chiefly to that persistence of Roman traditions in both,
which was made possible by the system under which public
works were executed during the Roman empire. This requires
a short explanation. ¹ The administration of public works,
centralized in Rome, was carried out by the building depart-
ments of the provincial municipalities, but the execution
was in the hands of local hereditary building Guilds or
Collegia, who handed down their methods and secrets from
father to son. Consequently the same class of buildings
would be carried out everywhere on much the same lines,
viz., those laid down by the central administration; but the
execution and details would differ somewhat as they were
due to local habits and traditions. In Provence Roman
traditions were never lost, as we see in the strange picture
given us by Sidonius Apollinaris ² in the fifth century, of the
old Roman municipal functionaries moving like ghosts in
their old dress amongst the splendid and living figures of
their Gothic conquerors. Seeing that the Roman social and
municipal system and the church organization could traverse
the cataclysm of the barbarian conquest comparatively un-
disturbed, we may safely believe that the tenth century and
later buildings of Provence owe their resemblance to the
much earlier ones of Syria, more to the persistent traditions
of the old hereditary, though no longer state-organized
building guilds, than to any direct copying by means of
traders or monks. It is true that we have hardly any of the
architectural links which would have proved this persist-
ence of the traditions of the Collegia by a progressive evolu-
tion of tenth-century buildings from those of the fifth, and
that there is no documentary evidence relating to France.
There is, however, such evidence as regards Italy in one
particular instance, that of the so-called Comacine Masters.

When Constantine began to build his new Rome on the
Bosphorus in 334, he appealed to the Collegia of old Rome
to help him, and the higher grades and wealthier artists
flocked to Constantinople; ³ and when Rome finally fell and

-16-