Porta Marina

About

Southwestern gate of Ostia's Republican walls, where the Decumanus Maximus left the walled town toward the ancient coastline (the sea has since retreated several km from this point due to Tiber siltation). Belonged to the Republican-era wall circuit, usually dated to around the middle of the 1st century BCE; its remains lie at a lower level than the present Decumanus surface. In use as the city's seaward gate at 117 CE, before the Hadrianic-Antonine bath and residential district later built up outside it (Terme di Porta Marina, synagogue vicinity) reached its later monumental form.

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

• https://www.ostia-antica.org/regio4/10/10-1.htm
• https://www.romeartlover.it/Newostip.html
• Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia (Oxford, 2nd ed. 1973), ch. 2