More on Walls

I’ve been thinking and talking about walls a good bit lately — including an hour long conversation with David Pettegrew about the fortification of the eastern Corinthia. Last week I posted some scrappy notes on the Hexamilion Wall vaguely related to a paper that I’ll give in November at Michigan State. 

David and I discussed three key things relevant to understanding the Hexamilion Wall.

First, we acknowledged that considering how (and whether) the wall functioned as a fortification is important to trying to unpack the motivation for the wall. Gregory argued in the Isthmia dedicated to the wall that is served to protect the Peloponnesus for the kind of large overland invasion witnessed in the later 4th century. The destructive impact of Alaric’s Visigoths might have been at the forefront of the Imperial administration’s mind. The wall would have prevented a large land based army from moving easily into the Peloponnesus. 

Of course, a large land based army invading the Peloponnesus would have been quite an unusual thing historically with only a handful of examples. More than that, there’s little reason to imagine that the Peloponnesus in the 5th century was particularly valuable territory for the Roman state. This isn’t to say that it was not valuable, but an army invading the Peloponnesus would have effectively entered a cul-de-sac and not a particularly profitable place to invade. Moreover, the absence of a wall would have not made the passage south into the Peloponnesus particularly easy. The Venetians, for example, appear to have managed passage south in the Morea through a series of smaller fortifications along the northern side of Mt. Oneion which runs immediately to the south of the Hexamilion Wall. Hellenistic fortifications along the top of Mt. Oneion may represent another method of preventing an army from moving south through various passes into the Peloponnesus. The city of Corinth often served as a sufficient deterrent (or a “fetter”) for armies moving through the region as well. A Hellenistic barrier wall served to block passages into the Peloponnesus, but it was erected by an alliance of largely Peloponnesian cities rather than an entity outside the Peloponnesus (similar to the Venetian walls which we’ve connected to the Second Venetokratia).

In short, the Hexamilion Wall is a bit strange when considered in light of earlier efforts to fortify the Isthmus and when considered in the larger context of Late Roman strategy. It may be then that residents of the Peloponnesus lobbied for the construction of the Hexamilion. Or that it served a strategy dictated by defense in depth which created “speed bumps” designed to slow the movement of any invading army and manifested itself in city walls, rural fortifications, garrisons, and even barrier walls like the Hexamilion. Later sources, such as Procopius, point in this direction. 

This brings us to the second point: perhaps the wall’s value both in the 5th century and later was largely symbolic. There is no doubt that Late Antiquity was an era of monumentalized architecture. The construction of city walls, massive basilica style churches, monumental villas, and dramatic urban features characterized a theatrical-turn in Late Antique architecture. The vivid use of walls to symbolize cities (and regions) in mosaic pavements, for example, stresses their prominence in the representation of the city in Late Antiquity and corresponds to ambitious urban fortification campaigns around the Empire. 

If the Hexamilion is as much symbolic as strategic, its location at both a point of north-south transit and east-west movement across the Isthmus makes sense. It would represent both an expression of imperial power, but also — as David noted to me — an expression of local power and wealth. Travelers through the region would have either passed through the wall to points south or walked in its shadows as they moved east-west to either Kenchreai or Lechaion. In later centuries, the construction of monumental Christian basilicas similarly marked the presence of Christian, ecclesiastical, regional, and even imperial authority. Later inscriptions — such as those crediting Justinian and Viktorinus from Isthmia and Corinth — reflect the deep entanglement of sacred power, imperial power, and fortification which by the 6th century appears to be standard in many places around the empire. In this case, the wall might represent the power of the empire (and its increasingly entanglement with sacred power) to protect its communities. In this context, the strategic needs of the wall would have been secondary to its symbolic power. This is also in keeping with a history of symbolic gestures by emperors at the Isthmus.

We might complain that such a gesture seems dramatic and inefficient, and that would certainly be true, but it is hard to imagine that Nero’s doomed effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus was any less of an inefficient and dramatic gesture. After all, Roman engineers were no fools and they must have understood that the topography and geology doomed the project from the start.

Finally, the research of myself and my colleagues at Isthmia has largely focused on the afterlife of the wall and the buildings adjacent to it on the Isthmus. These communities might have been ignorant of the wall’s strategic or symbolic function when they used its abandoned fortress as a place of burial or occupied the collapsing ruins of a Roman bath building into its ramparts.

On the other hand, these people likely contributed to place making in much the same way as the builders, architects, funders, and defenders of the wall did. As I noted last week, but Jon Frey and myself have noted that despite the monumentalized character of imperial investment in the Isthmus, there are signs of resistance throughout Late Antiquity. While we should not expect these signs to operate on the same monumental level as churches, fortresses, and walls, the presence of fish and boats inscribed in the still-wet mortar of the fortress and wall, the presence of liturgical variation in nearly contemporary church buildings, and the reuse of the wall and fortress at Isthmia as the backdrop for domestic activities and agriculture suggest that Corinthian lives continued the shadow of imperial investment. The walling of the gate to the fortress may suggest, on the one hand, that there was no longer a monumentalized way through the wall after the later 6th century. On the other hand, it hints that there were likely any number of less monumental ways over, under, or through the wall by that time.  

The existence of handmade pottery in contexts adjacent to and inside the fortification may even indicate that the wall did not disrupt the movement of technologies, cultures, and groups through and along the wall in the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period. In fact, the presence of these so-called “Slavic Pots” in contexts along the wall speak to the wall’s irrelevance or even fundamental inadequacy as a barrier. History seems to indicate that the wall never served its strategic function either and was probably always too long to serve as anything more than a proteichisma before the mass of Mt. Oneion or the strategic location of the city of Corinth astride major east-west and north-south routes. Perhaps, in the end, that was all that it was meant to be.