Thomas Fleming, Politics of Dante II

The way to begin to understand this is to subject one’s self to the evidence and not to impose preconceived opinions. Pilate as procurator–and not a very good one, it would seem–was an officer of the Empire. Neither he nor the little territory he ruled were important enough for him to be a governor. What I said was that the Empire of Augustus was a federation of city-states. In Italy, this simply meant that the major towns preserved the traditional internal authority of the Italian civitates. In the cities of the East, the Romans gradually extended the same privileges. In more barbaric Gaul they treated the tribal confederacies that had major towns as civitates and where they found none, they constructed them and built theaters, baths, public basilicas, etc. This is not a controversial point, though one might debate the limits of the autonomy. The writers of the Scriptures, I am sorry to have to say, are not the best authorities on how the Roman Empire was governed, since none of them was every in a position of real authority and the only way they made the acquaintance of members of the ruling class was by running afoul of the law. That is how Paul met Gallio, the half-brother of Seneca. What Dante may or may not have understood of the Empire may never be learned, but what we do know is that he would have understood how a very similar, albeit looser structure existed when Tuscany was nominally ruled by a Count or Margrave. Again, I cannot tell the whole story of the Roman Empire here, much less the history of Medieval Tuscany. I must ask readers who have not studied to accept more or less the historical reconstructions I have outlined as a means of understanding Dante. If I am knowingly presenting a private and controversial opinion, I shall let you know. But neither the federative structure of the principate (Augustus to Marcus Aurelius) nor the highly decentralized feudal structure of West-Imperial Italy are matters of controversy.