Porte d'Auguste
About
Built around 16 BCE as the grand eastern gateway into Nemausus, this gate greeted every traveler arriving on the Via Domitia from Italy. Two broad carriage arches, flanked by narrower pedestrian passages topped with statue niches, still carry the dedication crediting Augustus's fortification of the colony. It originally carried twin projecting towers and an arcaded upper gallery, both long gone. By 117 CE it had been funneling trade and traffic through those arches for well over a century.
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.
Sources
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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 →