Porta Iustitiae
About
The southern gate in Paestum's circuit stood where the road toward the Roman colonies of Lucania left the city, opposite Porta Aurea on the northern side. Together with three companion gates it gave access through nearly 5 kilometers of unbroken fortification. Builders set it into the fourth-century BCE Lucanian wall and Roman colonists kept it standing after 273 BCE without major redesign. It remained one of the city's four working entrances throughout the Trajanic era.
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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