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Porta Caesarea, Salona
About
Augustus's engineers raised this gateway in large opus quadratum limestone blocks in the last years of his reign, giving Salona a ceremonial threshold into its old town. Two octagonal towers flanked a wide central carriageway plus two side passages for pedestrians. It stood in exactly this form in 117 CE, a full century before any later aqueduct piping was routed across its top.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
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 →