Art, Ceremony, and City Walls: The Aesthetics of Imperial Resurgence in the Late Roman West

This study focuses on an unusual and underappreciated group of city walls built in north-central Gaul beginning in or shortly after 275 CE, all of which featured elaborate polychrome patterning in their exterior facades. Without discounting the capacity of these walls to regulate access, it is suggested here that notions of defense are wholly inadequate to explain why there was such an effort to make these structures as elaborate and visually striking as possible. It will be argued that the polychrome Gallic walls are, in the first place, a response to the exigencies of a particular moment, when the "legitimate" emperors and their representatives sought to reassert the prerogatives, and exalt the profile, of the central government in the heartland of the erstwhile secessionist Imperium Galliarum. In a more general sense, these walls, like other aesthetically-embellished circuits elsewhere in the empire, also should be seen as powerful complements to, and backdrops for, the increasingly complex and hieratic battery of ritual and ceremony deployed from the late third century to proclaim the glory and unimpeachable stability of an imperial regime chronically weakened by civil wars and attempted coups d'etat.