Paradiso · Canto VI ·
Paradiso VI — Justinian As Light
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 73 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto VI
Before reading
This is the only canto in the entire Commedia in which a single voice speaks from the first tercet to the last. There is no narrator, no interjection, no exchange. The Emperor Justinian — who in canto V appeared as a bright soul eager to be questioned — answers Dante's request in a monologue of 142 lines that turns out to be the whole history of the Roman Empire seen as a single divinely guided flight of an eagle. It is a hundred cantos of European poetry in one canto.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is in the heaven of Mercury, the sphere of souls whose virtuous work in the world was tinged, in some measure, by the love of human fame. Justinian's life qualifies him exactly: he was an emperor, and emperors must rule conspicuously. But the canto is not about Justinian's own life. It is about the thing Justinian served — the Empire — and the canto's argument is that the Roman Empire was not a human accident but a vehicle of providence: the historical means by which God prepared the world for the Incarnation and continued, through the medieval emperors, to prepare it for the kingdom to come. Justinian narrates this history as the flight of the sacred standard — the imperial eagle, the sacrosanto segno — across centuries and continents.
For Dante, who was writing in permanent exile, this argument was personal. He was a Ghibelline in temperament if not in original party alignment — that is, he believed the universal monarchy of the Emperor (the Holy Roman Empire, descended from Caesar Augustus through Charlemagne to the contemporary German emperors) was the divinely ordained counterweight to the spiritual monarchy of the Pope. The Florence that exiled him was a Guelph city, fiercely papal. Justinian's speech in this canto is the Commedia's most extended and most exalted statement of imperial theology. It is also a piece of political grief, because Dante believed his own age had betrayed the imperial idea — by Guelph and Ghibelline both, who had appropriated the eagle for partisan ends and corrupted what should have been the single banner of the world.
What it helps to know
Justinian I (483–565, reigned 527–565) was the Byzantine emperor who oversaw the codification of Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis — the legal compendium on which every European jurisprudence is eventually built. He attempted to reconquer the western half of the empire (briefly recovering Italy, North Africa, and southern Spain). He built the Hagia Sophia. He was for centuries the symbolic figure of the Christian emperor as lawgiver. Dante puts him in Mercury rather than higher because his motives were not free of imperial vanity.
A small biographical detail in the canto matters. Justinian says that before his conversion he believed in one nature only in Christ — the Monophysite position — and that Pope Agapetus led him to the true faith. The detail is a quiet placement of papal authority over imperial authority on matters of doctrine, balanced against the rest of the canto's exaltation of imperial authority on matters of governance. Dante's politics will not let either swallow the other.
The canto's central section is a flight of the eagle across Roman history — from Aeneas leaving Troy, to the early kings, to the great Republican generals, to Caesar, to Augustus under whom Christ was born, to Tiberius under whom Christ was crucified, to Titus who avenged the Crucifixion by destroying Jerusalem, and finally to Charlemagne, defender of the Church against the Lombards. The reader does not need to know each episode; the cumulative force is the point. History is a single arc, and the arc has direction.
The canto ends with a small, devastating portrait of a single soul: Romeo of Villeneuve (c. 1170–1250), seneschal to Raymond Berenger IV of Provence. Romeo arranged advantageous marriages for all four of Raymond's daughters (one became queen of France, one queen of England, two became queens elsewhere) and was rewarded with slander, dispossession, and exile in old age. The poet of exile inserts, into the great imperial canto, the small private story of a faithful servant cast out by the masters he had served.
What to read for
Notice that the entire canto is one voice. Paradiso's usual structure of question-and-answer is suspended. The reader is given a long, sustained, increasingly impassioned political vision.
Notice the canto's pivot near the end. After the great flight of the eagle, Justinian turns to his contemporaries — the Guelphs and Ghibellines of 1300 — and condemns both: the Guelph who opposes the public sign and the Ghibelline who appropriates it for his party. The eagle is not anyone's faction; it is the world's.
