Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI | Page 7

like them, an actual seat of empire. But it not the less marks a stage, and one of the greatest stages, in the history of the Empire.
On his own Dalmatian soil, Docles of Salone, Diocletian of Rome, was the man who had won fame for his own land, and who, on the throne of the world, did not forget his provincial birthplace. In the sight of Rome and of the world Jovius Augustus was more than this. Alike in the history of politics and in the history of art, he has left his mark on all time that has come after him, and it is on his own Spalato that his mark has been most deeply stamped. The polity of Rome and the architecture of Rome alike received a new life at his hands. In each alike he cast away shams and pretenses, and made the true construction of the fabric stand out before men's eyes. Master of the Rome world, if not King, yet more than King, he let the true nature of his power be seen, and, first among the C?sars, arrayed himself with the outward pomp of sovereignty.
In a smaller man we might have deemed the change a mark of weakness, a sign of childish delight in gewgaws, titles, and trappings. Such could hardly have been the motive in the man who, when he deemed that his work was done, could cast away both the form and the substance of power, and could so steadily withstand all temptations to take them up again. It was simply that the change was fully wrought; that the chief magistrate of the commonwealth had gradually changed into the sovereign of the Empire; that Imperator, C?sar, and Augustus, once titles lowlier than that of King, had now become, as they have ever since remained, titles far loftier. The change was wrought, and all that Diocletian did was to announce the fact of the change to the world.
Nor did the organizing hand of Jovius confine its sphere to the polity of the Empire only. He built himself a house, and, above all builders, he might boast himself of the house that he had builded. Fast by his own birthplace--a meaner soul might have chosen some distant spot--Diocletian reared the palace which marks a still greater epoch in Roman art than his political changes mark in Roman polity. On the inmost shore of one of the lake-like inlets of the Hadriatic, an inlet guarded almost from sight by the great island of Bua at its mouth, lay his own Salona, now desolate, then one of the great cities of the Roman world. But it was not in the city, it was not close under its walls, that Diocletian fixt his home. An isthmus between the bay of Salona and the outer sea cuts off a peninsula, which again throws out two horns into the water to form the harbor which has for ages supplanted Salona.
There, not on any hill-top, but on a level spot by the coast, with the sea in front, with a background of more distant mountains, and with one peaked hill rising between the two seas like a watch-tower, did Diocletian build the house to which he withdrew when he deemed that his work of empire was over. And in building that house, he won for himself, or for the nameless genius whom he set at work, a place in the history of art worthy to rank alongside of Iktinos of Athens and Anthemios of Byzantium, of William of Durham and of Hugh of Lincoln.
And now the birthplace of Jovius is forsaken, but his house still abides, and abides in a shape marvelously little shorn of its ancient greatness. The name which it still bears comes straight from the name of the elder home of the C?sars. The fates of the two spots have been in a strange way the converse of one another. By the banks of the Tiber the city of Romulus became the house of a single man: by the shores of the Hadriatic the house of a single man became a city. The Palatine hill became the Palatium of the C?sars, and Palatium was the name which was borne by the house of C?sar by the Dalmatian shore. The house became a city; but its name still clave to it, and the house of Jovius still, at least in the mouths of its own inhabitants, keeps its name in the slightly altered form of Spalato....
We land with the moon lighting up the water, with the stars above us, the northern wain shining on the Hadriatic, as if, while Diocletian was seeking rest by Salona, the star of Constantine was rising over York and Trier. Dimly rising above us we see, disfigured indeed, but not destroyed, the pillared