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 Caesars.  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 Caesars, and Palatium was the name which was borne by the house of Caesar 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 Caesar 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.