Porte Saint-Andre, Autun
About
Roman engineers raised this gate as the eastern threshold of Augustodunum around 15 BCE, cutting four passages through its face: two broad bays for cart traffic and two narrow ones for pedestrians. Large quadrangular limestone blocks from the Chalonnais quarries still lock together without mortar in the surviving arches. No other city in Gaul kept a Roman gate standing this complete above street level, and by 117 CE it had already carried two centuries of traffic in and out of the Aeduan capital.
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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