four, with a cake of chocolate in my pocket, for the rest trusting to
living on the country. Not until seven o'clock did the country offer
anything. Then I got coffee from a Highland girl at a very primitive
inn at the point of one of the zigzags. She had not "a very shower
of beauty"; but she did have "the freedom of a mountaineer," and a
kindly twinkle in her eye. A man takes kindly to the hand and face
that signify refreshment in time of need. When I asked how far it was
to Cettinje the mountain maid said "_tetre ore_," which, though it was
a rather bad mixture of Italian and something else, probably Slavic,
was extremely encouraging. Even if the climb continued for two hours
more I ought to reduce her "four hours" to three. In fact, at eight
o'clock, at the end of three and a half hours of steady toiling climb,
I found myself at an altitude of nearly three thousand feet, almost
perpendicularly above Cattaro, with the Galatea so near that it seemed
as if I could drop a stone upon her deck; but I thought it best not
to try; I was in a hurry. In a few minutes more I broke through the
mountain which had given me so much trouble, and I was in Montenegro.
I soon passed the frontier town of Njegus, in the bed of a dried-up
lake, the birthplace of Prince Nicholas, the ruling sovereign, who has
a country house there of such modest appearance that one could hardly
believe it to belong to a prince.
Now my work began anew; another mountain wall confronted me and the
road, which as far as the border had been good, was freshly strewn
with cracked stones, the bicyclist's terror. When at last I reached
the top of this second range, a sight worth seeing unfolded itself
before my eye. All Montenegro, a mass of gray stone rising here and
there into peaks, lay spread out before me. In the far northeast one
could see the important hill fortress of Niksic, but no land anywhere
appeared. In fact, all the soil in Montenegro, except in the southern
part around Lake Skutari, is found in larger or smaller clefts of
the rocks; Cettinje itself being simply one of the largest of these.
Now it was downhill, and I abused my wheel shamefully, running it
hard over the stones as the only way of accomplishing the journey. At
about ten o'clock, just after feasting my eyes on the grand chain of
snow-covered Illyrian mountains in the background, I turned a large
cliff and looked down into a bowl five or ten times as large as that
of Njegus, and saw at its farther end Cettinje, looking like a large
German country village with roofs of red tiles. This is without doubt
the most primitive capital of Europe. Words almost fail to express its
plainness. But it is a place worth seeing, and after a reasonable halt
I made haste to traverse in the blazing sun the two or three miles
which lay between the rim of the bowl where I stood and the town.
It was some years since I had felt myself so out of the world as I did
up there among the mountains and men of Slavic speech. I betook myself
to a modest inn, Kraljevic Al Marco, for lunch. After wrestling to my
satisfaction with Italian, I noticed that the landlady turned to her
little boy and said something to him in Greek. Quick as a flash the
ice was broken and we were talking Greek like lightning. It was a
family of Greeks, the brother of the landlady being the interpreter at
the Greek Consulate.
After an hour or two of rest they showed me about the town for awhile,
after which I cut loose to see things for myself. What a plain town it
is! The palace of the present sovereign, called the New Palace, is one
of the few two-story buildings in the place, but even this has hardly
any ornament except four pairs of attached Corinthian columns on each
of the stories at the front side, and two pairs on each of the other
sides. The so-called "Old Palace" is plainer than most modern jails.
The one building of interest is the monastery, in which lies buried the
ancestor of the ruling family, on whose sarcophagus the Montenegrins
lay their hands and swear when they go out to battle to be good and
true soldiers. And they have kept their oaths well. These Montenegrins
are simply Servians who never bowed the knee to the Turks. It has
occurred more than once or twice that a Turkish army has entered this
land of rocks eighty thousand strong, sweeping everything before it,
only to return decimated, if perchance it escaped destruction. There is
a round tower in the rear of the monastery, on which the heads of Turks
used to be nailed up.
