Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America

Ancient Greece and Rome have long been prominent in Latin America. The model of Roman imperialism, challenges to Aristotle’s theories of geography and natural slavery, and Cicero’s notion of the patria have had a pervasive influence on thought and politics throughout the region. Yet despite their role in shaping beliefs and social realities over the course of five centuries, conceptions of European antiquity in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and the South American continent have received little systematic study.

This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history - from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The volume brings together essays by specialists in art history, cultural anthropology and literary studies, as well as Americanists and scholars of the classical tradition. In showing that appropriations of the Greco-Roman past are a recurrent catalyst for change in the Americas, this book also calls attention to ideas and developments which have been overlooked in standard narratives of intellectual history.