The impact of ancient Greece and Rome on the New World is usually considered in terms of a very wide range of discourses about the Americas from the European Renaissance. The celebrated ‘‘Controversy of the Indies,’’ for instance, was a battle of books and speeches, conducted in Valladolid in Spain in 1550-1, in which the Spanish humanist Juan Gines de Sepiilveda appealed to Aristotle’s notion of the natural slave to argue that the ‘‘barbarian’’ Indians should be subjugated. Bartolome de las Casas used his own knowledge of ancient philosophy to counter that all humans were rational: challenging the application of the term ‘‘barbarian’’ to the Indians, he insisted that war and slavery should not be imposed upon them. That debate did not just involve Aristotelian thought: the historical precedent set by the Roman empire also played a major part in the arguments of both sides (Lupher 2003).
Ethnographers like Peter Martyr (Eatough 1998, 1999a), Bernardino de Sahaghn (Ledn Portilla 2002; Mason 1994; Lupher 2003), and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo informed debates like this by applying classical paradigms to the cultures they described. Conversely, reports about the pagans in the newly conquered territories were occasionally used to shed light on pre-Christian Greece and Rome. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis de La Cerda, for example, applied knowledge gleaned from the New World in his magisterial Latin commentary on the complete works of Vergil (Laird 2002: 190-1). And in a Spanish translation ofVergil’s Georgies (1596), the Galician Juan de Guzman, supposedly resident in the New World, offered a silva de varia lecciOn (a miscellany of variegated reading) of indigenous American words by way of comment on 48 ofVergil’s verses (Morreale 2002). But far more frequently, it was ‘‘recognition’’ of aspects of the classical past in American phenomena and cultural practices that found expression in European literature and poetry. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a number of neo-Latin epics recounting Columbus’ feats in Vergilian style abounded in Italy and elsewhere: Fracastaro’s Syphilis (1530) and Stella’s Columbeid are the earliest and best known examples (Eatough 1984, 1999b; Hofmann 1994). Columbus’ own son Ferdinand made a significant annotation to the lines of Medea - quoted in the first epigraph to this chapter - in his copy of Seneca: ‘‘this prophecy was fulfilled by my father... the Admiral in 1492’’ (Elliott 1988:1; see also Rossi 1998). The extent to which the Renaissance preoccupation with antiquity determined the way in which the Americas were conceived and regarded has been subjected to a great deal of attention - and by very prominent figures such as Antony Grafton (Grafton, Shelford, and Siraisi 1992), Stephen Greenblatt (1991), and Tzvetan Todorov (1984).
The classical tradition is often regarded as a monument that can stand only awkwardly on American soil, simply because European imperialism and elitism first put it there. But Greek and Roman antiquity has perfused the culture and imagination of Latin America. Classical motifs and themes abound in visual art, architecture, literature, and all kinds of intellectual discourse. Well-known architectural examples include the colonial Catedral Metropolitana of Buenos Aires, the Palacio del Gobierno in Quito (remodelled with a neoclassical facade after Ecuador’s independence in the 1830s), and the imposing mid-twentieth-century statue of‘‘The Archeress of the North Star’’ in Mexico City, popularly known as Diana la cazadora (Diana the huntress). The American classical tradition, however, pertains not only to criollos (Spanish Americans in the ethnic sense) and the Portuguese colonial class in Brazil. The classical tradition is also an important part of the continent’s rich mestizo (mixed race, multicultural) and indigenous heritage - and that aspect of it certainly merits much more emphasis and academic attention than it has so far received. But it is also important to remember that criollos, those people of Spanish origin born in the Americas, were not generally accorded the same status as Spaniards in Spain during the colonial period (roughly 1520-1800). The same situation did not obtain in Brazil, where there was no creolization of the colonial state, despite the emergence of a Brazilian as opposed to Portuguese identity from the early 1700s (Bethell 1987). Thus even an account confined to the role of the classical legacy in the criollo experience would constitute an account, however selective, of an American inheritance. As the present chapter is the first-ever guide to the classical tradition in English to give any consideration at all to Latin America, the basic emphasis here on cultural productions from the countries in the region should need no justification.
At the same time, the confused political, ethnic, and cultural scenario that prevailed after the European incursions has meant that the definition of what - or who - is American can never be conceived too rigidly. Juan Correa (1646-1716), an important painter in colonial New Spain (Mexico) and one of the very few artists to treat classical themes, is a case in point. His mother’s parents were bozales, or native Africans, and his father’s parents, a Spaniard and a mulata, or possibly a morena (Moor), were both from Cadiz. Correa’s paintings were celebrated for depicting individuals from Christian and pagan literature de color quebrado (in a burnt color) (Velasquez Guttierez 1998: 9n1). An animated detail from his ambitious screen The Four Elements and the Liberal Arts presents the Daughters of the Sun - from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 2.344-66, where they are turning into poplar trees - as mulatas, crowned with headdresses of shooting leaves.
