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 Gynaecium.  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 the Emperor—­stood ready to become a city.

It was a chester ready made, with its four streets, its four gates, all but that toward the sea flanked with octagonal towers, and with four greater square towers at the corners.  To this day the circuit of the walls is nearly perfect; and the space contained within them must be as large as that contained within some of the oldest chesters in our own island.  The walls, the towers, the gates, are those of a city rather than of a house.  Two of the gates, tho’ their towers are gone, are nearly perfect; the “porta aurea,” with its graceful ornaments; the “porta ferrea” in its stern plainness, strangely crowned with its small campanile of later days perched on its top.  Within the walls, besides the splendid buildings which still remain, besides the broken-down walls and chambers which formed the immediate dwelling-place of the founder, the main streets were lined with massive arcades, large parts of which still remain.