Rome and the East
language in which the jurist Paulus speaks of the status granted to the inhabi-
tants by Vespasian clearly suggests a grant to an existing population (Dig.,
, , ):Divus Vespasianus Caesarienses colonos fecit, non adiecto, ut et iuris Italici
essent, sed tributum his remisit capitis; sed divus Titus etiam solum immune factum
interpretatus est.
Ulpian confirms that the Colonia Caesariensis did not enjoy theius Itali-
cum(Dig. , , , ). It seems from the way that the jurists (though no earlier
source) express themselves that they sawcoloniaeas belonging potentially to
four possible grades: () no privileges; () partial remission oftributum; () full
remission oftributum; and ()ius Italicum. Paulus’ account indicates that Ves-
pasian, on granting the status ofcolonia, gave along with it only remission of
tributumcapitis. It can be taken as certain that Titus’ interpretation, giving the
remission a wider definition, will have been in response to a submission by
the city, either transmitted by thelegatusof Judaea or (more likely) brought
before him by an embassy.
By the standards of a middle-rank provincial town, the life of Caesarea is
illustrated, or potentially illustrated, by quite an extensive range of literature,
above all Christian. For it was there for several decades that Origen taught,
there that Pamphilus established his library, and there above all that Eusebius
lived, wrote, and served as bishop. Yet Eusebius for instance never refers to
Caesarea’s status ascolonia. Nor, more significantly, does Gregorius of Neo-
caesarea, for whom, as we saw, Berytus was a ‘‘more Roman’’ city (text to n.
above), but Caesarea was merely the seat of the governor of Syria Palaestina,
and by divine providence the place where he came to be a pupil of Origen.
Nothing in any of these sources would suggest to us that Caesarea was not
still a Greek city like any other. The same is largely true of inscriptions: wit-
ness the second-century inscription of a boxer from Aphrodisias cited earlier
(text to n. above), in which the town appears asCaesareaStratōnos, a curious
mixture of the two names which it had successively borne before becoming
acolonia. However, there is some slight inscriptional evidence reflecting the
new status of the place. One item is a remarkable Greek inscription of the
end of the second century from Mount Carmel, which also illustrates the at-
traction of the Zeus, or Iuppiter, of Heliopolis:ΔιὶἩλιοπολείτῃΚαρμήλῳ/
Γ.Ἰούλ.Εὐτυχᾶς/κόλ(ων)Καισαρεύς. It is inscribed on the base of a statue
of which only the toes of one foot remain.^86 The localisation of a cult of
the deity of Heliopolis on Mount Carmel raises complex problems of reli-
. M. Avi-Yonah, ‘‘Mount Carmel and the God of Baalbek,’’IEJ (): AE
, SEGXIV Hajjar (n. ), I, no. , and pl. lxxxvi.