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Simón Bolívar’s Rome

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Notes

  1. I wish to thank the following for their generous assistance as I wrote this essay: Ronald Briggs, Denis Feeney, Scott Farrington, Christopher Francese, Helen Yeh and Amy Wlodarski. I am especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.

  2. Contemporary sources give conflicting accounts regarding Bolívar’s attendance at the Paris coronation. On the one hand, Bolívar’s French general Peru de Lacroix, who had himself served under Napoleon and eventually wrote a biography of Bolívar, recorded that Bolívar attended the coronation in Paris. P. de Lacroix, Diario de Bucaramanga, Caracas, 1982 [1912], pp. 67–8. On the other, three authors – Simón Rodríguez, who was with Bolívar in Paris, Daniel O’Leary, who later became Bolívar’s aide-de-camp and biographer, and U.S. Naval officer Hiram Paulding – assert that Bolívar remained inside his lodgings in a sort of political protest against Napoleon’s treachery to republican ideals. The account of Simón Rodríguez is considered by many to be problematic for reasons I discuss below. It is recounted in M. Uribe Ángel, ‘El Libertador, su ayo y su capellán’, in Homenaje de Colombia al Libertador en su Primer Centenario. 1783–1883, ed. M. Ezequiel Corrales, Bogotá, 1884, pp. 72–4 (73). According to O’Leary, ‘Napoleon was no longer [for Bolívar]… the symbol of liberty and glory, no longer the object of his political devotion’. D. O’Leary, Bolívar and the War of Independence, Austin, 1970, p. 15. (I use the English version of O’Leary’s biography edited by Robert McNerney because it seems that although O’Leary later switched to writing in Spanish, he wrote much of the first chapter, where the cited information is located, in English; see p. xii.) Paulding’s account was published as H. Paulding, A Sketch of Bolívar in His Camp, New York, 1834, p. 78.

  3. S. Bolívar, Doctrina del Libertador, ed. M. Pérez Vila, Caracas, 1976, p. 4.

  4. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Here I use the translation in S. Bolívar, El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, ed. D. Bushnell and transl. F. H. Fornoff, Oxford, 2003, p. 114.

  5. C. Conway, The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature, Gainesville, 2003, p. 152. For more on the ‘cult of Bolívar’, see G. Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar, 3rd edn, Bogotá, 1970, and E. Pino Iturrieta, El divino Bolívar, Caracas, 2003.

  6. P. Catalano, ‘Derecho público romano y principios constitucionales bolivarianos’, in Constitución y Constitucionalismo Hoy, ed. E. García de Enterría, Caracas, 2000, pp. 689–715 (700).

  7. A. Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513–1830, New Haven, 1990, p. 145.

  8. Although Carl Richard does not discuss the appeal of empire, he addresses the romanticized view of the Roman Republic inherited by the revolutionary generation in British America. C. J. Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, Lanham, 2009, pp. 149–50. Clifford Ando’s work offers a necessary corrective of this contemporary view of Rome. Ando, who challenges popular views of Roman historiography like those espoused in the 18th century, argues, for example, that narratives of Roman citizenship have often been inaccurately appropriated by enlightenment discourses. See C. Ando, Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition. Empire and After, Philadelphia, 2011, and ‘ “A Dwelling Beyond Violence”: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Contemporary Republicans’, History of Political Thought, 31, 2010, pp. 183–220.

  9. This volume was, in fact, published the year after that centenary. Uribe, ‘El Libertador’ (n. 2 above), pp. 62–74.

  10. G. Masur, Simón Bolívar, Albuquerque, 1948, p. 59.

  11. V. Lecuna, Catálogo de errores y calumnias en la historia de Bolívar, 3 vols, New York, 1956, I, p. 154.

  12. S. Rotker, ‘El evangelio apócrifo de Simón Bolívar’, Estudios: Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales, 6, 1998, pp. 29–44 (29).

