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Classical Traditions and Internal Colonialism in Early Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Text, Translation, and Notes on Three of Villerías’ Greek Epigrams.

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Abstract

This essay analyses three epigrams, that are among the only original compositions known to us so far written in ancient Greek in New Spain, composed by the largely unknown eighteenth-century Mexican poet José de Villerías y Roelas and transmitted only through a single largely unpublished manuscript. I present an edition, a translation, and an analysis of Villerías’ compositions, focussing mainly on the literary themes and lexicon that conforms the poet’s use of Greek in his epigrams devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to Segura y Troncoso and Zoïlus, and on the motives and ideological implications that his poetic images reveal. Finally, the closing discussion considers how the use of Greek language and the revamping of classical traditions in the early eighteenth-century Mexico can be analysed as intellectual phenomena that are deeply related to the colonial dynamics of internal colonialism and class conciliation, a circumstance that is symbolically depicted in an important material element of Villerías’ manuscript (MS 1594), the emblem on its first page showing a bee trapped in a spiderweb.

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Notes

  1. Máscara, Octavas (Francisco Rodríguez Lupercio, México, 1721), see M. L. Tenorio, Poesía novohispana. Antología, Tomo 2, Mexico, 2010, p. 997, and n. 26 below. All translations from Spanish are mine.

  2. Postclassicisms Collective, Postclassicisms, Chicago–London, 2020, p. 5.

  3. A very useful division of the general blocks that make up Latin American classicisms can be found in R. Andújar and K. P. Nikoloutsos, ‘Staging the European Classical in “Latin” America: An Introduction’, in Greeks and Romans in the Latin American Stage, ed. R. Andújar and K. P. Nikoloutsos, London–New York, 2020, pp. 4–5. On classical reception as a framing tool for justifying the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, see D. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-century Spanish America, Ann Arbor, 2003; and for the case of Perú, see S. MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, Spain, the Incas, and Peru, Princeton, 2006. On the Neo-Latin Columbus epic in Paraguay, see M. Feile Tomes, ‘News of a Hitherto Unknown Neo-Latin Columbus Epic, Part I: José Manual Paramás’s De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio (1777)’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 22, 2015, pp. 1–28. An overview on New Spanish Latin literature can be found in A. Laird, ‘Latin America’, in A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. C. W. Kallendorf, Malden–Oxford, 2007, pp. 222–36 (233–4) with bibliographical references. A. L. Kerson has written on Landívar (Rafael Landívar and the Latin Literary Currents of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century, Ann Arbor, 1968; ‘El concepto de utopía de Rafael Landívar en la Rusticatio Mexicana’, Revista Iberoamericana 96–7, 1976, pp. 363–79; ‘The Heroic Mode in Rafael Landívar’s Rusticatio Mexicana’, Dieciocho, 13, 1–2, 1990, pp. 149–64), Alegre (‘Francisco Javier Alegre’s Translation of Boileau’s Art poétique’, Modern Language Quarterly, 41, 2, 1981, pp. 153–65), and Abad (‘Diego José Abad, Dissertatio Ludicro-Seria’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 40, 1991, pp. 357–422). More recently, A. Laird has also written on Landívar (The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar and the Rusticatio Mexicana, Duckworth, 2006), Alegre (‘La Alexandriada de Francisco Javier Alegre: arcanis sua sensa figuris’, Nova Tellus, 21, 2, 2003, pp. 167–76), and Abad (‘Selenopolitanus: Diego José Abad, Latin, and Mexican Identity’, in Studi Umanistici Piceni: Atti dei Congresi, 24, Sassoferrato, 2004, pp. 231–7).

  4. I understand the concept of criollo, following J. A. Mazzotti, ‘Criollismo, Creole, and Creolité’, in Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, ed. Y. Martínez-San Miguel, B. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and M. Belausteguigoitia, London, 2015, pp. 87–100, as ‘a social, legal and geocultural category more than a strictly biological one’ (ibid., p. 89), and also as a person born in the Americas claiming Spanish origin but at the same time distancing himself from colonial institutions (see A. Higgins, Constructing the Criollo Archive. Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana, West Lafayette, 2000, p. 3). On the differences between the concept of criollo and creole, the latter being a cultural category and phenomenon describing the African roots in the Caribbean context, see also J. A. Mazzotti, ibid, pp. 95 ff. On the 19th-century patriotism and 20th-century nationalism and its relationship with classical culture in Mexico, see A. Laird’s ‘The Cosmic Race and a Heap of Broken Images’, in Classics and National Cultures ed. P. Vasunia and S. Stephens, Oxford, 2010, pp. 163–81 (168 ff.). On the re-discovery of the ancient Greeks on the eve of the Mexican revolution by the Dominican intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña and its powerful influence in figures such as José Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes, see R. Andújar’s ‘The Caribbean Socrates: Pedro Henríquez Ureña and the Mexican Ateneo de la Juventud’, in Classics in Extremis, ed. E Richardson, London, 2018, pp. 101–14.

  5. I take the concept of ‘superstructure’ from A. Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’ (1929–1935), in Selection from the Prison Notebooks translated and edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell–Smith, New York, 1971.

