Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice Part 4

And now the birthplace of Jovius is forsaken, but his house still abides, and abides in a shape marvellously 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.e.

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.

He placed his home in a goodly land, on a spot whose first sight is striking at any moment; but special indeed is the good luck of him who for the first time draws near to Spalato at the hour of sunset. It is a moment to be marked in a life, as we round the island headland, one of the stony Dalmatian hills rising bleak and barren from the sea, and catch the first glimpse of the city, the tall bell-tower, the proud rampart of mountains which forms its background. But the sight is more spirit-stirring still if we come on that sight at the very moment when--in sight of the home of the great persecutor we may use the language of mythology--the sun-G.o.d has just sunk into its golden cup.

The sinking sun seems no unfit symbol, as we look on the spot where the lord of the world withdrew to seek for rest after his toils.

Another moment, the headland is rounded; its top is kindled like Vesuvius in the last rays of the sunlight; the lesser light is kindled before the greater has wholly failed us, and, by the light of sun and moon together, we can trace out the long line of the sea-front of the palace which became a city. No n.o.bler site could surely have been found within the bounds of the Empire of the two Augusti and their Caesars. The sea in front, the mountains behind, the headlands, the bays, the islands scattered around, might indeed have formed a realm from which the prince who had there fixed his home would have been unwise to go forth again to wrestle with the storms of the world which lay beyond its borders. The mountains have drawn nearer to the sh.o.r.e; the islands have gathered round the entrance of the haven, as if to shut out all but the n.o.ble bay and its immediate surroundings, as if to fence in a dominion worthy of Jovius himself.

We land with the moon lighting up the water, with the stars above us, the northern wain s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.s under gloomy arches, through dark pa.s.sages, and presently we find ourselves in the centre 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 re-organized 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 pa.s.sed 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's. 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 superst.i.tion from the world, that we see the n.o.blest forestalling of the long arcades of the Christian basilica. It is with thoughts like these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us where every outline is clear and every detail is invisible, 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 compa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TOWER, SPALATO.]

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 surpa.s.ses Zara and all its other neighbours. The youngest of the 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 outstripped 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 Not.i.tia 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 towards 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 s.p.a.ce 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, though their towers are gone, are nearly perfect: the _porta aurea_, with its graceful ornament; 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 ma.s.sive arcades, large parts of which still remain. Diocletian, in short, in building a house, had built a city. In the days of Constantine Porphyrogenitus it was a [Greek: kastron]--Greek and English had by his day alike borrowed the Latin name; but it was a [Greek: kastron] which Diocletian had built as his own house, and within which was his hall and palace. In his day the city bore the name of Aspalathon, which he explains to mean [Greek: palation mikron]. When the palace had thus become a common habitation of men, it is not wonderful that all the more private buildings whose use had pa.s.sed away were broken down, disfigured, and put to mean uses. The work of building over the site must have gone on from that day to this. The view in Wheler shows several parts of the enclosure occupied by ruins which are now covered with houses. The real wonder is that so much has been spared and has survived to our own days. And we are rather surprised to find Constantine saying that in his time the greater part had been destroyed. For the parts which must always have been the stateliest remain still. The great open court, the peristyle, with its arcades, have become the public piazza of the town; the mausoleum on one side of it and the temple on the other were preserved and put to Christian uses. We say the mausoleum, for we fully accept the suggestion made by Professor Glavinich, the curator of the museum of Spalato, that the present _duomo_, traditionally called the temple of Jupiter, was not a temple, but a mausoleum. These must have been the great public buildings of the palace, and, with the addition of the bell-tower, they remain the chief public buildings of the modern city. But, though the ancient square of the palace remains wonderfully perfect, the modern city, with its Venetian defences, its Venetian and later buildings, has spread itself far beyond the walls of Diocletian.

But those walls have made the history of Spalato, and it is the great buildings which stand within them that give Spalato its special place in the history of architecture. In the face of them we hardly stop to think of the remains of Venetian or even of earlier times. Yet both within and without the palace walls, sc.r.a.ps of Venetian work may be found which would attract the eye on any other spot, and hard by the north-western tower of Diocletian there remains a small desecrated church of the Byzantine type, which out of Spalato might be set down as a treasure. But, as we stand beneath the arcades of Jovius, things which would elsewhere be treasures seem as nothing. They, and the other buildings which stand in artistic connexion with them, form an epoch in the history of art, apart from the general history and general impression of the city which they have at once created and made famous.

SPALATO REVISITED.

1877--1881.

I thought it right to reprint the foregoing sketch of Spalato, the record of my first visit there in 1875, exactly as it was first written, with the change of two or three words only. It seemed worth while to keep the first impressions of such a place as they were set down at once after the first sight of it. Instead therefore of recasting this piece, as I have done several of the others, I will mention a few points on which later visits and further reading might have led to some change in what I first wrote nearly on the spot.

Another paper of a strictly architectural character, headed "Diocletian's Place in Architectural History," has been reprinted in the third series of my Historical Essays, as an appendix to the essay headed "The Illyrian Emperors and their Land."

