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.
The Romans' greed for gold was here seen in its sharpest phase. They dug miles into the heart of mountains, and carried water hundreds of miles in artificial channels for washing deposits of gold. Perhaps no one can ever convey or even conceive of the horror of the life of slaves in these works. In droves of tens of thousands, many of them made slaves instead of masters by the mere fortune of war, they were driven into the bowels of the earth with poor chance of seeing the light again. It is, at any rate, a fact that months passed without such re-emergence, a fact which lessened the likelihood of any re-emergence at all. In that great and cruel empire, slave life counted for little; the supply was abundant.