Aphrodisias Tetrapylon
About
This ornate ceremonial gate of sixteen Corinthian columns, blue-and-white marble, and pediments carved with Eros and Nike figures marked the processional entrance to the sanctuary of Aphrodite. Stylistically Antonine to Severan, it was built around 200 CE, roughly eighty years after Trajan's death, so it did not yet exist in 117 CE. Toppled by earthquakes, it was rebuilt stone-for-stone from original blocks in 1991.
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
.jpg?width=800)
.jpg?width=800)
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 →