First, with regard to the name of the place itself. I seem, when I wrote my paper of first impressions, to have had no doubt as to the received derivation from _Palatium_. That derivation is wonderfully tempting, and it enables one to make an epigrammatic contrast between the _Palatium_ of Rome and the _Palatium_ of Spalato, between the city which became a house and the house which became a city. But the fact remains the same, whatever may be the name. The city did become a house, and the house did become a city, whether the two were called by the same name or not. And I am now convinced, chiefly by Mr. Arthur Evans, that the name of Spalato has nothing to do with _Palatium_. I began to doubt rather early, as I did not see how the =s= could have got into the name; in a Greek name the origin of the =s= would have been plain enough, but it seemed to have no place in a Latin name.

And I was staggered by the form _Aspalato_ found as early as the Not.i.tia Imperii. Nothing goes for less than the etymologies of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and anyhow it is hard to see how [Greek: Aspalathon], the form which he uses, could mean [Greek: mikron palation]. But, as I had nothing better to propose, I thought it better, when I wrote the fuller paper which appears in the Historical Essays, to say nothing about the matter either way. I need not stop to dispute against the intrusive r in the vulgar form _Spalatro_, as both Sir Gardner Wilkinson and Mr. Neale have done that before me. But it is wonderful to see how early it got in. It is as old as the Ravenna Geographer, who has three forms--_Spalathon_, _Spalathron_, and _Spalatrum_. I need hardly say that the _r_ is unknown in the country, unless perhaps now and then in the mouth of some one who thinks it fine. So one has known people in England destroy etymology, by sounding _Waltham_ as if it had a _thorn_, and _Bosham_ with the sound of the German _sch_. I am now fully convinced that the name has nothing to do with _Palatium_. It is plain that the oldest form that we can find is _Aspalathum_, and I am inclined to accept the view of Mr. Evans, who connects the name with _Aspalathus_, or perhaps with [Greek: asphaltos]. But I must not venture myself in any quarter which savours of botany or geology.

With the newer lights which I have made use of in Historical Essays, I think I should no longer speak of Diocletian as "the great persecutor." Galerius ought in fairness to take that name off his shoulders. Mr. A. J. Mason has certainly proved thus much; and it is a great comfort to think so in visiting Spalato. Nor should I have spoken of him as a native of Salona. He was of Doclea, Dioclea, however we are to spell it, within the present bounds of Tzernagora.

Those who at various times have spoken of Saint Alban as "protomartyr _Anglorum_," and of King Lucius as becoming "a _Swiss_ bishop," might also speak of Diocletian as a Montenegrin.

I was doubtless right in saying that no Emperor, strictly so called, inhabited the Palace after Diocletian. In strictness indeed no Emperor ever inhabited it at all, as Diocletian had ceased to be Emperor when he went there. But I think that, at the time of my first visit, I had not fully taken in the story of Nepos and his father Count Marcellian.

One is strongly tempted to think that, when Nepos was killed "haud longe a Salonis, sua in villa," the place meant is the palace of Spalato. On the other hand, we have the earlier entry in the Not.i.tia, which certainly looks as if the palace had already become a kind of Imperial factory. But Nepos would hardly live in the same style as Jovius, and the palace is quite big enough to lodge the deposed Emperor and the work-women at the same time.

On the special importance of Spalato in the history of architecture I have spoken in several places, specially in the paper in my Historical Essays to which I have already referred. My main position is that, in the palace at Spalato, after a series of approaches, many of which may be seen in the building itself, Diocletian or his architect hit on the happy device of making the arch spring directly from the capital of the column. To merely cla.s.sical critics this seems to mark the depth of degradation into which art had fallen in Diocletian's day. To me it seems to be the greatest step ever taken, the beginning of all later forms of consistent arched architecture, Romanesque, Gothic, or any other. The importance of the step is of course the same whoever took it; and if the same feature can be shown in any building earlier than Spalato, we must transfer our praises from, the designer of Spalato to the designer of that building. Spalato would in that case lose something of its strictly architectural interest; but that would be all. But, as far as I know, no such rival has appeared. If the same form really was used in the baths of Diocletian at Rome, that would not be a rival building, but a case of the same mind working in the same way in two places. And to establish an earlier use of the form, it would be needful to show that it was deliberately employed in some considerable building. There is nothing commoner in the history of architecture than the casual and isolated appearance of some form, which the designer had not so much chosen as stumbled on, long before the time when it really came into use. I put in this caution, because I know that there is a kind of feeble approach to the arrangement at Spalato in one or two buildings at Pompeii. And, great as was the advance at Spalato, it had, like many other cases of advance, its weak side. The Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital were both of them s.h.i.+fts to relieve, as it were, the light abacus of the Corinthian capital from the weight which the arch laid upon it. The heavy abacus of Pisa and Lucca was a better escape from this difficulty. Again, the lightness of the columns used at Spalato and in the basilicas which followed its model forbade the use of the vault, and condemned the roofs of the basilicas to be among their poorest features. In the peristyle itself of course no roof was needed, though to an eye used to Rome and Ravenna it has so much the air of an unroofed basilica that it is really hard to believe that it was always open. But, though the basilican arrangement forbade the use of the vault, yet the step taken at Spalato was not without its effect on later vaulted buildings. When the vault came in again, as in the heavier forms of the German Romanesque, men had learned that the arch and its pier, whether that pier was a light column or a ma.s.sive piece of wall, were enough for all artistic purposes, without bringing in, as in the cla.s.sical Roman, purely ornamental features from a style which followed another system of construction. I came to my belief in the architectural importance of Spalato thirty years before I saw the building itself, and, now that repeated visits have made the peristyle of Diocletian as familiar to me as Wells cathedral, I admire and approve just as much, though of course I cannot undertake to be quite as enthusiastic now as I was on the evening when I first saw it.

