Amidst the decay of the empire in the third century Dalmatia suffered comparatively little; indeed, Salonae probably only reached at that time its greatest prosperity. This, it is true, was occasioned partly by the fact that the regenerator of the Roman state, the emperor Diocletian, was by birth a Dalmatian, and allowed his efforts aimed at the decapitalising of Rome to redound chiefly to the benefit of the capital of his native land; he built alongside of it the huge palace, from which the modern capital of the province takes the name Spalato, within which it has for the most part found a place, and the temples of which now serve it as cathedral and as baptistery.[118] Diocletian, however, did not make Salonae a great city for the first time, but, because it was such, chose it for his private residence; commerce, navigation, and trade must at that time in these waters have been concentrated chiefly at Aquileia and at Salonae, and the city must have been one of the most populous and opulent towns of the west. The rich iron mines of Bosnia were largely worked at least in the later imperial period; the forests of the province likewise yielded abundant and excellent timber; even of the flourishing textile industry of the land a reminiscence is still preserved in the priestly "Dalmatica." Altogether the civilising and Romanising of Dalmatia form one of the most peculiar and most significant phenomena of the imperial period. The boundary between Dalmatia and Macedonia was at the same time the political and linguistic demarcation of the West and East. As the spheres of rule of Caesar and Marcus Antonius came into contact at Scodra, so did those of Rome and Byzantium after the partition of the empire in the fourth century. Here the Latin province of Dalmatia bordered with the Greek province of Macedonia; and the younger sister stands here alongside of the elder, vigorous in aspiration and excelling in energy of effort. [Sidenote: Pannonia down to Trajan.]