City Walls of Salona (Urbs Vetus)

WallDalmatia · Solin, Croatia, around Porta Caesarea, Salona archaeological parkBuilt 150 BCE

About

Massive limestone blocks ringed Salona's old town, the urbs vetus, by the 2nd century BCE, long before Rome made the city a colony. In 47 BCE the walls proved their worth: defenders posed wives and children atop the ramparts to fake round-the-clock watch, then broke a Pompeian siege under Marcus Octavius in a single sortie. Stretches of that original circuit still framed the eastern gate in 117 CE.

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.

In ancient writing

Hirtius (attrib.), Bellum Alexandrinum 42-47
Describes the 47 BCE siege of Salona by the Pompeian commander Marcus Octavius, repelled by the town's Caesarian defenders using its walls and a coordinated night sortie.