City Walls of Butrint
About
Epirote builders raised Butrint's fortification circuit in four distinct phases across the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, using smoothed polygonal blocks on the acropolis and massive rectangular ashlar courses around the lower town. Archaeologists label these phases Butrint I through IV, the last dated to the 3rd century BCE. Roman colonists inherited the walls rather than rebuilding them, and the same fortifications still encircled the city when Hadrian took power in August 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.
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 →