Hellenistic Ramparts and Porte d'Italie
About
A gateway flanked by two stone towers standing up to 15 meters tall once guarded Massalia's harbor-side entrance — the oldest visible fortification anywhere in France. Pink limestone curtain walls run alongside it, laid down generations before Rome ever set foot in Gaul. Julius Caesar's legions besieged the city in 49 BCE and stripped it of its fleet and most of its territory for backing Pompey, but never tore down its walls. By 117 CE these Greek-built defenses had stood watch over the port for more than 450 years.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →