ameless 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, th
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