Page 54 - A Walk to Caesarea / Joseph Patrich

40 Historical Review

at a rate of 12.5% (one eighth/octava); and a levy on measures and weights collected from merchants and people
of means and property, who were apparently organized in professional associations, a type of guilds. Among
them were members of the council (or the council as a group), ship owners and managers of the games, perfume
merchants, lentil merchants, the grain custom magistrate (mesites), and money changers (nomismatapuloi). A

yearly budget of 56091/4 solidi was collected from these local payers. According to Jean Gascou, this sum was

more than half the yearly budget of Antaeopolis – a city of moderate size in Egypt, in the mid sixth century. Just
for comparison, according to a Jewish Rabbinic source of the first half of the fourth century, 1 gold dinar (solidus)
could buy a loaf of bread for the entire year. The inscription reflects an interesting and intricate socioeconomic
structure.

Fig. 43 During the Persian conquest (614–627),
the highest ranking Christian who had
Lead seal (bulla) of direct access to the Persian governor who
Gregorius, in charge of the lived in the city, was the kommerkiarios,
silk trade through Caesarea apparently a high-level office in the Persian
(kommerkiarios). His name regime (Fig. 43). Another source from the
and function are written in end of the Byzantine period explains this term as “the archon of silk”, which may
Greek as a monogram indicate the existence of silk trade through the Caesarea harbor during the period
of Persian rule. More than 300 years earlier, a number of rabbis of Caesarea were
known to have been silk traders.

The Population and Religious Structures

As a result of the third-century crisis many members of the city’s veteran elite
went bankrupt and refrained from serving in the curia, which involved personal
responsibility for the amount levied in taxes on the city to be given to the
government. In their place a new elite arose, comprised of landowners who had
recently become rich as well as the Christian leadership, headed by the bishop. The
bishop was the highest-ranking citizen, second only to the governor. Christianization
came gradually, but ultimately the Christians became the majority. The city’s
eminent status as a center of Christian scholarship, held from the days of Origen
(d. c. 254) in the third century and Pamphilus (martyred in 309), continued into the
fourth century under the leadership of Eusebius (bishop, 315/16–339). Pamphilus
assembled and copied the works of Origen, who founded the Christian academy
in Caesarea, to which he had moved from Alexandria. The library established
by Pamphilus had some 30,000 books. It included, among others, many secular
works on Greek science, philosophy, history, drama, poetry, and rhetoric, as well as
writings in Greek by Jewish authors, some of which have been preserved only in the
works of Eusebius. Pamphilus and Eusebius took upon themselves the cataloguing
of this collection. Also operating in the library was a scriptorium (a center for