When I was last at Spalato, a process was going on which always makes one tremble. The peristyle and the inside of the mausoleum were surrounded by scaffoldings. As for the mausoleum, it was perhaps a mistake ever to make it into a church; but, as it has been made into a church, the additions and changes which were needed for that purpose have become part of the history, and ought not to be meddled with. It must always have been nearly the smallest, and quite the darkest, metropolitan church in Christendom; but that it is so is part of the wonder of the place. And, if some of the details were restored in plaster at the time of a certain famous royal visit, it seems hardly worth while to knock them away, with the chance of knocking away some of the genuine stone along with them. That royal visit is commemorated in a tablet at the end of the peristyle, which professes great loyalty to a personage described as "Franciscus Primus, Austriae Imperator et Dalmatiae Rex." The man so labelled in Diocletian's own house had been the last successor to Diocletian's empire.

In the changes which are being made in the peristyle, it is said that this tablet was first taken down as being modern, and then set up again, because official loyalty overrode all considerations of what was old and what was new. But some care should be taken in removing what is modern in such a place as Spalato. It is very well to get rid of some mean excrescences; but, where the arches have been filled up by Venetian buildings of respectable work, it would seem to be a great mistake to open them, to say nothing of the chance that such opening may endanger the columns and arches themselves. Though built up, they are not so blocked as to hinder a full study of their details. Indeed the building up, both of the arches of the peristyle and of the heavier arches in the other parts of the palace, is really a part of the history which should be preserved. It marks the distinctive character of Spalato as the house which became a city.

That city, as it now stands, stretches, I need hardly say again, a long way beyond the bounds of the ancient house. Yet one cannot conceive Spalato without Diocletian's palace. It is something much more than the chief object and ornament of Spalato, as this or that building is the chief object and ornament of any other city. It is more than the castle or monastery round which a city has often grown.

It is not merely that, but for the existence of the palace, the city would never have come into being; the palace still is the city in a sense in which we could hardly use those words of any other building elsewhere. Yet there are things to see at Spalato besides the palace.

The museum is eminently a thing to see; but then it is within the palace, and moreover, though it is locally placed at Spalato, it belongs historically to Salona. There is a good deal of pretty Venetian work scattered up and down, both within the walls of Diocletian and without them. The piazza just outside the gate of iron, where the traveller will most likely seek his breakfast, his coffee, and his maraschino, would have some attractions in itself, if it did not lie just outside the gate of iron. The eye naturally turns to the gate, and to the little campanile perched on it; otherwise it might very fairly rest on the Venetian _loggia_, with its columns and their wide--yet not sprawling--pointed arches. It might rest none the less because the building so strongly suggests that cla.s.s of English town-halls or market-houses of which I said something when speaking of Udine. The octagonal tower too, and the remains of the Venetian fortifications generally, are worth a glance. The difficulty is, in the home of Jovius, to give even a glance to anything but the works of Jovius.

The mausoleum, now the once metropolitan church, and the temple, now the baptistery, have both of them become churches by accident. Besides these, the first impression is that Spalato has little to show in the ecclesiastical line. And further examination will not take away that impression as to quant.i.ty, though it will modify it somewhat as to quality. The little desecrated church which in 1875 I saw just within the palace walls, embodied in military buildings, I could not find in 1881. I was told that it had been burned, and there certainly was a burned building thereabouts; but I did not feel quite sure that I had hit upon the right site, and whether the church that I was looking for might not still be there, imprisoned in some of the queer devices of Austrian occupation. But in 1881 I and my companion lighted by way of recompense on one most curious building which neither of us had seen in earlier visits. This is the little church of Saint Nicolas in the suburb on the slope of the hill. It is very small, of a rude kind of Byzantine type, with four of the very strangest columns I ever saw.

