It might be considered that we would not be able to shed any new light on ancient texts that have already been studied so many times in the past centuries. It is nevertheless worth the effort of reading the complete corpus of ancient texts providing a description of ancient port structures and French translations of these, and many more texts, are available in the pdf version of Volume II of this project.
- Centumcellae (Pliny the Younger, Letters, 6, 31)
- Portus Claudius (Suetonius, Claudius, 20)
- Portus Claudius (Dio Cassius, History, 60, 11)
- Portus Claudius (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 16, 76 & 36, 14)
- Portus Iulius (Dio Cassius, History, 48, 50)
- Portus Iulius (Suetonius, Augustus, 16)
- Brindes (Caesar, Civil War, 1, 25)
- Hereum Promontorium (Fenerbahce, Chalcedonia) (Procopius, Buildings, 1, 11)
- Hellespont crossing by Xerxes (Herodotus, History, 7, 34-37)
- Ephesus (Strabo, Geography, 14, 1)
- Samos (Herodotus, History, 3, 60)
- Tyre (Quintus Curcius, Stories, 4, 2)
- Caesarea Maritima (Flavius, Jewish War, 1, 21)
- Caesarea Maritima (Flavius, Jewish Antiquities, 15, 9)
- Alexandria (Strabo, Geography, 17, 1)
- Alexandria (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 36, 18)
- Alexandria (Athenaeus, Philosophers’ dinner, 5, 9)
- Carthage (Appian, Libyca, Book 8: The African Book, chap. 96)
And a few more general texts:
- Poliorcetica (Philo of Byzantion, chap. 3-4)
- Harbours (Vitruvius, de Architectura, 5, 12)
- Sand (Vitruvius, de Architectura, 2, 4)
- Lime (Vitruvius, de Architectura, 2, 5)
- Pozzolana (Vitruvius, de Architectura, 2, 6)
- Pozzolana (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35, 47)
- Mortar & lime (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 36, 52-54)
- Iron (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 34, 39-43)
In addition to this corpus of textual information, we also have an iconographic corpus consisting of over 260 depictions of ports during the Imperial period on coins, mosaics, paintings, ceramics, etc., as provided by Stéphanie Mailleur (2020).
It appears from these documents that much is still unknown about ancient port structures and, more generally, about the “portscape”.
 MAILLEUR, S., 2020, “Imagining Roman ports. the contribution of iconography to the reconstruction of Roman Mediterranean portscapes of the Imperial Period”, PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, (249 p).
See also her 2019 presentation (in French).