Augustine on Empires

Augustine thought that imperial ambition was self-destructive folly. If humans had been rational, they would have created, not empires, but an enormous number of small states—Augustine says regna, literally “kingdoms”, but he means any political arrangement whatever. A multitude of tiny, harmless polities could have lived at peace among themselves and therefore at peace internally, just as a city contains innumerable households, none of which seeks to dominate the others, and all of which maybe domestically at peace.

Alan Ryan in On Politics (p.175).