The Role Of Punishment In Dante's Inferno

Dante sought to show that the Roman people had acquired their ‘world empire’ by divine right. By doing so, according to Joseph Canning, Dante gave “powerful expression to the myth of Rome, deploying a mass of republican and imperial examples drawn from Roman history and literature”. Dante reasoned that Rome’s divinely ordained authority was demonstrated by Christ’s birth during the Roman Empire. He claimed that Christ “willed to be born of the Virgin Mary under an edict of the Roman authority”. “Therefore”, he continues “Christ signified by his coming that the edict given by Augustus, under the authority of the Romans, was just”. Furthermore, Dante maintained that Rome’s divine authority was verified by Christ’s submission to Roman punishment, as “punishment is not merely the infliction of an injury, but an injury inflicted by someone who has penal
Thus, because Christ chose to submit to this authority, it was confirmation that it was a just punishment. Dante further argued that, “mankind is at its best when it resembles God as much as it can”, and to best resemble God, humanity must be unified into a single whole, which was only possible “when it submits wholly to a single government”. Dante maintained that the Roman Empire was the font of all law, and that the Roman Emperor was both dominus mundi and animate lex in terries (legality personified). Moreover, Dante greatly expanded the concept of the individual citizen, collecting it into the humana civilitas. Thus, Dante’s ‘Roman’ was a citizen of something beyond Christendom, a world-government which encompassed the entire human race. The practical realisation of this was that, rulers, such a King Robert of Naples, were subject to the emperor and the empire, not just because of their Christian faith, but simply because they were fundamentally a part of this humana