The Hellenistic round towers of Perge's city gate · Wikimedia Commons

Hellenistic City Gate of Perge

Porta Pergae

GateLycia et Pamphylia · Aksu, Antalya, TurkeyBuilt 300 BCE

About

Perge's founders raised two round defensive towers flanking the city's southern gate in the 3rd century BCE, standing three stories over a horseshoe courtyard cut into the fortification line. The towers had already watched over the city for more than four centuries by 117 CE. A wealthy priestess named Plancia Magna would later fill the courtyard with imperial statues and a triple arch, but that remodeling began only after Hadrian took the throne. On 11 August 117 CE the bare Hellenistic towers, without her later decoration, were what stood here.

What happened here

The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.