Salona

"M. Charles Diehl prefaces his learned description of the ruins with the delightful observation that for a visit to Salona two things are necessary - "Strong legs and some enthusiasm for archæology", for the great Roman town, the capital of one of the richest provinces in the Empire, nothing remains to-day but some broken walls and some rifled sarcophagi. The configuration of the ground has changed, the harbour has silted up, and where the sea once washed the walls of the harbour are now low-lying meadows. Rich and populous as the city was, the starting-point for the Roman roads over the mountains into the interior, it is impossible to accept the statements of Constantine Porphyrogenitus that it was half as large as Constantinople.

It is three and a half miles to Salona, and the road from Split leads from the west end of the town, past the new museum, over the low hill, down into the valley of the Jader with Diocletian's aqueduct on the right, and then climbs through the modern village of Solin to the entrance to the ruins of the great Christian basilica. The full force of the persecution which, according to Gibbon, Diocletian sanctioned with much reluctance, fell upon Salona, and many of the tombs in the cemetery beyond the church are those of the martyrs of that period. […]. What the Avars began in the way of demolition the Venetians completed. […]. The Venetians, a practical race, not content with methodically destroying anything in the buildings which were still standing that could serve as a point d’appui for the attacks of the Turks, who held Clissa, having pulled down in 1647 what remained of the walls of Salona (pp. 82-84).

So much che the trained eye of the archælogist and architect reconstruct for us of the vanished glories of the great cathedral, but the ordinary traveller will bring away a remembrance of the wild-flowers which grow among its ruined stones and of the columns which here and there have been raised on the broken bases and stand out in melancholy beauty against a background of sea and mountain. […]. In the little museum where the custodian lives is a collection of small objects which did not tempt any of the successive generations of robbers. A narrow road leads through the vineyards and patches of cultivation which are broken in every direction by low ruined walls to the amphitheatre. A few arches are still standing, but the whole looks curiously small for such an important town (pp. 85-86)”.