus, himself a disciple of Pierius of Alexandria, taught there. Pamphilus’s disciple and successor was Eusebius, the historian, whose tendencies were favorable to the Arians.
The bishop Acacius, head of the party of the « Homoioi », had even more pronounced Arian tendencies. The scholarly tradition did not die out at C. The bishop Gelasius published his historical writings, now lost, in the second half of the fourth century, and Rufinus seems to have drawn on them. The rich library, together with its attached archive, must have been lost in the seventh century during the Muslim invasion, and from that moment the city shared the fate of the others in Palestine. When, toward the end of the eleventh century, C. was conquered by the Crusaders, it became the seat of a Latin metropolitan see dependent on the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem. Conquered by Saladin, it was retaken by the Crusaders on 7 Sept. 1101, fortified by St. Louis IX of France, and destroyed by Bibarg in 1265. C. is today the seat of a Melkite bishop.