Porta Romana

About

Northeastern gate of Ostia's Republican-era city walls, opening onto the Via Ostiensis toward Rome, at the start (from Rome's direction) of the Decumanus Maximus. The larger walled circuit that replaced Ostia's original small castrum is generally dated to the late 2nd-early 1st century BCE (often attributed to Sulla's era, c. 87-82 BCE, though scholars note the Sullan attribution itself lacks hard proof); a statue of Minerva excavated at the site is associated with the gate's decoration. Definitely standing and in use as the city's principal landward entrance at 117 CE.

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/dict/topics/walls/walls.htm
• https://brewminate.com/the-city-walls-of-ancient-ostia/
• Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia (Oxford, 2nd ed. 1973), ch. 2