Read the closing tercets on Romeo slowly. They are short. They are also one of the most poignant passages in the cantica, and they are the canto's only piece of personal portrait — the pilgrim's exile speaking to the seneschal's.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto is the Commedia's most extended and most exalted statement of imperial political theology, and it is also one of the poem's most personal pieces of political grief. The Emperor Justinian, in the only sustained monologue any character is given anywhere in the poem, narrates the history of Rome as the flight of a single divinely guided eagle from Aeneas through Augustus to Charlemagne. The flight is not metaphor; in the canto's reading it is the actual shape of providence. The Empire is the historical instrument by which God prepares the world for, and then keeps the world fit for, the Incarnation. The canto's argument is exalted; its turn toward the end is bitter. After narrating the eagle's flight, Justinian rounds on the contemporary Italian factions who have appropriated the sacred standard for partisan ends — Guelph and Ghibelline both — and condemns both. The canto's closing piece is the smallest and most poignant: the figure of Romeo of Villeneuve, a faithful servant cast out by the masters he served, slipped into the great imperial speech as the poet of exile's quiet self-portrait.
The structure: one voice, one canto
The canto is unique in the Commedia: a single speaker, no interlocutor, no narrative interruption, first tercet to last. Paradiso moves usually by question-and-answer; here the question (Dante's, at the end of canto V) was a single one — who are you? — and the answer takes 142 lines and tells not the speaker's life but the world's. Justinian opens with the most laconic self-introduction in Paradiso.
Caesar I was, and am Justinian, Who, by the will of primal Love I feel, Took from the laws the useless and redundant (Par. VI.10–12)
Caesar I was, and am Justinian — Cesare fui, e son Iustinïano. The line is a tense-shift in three Italian words: was Caesar (the office, ended), am Justinian (the soul, eternal). Then he tells the famous reform — the Corpus Juris Civilis, the legal compendium that built every later European jurisprudence — in the briefest possible compass: I took from the laws the useless and redundant. He attributes the reform to primal Love — that is, to the Holy Spirit — and almost immediately moves off himself onto the thing he served.
The eagle: history as a single flight
The central body of the canto is the long flight of the sacrosanto segno — the sacred standard, the imperial eagle — across centuries.
After that Constantine the eagle turned Against the course of heaven, which it had followed Behind the ancient who Lavinia took, (Par. VI.1–3)
The opening tercet sets the flight's geography. The eagle was carried behind the ancient who Lavinia took — Aeneas, husband of Latin Lavinia, founder of the Roman line — westward. Then with Constantine's transfer of the capital to Constantinople in 330 AD it turned against the course of heaven, eastward, back to the lands from which Aeneas had brought it. Two centuries later it had come down to Justinian himself, who narrates the rest of the flight: through the early kings, the great Republican generals (Cincinnatus, Torquatus, the Decii, Fabius), through Caesar's wars and Augustus's settlement, through the Crucifixion under Tiberius and the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, through to Charlemagne. The reader does not need to follow each episode. The cumulative force is the argument: history has a direction, the direction is divinely intended, and the eagle is the visible thread of that intention.
The boldest single piece of the flight is the canto's reading of the Crucifixion. Christ suffered under Tiberius — that is, under Roman imperial law — and the eagle, in suffering Him, made just satisfaction for Adam's sin. Then under Titus the same eagle made just vengeance on Jerusalem for the deicide. The argument is dizzyingly imperial: the Empire is not merely the cradle in which Christ was born but the instrument by which both the just satisfaction and the just vengeance for the Incarnation were enacted. The reader of 2026 may flinch at the reading of 70 AD as God's justice; the reader of 1320 would have found the argument standard. The canto is showing how high the imperial idea, at its medieval theological peak, could be raised.
The pivot to the present
After the great flight, Justinian turns suddenly to the Italian factions of Dante's own day.
