Moenia Beneventana
About
Rome's Latin colony at Beneventum, founded in 268 BCE, ringed its hilltop with a defensive circuit running roughly 2,100 meters around a pentagon-shaped town of nearly 30 hectares. The walls climbed the high ground between the Calore and Sabato rivers, guarding the point where the Via Appia entered from the west. Medieval fortifications nearly two miles long later rose along much of the same ancient line. Sections of the original masonry still surface beneath today's city center.
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 →