Sabine MacCormack (1941–2012)

There is more to the Roman legacy than togas, roads and orgies. The Romans invented ways of thinking about everything from architecture to language to war. In this deeply researched, expertly constructed study, Sabine MacCormack shows how Roman and classical literature provided themes and concepts not only for description and analysis of the land of Peru and the empires of the Inca and Spanish, but for the interpretation of historical experience itself. In so doing she exposes currents of thought linking the classical, medieval and early modern worlds of Europe and the Americas.

In the encounter with the New World, Spanish forms of knowledge and understanding changed and mutated, writes MacCormack. The literary conventions of the semi-official report, or relación, proved inadequate for the purpose of informing readers about events that were unprecedented and unheard of, occurring in lands hitherto unknown. Implicit in MacCormack’s presentation is an acknowledgment that the writing of history is a creative act, and she shows how 16th-c. Spanish and Peruvian historians were able “to incorporate Andean experience into human experience across space and time by relying on classical precedent and historiography.”

One of MacCormack’s major accomplishments here is the recovery and interpretation of obscure Peruvian texts from the first century or so after Pizarro’s first contact with the Inca in 1526. Peruvian chroniclers reached back in time to relate the foundation myths of the Inca and to correlate the Spanish past with the Andean and Incan past. They sought to explain the rise and expansion of an Incan empire, and to account for its defeat at the hands of the Spanish. As to why the Europeans found themselves in the Americas, chroniclers like las Casas saw in the work of Vergil, Seneca and other Romans (and in Plato's Atlantis) prophecies heralding the existence of a New World. The Inca, also, in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Historia general del Perú (1617), imagined the grand designs of history: their own apocalyptic tradition foretold the arrival of the Spanish and the collapse of an empire not unlike the empire of the Romans.

Whereas Europeans tended to look at history as a continuing sequence of events receding into bygone times, the Inca viewed the past more episodically—the rise of a new ruler indicating an authentically new beginning. In Nueva Crónica y buen gobierno (1615), Felipe Guaman Poma described the first four Andean ages in a manner reminiscent of Lucretius, who also viewed the civilizing process, the development of material affluence and artisanal specialization as correlates of violence and warfare. For Peruvian-Spanish writers versed in Roman history, the conflict between Caesar and Pompey described the essence of the civil wars between the conquistadors Pizarro and Almagro and the viceroy Nuñez Vela; the fatal passions unleashed by greed and the lust for power, much emphasized in the works of Livy and Sallust, were reanimated in the Incas' fratricidal war between Atahuallpa and Guascar.

Roman antecedents helped the early modern historians of Spanish Peru to understand the proliferation of local idioms despite the imposition of ‘official’ Incan Quechua. The ideas of the Roman Vitruvius (De Architectura)—that the layout of cities and the design of public buildings should project a certain aesthetic dignity and functionality—filtered through Spanish writers to Peru, to be applied in places like Arequipa and Cajamarca. Representations of Roman deities decorated Andean churches, and public rituals and funerary ceremonies “were deeply imbued with Roman gestures and political concepts.” Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535) shared with Pliny and Ptolemy the perception of human experience and nature forming a continuously evolving interconnected fabric: for Oviedo and his contemporaries, human beings were environmentally conditioned by the place of their birth (how they looked, what they ate, their language and customs), and nature itself had been shaped and crafted by human labor, culture and language.

Even and still, with the Roman past so near at hand—in the form of ideas and texts and traditions—the early modern Peruvian chroniclers could not draw conclusive lessons from the past, and neither can we. The Roman legacy is rife with contradictions and uncertainty, writes MacCormack, serving to inform all who followed of the variability and unpredictability of human affairs. On the Wings of Time eloquently makes the point.… (meer)