"Speak, speak with confidence and
trust them even as gods." All eagerness for knowledge, Dante inquires of
the friendly splendor who he is and why he is in this particular Heaven.
The story told by the spirit of Emperor Justinian is a brief sketch of
his own life, with reference to his conversion from heresy by Pope
Agapetus, to the victories of his general, Belisarius, and to his own
great work of the codification of the Roman law. He then traces the
history of Rome from the time of AEneas to the thirteenth century, bent
upon showing that the Roman Empire, as a world-power over governments
and peoples, is divine in its institution and providentially protected
in its course. Two facts are adduced in crowning proof of this audacious
statement, viz., Christ's choosing to be born and to be registered as a
subject of Caesar and His crucifixion under Tiberius, acting through
Pontius Pilate as the divinely constituted instrument of eternal justice
exercised by the Heavenly Father against His Son, at once the victim of
sin and its atonement.
Dante enlarges on this point in his Monarchia. "If the Roman Empire did
not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ.... If,
therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge,
the penalty would not have been properly punished; and none could be a
regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind, for all mankind
was punished in the flesh of Christ, who 'hath borne our infirmities and
carried our sorrows,' as said the prophet Isaias.
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