Herod's Hippodrome and Amphitheatre

Josephus calls it an amphitheatre, and that word has caused trouble ever since. In the late Republic and early Empire the term was used loosely for a large entertainment enclosure rather than specifically for the oval buildings of later Roman practice, so his label describes what the place did rather than what shape it was. Surveyors working for the British in 1873 mapped the theatre and the large circus east of the city but found no amphitheatre at all, and in the 1950s Avraham Reifenberg identified a big rounded structure north-east of the city that fitted the word but not Josephus's directions. The seaside building is now generally taken to be the one he described, on the strength of its position, its form, its date and the view from its seats.

Modern names for it differ because two teams dug it. Yosef Porath, who directed the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation, called it Herod's circus and published it under that title. Joseph Patrich, who excavated in the same complex, argued that a U-shaped building of this size, fitted with permanent starting gates for chariots, is properly a stadium adapted to hippodrome use, and named it a hippodrome-stadium. The two of them set the argument out in print in the Journal of Roman Archaeology in 2001 and 2003. In Hebrew the building is usually the western hippodrome, to distinguish it from the eastern one.

The disagreement is not only about vocabulary. Porath reconstructs a segmented spina, the central barrier a Roman circus runs around, and eight starting gates set on an arc so that the teams broke radially, as at the Circus Maximus. Patrich reads the starting arrangement as parallel lanes running to the first turning post in the Greek manner, in a building whose ancestry is Hellenistic rather than Roman. The evidence is the same trenches; the reconstruction drawn from it is not.

• Herod's circus: Porath and the Israel Antiquities Authority
• Hippodrome-stadium: Patrich, in the Journal of Roman Archaeology
• The western hippodrome: standard Hebrew usage at the site
• An amphitheatre: Josephus, and the sign-writers who followed him

The site was new land. The stretch of sand south of the harbour had been thrown up by the sea working against Herod's own breakwaters, and the building went up on it, on a north-south axis, built of the local kurkar sandstone and finished in white plaster. The arena measured 301 metres by 50.3 metres. The parks authority gives the round figures as 300 metres by 50, and notes that the sand surface suited chariot racing.

Seating went in by stages. At first only the eastern wing was built, so the crowd sat with the arena in front of them and the sea behind it, facing west into the afternoon light. Seats were later added on the southern curve, and later still on the west. Twelve rows of seats rose on the eastern side above a low wall that kept the crowd off the track: on the Israeli foreign ministry's account that wall stood a little over a metre high. Capacity estimates vary with the phase and with the scholar. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land has the building growing from about 7,500 places to about 12,500; the foreign ministry's account says 8,000 rising to 15,000; Patrich's figure for the finished building is around 10,000.

The starting gates were at the northern end, eight of them on an arc, and chariots ran either as quadrigae drawn by four horses or as bigae drawn by two. The southern end was the curve, which is why the turning post there was the dangerous one.

Where the building sits is as deliberate as how it was built. The promontory palace, 175 metres by 54 metres at its largest and set on two levels, runs along the south-western boundary of the arena, and the palace's upper terrace adjoined the racecourse at its north-eastern corner. The theatre is a few hundred metres further south. Herod put his three great public buildings inside the city and next to his own front door, which was not usual Roman practice.

The opening programme is described by Josephus in the sixteenth book of the Antiquities. For the dedication of the city Herod prepared 'a contention in musick, and games to be performed naked', along with 'a great number of those that fight single combats, and of beasts for the like purpose', plus horse races and the more expensive kinds of show then current at Rome. He consecrated the festival to Caesar and ordered it repeated every fifth year. Josephus puts the value of the furnishings and ornaments at around five hundred talents, some of it a gift from the emperor's wife, and says the fighting ran through the day and the entertaining through the night.

So the building was never single-purpose. Patrich lists three programmes running in it: athletics, horse and chariot racing, and Roman spectacle in the form of gladiatorial shows and staged hunts. That mixture is the reason the terminology is contested, and it is also the reason the place could be adapted later without being rebuilt from the ground up.

One name of a competitor survives. An inscription found here reads 'Morismus the charioteer', which the foreign ministry's account of the site cites as part of the evidence that the building was used for racing rather than for gladiatorial games alone.

A darker episode belongs to Caesarea rather than provably to this arena. After the fall of Jerusalem, Titus marked his brother's birthday at Caesarea Maritima with games at which, Josephus writes, 'the number of those that were now slain in fighting with the beasts, and were burnt, and fought with one another, exceeded two thousand five hundred'. He does not name the building. Caesarea had a theatre and this arena at the time, and both would have served.

At some point either side of 100 CE a much larger circus was laid out in the eastern part of the city, more than 412 metres long and 90 metres wide, and the chariot racing went with it. Exactly when is not settled: the parks authority's own account puts the eastern building at the end of the first century or the start of the second, while the encyclopedia entry has racing continue on the seafront until about the middle of the second century.

What happened next to this building is clear enough on the ground. It was shortened by roughly 130 metres. A curved wall was thrown across it to cut the southern section off from the rest, and that section became a Roman amphitheatre for gladiatorial contests, staged hunts and fights between wild animals. The arena floor was dug half a metre below the Herodian racing surface, and the bare podium wall was plastered and painted. Animals were held below the arena, and because the perimeter walls were low they were raised with netting to keep the beasts off the crowd.

The paintings went through fashions. The earliest showed animals drawn at different scales against schematic vegetation, with the lower legs of a man walking among them, probably a beast handler or a gladiator. Those were replaced by painted imitations of coloured marble panelling, and those in turn by plain plaster with a red band. The sea did the rest: salt spray and blown sand meant the plaster needed constant repair.

By the third century the amphitheatre in the southern section had gone out of use. The shell filled with earth and refuse, and in the Byzantine period houses and installations were built in it, including a two-level residence with a colonnaded lower court and a fountain. The likeliest reason it was abandoned is the larger amphitheatre that had been built north-east of the city, which took the same audience.

The building was exposed between 1992 and 1998, in the Israel Antiquities Authority campaign directed by Yosef Porath, with Patrich digging in the same complex. The final report, Caesarea Maritima Volume I: Herod's Circus and Related Buildings, runs to two parts, one on architecture and stratigraphy and one on the finds, and both can be downloaded free from the authority's publications site. Its chapter headings are a fair summary of the building's life: the initial circus, alterations, transformation into an amphitheatre and the circus revived, then post-circus remains.

The eastern side and the rounded southern end are the best preserved parts. The western side was largely destroyed by the sea, which is why the arena now opens straight onto the shore and the promenade. Most of the stone seating was taken away for building over the centuries, so what a visitor reads as the cavea is the lower courses and the podium rather than a bank of tiers.

The wall paintings on show beside the arena are copies. The original plaster was left exposed to weather, salt and sand and was suffering for it, so the paintings were reproduced on panels and set up nearby. This is worth knowing before standing in front of them: the pictures are honest reconstructions of what was found, not the surviving Roman surface.

The parks authority groups the arena, the reproduced paintings and an ancient public latrine as one compound, reached from the seafront promenade that runs between the Crusader gate in the north and the promontory palace in the south. It also uses the arena, mainly on holidays and school breaks, for horse events on the ground where the racing happened.