Porte de Mars, Reims
About
A monumental triple archway rose in Durocortorum in the early 3rd century CE, stretching 32 meters long and 13 meters high, the widest triumphal arch to survive anywhere in the Roman world. Carved reliefs along its vault show Romulus and Remus nursed by the wolf and Leda with Jupiter as a swan. Built roughly a century after Trajan's death, it did not yet exist on 11 August 117 CE; later builders folded it into the medieval city wall, where it stayed hidden until demolition work fully re-exposed it in the 1840s and 50s.
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 →