Tossed to and fro between the temporal and spiritual lords who claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the dissensions of aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens, Pola found rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of Saint Mark in 1331.[9] Since then, till its new birth in our own times, Pola has been a failing city.  Like the other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to Austria, from Austria to France, from France to Austria again.  It is under its newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh life, and the haven whence Belisarius[10] sailed forth has again become a haven in more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united Austrian and Hungarian realm.

That haven is indeed a noble one.  Few sights are more striking than to see the huge mass of the amphitheater at Pola seeming to rise at once out of the land-locked sea.  As Pola is seen now, the amphitheater is the one monument of its older days, which strikes the eye in the general view, and which divides attention with signs that show how heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its new career.  But in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which befitted its rank as a colony of Rome.  The amphitheater, of course, stood without the walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope of the hill which was crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern fortress rises above the Franciscan church.  Parts of the Roman wall still stand; one of its gates is left; another has left a neighbor and a memory....

Travelers are sometimes apt to complain, and that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheaters are very like one another.  At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as the amphitheater there has several marked peculiarities of its own.  We do not pretend to expound all its details scientifically; but this we may say, that those who dispute—­if the dispute still goes on—­about various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will do well to go and look for some further light in the amphitheater of Pola.  The outer range, which is wonderfully perfect, while the inner arrangements are fearfully ruined, consists, on the side toward the town, of two rows of arches, with a third story with square-headed openings above them.

But the main peculiarity in the outside is to be found in four tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and Nimes, signs of Saracenic occupation, but clearly parts of the original design.  Many conjectures have been made about them; they look as if they were means of approach to the upper part of the building; but it is wisest not to be positive.  But the main peculiarity of this amphitheater is that it lies on the slope of a hill, which thus supplied a natural basement for the seats on one side only.  But this same 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.