It was good luck for me that my visit fell on Sunday, for the men were
in their best dress. Dress did not make the man; the man was there
to begin with. There was hardly an adult who did not measure over six
feet; and they looked every inch a man. If there were only enough of
them they would soon settle the Eastern question. Alexander III. of
Russia knew how to value his "only faithful ally." In contrast to the
men, the women look like drudges. The male sex has really arrogated
to itself all the beauty, a result that has come about from the fact
that, while the men have for ages borne arms and ranged free, the women
have been the tillers of the scanty soil as well as servants of all
work. _Men_ are the one product of Montenegro. The only product of the
_soil_ beyond the grain and potatoes, which afford scanty sustenance,
is tobacco, which is good and cheap. There is a heavy duty on it in
Austria, something like two hundred per cent.; everybody tries to
smuggle it in, and the trick often succeeds.
The next day was the birthday of the Crown Prince, and when I made
ready to depart my new friends said, "Of course you are going to
stay to the great festival," apparently thinking that that was what
I came for. I asked if the young man himself was to be present,
and they replied, "Oh! no." "Then," said I, "I think I will not be
present either." So I got off at half-past two in a fierce heat, and
by easy stages, meeting as I went several of my stalwart third-class
fellow-passengers, I reached the Galatea in season for a good dinner.
On the way from Cattaro to Spalato the chief object of interest is
Ragusa, a strongly fortified city of about twelve thousand inhabitants,
which, after maintaining itself as a free republic until 1805, often
leaning upon Venice the while, went in the next decade through great
vicissitudes, being in 1811 annexed by Napoleon to the new "Kingdom of
Illyria," and in 1814 falling into the hands of Austria, so good at
taking hold but so slow at letting go. But, after all that may be said
of the land-greed of Austria, it has been no evil lot for Dalmatia to
fall into her hands. Austria has inherited--let Professor Freeman turn
over in his grave to hear it said--the rôle of Rome as road-builder,
civilizer, and introducer of general prosperity along this coast. She
is now pushing a network of railroads along the coast and up from
the coast towns into the interior. Ragusa has a very Venetian look
in its old part and a very nineteenth-century look in its new part.
Its surroundings are almost as interesting as the city itself. On the
lovely island Lacroma, hard by on the south, is a church founded by
Richard Cœur de Lion. Somewhat farther off to the north, on the shore,
lies Canosa, ever remembered by a spring of pure water shaded by two
gigantic plane-trees forty feet in circumference, an enchanted spot. At
or near Ragusa lay the Greek city Epidauros.
In this region might well be located the "Islands of the Blessed";
for here we begin to encounter islands by tens and dozens, large and
small. The rest of the journey was dodging in and out among islands. We
have lakes in America which boast their three hundred and sixty-five
islands, one for each day in the year; but the Dalmatian islands are
not to be counted by hundreds, but by thousands, if one were to count
them at all. They are generally spoken of as innumerable. Geologists
say that there has been here a subsidence of great strips of land,
and that the sea has in some cases broken up the remaining strips
into pieces of a size to suit itself, ranging from fifty rods to
fifty miles in length. Here comes the infinite charm of sailing along
the Dalmatian coast, this interlocking of sea and shore. No wonder
that the Dalmatians are all sailors, wooers of the salt sea gale. I
myself longed to get off the steamer and get into one of the numerous
sailboats that were ploughing through the dashing waves.
Had the Galatea stopped as long at Spalato as it had at Cattaro, I
should have been tempted to crowd my enjoyment of it into the same
space; but she had now transformed herself into an express boat, bent
on reaching Trieste in the shortest possible time. So, with some
regret, I left my hospitable quarters on my floating home to trust
myself to the welcome of an inn.
But little did I care for the inn. Within a quarter of an hour from
the time when I left the steamer I was in the heart of one of the
strangest cities of the world, threading my way through narrow winding
streets, passing here and there a temple, generally embedded in some
later building, running up against a continuous wall two or three
stories high which I followed until I found a gate that would let me
go through it; then I followed the outside of this wall until I found
another gate that let me in again, when the maze again engulfed me. I
was in the famous Palace of Diocletian.
