So sorely did the other spirit cry, While the one spoke, that for the very dread I swooned as if I were about to die, And I fell down even as a man falls dead. Those versions, I submit, are all good; and I risked the tedium of repeating the same idea of Dante in the English of three different translators. Because my simple point is that Dante in English is interesting--to anybody who cares for English literature. DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Dante's _De Monarchia_ is usually treated by the commentators as a mere footnote to the _Commedia_; and this subordination is justifiable because the poet in Dante overwhelms all other expressions of his genius and also because the _Commedia_ contains much political philosophy, some of which _De Monarchia_ elucidates. But _De Monarchia_, considered by itself, is a work of great importance. Even if by some unthinkable accident the _Commedia_ had been lost and _De Monarchia_ had survived, it would remain a significant treatise on the state and the papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we regard the political writings of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure, the chief interest of the work for us lies in the fact that Dante wrote it, and it would lose some of its value if it were isolated from the rest of his thought; the amazing unity of his mind and the coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal view of any part of him essentially false. His vision of earth and heaven has a thousand aspects but no fragments. Even the unfinished works, _Il Convivio_ and _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, are not fragments but are rather to be read as partial manifestations of a singular and consistent plan. _De Monarchia_ is a vision of earthly well-being. It is an argument, prosaic and heavy in the English translations and very difficult in the original, I should suppose, even to an excellent Latin scholar. But the argument embodies a dream of the greatest of dreamers. The first part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only under a single world-governing monarch are possible the solidarity of mankind and the fullest possible development of the human spirit. In unity man can find peace and justice. Man is made in the image of God, and God is one; wherefore man in imitation of God must make the secular world conform to the universe and set up a unique earthly dominion. In the nature of things empire is divinely ordained and this is further proved by the fact that Christ willed to be born under the Emperor Augustus.