But if the legionary camp is powerless to affect the ancient palace plan, it did not wither away, unnoticed, like a plant upon uncongenial soil. It bloomed again in the cities of the eastern Roman empire, in Boṣrâ, in Damascus, in Apamea. Towns such as Diyârbekr, where not one Roman stone remains upon another, still betray a Roman origin in their crossed thoroughfares and quadruple gateways.[267] And therewith it returned, remodelled, to the West. The palace at Antioch was built on the plan of the Roman limes camp. Diocletian copied it at Spalato, and Constantine’s palace in his new capital was in some respects an echo of that of Diocletian, though the true oriental palace was not without effect upon Constantinople.[268] The imperial residence, stereotyped by him, went on into other phases, too complex, and often too obscure, to be followed here, but it is curious to note that five hundred years later, Theophilus, himself an Asiatic, since his father, Michael II, was a Phrygian by birth, built for himself a palace on the Bithynian coast which was modelled avowedly on the palace of the khalifs at Baghdâd.[269] A few years later Mutawakkil laid out Balkuwârâ--what sister _ḥîri_ with two sleeves stood at Bryas, on the shores of Marmora? One other point remains. The palace of Ukhaiḍir is contained within a towered wall which is wholly distinct from it. This is not the encompassing wall of the ancient East, the primary condition of the structure. It has the four gateways of the Roman camp, though the unneeded cross-roads have dropped away. Here at last Imperial Rome has come to her own. For all its oriental system of fortification, its towers and its hourds, its machicolations and its loopholes, its casemates and its crenellations, this wall is perhaps no other than the wall which surrounded the legionary camp. But I doubt whether the camp itself, which made so fleeting an apparition on the Asiatic frontiers, was the deciding factor. The camp lived on in the city and made a far deeper impression through the city than through the limes fortresses. The scheme is repeated at Sâmarrâ. Balkuwârâ forms part of a great enclosure similarly disposed, with three gates, like the gates of Ukhaiḍir, the palace taking the place of the fourth.[270] The area covered by the enclosure is so extensive that it resembles a town rather than a royal dwelling, and through this town run the crossed thoroughfares which were once the Via Principalis and the Via Praetoria. CHAPTER V THE FAÇADE