Save that they have a mighty _entasis_, they really have more of an Egyptian cut than anything Greek, Roman, Gothic, or any of the forms to which Aryan eyes are used. The Franciscan church at the foot of the hill, with its cloister, would be worth a glance for its own sake; and it is worth much more than a glance on account of the precious sarcophagus which the cloister shelters. But this, like the objects in the museum, is an outlying fragment of Salona, to be talked of there. To the modern church on the other side of the city it would be only kindness to shut our eyes. But we cannot help looking at it; it aims at the style of the place, and clearly fancies itself to be Romanesque, if not Roman. We look at its tower, and we look back to the mighty campanile within the walls. Somehow the fourteenth century could adapt itself to the fourth; but the nineteenth cannot adapt itself to the fourteenth. Yet it is something for Spalato to say that it contains the n.o.blest and the most ign.o.ble of all towers that do profess and call themselves Romanesque.

Eitelberger has well hit off the character of the three chief Dalmatian cities in three pithy epithets. Zara is _bureaukratisch_; Spalato is _burgerlich_; Ragusa is _alt-aristokratisch_. The burghers seem to make more progress than either the foreign officials or the native patricians. Both better quarters and better dinners can be had at Spalato in 1881 than were to be had there in 1875. In 1881 we can walk on sh.o.r.e, while in 1877 boats were needed. And in 1881 the railway--a wonder in Dalmatia--was ready to carry us to Salona or even to Sebenico, but not to Trau. On the other hand in some other respects, if not Spalato, at least its foreign rulers, seem to advance backwards, if they advance at all. Those who dwell under the shadow of Apostolic Majesty are used to the daily suppression of such newspapers as venture to proclaim inconvenient truths. At Spalato that Apostolic and const.i.tutional power has gone a step further by suppressing the munic.i.p.ality. With us, when a Stewart king suppressed an ancient corporation, he at least set up another of a new Stewart fas.h.i.+on. But at Spalato the _podesta_--the _potestas_ still lingers in Dalmatia, while in Italy only syndics are tolerated--and the other elders of the city seem to have become altogether things of the past, no less than Jovius and his Empire.

SALONA.

1875--1877--1881.

The strictly cla.s.sical student will perhaps be offended if any one, on reading the name at the head of this article, should ask him where the place is, and how its name is to be p.r.o.nounced. Salona, he will answer, is in Dalmatia, and how can there be more than one way of sounding the _omega_ in the second syllable? And so far he will be right. The Salona of which we speak is in Dalmatia, and, as its most usual Greek forms are [Greek: Salona] and [Greek: Salonai], there can be no doubt as to the rights of that particular _omega_. But those who have gone a little deeper into the geography of south-eastern Europe will know that, besides the Dalmatian Salona, there is another within the Greek kingdom, which has taken the place of the Lokrian Amphissa.

As we write the names of the two, we make no difference between them, and we fear that most Englishmen will make as little difference in sounding the two names as in writing them. Yet, as Boughton in Northamptons.h.i.+re and Boughton in Kent are, by those who have local knowledge, sounded in two different ways, so it is with the Lokrian and the Dalmatian Salona. [Greek: Salona] and [Greek: Salona] differ to the eye; and, among those with whom Greek is a living tongue, they differ to the ear also. But it is not with the Lokrian Salona, but with the Dalmatian Salona, that we are here concerned. We need not disturb the feelings of the late Bishop Monk, whose one notion of accentual reading was that those who follow it must "make some strange false quant.i.ties." The cla.s.sical purist may make the _omega_ in the Dalmatian Salona as long as he pleases. Only, if he p.r.o.nounces the Lokrian Salona in the same fas.h.i.+on, he will wound the ears of those to whom the chief notion of (so-called) quant.i.tative reading is that those who follow it must make some strange false accents.

At Salona we are in one of the subject lands of Venice, but we cannot say that we are in one of her subject cities. For Salona, as a city, had pa.s.sed away before the Serene Republic bore rule on these coasts, in truth before the Serene Republic was, while the lagoons still sheltered only those few settlers whom the minister of Theodoric likened to waterfowl on their nests. As a city, it pa.s.sed away as few cities have pa.s.sed away. Others indeed have perished more thoroughly; of some the very sites have been lost; but there is no city whose name survives which has left so little trace of what it was in the time of its greatness. For it is not like those cities whose very name and memory have perished, which are wholly ruined or buried, which have no modern representatives, or whose modern representatives bear wholly different names. Salona is still an existing name, marked on at least the local map; but, instead of the head of Dalmatia, one of the great cities of the Roman Empire, a city which was said to have reached half the size and population of the New Rome itself, we find only a few scattered houses, which hardly deserve the name of a village. By the side of modern Salona, modern Aquileia looks flouris.h.i.+ng, and modern Forum Julii might pa.s.s for a great city. For Aquileia is not wholly dead as long as the patriarchal basilica still stands, if only to discharge the functions of a village church. But at Salona the traveller hardly notices whether there be any church in use or not. Of modern objects the one which is most likely to catch his eye is the building which at least proclaims, in the name of "Caffe Diocleziano,"

that Salona in her fall has not forgotten the man who commonly pa.s.ses for her greatest son, who, according to some, was her second founder, and who, in any case, was her most renowned neighbour. By a strange piece of good luck, the citizen and sovereign of Salona who came back to spend his last days in his own land had reared at no great distance from her the house which, when Salona fell, stood ready to receive her inhabitants, and to take her place as a new city.

