City Walls of Corduba
About
The original defensive circuit dates to the mid-2nd-century-BCE Republican foundation under M. Claudius Marcellus, enclosing about 48 hectares with limestone curtain walls and semicircular towers. When Augustus refounded the city as Colonia Patricia, capital of Baetica, the walled area was expanded to roughly 78 hectares. Surviving stretches near Puerta de Almodovar still show the coursed Roman masonry; by 117 CE the expanded Augustan-era walls had stood for well over a century.
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
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