City Wall of Augusta Treverorum
About
Builders under Marcus Aurelius ringed the city with 6.4 kilometers of wall pierced by four main gates and studded with towers. The circuit postdates the 117 CE snapshot: under Trajan, Augusta Treverorum was a rich open town with no defences whatsoever. The line swallowed the amphitheatre, whose outer wall was drafted in as a bastion. Later generations quarried most of it away, leaving only buried footings and the Porta Nigra.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
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 →