  13. Ibid., p. 42 [italics in the original]. For similar views that regardless of the authenticity of the Oath, it merits our attention because it has become part of Venezuelan and Spanish American nationalist narratives, see Conway, The Cult of Bolívar (n. 5 above), p. 152; and L. M. Mignone, ‘Remembering a Geography of Resistance: Plebeian Secessions, Then and Now’, in Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory, ed. K. Galinsky, Ann Arbor, 2014, pp. 137–50 (148–50).

  14. Rotker, ‘El evangelio’ (n. 12 above), p. 32.

  15. Ibid., p. 40.

  16. Ibid., p. 37.

  17. The standard work on translatio imperii is W. Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtesdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Tübingen, 1958. The most exhaustive study of the origins of the translatio imperii trope I have found is S. Breuninger, ‘Morals, the Market, and History: George Berkeley and Social Virtue in Early 18th-Century Thought’, PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002, esp. chapters 8–9. Also see, J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3 of The First Decline and Fall, Cambridge, 2003, esp. chapters 6–7; and E. Bartosik-Vélez, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire Nashville, 2014, pp. 44–8.

  18. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 4.

  19. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 113. This translation is slightly modified to capture the future meaning of ‘ha de verificarse’ in the original.

  20. See n. 2 above. Regarding the significance of the coronations for Bolívar, see L. Zea, ‘Imperio romano e imperio español en el pensamiento de Bolívar’, Nuestra América, 1, 1980, pp. 11–25 (12). For an argument regarding the importance of Bolívar’s witnessing the political situation in Milan during the time of Napoleon’s coronation, see A. Filippi, El Libertador en la historia italiana: Ilustración, ‘risorgimiento’, fascismo, Caracas, 1987, chapter 1, pp. 23–39.

  21. O’Leary, Bolívar (n. 2 above), p. 16.

  22. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 74.

  23. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 30.

  24. For more on the primacy of Rome in the translatio imperii, see R. Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam, Hanover, 1997, esp. chapters 2–4.

  25. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 62.

  26. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 18.

  27. The list of studies that take a stand in this debate is too long to list here. For a relatively recent opinion, see La Prensa de Monagas, ‘¿Monte Aventino o Monte Sacro?’, 10 September 2011, at www.laprensademonagas.info/Articulo.aspx?aid=64950. For a summary of the debate, see, H. A. Calderón R., ‘Una reflexión más sobre el juramento de Bolívar en el monte sacro’, Boletín del Grupo de Investigación y Estudios sobre Historia Antigua y Medieval 4, 2006, np, at http://erevistas.saber.ula.ve/index.php/boletingiesham/article/view/4467/4259; and S. V. Pérez Medina and G. Pérez Medina, ‘Bolívar y las colinas romanas: Un juramento y una tradición polémica’, Boletín del Grupo de Investigación y Estudios sobre Historia Antigua y Medieval, 4, 2006, np, at http://erevistas.saber.ula.ve/index.php/boletingiesham/article/view/4468/4260.

  28. Uribe, ‘El Libertador’ (n. 2 above), p. 74.

  29. S. Bolívar, Obras completas, ed. Vicente Lecuna, 2nd edn, 3 vols, La Habana, 1950, I, p. 881.

  30. For an exhaustive discussion of the sources documenting both secessions, see Mignone, The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order, Ann Arbor, 2016, chapter 1, pp. 17–47.