  6. On the complex processes of the criollo’s subject unfolding and its dynamics, and on the criollo’s attempts ‘to achieve a level of authority in the intellectual sphere parallel to that which they exerted in those of agriculture and trade’ (p. 11), see A. Higgins, Constructing the Criollo Archive (n. 4 above), Introduction. As is well known, one of the most important stages in the construction of the criollo subjectivity was accomplished in the writings of Sigüenza y Góngora. On Sigüenza y Gongora’s invention of criollo tradition and on the emergence of a criollo political discourse in the context of the social and political crisis of the seventeenth-century Spanish imperialism, see A. More, Baroque Sovereignty. Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico, Philadelphia, 2013, Introduction.

  7. This is a recurrent concept in postcolonial studies that has been used to describe the phenomenon of hybridity (see, J. Kei-Kato, How Immigrant Christians Living in Mixed Cultures Interpret their Religion: Asian American Diasporic Hybridity and its Implications for Hermeneutics, Lewiston–New York, 2012, and J. Kei-Kato, Religious Language and Asian American Hybridity, New York, 2016, p. 13). The concept is related to Homi K. Bhabha’s famous ‘third space’. On criticisms about this concept, see J. Gruber, ‘(Un)silencing Hybridity: A Postcolonial Critique of Comparative Theology’, in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom. Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. M. Brecht and L. B. Locklin, New York–London, 2015, pp. 21–35 (23–4).

  8. On criollo subjectivity as a tension between collaboration with colonialism and resistance to the metropolis and its ‘ambiguous discursive relationship with the indigenous cultures’, see N. R. Altschul, Geographies of Philological Knowledge. Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic, Chicago–London, 2012, pp. 13–25. Valuable and useful insights can be found in M. Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn, London-New York, 2008, on the role and participation that criollos had in the production of colonialist and anti-colonialist doctrines (p. 88), and on their gradual positioning as bureaucratic elites by the beginnings of the 19th century, (pp. 111–12).

  9. His second last name is uncertain, see I. Osorio Romero, El sueño criollo. José Antonio de Villerías y Roelas (1695–1728), Mexico, 1991, p. 12, n. 7. Roales appears in the marriage registry book, Ruelas in his death certificate. Roelas is a combination of both forms. This is not the place to delve into the vicissitudes of the poet’s life: his struggle against poverty and sickness, which is constantly referenced in the limited evidence we have from his time, his premature death at the age of 33 (1728) and the difficulties he faced in order to publish his poetry and ascend in the social stratification of the plural reality he inhabited. On these matters, Osorio’s El sueño criollo remains the most comprehensive study. A. Laird’s ‘The Aeneid from the Aztecs to the Dark Virgin. Vergil, Native Tradition and Latin Poetry in Colonial Mexico from Sahagun’s Memoriales (1563) to Villerías’ Guadalupe (1724)’, in A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition, ed. J. Farrell and M. C. J. Putnam, Malden, MA–Oxford, 2010 pp. 217–33 presented Villerías and his work to the English-speaking world through an important article focussing mainly on the author’s deep relationship with Virgil, which plays an important part in colonial cultural history. The AGNM preserves the file that keeps all the information about his graduation as Bachelor of Jurisprudence in the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1724. Due to his poverty, Villerías was allowed to not pay the necessary fees for his graduation, see Osorio, El sueño criollo, p. 16. José Mariano Beristáin de Souza in his Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional vol. 3 (1821) [facsimile of original publication], Mexico, 1981, says about him: ‘¡Oh si no hubiese sido su estudio tan excesivo, o su salud hubiese sido más robusta! Siempre enfermizo y siempre entregado a los libros’ (‘Alas, had his studying been less excessive, or his health more robust! Always sickly and so devoted to his books’). Fray Juan Antonio de Segura y Troncoso, founder and president of the Academia Guadalupana of Poetry (an association to which Villerías belonged) mocks him in a poem for having been infected with syphilis, see M. Lilia Tenorio, Poesía novohispana (n. 1 above), pp. 987–8).

  10. I understand the concept of colonial technologies as the ensemble of techniques and methods (not only economic, political and juridical, but also intellectual and cultural) that allow the settlers to strengthen and reproduce the colonial structure successfully. See La paperson, A Third University is Possible, Minneapolis, 2017, introduction and chapter 1.

  11. The term criollo conciliation refers to one of the complex processes through which the Mexican nation state was created thanks to the progressive assimilation of one part of the Mexican inhabitants to the ruling class. The class struggle was thus disguised, through ever-expanding concessions of a number of rights and benefits to the criollos, as a reconciliation of that struggle, masquerading a growing and irreconcilable division between indigenous people and criollos. On the relations between the dominant classes and the ‘lettered city’ and on the processes through which intellectuals institutionalized themselves constituting an autonomous power that transformed the intangible cultural capital into a material one, see A. Rama, La ciudad letrada, Hannover, 1984, particularly chapter 2 (p. 35). On the function of intellectuals as replicators of the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes, see Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’ (n. 5 above).

  12. For example, the New Spanish priest and theologian Miguel Sánchez who in his Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), linked Guadalupe with the mysterious woman of the Book of Revelation (chapter 12), see M. Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), in Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, ed. E. De la Torre Villar & R. Navarro de Anda, Mexico, 1982, pp. 152–281. On the role of Sánchez in the construction of the Guadalupan myth, see Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), p. 217, and Cañizares Esguerra, Católicos y puritanos en la colonización de América, Madrid, 2008, pp. 113–16. On the legacy of European humanism and the prose and poetry of classical Greece and Rome as cultural validation mechanisms of Guadalupe’s apparition (particularly in Riofrío’s Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum, one of the most important antecedents of Villerías’ Guadalupe), see A. Laird, ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Birth of Latin Epic in Mexico: Bernardo Ceinos de Riofrío’s Centonicum Virgilianum Monimentum’, in Mexico 1680: Cultural and Intellectual Life in the Barroco Indias, ed. J. Andrews and A. Coroleu, Bristol, 2007, pp. 199–220.

