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 "Notitia" as a Gynæcium. 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 toward 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 space 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, tho' their towers are gone, are
nearly perfect; the "porta aurea," with its graceful ornaments; 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 massive arcades, large parts of which
still remain.

Diocletian, in short, in building a house, had built a city. In the days