Augustan City Walls of Nicopolis
About
Augustus enclosed his new Victory City with a polygonal circuit stretching roughly 5,000 meters, built within the first five years after the city's founding. The walls used a poured-concrete core faced in brick, thickening from 2.5 meters along the curtain to 4.6 meters at the five gates. They read more as a statement of Roman order than a real defensive necessity, since the victory at Actium had already made the region safe.
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 →