Porte des Gaules, Frejus
About
Forum Iulii's western gate opened directly onto the Via Aurelia, the road linking Rome to Gaul, through a monumental semicircle 50 meters across, flanked by round towers and a wide carriageway. It is the best preserved of the four gates that once pierced the city's 4-kilometer circuit wall. In 1919 excavators found the original paving still rutted by Roman cart wheels beneath the arch, which by 117 CE had funneled traffic between Italy and Gaul for roughly a century.
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
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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 →