Porta Aurea
About
Set at the northern point of the city walls, this gate carried its name from a golden hue ancient writers attributed to its stonework at sunrise. It anchored the northern approach along nearly 5 kilometers of fortification studded with 28 towers. Centuries of stone-robbing after antiquity left it the most fragmentary of Paestum's four gates, reduced today to scattered foundation blocks. In 117 CE it still stood as a functioning entrance in the working city wall.
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
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 →