A very different case is that of the poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (1533-94), a patriotic Spaniard who dedicated his epic La Araucana to Philip II. Even though Ercilla was a conquistador in Peru, even though he returned to Spain and died there, and even though his epic poem recounts its author’s own part in punitive expeditions to crush the rebellious Araucanian Indians of Chile, Ercilla is nonetheless staunchly regarded as the national poet of Chile, even as a virtual founding father of the nation: an ‘‘inventor and liberator,’’ in the words of the deeply humanitarian Chilean communist Pablo Neruda (1971, quoted in Kallendorf 2003: 395). This apparently puzzling accolade is in no small part explained by the way in which classical literary models are used in La Araucana itself. Allusions to Roman poets and historians are frequently compounded in order to provide analogies that give an epic stature to the indigenous warriors, as in the following excerpt from a lengthy description of the Araucanian sacking of ConcepcicSn:
Not with so much severity did the Greek people penetrate into the Trojan settlement scattering Phrygian blood and live fire, cutting it down to the utmost foundation, as in anger, vengefulness, and blind frenzy the barbarian people - not content with plunder makes ruin, destroys, lays waste and yet still cannot take fill of its malevolence.
The grim tenor of the description and its hyperbolic, moralizing tone recall the style of the Roman poet Lucan, but the particular situation presented here evokes Aeneas’ pathetic description of the fall of Troy in the second book of Vergil’s Aeneid. Only a few lines later, Ercilla’s araucanos codiciosos (avaricious enemies) are likened to columns of ants carrying their booty: this turns to different effect the simile Vergil had used to convey positively the industry of the ancient Tyrians as they built Carthage under Dido’s leadership (Aeneid 4.402-7). Although the high esteem Alonso de Ercilla has for the Araucanians is made very clear in the opening stanzas of his poem and in his prose preface, different readings of the ways in which he transforms his literary sources - and indeed different readings of those sources themselves - have informed a range of opinions about the quality of the poet’s sympathy for the indigenous Chileans (Quint 1993: 131-210; Kallendorf 2003).
Correa’s paintings were relatively exceptional for giving afromestizo, or indigenous American likenesses, to figures from Scripture or classical literature. A kind of reverse of that process - in which indigenous American cultures, achievements, and individuals were represented in terms of paradigms and precedents from Greek and Roman civilization - was in fact nothing less than routine, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. During the 1530s the philanthropic humanist Vasco de Quiroga, a devotee of Plato, Lucian, and Thomas More, sought to defend Indian autonomy by constructing ‘‘Utopian’’ communities in Mexico City and Michoacan (Zavala 1965). Indeed, from soon after the first conquests until well into the nineteenth century, there were those who sought actually to equate American populations with early Mediterranean peoples. In the 1550s Vinko Paletin, a Croatian Dominican, insisted that the Mayan inscriptions at Chichen Itza were in Punic and that the Carthaginians had once possessed the Indies - this was to show that the Roman Empire had proper title to these Punic territories, which, via the papacy, could pass to the Spaniards! (Lupher 2003: 167-86). Some comparable claims were made in the 1660s by another Dominican, Gregorio Garcia, who argued that the natives of America were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and that the Carthaginians had constructed the Incan and Mayan monuments - Garcia’s more laudable aim here was to indicate that Spaniards and the native Americans had common ancestors (Garcia 1980 [1607]; Trading 1991: 195-200, 382).
However, it was by no means only Europeans living in the Americas who perceived connections between indigenous American culture and European antiquity. Educated Indians and mestizos sought to ennoble, or simply to make sense of, their complex heritage in terms of classical models. This is evident in the famous writings of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616). Garcilaso was the illegitimate son of the niece of the Inca Huaina Capac; his father was a prominent conquistador. A native speaker of Quechua, he had mastered Spanish and Latin in Cuzco before he traveled to Spain in 1560, never to return to Peru. Garcilaso’s first publication in 1590 was a translation of a Neoplatonic work in Italian that also drew heavily from Jewish philosophy: Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of love) by Leone Ebreo.2 This was followed by La Florida del Inca - an account of De Soto’s expedition to the southeastern part of North America - in 1605, and the Comentarios reales de los Incas (The royal commentaries of the Incas) in two volumes: the first came out in 1609, the second, tactfully retitled La historia general de Peru (The general history of Peru), in 1617. Garcilaso was well aware of comparisons of the Incas to the Romans which had been made already by Spaniards, and he maintained that, for the purpose of writing Inca history, ‘‘all comparisons are odious’’ (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966: 1.1.xix.51, quoted and trans. in MacCormack 1998a: 11). Nonetheless, the idea of Rome, along with its history and its historians, from Livy to Isidore of Seville, pervades the Comentarios reales. After expressing his objection to the Spaniards’ attempt to rename Cuzco ‘‘New Toledo,’’ the Inca Garcilaso writes as follows:
For Cuzco in relation to her empire was another Rome in relation to hers, and the one can thus be compared to the other, for they resembled each other in the most noble respects: first and foremost, in having been founded by their first kings; secondly, in the many diverse nations which they conquered and subjected to their empire; thirdly, in the large number of such good and truly excellent laws which they established for the government of their states; and fourthly, in producing so many and such excellent men and raising them with good civic and military teachings. (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966: 1.1)
And Sabine MacCormack has shown how the letter and spirit of Livy’s Preface to his Histories was closely followed by Garcilaso, who sets out his own historical programme in almost exactly the same way:
We will carefully recount the Inca’s more historical doings, leaving aside many others as being irrelevant and prolix. And although some of what has been said, and of what will be said, may appear to be fabulous, I decided not to omit recording these matters, in order to avoid discounting the foundations on which the Indians build to explain the greatest and best achievements of their Empire. For it is on these fabulous beginnings that the grandeur that belongs to Spain was in effect founded. (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966: 1.1.xix.50-1, trans. in MacCormack 1998a: 18-19)
But as MacCormack also points out, such literary borrowing from ancient historians should not be taken to imply that Garcilaso, who treated his Peruvian sources with considerable care, was producing a fictionalized or imaginary history of his people. His methods as well as his expression were informed by Polybius, Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and others, who regarded historical truth as bound up with the ‘‘moral dimension in human action and in historical processes’’ (MacCormack 1998a: 12).
