THE PALACE
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Diocletian was impatient to enter on possession and to enjoy the leisure ensured by his abdication, though the dullness and rain of a Dalmatian winter must have tried his nerves, fresh from the full-blooded activities of his Imperial career; and we are not sure that Prisca was with him, nor always ready to relieve the tedium. But the moist spring climate was favourable to his horticultural hobby, and there he grew his famous cabbages, “ olera manibus nostris insita ”; and when his Imperial colleague, Maximian, urged that they should both return to power, Diocletian wrote to say, “ If you only saw the cabbages, planted by my own hand, you would never make so foolish a suggestion ”. And the tradition of the Imperial cabbage still survives in Spalato. One of the best and most famous of its dishes is Sarma, or choux farcies. In Spalato Diocletian passed the last seven years of his life (305 to 313) and there he died; whether from natural causes—he was a sick man when he Nicomedia—or by his own hand, in dread of what might be in store for him from the jealousy of his successors, Licinius and Constantine, is uncertain ; 1 A drning of their attitude had reached him in the menacing letters received on his refusal to attend le marriage of Licinius and Costanza. He was