There is a marked difference between the position of the older and that of the newer city. Spalato stands indeed on a bay, but it is a bay which, in that region of channels and islands, may pa.s.s for the open sea. Salona lay at the innermost point of the deep gulf which bears her own name, the gulf which forms one side of the peninsula on which Spalato stands, and which is s.h.i.+elded from the main sea by the island of Bua. It is curious to compare the real geography with the way in which the land and sea are laid down in the Peutinger Table, where Bua seems nearer to the coast of Italy than it is to Salona. Sir Gardner Wilkinson appositely quotes the lines of Lucan:--

"Qua maris Hadriaci longas ferit unda Salonas, Et tepidum in molles Zephyros excurrit Iader."

_Longae_ certainly well expresses the way in which the city must have spread itself along the mouth of the river, and the northern side of the bay. And, more than this, the idea of length must have been deeply impressed on Salona by the long walls which, as we shall presently see, yoked the city to something or other beyond her own immediate defences. Salona, like most of the older cities, was not at all like one of our square _chesters_ which rose up at once out of some military necessity. The Dalmatian capital had grown up bit by bit, and its walls formed a circuit almost as irregular as that of Rome herself. The site was a striking one. As we set forth from the comparatively flouris.h.i.+ng daughter to visit the fallen mother, the road from Spalato leads us over a slight hill, from the descent of which we look on the bay with its background of mountains, a view which brings before us two strongly contrasted sites of human habitation. In advance of the mountain range stands the stronghold of Clissa, so famous in later wars--a stronghold most tempting in a distant view, but utterly disappearing when we come near to it. The seat of the Uscocs has nothing to show but its site and an ugly fortress; yet the hill is well worth going up, for the site and the view from it, a most instructive geographical prospect over mainland, sea, and islands. We turn to our Imperial guide, and we find that [Greek: Kleisa] was so called because it kept the key of the pa.s.sage over the mountains. It was the [Greek: Kleisoura], so called [Greek: dia to synkleiein tous dierchomenous ekeithen]. He has to tell us how it was taken by invaders, whom he speaks of as the Slaves who were called Avars ([Greek: Slaboi, hoi kai Abaroi kaloumenoi]).

The ethnological confusion is like that of another self-styled Imperial personage, who thought that he could get at a Tartar by scratching a Russian. But in both cases the confusion is instructive, as pointing to the way in which Slavonic and Turanian nations were mixed up together, as allies and as enemies, in the history of these lands. Far below, on the bosom of the bay, a group of small islands are covered by a small village, which seems to float on the water, and which well deserves its name of _Piccola Venezia_. Between the height and the sea lay Salona, on a slight elevation gently sloping down to the water; here, as so often on the Dalmatian coast, it needs somewhat of an effort to believe that the water is the sea. To the right of the road, we see the ruins of the aqueduct which brought water to the house of Diocletian--an aqueduct lately repaired, and again set to discharge its ancient duties. Ancient fragments of one kind or another begin to line the road; an ancient bridge presently leads us across the main stream of the Giadro, Lucan's Iader, which we might rather have looked for at Zara. We mark to the right the marshy ground divided by the many channels of the river; we pa.s.s by a square castle with turreted corners, in which a mediaeval archbishop tried to reproduce the wonder of his own city; and we at last find ourselves close by one of the gates of Salona, ready to begin our examination of the fallen city in due order.

The city distinctly consists of two parts. A large suburb has at some time or another been taken in within the walls of the city. This is plain, because part of a cross wall with a gate still remains, which must have divided the s.p.a.ce contained within the outer walls into two.

This wall runs in a direction which, without professing to be mathematically correct, we may call north and south. That is, it runs from the hills down towards the bay or the river. Now, which was the elder part of the two? that to the east or that to the west? In other words, which represents the prae-Roman city, and which represents its enlargement in Roman times? By putting the question in this shape, we do not mean to imply that any part of the existing walls is of earlier than Roman date. The Roman city would arise on the site of the earlier settlement, and, as it grew and as its circuit was found too narrow, it would itself be further enlarged. The cross wall with the gate in it must of course have been at some time external; it marks the extent of the city at the time when it was built; but in which way has the enlargement taken place? It used to be thought that the eastern, the most inland division, was the elder, and that the city was extended to the west. And it certainly at first sight looks in favour of this view that, in the extreme north-west corner, an amphitheatre has clearly been worked into the wall, exactly in the same way in which the _Amphitheatrum Castrense_ at Rome is worked into the wall of Aurelian.

