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 Caesars, 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, Caesar, 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.