  13. See Coda below.

  14. B. Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación de las cosas de la Nueva España (1604), ed. E. de la Torre Villar, Mexico, 1987, see D. A. Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano, Mexico, 1980, p. 16.

  15. Pedro José Márquez, Due antichi monumenti di archittetura messicana, Rome, 1804, pp. 23–4, gathered by G. Méndez Plancarte, Humanistas Mexicanos, Mexico, 1941, p. 140.

  16. See Brading, Los orígenes (n. 14 above), p. 23. Nevertheless, ‘the creoles did not present a united front (…) Creoles from noble and wealthy families who dreamed of forming alliances with families of Spanish grandees, or even with high gachupín officials, displayed a sincere loyalist attitude and adjusted to their position’ (J. Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531–1813, Chicago–London, 1976).

  17. J. A. Ahumada, Representación política legal a la Magestad del Sr. Don Felipe V en favor de los españoles americanos (1725), Madrid (reprinted in Mexico, 1820). He refers to Villerías’ Poem ‘The Weeping of the Stars at the Darkened Sunset in the West’ (‘El llanto de las estrellas al ocaso del sol anochecido en el oriente’), published in 1725 on the occasion of Louis I’ premature death (p. 13, n. 17).

  18. R. Aguirre Salvador, El mérito y la estrategia. Clérigos, juristas y médicos en la Nueva España, Mexico, 2003, p. 52. See also Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe (n. 16 above), pp. 8–9, and C. Rosenmüller, Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755, Cambridge, 2019, chapter 7. A. García, ‘Corrupción y venalidad en la magistratura Mexicana durante el siglo XVIII’, Illes Imperis, 16, 2014, pp. 13–37 (15 ff. and 29 ff.), argued that the destitutions had the clear political goal of marginalizing the participation of the American-born from colonial high-level bureaucracy.

  19. Among the Greek authors referred to in the notes at the end of each chapter are Aeschylus, Aristotle, Clement of Alexandria, Democritus, Demosthenes, Dio Chrysostom, Diogenes Laertius, Euripides, Isocrates, Philo, Plato, Plutarch, Polybius, Stobaeus, and Xenophon. Among the Latin writers, Cicero, Claudian, Horace, Martial, Ovid, Plinius, Quintilian, Sallust, Seneca, Silius Italicus, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Virgil appear.

  20. On the almost entirely criollo composition of the student body in the University of Mexico, see Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe (n. 16 above), p. 8.

  21. In the compilation of poems that Cristóbal Ruiz Guerra made in 1724 entitled Letras felizmente laureadas y laurel festivo de letras (Blissfully wreathed writings and a merry wreath in celebration of literature), which gathers the poems written in celebration of Louis I’s ascension to the throne, Villerías published these three Latin epigrams (two of which won the first and the second prices, see S. M. Mcmanus, S. M. ‘The Art of Being a Colonial Letrado: Late humanism, learned sociability and urban life in eighteenth-century Mexico City’, Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 56, 2017, pp. 40–64).

  22. Internal colonialism is a category analysed by Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova in ‘Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo’, América Latina. Revista del Centro Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 6, 3, 1963; La democracia en México, Mexico, 1965, ch. 5; ‘Colonialismo interno (una redefinición)’, in Conceptos y fenómenos fundamentales de nuestro tiempo, Mexico, 2003, and ‘El colonialismo interno’ (1969), in Sociologia de la explotación. Nueva edición, corregida, Buenos Aires, 2006, pp. 185–205. Internal colonialism is a diachronic structure of social relations of domination and exploitation between heterogeneous cultural groups inside dual or plural societies where the dominant local groups, represented in Latin America by criollos, exercise a colonial control over the rest of the social groups that already existed before the formation of the nation state (see P. Quintero, [2015], ‘Colonialismo interno’ at http://www.cecies.org/articulo.asp?id=451 [accessed 10 November 2020]. A recent discussion on the scope and new possibilities of this concept can be found in P. H. Martins, ‘La actualidad de la Teoría del Colonialismo Interno para el debate sobre la dominación y los conflictos inter-étnicos’, in comp. Alberto Bialakowsky et al., Encrucijadas abiertas, Buenos Aires, 2017.

    https://www.teseopress.com/encrucijadasabiertas/chapter/71/) [accessed 15 March 2021].

  23. See I. Osorio Romero, ‘El helenismo en México. De Trento a los filólogos sensualistas’, Nova Tellus, 4, 1986, pp. 63–117 (81). The manuscripts of Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero preserved in the National Library of Mexico still require more research. As far as I could see in a brief review of the digitalized manuscripts, they contain important Greek material that needs deep analysis.

  24. I am currently working on an edition of the nine epigrams with a translation and commentary.

  25. As far as I am aware, this is its second edition. The first one was published by L. Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica en José de Villerías y Roel’, in Cultura clásica y cultura mexicana, Mexico, 1983. I. Osorio, ‘El helenismo en México’ (n. 23 above), p. 82 also printed Rojas’ text.

