Nicaea City Walls
About
Nicaea's Hellenistic walls, raised under King Lysimachus around 300 BCE, had largely disappeared by the Roman period. The Flavian emperors rebuilt the circuit from scratch in the later 1st century CE, laying out an irregular pentagon nearly 5 kilometers around with four new marble gates dedicated by the provincial governor. Little of what visitors photograph at Lefke Gate today is this Roman fabric, since most standing stonework was rebuilt again centuries later under Byzantine emperors.
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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