The city Spalato was once all inside the palace (palatium), and got its
name from that fact; but in later years the city has so grown that the
palace is embedded and almost lost in the city. In order to get a good
idea of the city and palace together one should climb the campanile,
a fine Romanesque structure, incomparably finer than that the loss of
which Venice now mourns. In 1882 it became necessary to take down all
but the four lower stories and rebuild. Money has come in slowly, and
the staging which practically hides the beautiful campanile may not
come down for several years more. The door leading into this immense
wooden structure bore the legend, _L'ingresso è vietato_. But following
a maxim hewn from life, that a sightseer must always go on until he is
stopped, I went and pushed my way through the workmen, boss and all,
probably with a more assured air because a good citizen had a few
minutes before told me, "You will see a sign saying 'No admittance,'
but it doesn't mean anything."
[Illustration: SPALATO. PALACE OF DIOCLETIAN. SOUTH FRONT.]
At the foot of the campanile is an Egyptian sphinx whose head has been
battered by a falling stone. The natives call it the "man-woman," and,
curiously enough, they call the sun disk between its paws "pogazza"
(a loaf of bread), a roundabout corroboration of what I used to hear
in childhood: "The moon is made of green cheese; the sun's a loaf of
bread." The view from the top is fine, whether you look landward or
seaward; but the real reward of the climb is that here only the extent
and plan of the palace and the adjustment of the buildings within it
become perfectly clear.
The term "palace" is a misnomer. What we have is really an enormous
enclosure, a sort of Roman camp. The area is trapezoidal; in other
words, the sides vary in length. The north or landward side, which
is the longest, has a length of 700 feet. The circuit is about half
a mile, and it consumes the better part of half an hour to work your
way around it. There could, of course, be no question of roofing over
such a space. The whole area was divided into four approximately equal
squares by two great passages, one thirty-six feet broad, leading from
the water gate on the south side called the Silver Gate, through which
the imperial barge used to sail into the palace, to the Golden Gate on
the north side, the other running from the Iron Gate on the west to
the Bronze Gate on the east. The first of these ways is interrupted
near the south end by the imperial house itself. The enclosing wall was
fifty feet high at its lowest part, and was seventy-five feet high near
the sea where the ground fell off, so that all the buildings, sacred
and profane, distributed within were hidden from view to outsiders.
Not only did the imperial family, but courtiers and menials, making a
population of some thirty thousand, have quarters here.
The builder and occupant of this palace was the greatest personality of
the Cæsars after Marcus Aurelius, whom in military and administrative
force he greatly surpassed. Entering the service as a simple legionary,
he rose by slow degrees of service in all parts of the empire under
various nonentities of emperors, until at Chalkedon, in 284 A.D.,
the soldiers proclaimed him emperor. There is a legend that a Druid
priestess had prophesied to him when he was serving in Belgium under
Aurelian that he would become emperor immediately after killing a
boar. It is said that he saw the fulfilment of this prophecy when the
Emperor Numerianus was assassinated at Chalkedon by a certain Aper
(_i.e._, boar), whom he immediately struck down, exclaiming, "I have
killed the boar." Of course there are those who think that the legend
grew out of the name of the assassin. Diocletian's name will ever
be associated with the last and most wide-reaching and systematic
persecution of the Christians; but this policy was most likely forced
upon him by the fanaticism of his colleague, Galerius. At this time the
Roman Empire had become too bulky to be well administered by one man,
however able and conscientious, and of his own accord he associated
others with himself in the imperial power, confining himself entirely
to the eastern part. Two years after he had issued at Nikomedia, in 303
A.D., his edict of persecution of the Christians, the cares of office
weighing too heavily upon him, he laid aside the purple, retired to
Salona, and began building this palace about four miles distant from
it. When his withdrawal was so sorely felt that he was importuned to
resume the imperial power, he declined, referring to the sweet peace
which he enjoyed among his cabbages at Salona. There can be little
doubt that the reason which influenced him to choose Salona as his
place of retirement was that it was his birthplace, although the
Montenegrins hold that they have the true birthplace in Doclea, not far
from Cettinje.
