City Walls of Cumae
About
Defenders raised walls of finely cut tufa along the acropolis's southeastern ridge as early as the 6th century BCE, extending the line as the lower city grew. Roman engineers later reinforced sections of the circuit, and its course went on to shape the medieval town centuries afterward. A visitor walking Cumae in 117 CE followed roughly the same defensive perimeter that had protected the city hundreds of years before, tying together the acropolis heights, the temple terraces, and the lower town's forum and harbor.
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 →