Porta Sirena
About
This eastern gate takes its name from a carved relief of a two-tailed siren set into its keystone, still legible after more than two thousand years of weather. It formed the main approach from the inland hills, funneling traffic from the Lucanian countryside straight toward the forum. Builders cut it into the fourth-century BCE circuit and Roman engineers kept it in service without major rebuilding. Of Paestum's four gates it survives today in the best original condition, arch and all.
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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