  26. The epigraph of this article comes from the beginning of the Castillian version known as Máscara. This Máscara, together with the first Latin Victor was published in 1721 by Francisco Rodríguez Lupercio. The book has been digitalized by the National Library of Mexico. The adjectae notae to this Victor are fundamental in reconstructing Villerías’ sources (see below, nn. 59 and 75).

  27. See L. Rojas and J. Quiñones, ‘Algunos poemitas de poetas griegos traducidos al latín por José de Villerias y Roelas’, Nova Tellus, 1, 1983, pp. 229–66. It would be necessary to conduct a specific study to determine the nature of Villerías’ sources in arranging his collection. From the 22 epigrams, 18 are not found in the Palatine Anthology. The first edition by R. F. P. Brunck was not published until 1772–1776 and later by F. Jacobs (1794, 1813–18172). A probable hypothesis is that Villerías had access to the Anthologia Planudea, of which at least three editions were available: J. Lascaris’ editio princeps (1494), A. Manutius’ edition (1503, reprinted in 1521 and 1530), and H. Estienne’s (1566). The four epigrams of Villerías that appear in the Palatina are also found in the Planudea (Villerías 9 = AP 5.94 = Pl VII.136; 10 = AP 7.524 = Pl IIIa 6.23; 15 =AP 7.3 = Pl IIIa 22.3; 22 = 10.84 = Pl Ia 13.10), whereas only three of the 18 epigrams not contained in the Palatina are present in the Planudea (13 = Pl IVa 11.4 [AP 16.155]; 16= Pl IVa 29.10 [AP 16.301]; 17 = Pl IVa 29.4 [AP 16.295]). It is quite likely that Villerías had various sources at hand, and that his own anthology does not necessarily derive only from one collection of epigrams. The first text (Luciani praefatio in Dialogos) is an interesting case because it is the sole epigram attributed to Lucian that has not been transmitted through either the Palatina or the Planudea. Many of Lucian’s epigrams were transmitted by both (9.367, 9.120, 9.74, 7.308, 6.18–20, 6.164, etc.), and four epigrams (16.154, 163, 164, and 238) come only from the Planudea (see B. Baldwin, ‘The Epigrams of Lucian’, Phoenix 29.4, 1975, pp. 311–35). Villerías could have read this epigram in one of Lucian’s editions that arrived in New Spain, many of which had this epigram as a preface of Lucian’s dialogues. A 1619 edition of Lucian (Loukianou Samosateoos apanta = Luciani Samosatensis opera omnia / Ioannes Benedictus, Medicinae Doctor, Salmurii: ex typis Petri Piededii) is preserved in the Biblioteca Palafoxiana of Puebla with the fire mark of El Colegio de San Juán. Another case is Villerías’ seventh epigram (Mimnermi de Venere = fr. 1.1–2 West), whose text coincides with Plutarch’s quotation of it (De virtute morali 445f), where Villerías could have read it.

  28. The contents of the manuscript are meticulously described in Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), pp. 383–407.

  29. Until now, we really do not know if the manuscript was written by Villerías. Some evidence, though not conclusive, suggests it could be a copy. In the section that transmits Guadalupe, there are a number of marginal corrections and some verses were crossed out. The corrections were presumably made by the same hand that wrote the text, see Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), pp. 201 and 383. Mistakes made in the Greek are emended in my version of the text.

  30. The MS reads μαρίαμ. One of the anonymous reviewers of this paper drew my attention to the fact that this form may not be an error of Villerías, but a deference to the Virgin’s Aramaic name. In the Septuagint, the indeclinable noun Μαριάμ is used when translating the Hebrew name מִרְיָם (Myriam) to call the prophetess Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron. In the New Testament both forms, Μαριάμ and Μαρία are used to name several women (the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, among others).

  31. The expression πᾶς δῆμος is used in Homer (Ilias 20.166, Odyssea 16.114, 21.17) and in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (271). Here it refers to the entire social spectrum of Mexico’s colonial reality: the peninsulares, the criollos, and the indigenous people. The adjective φαιδρός, that literally means brilliant, beaming, dazzling and, therefore, cheerful, recalls Maccabees IV.13.

  32. The emphatic particle γε with the exclamatory sense (Cf. J. D. Denniston, The Greek Particles, Oxford, 1934 [19542], pp. 126–8) allows the completion of the hexameter lacking one syllable. Since Plato the position of this particle placed before the subject addressed in vocative is common.

  33. The verb ψάλλω in the Septuagint means ‘sing the music of the harps’ (Psalms 7.18) and in the New Testament assumes the sense of ‘sing a hymn in honour of God’ (Romans 15.9, Corinthians 14.15, Ephesians 5.19). Cf. J. H. Thayer, A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament, New York, 1889. The verb is frequently used by Christian writers like John of Damascus, Eusebius and John Chrysostom.

  34. It is interesting to stress Villerías’ playful use of this adjective, taking into account his interest in Greek dialects (see below p. 19, n. 79). As will become apparent, the diction of this poem is not particularly Attic, but koine and biblical, mixed with Homeric Greek. The noun ἔπεα is not an Attic form, so that the words Villerías calls ‘Attic’ are not Attic at all. I thank the anonymous reviewer who drew my attention to this.

  35. The adverb ἱλαρῶς echoes Job 22.26, and it is frequently used in Christian authors. In classical literature, it is often found in Plutarch. The adjective ἱλαρός in Corinthians II 9.7 describes someone who is cheerfully inclined to God.

