Porte Bazee, Reims

Porta Meridionalis (conventional)

GateGallia Belgica · Reims, FranceBuilt 200 CE · Destroyed 1752 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

A monumental arch once marked the southern end of Durocortorum's main street, where the road left the city for Rome. Builders raised it in the 2nd or 3rd century CE, well after Trajan's reign had ended, so it was not part of the city Trajan's contemporaries walked through in 117 CE. City authorities tore the arch down in 1752, leaving behind just one pier and a single heavily worn column that still stand inside a school courtyard today.

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.