Porte d'Arroux, Autun
About
This gate marked the northern end of Augustodunum's main street and was one of the very first monuments raised when the city was founded and named for Augustus. Two large arcades once let carts roll through side by side, flanked by two smaller footpaths still visible today. Historians place its completion somewhere in the last decades of Augustus's reign, more than a century ahead of Trajan's death in 117 CE, and it has stood at this river crossing for over two thousand years.
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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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 →