  36. The verb θαρσεῖν is used in the Septuagint in summons in which men are conscious of Yahweh’s willingness to help them (Moses in Exodus 14.13 and 20.20 addresses the people of Israel saying θαρσεῖτε) or in messages that God himself directs to men in which he says θαρσεῖτε (Zechariah 8.13 and 8.15).

  37. The verb φεύγω is common in the New Testament with the meaning of ‘seek safety by flight’ or ‘to escape safe out of danger’ (Thayer, A Greek English Lexicon [n. 33 above]). The Virgin protects Mexican people from dangers and perils.

  38. The manuscript reads πίση. Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica’ (n. 25 above) corrected it with πιστή and translated it as ‘confiable’ (‘eres confiable para ahuyentar la cólera de la enorme laguna’). I think we can conjecture the verbal form πίσῃ (middle future 2nd singular or aorist subjunctive 3rd singular of πιπίσκω), which is a causal form of πίνω (to drink) and makes good sense in the context. The Mexican water (or the Virgin herself, if it is a 2nd person) absorbs the anger of the lake, that is, it gives course to the negative currents of plague, disease, and floods, channelling them into a beneficial track. Although it is a verb attested in classical Greek (Pindar Isthmian 6.74, Hippocrates, Mul. 1.59 and 1.63, Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea 1111a14), this is an uncommon verbal form. The future tense seems a little bit odd and the subjunctive aorist with eventual sense seems syntactically difficult to justify here, although it would give some symmetrical balance with the other subjunctive forms of verse 1 and 8 (ψάλλῃ and ᾄδῃ).

  39. The verb κηρύττω is very common in the New Testament and refers to the act of proclaiming a message as a herald. In particular, it is used to talk about the public proclamations of the gospel made by the apostles, see Thayer, A Greek English Lexicon (n. 33 above). Villerías is summoning all people to elevate Guadalupe to the dignity of the Gospels.

  40. 7 elegiac couplets written in Latin which contain a mnemotechnic and didactic game for learning the contractions of the Greek vowels have been preserved in the manuscript (fols. 67r– 67v).

  41. See Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), pp. 12–13.

  42. A wide outlook of the Greek language in New Spain can be found in Osorio, ‘El helenismo en México’ (n. 23 above). Osorio emphasized how the situation of Greek in Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (deeply related to the confrontation between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation) determined the meagre knowledge of Greek language, culture, and literature in Mexico. The triumph of the Counter-Reformation in Spain, with all its scholastic traditionalism, condemned the Hellenists to the inquisition (ibid., p. 67). It seems that was the reason why Greek was not taught in New Spain during the 16th century, either in New Spanish colleges or in the convents.

  43. Beristáin also has an entry on him in his Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional vol. 2, Mexico, 1819, where he says that Galvez y Escalona was the author of ‘Tres artes para aprender las lenguas Griega, Hebrea y Siriaca’ (‘three grammars to learn Greek, Hebrew and Syriac Languages’).

  44. See Osorio, ‘El helenismo en México’ (n. 23 above), p. 81.

  45. The third epigram is dedicated to the grave of Francisca Cervantes (of whom I was not able to find information); the fourth is dedicated to Pedro Ramírez (Πέτρον Ῥαμίριον) that could be identified with Pedro Ramírez del Castillo of whom Beristáin said (Bibliotheca vol. 3 [n. 9 above], p. 7) he was doctor and professor of philosophy and rhetoric in the Seminario tridentino of Mexico and dean of the University twice; the fifth is devoted to Juan Antonio Segura y Troncoso (see n. 9 above). See Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica’ (n. 25 above), pp. 278–81; and Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), pp. 72–5.

  46. Flores mentions Homer, Callimachus, the tragedians, comedians, Demosthenes and Aeschines. See G. Méndez Plancarte, El humanismo mexicano, Mexico, 1970, pp. 95–112.

  47. Ibid., p. 122.

  48. According to Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), p. 71 here is preserved a Greek epigram of Villerías. Until now, I have not been able to find this manuscript.

  49. Γραμματική τῆς γλώσσης ἑλληνικῆς ἐν τῇ διαλέκτω ἰβηρικῆ o Gramática de la lengua griega en idioma español, Lyon, Florian Anisson, see Osorio, ‘El helenismo en México’ (n. 23 above), pp. 76–9. See n. 76 below.

  50. See ibid., p. 79.

  51. A copy of this grammar nowadays can be found in the library of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística of Mexico City.

  52. Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica’ (n. 25 above), p. 277 proposed the integration of the noun ἀποκοπῆ, which is obviously unmetrical.

  53. See J. P. Lange, Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scripture. An Exegetical and Doctrinal Commentary. Volume I. Genesis–Ruth, ed. P. Schaff, Delaware, 2014, commentary ad locum.

  54. See New Pauly Online, sv. Apopompé: ‘The expulsion of a misfortune usually interpreted as demonic (sickness, fever, epilepsy, damage to land and living creatures)’.

  55. See Alcaeus frs. 6 and 208 Voigt, Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes 64, and 758, Eumenides 832, etc.

  56. The constant presence of Horace Carm. 1.14 in the early modern period was due to Quintilian’s celebrated discussion in Institutio 8.6. I thank the anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this.

  57. C. G. Montefiore, ‘A Tentative Catalogue of Biblical Metaphors’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 3, 4, 1891, pp. 623–81 (636).