Now mayest thou judge of such men as I accused But now, and of their errors, which are the cause Of all your miseries.
(The exact tercet here is paraphrased — the substance is Justinian's argument that the Italian Guelph who opposes the public sign of the eagle and the Italian Ghibelline who seizes it for his party are both guilty of the same defacement of the imperial banner.) The position is precisely Dante's own. He had begun his political life as a Florentine Guelph (his family was Guelph by tradition); he ended as the Commedia's most exalted imperialist. The position the canto stakes is that the imperial standard belongs to the world, not to any party — and that both the Guelphs (who deny its authority) and the Ghibellines (who claim it for themselves) have corrupted it. Read in 1320, the speech was an extraordinary act of authored anger against both the parties of his ruined home.
Mercury and its diagnosis
The canto offers one more line that closes the loop with canto V. This little planet — Mercury — adorns itself with the good spirits that have active been, that fame and honour might come after them. The diagnosis applies to Justinian as well as to those he is about to name. The reformer of the laws, the builder of Hagia Sophia, the conqueror of three lost provinces — his motive was not pure. The fame mattered to him. Heaven does not condemn the motive; it places it. The fact that a man as great as Justinian is in Mercury rather than higher is the cantica's quiet insistence that even imperial virtue is, in its earthly tincture, not the highest virtue.
Romeo of Villeneuve
The closing tercets pivot from emperors to a single old servant.
Then he departed poor and stricken in years, And if the world could know the heart he had, In begging bit by bit his livelihood, (Par. VI.139–141, in the canto's vicinity)
Romeo of Villeneuve was seneschal to Raymond Berenger IV, Count of Provence. He arranged advantageous marriages for all four of Raymond's daughters — one became queen of France (Margaret, wife of Louis IX), one queen of England (Eleanor, wife of Henry III), the other two queens of Sicily and the Romans. Slandered by jealous courtiers, he was dispossessed and exiled in old age. The poet of exile inserts him into the great imperial canto as a small mirror. If the world could know the heart he had… — the line is the cantica's quietest piece of self-pleading. Dante is asking, through Romeo's silence, to be heard.
Famous and meaningful passages
The eagle's beginning.
After that Constantine the eagle turned Against the course of heaven, which it had followed Behind the ancient who Lavinia took, (Par. VI.1–3)
The whole history of empire in three lines: westward with Aeneas, eastward with Constantine, downward through time to me.
Justinian names himself.
Caesar I was, and am Justinian, Who, by the will of primal Love I feel, Took from the laws the useless and redundant (Par. VI.10–12)
Was Caesar, am Justinian. The office ends; the soul does not.
The diagnosis of the sphere.
This little planet doth adorn itself With the good spirits that have active been, That fame and honour might come after them; (Par. V.115–117, restated in VI's setting)
The active virtue diluted by love of fame. Justinian's diagnosis applies to himself.
Romeo at the end.
Then he departed poor and stricken in years, And if the world could know the heart he had, In begging bit by bit his livelihood, (Par. VI, near the close)
The closing portrait. The faithful servant cast out. Dante's own grief leant against another man's.
What to watch for
Watch the imperial reading of history. Canto VII will pick up the canto's hardest theological claim — the just satisfaction and just vengeance of the Crucifixion enacted through Roman law — and Beatrice will expand it into a full doctrine of the Incarnation. Paradiso VI and VII are a single argument split across two cantos.
Watch the cantica's politics of party. Justinian's condemnation of both Guelph and Ghibelline is the Commedia's clearest single statement of Dante's mature position above factions. The lesson will be restated, with more bitterness, when he meets his ancestor Cacciaguida in canto XV.
Watch Romeo. The portrait is small and the poet places it carefully. Every later canto's image of the exiled faithful (Cacciaguida's prophecy, the bitter bread of the stranger's stair) will echo back to this seneschal's bit by bit.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.