How so keen an observer as Sir Gardner Wilkinson could have doubted about this building being an amphitheatre, still more how his doubts ended in his positively deciding that it was not, seems really wonderful. It has all the unmistakeable features of an amphitheatre, and we can only suppose that a good deal has been brought to light since Sir Gardner Wilkinson's visit, and that what is seen now was not so clearly to be seen then. As amphitheatres were commonly without the walls, this certainly looks as if the eastern part were the old city, and as if those who enlarged it to the west had made use of the amphitheatre in drawing out their new line of fortification, exactly as Aurelian in the like case made use of amphitheatre, aqueducts, anything that came conveniently in his way. But, on the other hand, Professor Glavinivc, whom we have already referred to when speaking of Spalato, and whose keener observation has come usefully in the wake of the praiseworthy researches of Dr. Carrara, has pointed out with unanswerable force that the gate has two towers on its eastern side, showing that that side was external, and that therefore the western part must be the older and the eastern the addition. This is evidence which it is impossible to get over. Clearly then the s.p.a.ce to the west of it was once the whole city, and the far greater s.p.a.ce to the east once lay beyond the walls. The gate must have been a grand one; but unluckily its arches have perished. There was a central opening, along which the wheel-tracks may still be traced, and a pa.s.sage for foot-pa.s.sengers on each side. The large rectangular blocks of limestone of which it is built have been encrusted in a singular way with some natural formation, which might almost be mistaken either for plaster or for some peculiarity of the stone itself. In the northern wall of the eastern part is an inscription commemorating the building or repair of the wall in the time of the Antonines. This by itself would not be conclusive; for the wall might very well have been rebuilt in their day and the city might have been enlarged to the west in a still later time. But the position of the gate is decisive, and the position of the amphitheatre is a difficulty that can easily be got over. If, besides the great enlargement to the east, we also suppose an enlargement to the west which would take the amphitheatre within the city walls, this will be quite enough.

We may rule then that the Illyrian city, the earlier Roman city, stood to the west of the cross wall, and that it was enlarged at some time earlier than the reigns of the Antonines by taking in an eastern suburb larger than the original town. The walls of both parts may be traced through a large part of their extent. The outer gate to the east was flanked by octagonal towers, and both a square and an octagon tower may be traced near the north-east corner. But the most remarkable thing about the walls of Salona is that, besides the walls of the city itself, there are long walls, like those of Athens and Megara, reaching from the western side of the city for a mile and more nearly along the present road to Trau. They have not been traced to the end; but there can be no doubt that they were built to make long Salona yet longer by joining the town to some further point of the coast. Nothing is more natural; the water of the bay by Salona itself is very shallow; when the city became one of the great maritime stations of the world, it was an obvious undertaking to plant a dock at some point of the coast where the water was deeper. And to one who comes to Salona almost fresh from the hill-cities of central Italy, from the strongholds of Volscians, Hernicans, and Old-Latins, from Cora and Signia and Alatrium, it becomes matter of unfeigned surprise to find Dalmatian antiquaries speaking of these walls as "Cyclopean."

The name "Cyclopean," though as old as Euripides, is as dangerous as "Pelasgian" or "Druid;" but, if it means anything, it must mean the first form of wall-building, the irregular stones heaped together, such as we see in the oldest work at Cora and Signia. Here we have nothing of the kind. The blocks are very large, and the outer surface is not smooth; but all of them are carefully cut to a rectangular shape, and they are laid with great regularity. There seems no kind of temptation to attribute them to any date earlier than the Roman conquest of Illyric.u.m. The style of building is simply that which is made natural by the kind of stone. And the same kind of construction, though with smaller blocks, is that which prevails throughout the walls of Salona, except where later repairs have clearly been made.

This has happened with the outer wall to the west, where some earlier fragments have even been built in. Otherwise, by far the greater part of the walls, towers, and gates of Salona, not forgetting a gate which has been made out in the long walls themselves, all belong to one general style of masonry.

Within the walls of Salona the general effect is somewhat strange. The city is pierced by the road from Spalato to Trau; in these later times it has been further pierced by the railway--strange object in Dalmatia, strangest of all at Salona--which starts from Spalato, but which does not find its way to Trau. The greater part of the s.p.a.ce is still covered with vineyards and olive-trees; systematic digging would bring a vast deal to light; but a good deal positively has been made out already. The amphitheatre has been already spoken of; the road cuts through the theatre. But, as becomes the history of the city, the greater part of the discoveries belong to Christian times, to the days when the bishopric of Salona was a post great enough to be employed to break the fall of deposed emperors. But we may doubt whether the head church of Salona, the church which held the episcopal chair of Glycerius, has yet been brought to light.

Near the north-western corner of the eastern division of the city the foundation of a Christian baptistery has been uncovered. The site of the baptistery, according to all rule, must be near to the site of the great church of the city. Now the baptistery stands near the wall; is it fanciful to think that at Salona, as well as at Rome, it was not thought prudent in the earliest days of the establishment of Christianity to build churches in the more central and prominent parts of the city? The baptistery of Salona keeps--the great basilica must therefore have kept--under the shadow of the wall of the extended city, exactly as the Lateran basilica and baptistery do at Rome. Of the baptistery it is easy to study the plan, as the foundations and the bases of the columns, both of the building itself and the portico in front of it, are plainly to be seen. Many of their splendid capitals are preserved among the rich treasures of the museum at Spalato. These are of a Composite variety, in which the part of the volute is played by griffins, while the lower part of the capital is rich with foliage of a Byzantine type. West of the baptistery, but hardly placed in any relation to it, are the remains of a small church, which seems to have been a square, with columns to the east and an apse to the north. Whatever this building was, it surely can never have been the great church of Salona. That must have been a basilica of the first cla.s.s; and we may hope that future diggings may bring that to light also. But outside the city to the north, successive diggings have made precious discoveries in the way of Christian burying-places and churches. Since the last researches have been made, it is perfectly clear that here, outside the walls, like the basilicas of the apostles at Rome, there stood a church of considerable size, that it had supplanted a smaller predecessor, and that it had another smaller neighbour hard by. It is now easy--but it is only very lately that it has become easy--to see nearly the whole outline of a church measuring--speaking roughly--about 120 feet long.

