A walled Roman city of the fifth century as the Church was reshaping it: the old grid, forum and baths still standing, a cathedral with its baptistery and bishop’s house in a precinct by the wall, and a great martyr’s basilica in the cemetery outside the gate.
The first Christian cities were Roman cities: their streets, walls, forum and baths were inherited, and the emperors’ laws, collected in the Theodosian Code of 438, still told governors to repair them. What changed was where the new buildings went. In Rome Constantine put the bishop’s cathedral not on the forum but on imperial land near the walls, at the Lateran, and the great churches of the martyrs outside the walls in the cemeteries along the roads, because Roman law, repeated in 381, forbade burial inside the city. This town follows that pattern.
Its cathedral obeys the church order of the Apostolic Constitutions: a long hall turned to the east, like a ship. Before it lies a forecourt with porticoes and a fountain, the arrangement Eusebius described at Tyre in about 315, and beside it an octagonal baptistery, eight-sided for the reason Ambrose’s inscription gives. (In Rome itself the Constantinian basilicas faced the other way, with their apses to the west; the eastward apse became the rule in the Greek East first, and later everywhere.)
In the old quarters small aisled basilicas have replaced house-churches; some plots are empty and some blocks have gone back to gardens, and traders’ booths creep into the colonnades of the main streets, the encroachment the laws kept ordering pulled down. Outside the east gate, tombs line the road to the martyr’s basilica and the domed mausoleum beside it.