  58. The plague of Cocolixtle is a very important narrative element of the poem Guadalupe. The first part of book three (vv. 1–124) describes the place in which this disease lives and how Pluto and Tonantzin conspired with him, personified, to infect Bernardino, Juan Diego’s uncle.

  59. It is likely that Villerías read the Homeric poems in Greek, see Osorio, El sueño criollo (n. 9 above), p. 78. In the footnotes to the Victor, he quotes Homer in Greek (see below).

  60. See M. L. West, The East Face of the Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford, 1997, p. 97.

  61. G. A. Chamberlain, The Greek of the Septuagint. A Supplemental Lexicon, Peabody MA, 2011, p. 112.

  62. The image of the liquid wrath of God is also found in Romans’ (9:20–4) metaphor of wrath as a liquid substance contained in a pot, see J. A. Doole, ‘Liquid Mercy, Liquid Wrath? God’s Empty Pots in Romans 9’, Zeitschrift für katolische Theologie, 138, 3–4, 2016, pp. 331–47.

  63. The adjective μέξικον is used in del Castillo’s Greek grammar, in the chapter devoted to the syntactic government of some adverbs ([n. 49 above], p. 479, §647: ἴδε μέξικον). In p. 433, §573 the adverb μεξικωισί is referred, together with ἑβραϊστί and ἑλληνιστί. It seems that this grammar was made with the aim of encouraging its Mexican readers to write in Greek.

  64. In obitum Ludovici Primi Hispaniarum Regis. Elegia, vv. 15–18 (Fol. 113v of the MS 1594).

  65. In the New Testament, and particularly, again, in the Book of Revelation, ὕδωρ can be used figuratively in the sense of ‘people’ (Revelations 17:1 and 17:15, see Thayer, A Greek English Lexicon [n. 33 above]).

  66. The dyke was constructed under the governments of Moctezuma I and Nezahualcoyotl and later extended at the end of the 15th century under the rule of Ahuitzotl. It is mentioned in the Crónica Mexicayotl of Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica mexicana (1598), Mexico, 1944, chapt. 80, pp. 384–5, and also by Friar Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana I (1615), comp. M. León Portilla, Mexico, 1975, book 2.47, p. 219 and 2.67, p. 265, among others. See C. Gibson, Los aztecas bajo el dominio español, Mexico, 1967, p. 241, n. 88. Francisco Xavier Clavijero also talked about the dyke, see F. X. Clavijero, Historia antigua de México y su conquista (1780), Mexico, 1987, Book 4, chapter on Mexico’s flooding.

  67. In the Septuagint the word χάος is only used twice, in Micah (1:6) and Zechariah (14:4), and in both cases it translates the same Hebrew word (גיא = gáy) which means ‘a great valley’, ‘gorge’, or ‘ravine’. The translation was probably due to homophonic reasons; see P. Walters, The Text of the Septuagint. Its Corruptions and their Emendation, ed. D. W. Gooding, Cambridge, 1973, p. 189 and G. B. Caird, ‘Homoeophony in the Septuagint’, in Jews, Greeks, and Christians. Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity, ed. R. Hamerton Kelly, Leiden, 1976, pp. 74–88 (86). The noun χάος is not used in the New Testament, although it can be found in Jerome’s Vulgata (chaos), particularly in Luke 16.26, where the Greek original text says χάσμα (‘chasm, gulf’).

  68. Villerías substitutes the biblical σύγχυσις of Genesis with the pagan χάος. This meaning, empowered by the original Greek sense of ‘formless matter’, is already reported in the first dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, which was published in 1726 (two years before Villerías’ death). The first time the voice ‘chaos’ appears in a Spanish dictionary is in 1611, see Sebastián de Covarrubias, Suplemento al Thesoro de la lengua castellana. Here, verses 1.5–8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are quoted and immediately after that is written: ‘Todo esto es mentira y como nos informa el verdadero conocimiento de Dios de la Fé catholica (…)’ (‘all this is a lie and, as the true knowledge of God and catholic faith informs us…’) and cites Genesis. The fact that the dictionary explicitly says that Ovid’s verses are a lie is evidence of how the Spanish sense of ‘chaos’ was adopted from Catholic imagery.

  69. J Lust, E. Eynikel and K. Hauspie, A Greek English Lexicon of the Septuagint, Stuttgart, 2003.

  70. Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica’ (n. 25 above), pp. 280–81, and Osorio Romero (El sueño criollo, [n. 9 above], p 74) printed this epigram. Both emphasized briefly the presence of the Bible and Homer in these verses.

  71. The manuscript reads γαλὰ and μελὶ with the oxytone accent and the late verbal form ἤκουκα, only used in grammarians as Aelius Herodianus, Theodosius of Alexandria, and Choeroboscus (not in the Bible). The use of this form may be due to metrical reasons (Homer never uses ἀκούω in the perfect tense), but I find more plausible to correct it with the aorist form. Another possibility is that Villerías had regularized the verbal paradigm forgetting the irregular perfect form of ἀκούω. The manuscript reads δίδακτε with proparoxytone accent.

  72. It is important to note that the copyist was familiar with the principal ligatures using them in καὶ, τοῦτο, and στόματος (σόματος), pace L. Rojas, ‘Cultura clásica’ (n. 25 above), p. 281, n. 21, who says: ‘la grafía incompleta en καὶ (…)’.