It ranged therefore with the smaller rather than the larger basilicas of Rome. It had two rows of large columns, which, from their nearness to one another, look as if they had supported an entablature rather than arches, with a transept, with the arch of triumph opening into it, and the apse beyond, to the east. There are also, in front of the arch of triumph, foundations which look most temptingly like those of _cancelli_, like those of Saint Clement's at Rome, but which seem too narrow for such a purpose. It is also plain, from the base of a smaller column at a lower level, that this comparatively large church was built on the remains of an earlier one. And this is borne out by the discovery of pavements at more than one level, which supported sarcophagi, which are still to be seen, and of which an inscription shows that the lowest level was of the time of Theodosius the Second and Valentinian the Third. This thrusts on the building of the upper and greater church to a later time, surely not earlier than the reign of Justinian. It must therefore have still been almost in its freshness when the last blow fell on Salona. And at such a time we can better take in the full force of the inscription which stood over the west door: "Dominus noster propitius esto reipublicae Romanae." The church, it should be noted, has been, at some time or other before it was quite swept away, patched up or applied to some other use. A later wall runs across the western face of the transept. An endless field for guessing is hereby opened; but it is more prudent not to enter upon it.

Another smaller ruined church stands close by, with its apse pointing to the north. This and the eastern part of the larger church are filled with sarcophagi of all kinds and sizes, reminding us of the newly-opened basilica of Saint Petronilla by the Appian Way. Among these is the tomb of an early _Ch.o.r.episcopus_. A crowd of architectural fragments are scattered around, among which one splendid Corinthian capital bears witness to the magnificence of the upper church. But the real wealth of Salona, both sepulchral and architectural, is not to be looked for in Salona itself, but in the museum at Spalato. There are a crowd of superb tombs, pagan and Christian, and the splendid capitals from the baptistery. There are stores of inscriptions, Latin and Greek, which would make the place where they are preserved a place of no small interest, even if that place were not Spalato. But one sarcophagus of pagan date still stays in its place, a little way beyond the city, because, being hewn in the limestone rock, it could not be taken away. This is that which is described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, which has some of the exploits of Herakles carved on its one face, and which has been so oddly changed in modern times into the altar of the canonized Pope Saint Caius. For he, like the Emperor under whom he suffered, pa.s.ses for a native of Salona. And a no less precious sarcophagus of Christian days is preserved in the cloister of the Franciscan church at Spalato. This represents the crossing of the Red Sea. The Pharaoh looks very much as if he were in a Roman triumphal chariot, trampling a genius or two of the waters under his wheels. His warriors follow, looking, according to the eyes with which we look at them, like Romans in military dress or like Albanians in the immemorial fustanella. The Aryan mind is offended at seeing men of another continent clothed in such a very European garb; it is for Egyptologers to say whether the sculpture is correct. The sea is very narrow; it swallows up the Egyptian chariots with great force, and the rescued Hebrews stand on the other side, Miriam just about to begin her hymn of victory. The subject of the sculpture is obvious; but it seems that n.o.body understood it till it was expounded by an exalted lady at that royal visit of 1818 which at Spalato is commemorated oftener than enough. The expounder was the wife of the man who had once been the last successor of Diocletian and Augustus; whether his queen had any claim to rank either as a successor of Prisca and Livia or as the doubtful mother-in-law of a conqueror from Ajaccio, we have not looked in any pedigree-book to find out. One would really have thought that the loosing of the knot was so easy that it might have been unravelled by the hand of a subject; but a book which we have before us by a local antiquary goes off into raptures at the surprising keenness of Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic eyes.