  31. An official government press release regarding Chávez’s 2005 commemoration on the Mons Sacer of the bicentenary of Bolívar’s Oath makes this interpretation clear: ‘In the year 494 BC, this hill takes on a starring role in the first popular rebellion recorded in Roman history. It represents an icon of resistance (ícono de la resistencia) and was a place of refuge for the commoners who were oppressed. After two hundred years, many Latin American countries are subject to the will of a foreign power.’ T. Ramírez Salas, ‘Principios del Juramento de Monte Sacro siguen más vigentes que nunca’, in Ministerior del Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información, Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela, posted 16 October 2005, quoted by Mignone, ‘Remembering a Geography of Resistance’ (n. 13 above), p. 137. This website is unfortunately no longer accessible; Mignone provides her own translation but not the original Spanish. Mignone goes on to note that despite the government’s official stance, Chávez’s 2005 speech at the Mons Sacer ‘never recalled the ancient Roman antecedent that had so inspired his beloved Bolívar’s’ Oath (p. 149), yet I would add that President Nicolás Maduro’s speech in Rome in 2013 does allude to the secessions. See ‘Maduro a Montesacro: Nel solco di Bolivar e Chavez verso il socialismo’, at https://vimeo.com/115701272. Mignone appears to ignore the possibility that, regardless of Venezuela’s official interpretation, it was not the plebeian secessions that motivated Bolívar in the first place. Indeed, she assumes that they did. For this assumption, see Mignone, ‘Remembering a Geography of Resistance’ (n. 13 above), p. 148; and Mignone, The Republican Aventine (n. 30 above), pp. 196, 198.

  32. Regarding this confusion, see Sallust, The Histories, ed. P. McGushin, I, Oxford, 1992, p. 80; and Mignone, ‘Remembering a Geography of Resistance’ (n. 13 above), pp. 140–45.

  33. Mignone, The Republican Aventine (n. 30 above), pp. 35, 32.

  34. Mignone, ‘Remembering a Geography of Resistance’ (n. 13 above), pp. 145–6; and The Republican Aventine (n. 30 above), pp. 40–47, 196–202. Mignone argues that the Aventine’s role as the site of the secessions is likely a fiction added to the ‘traditional secession legend’ in the 2nd century BCE by L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Given the seductive power of this legend, we should also not completely discount the possibility that Rodríguez and Bolívar, like so many scholars who have attempted to trace the steps of Bolívar in the Eternal City, were similarly ‘duped’ by the historical record and bought the myth that the Aventine was the site most closely associated with the plebeian secessions.

  35. Tito Salas’s ‘Juramento en el Monte Aventino’ (1910–1911) forms part of a triptych now hanging in the Federal Palace in Caracas; his more well-known ‘Juramento de Bolívar en Roma’ (1950) hangs in the city’s National Pantheon.

  36. Mignone, The Republican Aventine (n. 30 above), p. 200.

  37. Most scholars who have weighed in on the debate about the site of Bolívar’s Oath have curiously failed to consider the text of the Oath. Pérez Medina and Pérez Medina in their essay ‘Bolívar y las colinas romanas’, for example, provide a balanced and well-researched discussion regarding the difficulty of identifying the site of the Oath, but they ignore the text of the Oath itself. They opt for the Mons Sacer near the Anio River. Pérez Medina and Pérez Medina, ‘Bolívar y las colinas romanas’ (n. 27 above). R. Homero Calderón considers the text of the Oath but only insofar as it proves the speaker’s knowledge of Roman history. R. Calderón, ‘Una reflexión más’ (n. 27 above).

  38. Some scholars, perhaps in their zeal to represent Bolívar as a republican, would have us believe that Bolívar was focused almost exclusively on the Roman Republic, despite the fact that the text of his Oath, not to mention his other writings and his political innovations, as I discuss later, prove otherwise. Filippi, for example, writes: ‘No es por azar si el juramento retoma el discurso sobre la Roma antigua y, más precisamente, quiere referirse… a la Roma republicana’ (‘It is not by chance that the Oath takes up discourse about classical Rome and, more precisely, wants to refer to… republican Rome’). Filippi, El Libertador en la historia italiana (n. 20 above), p. 47 [italics in the original]. This contradicts Filippi’s earlier acknowledgement on p. 55 that the Oath at least refers to the Empire (although he contends that for Bolívar it only served as a negative model counterposed to the Republic), yet I would argue even this characterization of the text of the Oath is misleading, as is Filippi’s selective citation of the Oath, which conveniently omits Bolívar’s positive reference to the Emperors Trajan and Vespasian. Filippi further argues: ‘La comparación-contraste entre las dos Romas y la absoluta predilección por la Roma republicana, permanecerá como una constante en el pensamiento de Bolívar’ (‘The comparison-contrast between the two Romes and the absolute preference for Republican Rome, will remain as a constant in Bolívar’s thought’). Ibid. (n. 32 above), p. 58. Filippi cherry-picks from Zea for support in this argument (pp. 57–8), but Zea himself acknowledges Bolívar’s appeals to the Empire as a model for forging cultural unity. Zea, ‘Imperio romano e imperio español’ (n. 20 above).

