Arch of Caracalla
About
Volubilis's council raised the Arch of Caracalla between December 216 and April 217 CE, honoring the emperor for extending Roman citizenship to the province's free population and easing certain taxes. Its dedicatory inscription named Caracalla holder of tribunician power for the twentieth time and praised his mother Julia Domna as mother of the camp, the senate, and the country. Before construction finished, both Caracalla and Julia Domna had been murdered, turning a monument to a living emperor into one honoring the dead. This arch, the site's best-known landmark today, postdates Trajan's death in 117 CE by exactly a century, making it the clearest example of a Volubilis monument that falls outside this map's snapshot.
What happened here
It carries no gate and defends nothing. An arch marks a threshold — a boundary, a road junction, the entrance to a forum — and it exists to make you look up while you pass under it. The attic carries the dedication in bronze letters set into cut sockets; the letters go missing and the sockets stay. The panels beneath show the campaign being celebrated, arranged so that the version of events the emperor prefers is the one at eye level. Traffic goes through it all day, ox carts scraping the jambs. A triumph passes under it once, if at all; the rest of its working life is as a landmark, a meeting point and a shaded spot for someone selling something.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.5
Locates Volubilis as a free town in Mauretania Tingitana, equidistant from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, the city where this arch was later erected.
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 →