It must also be noticed that far greater correctness of detail is to be found (as would naturally be expected) in his descriptions of events occurring, and of places existing, during his own lifetime, and that for this reason his first production--the Wars, is far more valuable than his compilation of the Antiquities, though even in this he draws from early sources external to the Old Testament.
Here at Cæsarea we have a description of the port and public buildings which contains undoubted inaccuracies. He represents the port as equal in size to the Piræus, but it measures scarcely two hundred yards across either way, whilst the famous harbour of Athens was three quarters of a mile long and over six hundred yards in breadth. Josephus also speaks of the mole on the south side of the harbour as being "two hundred feet.â This can hardly mean in length, for the present measure is more than a hundred and thirty yards, and, if he means in breadth, the estimate is exaggerated, for the greatest width at present is eighty-five feet.
Thus, without taking any notice of the great length given for the stones sunk to form part of the breakwater, we find that Josephus estimates the harbour as equal to one of twenty times its capacity, and the mole at over double its real width. It must indeed be remembered that he wrote neither at Cæsarea nor at Piræus, and that exact surveys had then no existence. Yet this case is sufficient to prove that the measurements twice given (Ant. xv. 9, B.J. i. 21) are unreliable, and the descriptions exaggerated.
In shape the port of Cæsarea was not unlike the Piræus. The southern mole was adorned with towers, and had three colossi at the end, supported on two huge blocks of stone; on the north side a reef ran out, and was also adorned with three colossi on a tower. A temple of white stone stood opposite the mouth of the port, and of this the foundations appear still to exist--a wall with niches for statues, well worthy of examination as being of white stones, whilst all the other buildings are of brown-coloured masonry. In this temple were colossal statues of Cæsar and of Rome.
An amphitheatre, still remaining, was also built, to the south by the sea, capable of holding, as Josephus says, a vast number, for its diameter is 560 feet, and it could contain 20,000 persons. The theatre appears to have been within its circuit, where it still remains, but the hippodrome, over 1000 feet long, seems unnoticed by the historian. It is to the east, and in it are the remains of a goal post of granite, a magnificent truncated cone seven feet six inches high, once standing apparently on a base, a single block of red granite thirty-four feet long. How such blocks were moved it is difficult to imagine; nor was the material to be obtained in Palestine, being a fine kind of granite, so hard that the peasantry endeavouring to cut the stele into millstones, have only penetrated a few inches into the stone.