  39. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 3.

  40. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 113.

  41. Although the Venezuelan historian and diplomat Caracciolo Parra Pérez did not analyse the text of Bolívar’s Oath, he also proposed that Bolívar had been inspired not by the plebeian secessions but by the view of the ruins of the Forum. Parra Pérez, who was Venezuela’s foreign minister in Rome from 1927 to 1936, recounted that the Roman city official whom he asked about placing a monument honouring Bolívar on the Monte Sacro replied by saying that surely it was a view like the one outside his window, of the Forum, that inspired the Liberator. ‘Dejemos tranquilo al lejano Monte Sacro, donde nada vio aquél y nadie vería hoy su estatua. En el Aventino, zona arqueológica, no puede elevarse ningún monumento moderno: la gobernación buscará un sitio digno del de Bolívar’ (‘Let’s leave in peace the faraway Monte Sacro, where he saw nothing and where no one today would see his statue. [But] on the Aventine, an archaeological zone, a modern monument cannot be installed. The city council will look for a site worthy of Bolívar’). Quoted in J. Díaz González, El juramento de Simón Bolívar sobre el Monte Sacro, Rome, 1958, p. 102. (It is worth considering how 20th-century Italian politics – including the fascist regime’s distaste for popular rebellion (associated with the Aventine) – and policies designed to protect archaeological sites may have influenced the shape of the official Venezuelan version of the Bolívar myth at Rome. Regarding fascist desire to avoid commemorations of Bolívar’s Oath involving the Aventine, see Mignone, The Republican Aventine (n. 30 above), p. 198, no. 55). Díaz González, who fervently defends the view that the Mons Sacer was the site of the Oath, asserts that if Bolívar’s view of Roman ruins is the issue, there were plenty to see from the Mons Sacer. ‘Pero si fuese por falta de ruinas …, debemos entonces asegurar inmediatamente que desde el Monte Sacro … sí se veían ruinas: por lo menos el famoso y pintoresco Puente Nomentano sobre el Río Anio, los arcos del acueducto del Agua Virgen construído por Agripa, los sepulcros de las faldas de la colina misma (uno de los cuales era atribuído por la tradición a Menenio Agripa), los numerosos bloques de peperino que yacían por el suelo cerca del Anio, sin hablar de otras ruinas y de otros elementos como la Via Nomentana, las torres medioevales, etc.’ (‘But if it were for a lack of ruins …, we should then immediately affirm that from the Mons Sacer … yes, ruins were seen: at least the famous and picturesque Nomentine Bridge over the Anio River, the arches of the aqueduct of the Virgin Water built by Agrippa, the tombs on the skirts of that very hill (one of which according to tradition belongs to Agrippa Menenius), the numerous blocks of stone that lie on the ground near the Anio, not to mention other ruins and other things like Via Nomentana, medieval towers, etc.)’, p. 109. It seems to this author that Díaz González is grasping at straws here.

