hose virtue there was
the alloy of ambition and vainglory--a combination, according to Dante,
which makes "the rays of true love less vividly mount upwards." The poet
is addressed by a spirit who bids him ask any question he will and
Beatrice confirms the invitation. "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. And if the Roman
Empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Caesar, whose vicar was Pontius
Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind." To us both
the argument and its conclusion are wholly indefensible. It seems indeed
a mockery and a blasphemy to attribute to such a monster as Tiberius
Caesar glory because Christ was crucified in his reign. Dante's words,
however, as spoken by Justinian, leave no room for doubt that the poet
was convinced that all the ancient celebrity of Rome was insignificant
as compared to the glory that would come to it because it would carry
out the crucifixion of Christ.

"But what the standard that has made me