  73. Exodus (3:8, 3:17, 13:5, 33:3), Leviticus (20:24), Numbers (13:28, 14:8, 16:13, 16:14), Deuteronomium (6:3, 11:9, 26:9, 26:15, 27:3, 31:20), Joshua (5:6), Jeremiah (11:5, 32:22), and Ezekiel (20:6, 2:15).

  74. The Latin text is a panegyric where the virtues of the laudandus (I assumed Fray Joseph de las Heras) are listed. Among these Villerías says (vv. 187–8): ac verbiis Pylii dedit alma loquentis/ mella senis (…). In the footnote Villerías comments the phrase mella senis and quotes this verse from Homer.

  75. The doric pronoun ἐμεῦ is very interesting because it is given as an example of the Doric dialect in the chapter devoted to the dialectal forms of the pronouns of del Castillo’s Greek grammar ([n. 49 above], p. 160, §186). It is highly likely that Villerías took it precisely from there, although Homer uses it several times, which does not provide evidence for considering a Doric form. The grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus said that it is a common form both to Ionic and Doric Greek. (<Ἐμεῦ>. κοινὴ Ἰώνων καὶ Δωριέων).

  76. The adjective χαῦνος, again, is not used in the New Testament. In the Septuagint, it only appears in the Book of Wisdom (2:3). In classical literature, the adjective is not Homeric, but Pindar uses it (Pythian 2.61, Nemean 8.45).

  77. Unlike the usual dialect for the elegiac genre, which is the Ionic-Attic, in the epigrammatic tradition it is not rare to find Doric compositions. See. E. Bowie, ‘Doing Doric’, in Dialect, Diction, and Style in Greek Literary and Inscribed Epigram, ed. E. Sistakou and A. Rengakos, Berlin–Boston, 2016, pp. 3–22.

  78. He translated into Latin the Byzantine treatise titled De dialectis linguae Graecae written by Gregory of Corinth (known as Corinthius).

  79. Oxford Classical Dictionary (vol. II), pp. 1591–2.

  80. See V. Flores Militello, Tali dignus amico. Die Darstellung des patronus-cliens-Verhältnisses bei Horaz Martial und Juvenal, München, 2019, p. 118, n. 40.

  81. M. de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. F. Rico (RAE and ASALE), Madrid, 2004, p. 9.

  82. In the Septuagint, fire and light can be symbols of God’s glory (Psalms 27:1, Isaiah 60:2, Jer. 13:16). See Montefiore, ‘A Tentative Catalogue’ (n. 57 above), p. 649, and Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 16, ed. C. Helmer, S. L. McKenzie, T. Römer, J. Schröter, B. Dov Walfish and E. Ziolkowski, Berlin, 2018, s.v. ‘Light and darkness’, p. 571. Interestingly, Homer does not develop in detail the metaphor of light as fame and glory, focussing more on the figurative senses of ‘salvation’, ‘help’, ‘pride’, or ‘comfort’.

  83. καὶ οὐκ ἔσται σοι ἔτι ὁ ἥλιος εἰς φῶς ἡμέρας, οὐδὲ ἀνατολὴ σελήνης φωτιεῖ σου τὴν νύκτα, ἀλλ᾿ ἔσται σοι Κύριος φῶς αἰώνιον καὶ ὁ Θεὸς δόξα σου.

  84. καὶ οὐχ ἡμέρα καὶ οὐ νύξ καὶ πρὸς ἑσπέραν ἔσται φῶς.

  85. D. Tarrant, ‘Greek Metaphors of light’, Classical Quarterly, 10, 2, pp. 181–7 (182).

  86. We have evidence of the circulation of Pindar’s poetry in New Spain since the sixteenth century. A copy of the Enarrationes Loniceri (Lonicerus, Ioannes, Pindari poetae vetustissimi, lyricorum facile principis, Olympia, Pythia, Nemea, Isthmia. Basileae, 1535) is preserved in the Biblioteca Palafoxiana of Puebla. In the section of the manuscript that contains Villerías’ Latin translations of some Greek poems, there is one attributed to Pindar (probably spurious), which is an epitaph to Hesiod (fol. 89v). This could speak in favour of Villerías’ interest in Pindar.

  87. The fragment can be interpreted in a meteorological sense as a statement on the sun’s powerful brightness that surpasses all the other heavenly bodies (M. Marcovich, Heraclitus. Greek text with a short commentary, Merida, 1967, pp. 325–6), and on the way in which the sun, because of its brightness, causes the diurnal disappearance of the stars.

  88. Several sixteenth-century Latin translations of Plutarch’s Moralia are preserved in Mexican libraries. In W. Xylander’s Latin translations of the Moralia, Villerías could have read Heraclitus’ dictum. The passage from De fortuna (καὶ ὥσπερ ἡλίου μὴ ὄντος ἕνεκα τῶν ἄλλων ἄστρων εὐφρόνην ἂν ἤγομεν) is rendered: Et sicut sole sublato, quod ad reliqua sidera attinet, perpetua haberemus noctem (…) And the quotation from the aqua an ignis… (εἰ μὴ ἥλιος ἦν, εὐφρόνη ἂν ἦν·) is translated like this: si sole caveremus, noctem nobis futura perpetuam. In the Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa of Oaxaca, although from the 19th century, there is a Greek edition of Plutarch’s Moralia in six volumes (Plutarchi chaeronensis varia scripta quae moralia vulgo vocantur, Lipsiae: sumtibus et typis Caroli Tauchnitii, 1829). As regards Clement of Alexandria, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana of Puebla preserves a copy of the 1616 bilingual edition by Heinsius (Κλημέντος Ἀλεχανδρέως τὰ εὑρισκόμενα. Clementis Alexandrini Opera Graece et Latine quae extant, Lugduni Batavorum: excudit Ioannes Patius, 1616) as well as another copy of the same edition printed in 1688. In Heinsius’ edition Heraclitus’ fragment (ἡλίου μὴ ὄντος ἕνεκα τῶν ἄλλων ἄστρων νὺξ ἂν ἦν τὰ πάντα) is rendered in Latin: absente sole per caetera quidem astra nox essset ubique diffusa.