  42. Paulding, A Sketch of Bolívar (n. 2 above), p. 78. Vicente Lecuna assumes Paulding’s reference to the Palatine is an error. Lecuna, Catálogo de errores (n. 10 above), vol. 1, p. 154. Filippi rebuts Lecuna, saying that in walking to the Aventine in 1805 one logically would have either skirted the edge of the Palatine or crossed it, thus making Paulding’s reference to the Palatine understandable. Filippi, El Libertador en la historia italiana (n. 20 above), p. 53, no. 27. Curiously, Paulding’s daughter, Rebecca Paulding Meade, included verbatim this portion of her father’s account in her own biography of her father, yet instead of recording the place of the Oath as the ‘Palatine Mount’, she wrote ‘Tarpeian rock’, which designates the outcropping of rocks on the Capitoline from which criminals were hurled to their deaths: R. Meade, The Life of Hiram Paulding, Rear Admiral U.S.N., New York, 1910, p. 77. We note that Paulding’s daughter also appears to get her father’s version of Bolívar’s itinerary wrong. She records that Bolívar said that after his stay in France, he and his companions travelled to Spain ‘and from there to Rome’ (ibid.), but her father’s account clearly records: ‘From France we went to Rome’ (which is not entirely accurate either as the group travelled to other Italian cities before arriving in Rome, but it quite possibly could have been the itinerary Bolívar related orally to Paulding in 1824), p. 78. In sum, the daughter’s account contains what we believe to be two errors. It merits noting that the Spanish translation of Paulding’s A Sketch of Bolívar, published one year after the original was published in English, is truer to Paulding’s original: ‘en Roma ascendímos al Monte Palatino, allí nos arrodillámos todos tres y abrazándonos uno á otro jurámos libertar á nuestra patria ó morir en la demanda’ (‘in Rome we ascended the Mount Palatine, there all three of us kneeled and, hugging each other, we swore to free our homeland or die in the attempt’). H. Paulding, Un rasgo de Bolívar en campaña, transl. L.M., New York, 1835, p. 72.

  43. For Bolívar’s commitment to classical republicanism, see D. A. Brading, Classical Republicanism and Creole Patriotism: Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) and the Spanish American Revolution, Cambridge, 1983.

  44. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 3.

  45. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 113.

  46. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 4.

  47. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 113.

  48. Paulding, A Sketch of Bolívar (n. 2 above), pp. 77–8.

  49. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), pp. 68–9.

  50. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), pp. 24–5.

  51. S. M. Gustafson, ‘Histories of Democracy and Empire’, American Quarterly 59, 2007, pp. 107–33.

  52. The manner in which land was distributed by the Crown to settlers in the Spanish territories of the Americas also influenced settlement patterns. See A. Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History, Albuquerque, 1978, pp. 18–19. It should be noted that New Western historians have developed a much more nuanced understanding of frontiers in North America, one which complicates the notion of a single ‘line of settlement’. See P. Nelson Limerick, ‘The Adventures of the Frontier in the 20th Century’, in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. R. White and P. Limerick, Berkeley, 1994, pp. 67–102. For a concise discussion of distinct settlement patterns of European invaders and their descendants in Spanish and British America, see J. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830, New Haven, 2006, pp. 35–48.

  53. See J. Simon, ‘Simón Bolívar’s Republican Imperialism: Another Ideology of American Revolution’, History of Political Thought, 33, 2012, pp. 280–304. In the course of Simon’s argument that Bolívar assumed a mission to spread liberal political values throughout Spanish America, he contends that Bolívar’s efforts to wrest control of loyalist strongholds, as in Perú, were the products of his drive to territorial expansion. In fact, Simon describes Bolívar’s entire program for regional and continental unity as ‘display[ing the] territorial features of imperialism’ (p. 294). I disagree. ‘Territorial expansion’ and ‘imperialism’ are misnomers in this instance. To be sure, Bolívar sought to regain territory claimed by Spain and then to join it politically with the existing independent states. But Bolívar never employed a systematic agenda of pushing back borders and conquering territory other than that territory that had been claimed by Spain and its loyalist allies.

  54. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), pp. 112–13.

  55. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), pp. 40–41. This translation is slightly modified.

  56. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 12.

  57. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 6.