An earlier Mexican mestizo writer, Diego Valades, made an impressive attempt to use classical thought and learning to interpret indigenous traditions of knowledge. Yet in spite of the fact that his achievement was in many respects even more remarkable than that of Garcilaso de la Vega, Valades is nowadays far less well known - perhaps because, unlike the Inca, he wrote his major work in Latin (Laird 2006b; Abbott 1996: 41-59). Diego Valades, whose father was also a Spanish conquistador and whose mother was a member of the indigenous Tlaxcaltec nobility, was born in Tlaxcala between 1520 and 1533 and died in Italy, some time after 1582. He studied theology and philosophy in the Franciscan schools of Mexico City, and learnt the
Mexican languages of Nahuatl, Otoml, and Tarascan in order to work as a missionary. In 1571 he went to Spain and then to Paris before becoming Procurator General of the Franciscans in Rome. His Rhetorica Christiana (Art of Christian Rhetoric) was printed in Perugia in 1579. Consisting of nearly four hundred folio pages in Latin, illustrated by the author himself, this book is commonly deemed the first by an American writer to have been printed in Europe.3 The title, which suggests an inventory of the requirements for successful preaching, had been imposed on Valades by his superiors: the work is more of a doctrinal treatise that places special emphasis on the value of‘‘artificial memory.’’ Valades had realized that indigenous Mexican calendars involved both natural memory and something akin to the mnemotechnic theories he found espoused in Cicero, Augustine, and other classical, patristic, and humanist authors. That led Valades to construct an alphabet of words from Mesoa-merican ‘‘hieroglyphs,’’ which could be charged with new meanings. To make his case, he drew from a constellation of influences, ranging from the tenth-century Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi and the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aph-rodisias to classical humanists of the Renaissance such as Petrarch and Politian. This striking fusion of humanist learning and an aboriginal Mexican heritage reflects Valades’ own transculturation: his origins as a Tlaxcaltec mestizo did nothing to diminish his standing as a scholar in Rome, able to correspond with Pope Gregory XIII - to whom he dedicated his Rhetorica Christiana.
The fact that Franciscan colleges had been set up in New Spain in order to teach Latin, rhetoric, philosophy, music, and theology to youths of the indigenous nobility in the early 1500s meant that there were a number of ‘‘Indians’’ who were conversant with the language. The students produced grammars, dictionaries, and sermons. They translated classical authors like Pseudo-Cato and Aesop as well as Christian texts into Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica or ‘‘Aztecs’’ (Osorio Romero 1990; Laird forthcoming a). Latin was, of course, a shibboleth of the Roman Catholic Church, and its dissemination by no means always entailed enthusiasm for the culture of pagan antiquity. Nonetheless, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Latin language continued to retain its association with ancient Rome and its function as a medium of secular humanism and literature, to a much greater degree than it ever would in North America. By the 1530s, the Indians studying at Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in Mexico City had access to a wide range of pagan authors, including Cicero, Vergil, Seneca, Juvenal, Sallust, and Livy. One student, Pablo Nazareo, a prince from Xaltocan, translated the cycle of lessons for the church year from Latin into Nahuatl. In a Latin letter he wrote to Philip II of Spain in 1566, Nazareo quotes four verses from Ovid’s Ars amatoria (Art of love) and shows his knowledge of their provenance by adding the words ut ait Ovidius ille libro tercio de arte (as Ovid says in the third book of the Ars) (Gruzinski 2002: 94; Osorio Romero 1990). The same letter compares the king to Phoebus Apollo. Even if one leaves aside speculation about how far the Indians integrated their knowledge of European paganism and ancient history into their own thinking, it is clear enough that classical culture - not just the Latin language - had pervaded Mexico surprisingly soon after the Spanish conquest.
World History
