Carthaginian America: Classical Encounters in Early Ibero-American Epic

International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-023-00639-9 ARTICLE Carthaginian America: Classical Encounters in Early Ibero‑American Epic Maya Feile Tomes1,2,3 Accepted: 6 February 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Introduction1 Classics and America met as soon as Europe and America did.2 Greco-Roman texts and ideas were in the baggage – both literal and metaphorical3 – of Europeans travelling to the Americas from the earliest days of the transatlantic encounter and have been in one another’s orbit ever since. At the time of writing, Classics and the Americas have thus been acquainted for over five centuries and counting. ‘Acquaintance’ is admittedly an unduly mild metaphor in the context of what was initially (and subsequently) a tumultuous, violent time wherein the arrival of Classics in the Americas cannot be substantively uncoupled from the brutal imposition of the colonial order tout court and its accompanying ideologies, political institutions and educational edifices. At the same time, just as once-dominant narratives of unilateral 1 I wish to record my thanks to the editor, Erik Hermans, for his pointers (and patience), as well as to the anonymous reviewer for their many helpful further suggestions: though I have not been able to adopt everything on this occasion, I remain grateful for them all. I take full responsibility for the shape in which the argument of this article has remained. 2 For further discussion of this idea – and in general for fuller exemplification of many of the points touched upon in this introductory section – see M. Feile Tomes, ‘Introduction. Synecdoche in Reverse: America’s Transhemispheric Classics’, in Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, ed. M. Feile Tomes et al., Leiden/Boston, 2021, pp. 1–49 (esp. 14–16). Germán Campos Muñoz has opened his new book on Classics in South America with a similar observation: ‘We must first note that the connection between the Classics and Latin America is a phenomenon consubstantial with the arrival of Europeans in America’ (G. Campos Muñoz, The Classics in South America, London, 2021, p. 8). Meanwhile, for the problematics of the term ‘Classics’ (and ‘classical’) itself – though used throughout this chapter – see further ‘Synecdoche in Reverse’, pp. 5–7; also A. Laird, ‘Classical Learning and Indigenous Legacies in Sixteenth-Century Mexico’, in Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, pp. 209–241 (216). 3 This metaphor is borrowed from David Lupher’s seminal Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America, Ann Arbor, 2003, p. 1. * Maya Feile Tomes 1 Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 2 Modern and Medieval Languages, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 3 Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 13 Vol.:(0123456789) M. Feile Tomes arrival and “discovery” have now rightly given way to more pluralizing conceptions of the European–American encounter and resultant contact phenomena, so too is it a disservice to the multifaceted transatlantic (re)iterations of Greco-Roman culture in the Americas to continue to conceive of it solely as a European imposition serving purely Eurocentric ends. We can far more usefully, rather, speak in terms of contact phenomena here too: the encounter and emergent patterns of interaction not just between America and Europe but between American and European antiquities. America’s encounter with European antiquity will be the subject of this article, though an equal and opposite study would be no less possible (and a growing number already exists).4 In the first instance, the enabling conditions for this phenomenon were still, clearly, the importation, imposition and inculcation of unfamiliar Mediterranean cultural legacies in an American context to which they were alien; but this in turn swiftly translated into dynamic transatlantic traditions of classicalizing thought and cultural production energized by innovative modalities of engagement, interaction and appropriation of a sort which wholly escapes, and defies, any Eurocentric definition of what Classics might mean or be. Indeed, after its encounter with America, the very fabric of Classics itself is never the same again: a whole discipline – and worldview – irrevocably inflected by the pressure of the radically amplified transatlantic space. Rather than being merely acquainted with one another, then, Classics and America belong to each other. Crucially for our purposes, it was specifically in the Ibero-American context that this story of Classics in the Americas first began. Although in time there would be transatlantic classical contact phenomena from across the length and breadth of the American double continent and Caribbean, for historical reasons the phenomenon of American~classical interaction was more or less exclusive to the Iberian zones of occupation for at least the first post-contact century or so.5 The dynamism and acceleration in this sphere within just a few years of first European–American contact after Columbus strayed into the Caribbean Basin at the end of the fifteenth century are difficult to overstate. By the first decade of the 1500s, Columbus’s own son Hernando would be installed on Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) with a trunkful of classical books,6 and there was a fully fledged library in the new colonial capital at Santo Domingo by the 1510s;7 by the 1520s, Latin 4 For introduction to the broader study of contact phenomena between Europe and American antiquities, see, seminally, S. MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, Princeton, 2007; also e.g. M. Almagro-Gorbea and J. Maier Allende, De Pompeya al Nuevo Mundo: La corona española y la arqueología en el siglo XVIII, Madrid, 2012; S. Gänger, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837-1911, Cambridge, 2014; Globalized Antiquity: Uses and Perceptions of the Past in South Asia, Mesoamerica, and Europe, ed. U. Schüren, D. M. Segesser and T. Späth, Berlin, 2015. 5 See Feile Tomes, ‘Synecdoche in Reverse’ (n. 2 above), pp. 13–27, for extended discussion of this point. 6 E. Wilson-Lee, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library, London, 2018, pp. 117–24. See now also J. M. Pérez Fernández and E. Wilson-Lee, Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Toward a Cartography of Knowledge, New Haven, 2021. 7 E. Mira Caballos, ‘Algunas consideraciones en torno a la primera biblioteca de Santo Domingo’, Ecos, 3, 1994, pp. 147–54, and id., La Española, epicentro del Caribe en el siglo XVI, Santo Domingo, 2010, pp. 493–500; also D. Padilla Peralta, ‘Lucianic Dialogues in Colonial Santo Domingo: The Historical 13 Carthaginian America: Classical Encounters in Early… was being taught to Amerindians in the Valley of Mexico;8 a printing press was installed in Mexico Cit (...truncated)