  58. For the influence of Rousseau’s interpretation of the Roman constitution on Bolívar’s political thinking, see P. Catalano, ‘Conceptos y principios del derecho público romano’, in Modello romano e formazione del pensiero politico di Simón Bolívar, Quaderni Latinoamericani, 11, 1994, pp. ix–xix (ix). I note that Bolívar owned what was once Napoleon’s copy of Rousseau’s Du contrat social.

  59. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 121.

  60. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 48. I have opted to replace Fornoff’s translation of ‘tribunales domésticos’ as ‘domestic tribunals’ with ‘tribunes of the people’, which I believe more accurately reflects the nature of Bolívar’s thinking and his adherence to Rousseau’s discussion of tribunals, entitled ‘Du tribunat’ in the Social Contract, Book IV, chapter 5.

  61. It was a common misconception in the early modern period that the Roman senate was hereditary. It was not. See K. Hopkins and G. Burton, ‘Political Succession in the Late Republic (249–59 BC)’, in Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, ed. K. Hopkins, II, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 31–119.

  62. See A. Helg, ‘Simón Bolívar and the Fear of Pardocracia: José Padilla in Post-Independence Cartagena’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 35, 2003, pp. 447–71.

  63. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 38.

  64. Bolívar to Santander, 10 July 1825. Bolívar, Obras completas (n. 29 above), II, p. 484.

  65. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), pp. 126–7.

  66. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 53.

  67. Brading, Classical Republicanism (n. 43 above), p. 12.

  68. Bolívar, like many of his contemporaries in the Americas, appears to have misunderstood or misconstrued the fundamental nature of the Amphictyonic League, which was religious in nature. For similar misunderstandings in North America, see D. J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 126–8.

  69. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 72.

  70. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), pp. 27–8.

  71. Bolívar, Obras completas (n. 29 above), II, p. 167.

  72. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), pp. 216, 218.

  73. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), pp. 169, 170.

  74. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 216.

  75. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 169.

  76. Bolívar, Doctrina (n. 3 above), p. 218.

  77. Bolívar, El Libertador (n. 4 above), p. 170. I have modified the English translation to convey more accurately that the subject of Bolívar’s conjecture is the very confederation he proposes.

  78. Bolívar, Obras completas (n. 29 above), II, p. 428.

  79. Ibid., p. 445.

  80. While Heraclides’s work On Pleasure was lost, parts of it (including the anecdote in question) were copied by both Athenaeus and Aelian in the 3rd century C.E. In the 16th century, Erasmus translated the story from Aelian into Latin in his Adagia, and then Montaigne appears to have copied the story verbatim from Erasmus in his ‘Apologie pour Raimond Sebond’. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for identifying the source of Bolívar’s allusion to this ‘Greek madman’.

  81. On the popularity of Montaigne in 17th- and 18th-century France, see I. O. Wade, Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment, Princeton, 2015, pp. 89–95.

  82. Bolívar to Santander, 8 July 1826. Bolívar, Obras completas (n. 29 above), II, p. 428.

  83. J. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, Princeton, 2006, p. 5.

  84. Bolívar wrote on 9 November 1830 to General Juan José Flores, ibid., III, pp. 501–2: ‘Ud. sabe que yo he mandado veinte años, y de ellos no he sacado más que pocos resultados ciertos: 1o, la América es ingobernable para nosotros; 2o, el que sirve una revolución ara en el mar; 3o, la única cosa que se puede hacer en América es emigrar; 4o, este país caerá infaliblemente en manos de la multitud desenfrenada para después pasar a tiranuelos casi imperceptibles de todos colores y razas; 5o, devorados por todos los crímenes y extinguidos por la ferocidad, los europeos no se dignarán conquistarnos; 6o, si fuera posible que una parte del mundo volviera al caos primitivo, éste sería el último período de la América’.

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Bartosik-Vélez, E. Simón Bolívar’s Rome. Int class trad 25, 333–354 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0428-0

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