The chapel of Saint Caius, with its heathenish altar, brings our thoughts back to the long walls below it, the walls which yoked the ancient Salona to the deeper sea. It must not be forgotten that, in the days of its greatness, Salona was one of the chief ports of the Hadriatic, the greatest on its own side of it. After s.h.i.+fting to and fro from one port to another, that position has come back, if not to Salona itself, yet to its modern representative. If we distinguish the Hadriatic from the Gulf of Trieste, Spalato is undoubtedly its chief port; but the smallness of Spalato, as compared with the greatness of ancient Salona, is a speaking historical lesson. We see the difference between the place in Europe which is held by the Illyrian lands now and the place which they held in the days of the Roman peace. Then Salona was one of the chief cities of the Roman world, placed on one of the most central sites in the Roman world, the chief port of one of the great divisions of the Empire, and one of the main highways between its eastern and western halves. Such could be the position of a Dalmatian city when Dalmatia had a civilized mainland to the back of it. Salona therefore kept up its position as long as the Empire still kept any strength on its Illyrian frontier. It played its part in both the civil wars. Caesar himself enlarges on the strength of the city--"oppidum et loci natura et colle munitum." In after-times it was a special object of the regard of its own great citizen, who took up his abode so near to its neighbourhood. According to Constantino Porphyrogenitus, Salona was pretty well rebuilt by Diocletian. Its importance went on in the time of transition, as is witnessed by the growth of its ecclesiastical buildings, and by the high position held by its bishopric. Like the rest of the neighbouring lands, it pa.s.sed under the dominion, first of Odoacer and then of Theodoric, and it was the first place which was won back to the Empire in the wars of Justinian. Lost again and won back again, it appears throughout those wars as the chief point of embarcation for the Imperial armies on their voyages to Italy. This was the last century of its greatness; in the next century the modern history of Illyria begins. The Slaves were moving, and the Avars were moving with them. Salona fell into the hands of these last barbarians; it was ruined and pillaged, and sank to the state in which it has remained till our own time. Since the seventh century Salona has ceased to rank among the cities of the earth, but the house which had been raised by its greatest citizen stood ready hard by to supply a shelter to some at least of its homeless inhabitants. Things were wholly turned about on the bay of Salona and on the neighbouring peninsula. Down to the days of Heraclius, Salona had been a great city, with the vastest house that one man ever reared standing useless in its neighbourhood. From his day onwards the house grew into a city, and the city became a petty village, where, of all the places along that historic coast, the traveller finds least to disturb him in the pious contemplation of ruins. The only danger is that his meditations may be broken in upon by sellers of coins and sc.r.a.ps of all ages, dates, and values. Coins at Salona hardly need the process once known at the Mercian Dorchester as "going a-Caesaring." Caesars seem to be picked up from under and off the ground with much less trouble than hunting for truffles. And even he who is no professed numismatist or collector of gems will be pleased to give a few _soldi_, perhaps even for a very clear image and superscription of "Constantinus Junior n.o.b[ilissimus] C[aesar]," much more for any image and superscription of Jovius himself. It may have neither rarity nor value in the eyes of the numismatically learned; but it is something to carry away from Salona itself the head of the foremost local worthy in Salona's long annals.

TRAu.

1875--1877--1881.

The visitor to Spalato and Salona should, if possible, not fail to pay a visit to Trau. To most readers the very name will doubtless be strange. Yet Tragurium is an old city, a city old enough to be named by Polybios, to say nothing of later Greek and Latin writers. As in countless other cases, many readers may have pa.s.sed by the name without any notice at all; others may have turned to the map, and, having once found Tragurium, may have presently forgotten that Tragurium was anywhere recorded. The case may be different with those who carry on their studies so far as to have dealings with the Imperial topographer. In his pages the name of the city has got lengthened into [Greek: Tetrangourion], and we are told that it was so called [Greek: dia to einai auto mikron diken angouriou]. We are not ashamed to confess that the word [Greek: angouriou] gave us no meaning whatever, and that we had to turn to our dictionary to find that [Greek: angourion] means a water-melon. But where the point of likeness is between the town of Trau and a water-melon, and why the name should have been lengthened, so as to suggest, if anything, the notion of four water-melons, we are as much in the dark as before.

Those therefore who have made acquaintance with the city in the shape of [Greek: Tetrangourion] will have a chance of keeping it in their minds. But with those who light only either on Tragurium or on Trau, it will most likely happen as most commonly happens with places which play no great part in general history. The name pa.s.ses away as a mere name, till something happens to clothe it with a special meaning.

Salona the parent and Spalato the child are names which never can become meaningless to any one who has a decent knowledge of the history of the world. But the name of Tragurium, Trau, will probably always be purely meaningless, save to those whom anything may have led to take a special interest in Dalmatian matters. Tragurium has a history--no place is without one--but its history is purely local and Dalmatian. As far as one can venture to judge, the great course of human affairs would have been much the same if Tragurium had never become a city. But there it stands, and, as it stands, its position, its buildings, even its local history, combine to give it no small interest. They make it no contemptible appendage even to the famous spots in its immediate neighbourhood. Whatever was its origin, Tragurium became a Roman town, and it was one of those places on the Dalmatian coast which so long and steadily clave to their allegiance to the Eastern Caesars. As the Byzantine power declined, the town was disputed between the Kings of Hungary and the commonwealth of Venice, and once at least it is said to have felt the hand of Saracen plunderers. By each of the Christian powers by which it was disputed it was won and lost more than once, till it finally became Venetian in 1420. Perhaps the point of greatest interest in these dates is that Trau was a Hungarian possession at the time of the building of its cathedral church in the thirteenth century. It is said to have points of likeness to other great Hungarian churches of the same date.