City Walls of Volubilis
About
Volubilis raised its great defensive circuit in 168 and 169 CE under Marcus Aurelius, a direct response to the pressure Berber tribes from the Atlas Mountains kept putting on the city's Roman rulers. The rubble-and-ashlar rampart ran 2,613 meters around the city, enclosing 40 hectares and studded with six main gates and 24 towers. Builders recycled stone blocks pulled from older structures to raise it quickly. Because it postdates 117 CE by half a century, the early Roman municipium under Trajan and Hadrian actually stood open and unfortified on its Mauretanian frontier.
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
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.1
Names Volubilis among the towns of Mauretania; the passage describes the town, not its walls specifically.
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 →