Porte de France
About
Erected around 15 BCE on the opposite side of the city from the Porta Augusta, this gate carried the Via Domitia west toward Hispania, earning it the old local name Porte d'Espagne. A single semicircular arch, once flanked by two round towers, still frames the street that bears its name today. It's one of only two surviving gates from Augustus's original ring of fourteen towers. In 117 CE it stood as the quieter western counterpart to the Porta Augusta, still funneling travelers toward Spain.
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
Nearby
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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 →