Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI | Page 8

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 Cæsars, and Palatium was the name which
was borne by the house of Cæsar 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 front of the palace, reminding us of the
Tabularium of Rome's own capitol. We pass under gloomy arches,
through dark passages and presently we find ourselves in the center of
palace and city, between those two renowned rows of arches which
mark the greatest of all epochs in the history of the building art. We
think how the man who reorganized the Empire of Rome was also the
man who first put harmony and consistency into the architecture of

Rome. We think that, if it was in truth the crown of Diocletian which
passed to every Cæsar from the first Constantius to the last Francis, it
was no less in the pile which rose into being at his word that the germ
was planted which grew into Pisa and Durham, into Westminster and
Saint Ouen.
There is light enough to mark the columns put for the first time to their
true Roman use, and to think how strange was the fate which called up
on this spot the happy arrangement which had entered the brain of no
earlier artist--the arrangement which, but a few years later, was to be
applied to another use in the basilica of the Lateran and in Saint Paul
Without the Walls. Yes, it is in the court of the persecutor, the man
who boasted that he had wiped out the Christian superstition from the
world, that we see the noblest forestalling of the long arcades of the
Christian basilica.
It is with thoughts like these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us
where every outline is clear and every detail is visible, that we tread for
the first time the Court of Jovius--the columns with their arches on
either side of us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock the
art of those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel upon
earth. Nowhere within the compass of the Roman world do we find
ourselves more distinctly in the presence of one of the great minds of
the world's history; we see that, alike in politics and in art, Diocletian
breathed a living soul into a lifeless body. In the bitter irony of the
triumphant faith, his mausoleum has become a church, his temple has
become a baptistery, the great bell-tower rises proudly over his own
work; his immediate dwelling-place is broken down and crowded with
paltry houses; but the sea-front and the Golden Gate are still there amid
all disfigurements, and the great peristyle stands almost unhurt, to
remind us of the greatest advance that a single mind ever made in the
progress of the building art.
At the present time the city into which the house of Diocletian has
grown is the largest and most growing town of the Dalmatian coast. It
has had to yield both spiritual and temporal precedence to Zara, but,
both in actual population and all that forms the life of a city, Spalato
greatly surpasses Zara and all its other neighbors. The youngest
Dalmatian towns, which could boast neither of any mythical origin nor
of any Imperial foundation, the city which, as it were, became a city by

mere chance, has outstript the colonies of Epidauros, of Corinth, and of
Rome.
The palace of Diocletian had but one occupant; after the founder no
Emperor had dwelled in it, unless we hold that this was the villa near
Salona where the deposed Emperor Nepos was slain, during the
patriciate of Odoacer. The forsaken palace seems, while still almost
new, to have become a cloth factory, where women worked, and which
therefore appears in the "Notitia" as a Gynæcium. But when Salona
was overthrown, the palace stood ready to afford shelter to those who
were driven from their homes. The palace, in the widest sense of the
word--for of course its vast circuit took in quarters for soldiers and
officials of various kinds, as well as the rooms actually occupied by