Porta Marina
About
This western gate opened straight onto the road to the harbor, a fifteen-minute walk from the shoreline in antiquity. It carried the heaviest commercial traffic of any gate in the circuit, funneling grain, fish, and the city's famous roses in from the coast. The gate keeps its original Hellenistic-era masonry better than any other entrance in the wall, arch and flanking towers intact. Merchants and sailors still passed through it daily when Trajan died in 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
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 →