City Walls of Thessalonica (Hellenistic Circuit)
About
Cassander's original fortification circuit went up with the city's founding in 315 BCE, but the long Roman peace let it decay: by the mid-1st century CE the walls were already described as ruinous and unmaintained. Macedonia's demilitarized status under Rome made rebuilding unnecessary until the Gothic siege of 253/4 CE finally forced a full overhaul. At the 117 CE snapshot Thessalonica was effectively an unwalled city.
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 →