But the old Emperor's musings in his great palace must have been sadder
than Hadrian's conversings with his soul at Tivoli. Here he learned
of the triumph of Christianity through Constantine, a meaner spirit
than he. Then came the overturning of his statues at Rome and the
banishment and subsequent butchery of his wife and daughter. Added to
all this was a painful illness; and in the eighth year of his residence
in that palace where he had promised himself so much comfort and sweet
peace, to adopt the words of Marcus Aurelius, that noblest Roman of
them all, he "found the house smoky and went out."
Beside the pathetic interest attaching to the great founder of the
palace, another interest attaches to the immuring of it in the modern
city. In the seventh century Anno Domini waves of barbarians swept down
along the coast of Dalmatia. One of these was composed of Avars--a
people often mixed up, whether rightly or wrongly, with the Huns.
Even more than the Huns they were a "scourge of God." After leaving
a desert in their trail, butchering men and yoking women to their
carts, they came into this lovely region, destroyed the great city,
and then decided to settle down here. There was a grand scattering of
the degenerate Romans, who had been unable to hold their own, to the
neighboring islands, but after awhile a remnant came back and occupied
the palace, which was fairly well adapted to be used as a fort. Here
they defied the Avars, and at last outstayed them. The result was the
present city of Spalato.
One's first impression is that the palace, although tremendously
impressive from the outside wherever that is visible, has yet suffered
immensely from its partial burial in the modern city. The two temples
within were much more buried than the great wall, and have been only
partially brought to light again. But in another aspect of the case
the modern city saved the palace. Had the latter stood by itself it
would have been treated as a stone quarry, like so many ancient cities,
Salona itself, for example. Now there is hope that by removing here and
there a modern building--a process that was begun some time ago--the
greater part of the palace may be restored to the light of day. In
fact, the Porta Aurea has quite recently been freed from encumbrances
and, even without being restored, makes a fine impression.
From all that one now sees it is clear that the architecture, though
impressive as a whole, is shabby when examined in detail. The exquisite
finish of the Greek is, of course, lacking. But even compared with some
other Roman work it is seen to have been hastily done. Its nearest
parallel is found in Palmyra, which was restored by Diocletian.
The enclosing wall has half columns of the Doric order in a lower
story and Ionic half columns in a second. Of the buildings inside, the
"peristyle" in front of the royal residence makes the best impression,
because the space enclosed by it was thoroughly cleared out by the
Emperor Francis I. of Austria, nearly a century ago, a benefaction
duly recorded on a tablet inserted in an adjacent wall. Many of the
columns of the peristyle itself, however, are still half embedded in
the walls of buildings too important to be torn down. A building which
is now generally identified with the mausoleum of Diocletian forms the
present cathedral, the campanile of which caused the destruction of a
portion of a peristyle enclosing the mausoleum. This mausoleum is a
round building like the Pantheon, and like the latter has a perfectly
preserved dome which, unlike that of the Pantheon, was not open at the
top. About a quarter of a century ago the interior was restored under
the auspices of the ill-matched and ill-fated Rudolf and Stephanie,
who are mentioned on a conspicuous tablet, not as furnishing any cash
for the enterprise, but as _presentibus et opus admirantibus_. The
interior, forty-two feet in diameter, with eight large columns framing
four niches and bearing eight smaller columns superimposed, makes a
fine impression, although the space seems rather small for a cathedral.
A sculptured frieze encircling the dome at the bottom, and containing,
among other things, hunting scenes, must be catalogued as "shapeless
sculpture."
After being _presens_ and _admirans_ for half a day, wherever I could
enter and climb, I sought out Father Bulich, the director of the
museum as well as supervisor of all the archæological interests and
undertakings of Spalato and Salona, in order to get him to show me the
things that were under lock and key. I found him at his house dickering
with some visitors for antiquities, and the last I saw of him, two
days later, he was engaged in the same occupation. Nothing could
exceed his cordiality and his active help. As soon as he could get rid
of his visitors he brought out all the best works on Spalato, some
of them loaded with illustrations, and sent them around to my hotel.
