Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI | Page 7

position swallowed up the lower arcade on this side, and
it hindered the usual works underneath the seats from being carried into
this part of the building.
SPALATO[11]
BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN
The main object and center of all historical and architectural inquiries
on the Dalmatian coast is, of course, the home of Diocletian, the still
abiding palace of Spalato. From a local point of view, it is the spot
which the greatest of the long line of renowned Illyrian Emperors chose
as his resting-place from the toils of warfare and government, and
where he reared the vastest and noblest dwelling that ever arose at the

bidding of a single man. From an ecumenical point of view, Spalato is
yet more. If it does not rank with Rome, Old and New, with Ravenna
and with Trier, it is because it never was, 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 Cæsars, 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, Cæsar, 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 Cæsars. The fates of the two spots have been in a strange
way the converse of one another. By the