rk 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.

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 n