Unfortunately, I could not get half time, even by sitting up all night,
to read any large part of them. Then he took me over three of his
five or six small museums with which he has to put up instead of the
large one for which he prays as well as labors. But though he has done
much to bring order out of the chaos which he found, some luckier man
than he will probably be the arranger of the museum of Spalato worthy
of the name. Amid much that is common and uninteresting, and yet too
good to throw away, are objects of great value and importance. Nearly
everything is from Salona. He has catalogued and published nearly two
thousand seven hundred inscriptions. Gems are strongly represented,
as well as coins and other small objects. Sculpture, aside from some
good fragments, is represented mostly by sarcophagi, very few of which
rise above mediocrity. It is interesting to see here, as elsewhere, a
sarcophagus with the representation of Phædra and Hippolytos spared by
the Christians, who took Hippolytos as the "chaste Joseph." The oldest
object in any of the museums is a sphinx shown by an inscription to
belong to Amenophis III., the Memnon of the Greeks, of about 1500 B.C.
In one museum is a cast of a really fine head of Herakles, found in the
neighborhood but kept by the monks at Sinj.
Of objects which did _not_ come from Salona may be mentioned certain
Greek inscriptions which show the presence of Greeks on these coasts
and islands long before the great days of Rome. Of course it was
unlikely that, having put a girdle of colonies around southern Italy,
and pushed up along the eastern shore of the Adriatic as far as
Epidauros (Ragusa), they should remain strangers to this region so
crowded with islands, just their kind.
Father Bulich took me also into the one building inside the palace that
is kept locked. Its chief attraction is a perfectly preserved barrel
vault with coffers containing rosettes. This is supposed, partly from
its position, to have been Diocletian's court chapel; but whether it
was dedicated to Jupiter or to Æsculapius is a question which divides
the authorities. Lanza, Bulich's predecessor, inferred from a laurel
wreath bound by a ribbon which he took to be the imperial crown,
sculptured in the rear gable, that _this_ was Diocletian's mausoleum.
This rear end was said by the guide-books to be inaccessible, and so
of course it was what I most wanted to see. I mentioned my regret,
and, to my surprise, Bulich said, "Oh! it is perfectly accessible."
Then he led the way through several by-ways and up three flights of
stairs, almost tumbling over children in the dim light, until at last
we got into a kitchen which was backed up against the gable. There was
the laurel wreath, to be sure. Little did it interest the rosy-cheeked
woman who had her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and was trying in
some embarrassment to get them down again before a stranger. The wreath
was out of her reach; but the horizontal cornice of the gable was only
about four feet above the floor of her kitchen; and she had deployed
upon it--a splendid shelf--her oils and essences, her butter and sugar,
and all the appliances of a kitchen and a pantry. When Bulich, with
all the authority of an archæologist and a father confessor combined,
reproved her for quite a good-sized, fresh nick on the left ascending
cornice, her cheeks and even her arms took on a redder hue, probably on
account of my presence; for the priest was greeted on every staircase
as a familiar friend.
The next day he showed me his excavations at Salona, which he has
carried on under great difficulties. Since the Austrian empire has
no law for the expropriation of private property for the purpose of
archæological excavations, he has been obliged with his not all too
generous funds to make his peace with the owners of the fields; and,
since the whole area of Salona is covered by one continuous vineyard,
it has been very slow business. But he has managed to get a foothold
here and there. Here the greater part of a big amphitheatre has been
uncovered, here a long line of sarcophagi; at present he is pushing a
few yards farther the uncovering of a huge Christian basilica.
There had been no great surprises for me at Spalato; but Salona,
which had been to me a mere name, now suddenly loomed large before my
vision as the great city of the Occident next to Rome. Three things
made Salona what it was. It had in the first place a fine harbor at
the end of a deep bay. The silting up of the harbor in modern times
has brought it a little farther from the water's edge; but that the
water once lapped its walls is shown by its water gate. Secondly, just
back of Salona there is a great gap in the long chain of mountains
that follow the shore at a little interval as far as the eye can
reach. Through this gap a great road led into the heart of the Balkan
peninsula through what is now known as Bosnia and Servia to the Danube
and beyond. Thirdly, the region back of the gap was vastly important
to the Romans as a gold-bearing land. In the times of Augustus and
Tiberius gold was commonly referred to by the poets as "Dalmatian ore."
Salona was the place where all this gold was gathered for transmission
to Rome.