  89. Macrob. In somn. Scip. I 20.3 and M. Ficino de sole 6. In the National Library of Mexico, there are two volumes of a 1576 edition of Marsilio Ficino’s opera (Basilea: Henricpetrina) and a 1670 edition of Macrobius (Leiden: Arnold Doude Cornelius Driehvysen). Although I could not find evidence of Henri Estienne’s Poesis Philosophica (1573) in New Spain, I think some copies of it could have been in circulation. One volume of Estienne’s Θησαυρός τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς γλώσσης (1572) is preserved in the Jesuit old repository José Gutiérrez Casillas of the Library Eusebio F. Kino in Mexico City. This fragment is quoted In Estienne’s (1573) chapter on Heraclitus (in a slightly different reconstruction).

  90. Famously expressed also in fr. B57, apropos Hesiod’s ignorance of the unity underlying day and night.

  91. I. A. Leonard, Books of the Brave. Being an Account of Books and Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth–Century New World, Berkeley–Los Angeles–Oxford, 1949 (19922), p. 184.

  92. Although the drawing lacks one of the elements (the subscriptio) that constitute the triplex canonical emblem, it is clearly an emblem. On the relationship between emblematic and philological practices and the ideological function of the emblem as a tool to articulate and question power, see B. J. Nelson, ‘Philology and the Emblem’, in Philology and its Histories, ed. S. Gurd, Columbus, 2010, pp. 107–26.

  93. Martial Epigrammata 9, Praefatio: Maiores maiora sonent, mihi parua locuto/sufficit in uestras saepe redire manus. Nebrija: Maiores ad maiora petant, mihi parua secuto/ sufficiat pueris prima elementa dare. See F. González Vega, ‘Non esse parua sine quibus magna constare non possunt: la pequeña grandeza de la gramática según Antonio de Nebrija (y Erasmo)’, Studia Philologica Valentina, 13, 10, 2011, pp. 281–95 (290), and ‘Poesía de la imagen y representación del tiempo. Unos poemas inéditos de Nebrija’, Minerva, 24, 2011, pp. 31–57 (45). I thank K. C. Harloe for drawing my attention to the opening of Virgil, Eclogue IV (Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!), which is an interesting intertext of this emblem’s motto.

  94. See González Vega, ‘Non esse parua’ (n. 94 above).

  95. On the contrast and juxtaposition between the large and the small throughout the poem, see R. F. Thomas, Virgil, Georgics. Volume 2: Books III–IV, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 147–8.

  96. Since Aristotle (Historia Animalium 488a), bees, together with wasps, ants, and humans, are animals worthy of being called πολιτικά because they act towards a common interest (κοινὸν ἔργον).

  97. As indicated by Thomas, Virgil (n. 96 above), pp. 148–9, the use of the adjective tenuis recalls the Callimachean proverbial λεπτότης.

  98. On the political significance of Virgil’s bees in this poem as paradigm and model ‘of the moral and political renewal of Rome’ (C. G. Perkell, ‘A Reding of Virgil’s Fourth Georgic’, Phoenix 32.3, 1978, pp. 211–21 [212]), see H. Dahlmann, Der Bienenstaat in Vergils Georgica, Mayence, 1954 (I could only read the compte rendu of A. Grisart, ‘Compte rendu of Dahlmann, H. [1954], Der Bienenstaat in Vergils Georgica, Mayence, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur’, Latomus 14, 2, 1955, pp. 317–8), and the critical remarks of Perkell, who thinks that ‘the bees are too flawed to represent a moral or social ideal for human beings’ (Perkell, ‘A Reding of Virgil’s Fourth Georgic’ [above], p. 212; for bibliography see n. 6). Another political interpretation of the poem is J. Griffin’s ‘The Fourth Georgic, Virgil, and Rome’, Greece and Rome, 26, 1, 1979, pp. 61–80, who stresses the fact that Virgil omits any relationship between bees and poetry in the fourth Georgic, which would be a way to connect the bee’s virtues with the mores antiqui.

  99. See El mundo simbólico. Serpientes y animales venenosos. Los insectos (1681), trad. R. Lucas González and E. Gómez Blanco, México, 1999, book VIII.2: Insecta, Araneus. Picinelli’s treatise had a wide presence in New Spain, particularly in priestly circles where it was used in the religious oratory (see C. Herrejón Peredo, ‘La presencia de Picinelli en Nueva España’, in Los cuerpos celestes. Libro I (El mundo simbólico), trad. E. Gómez Bravo, México, 1997, pp. 47–63.

  100. As can be observed, the emblematic symbolism of the spider and the bee was widely diffused in the collections of emblems of the 16th and 17th centuries. Important information about the status of emblematic and symbolic literature in the eighteenth century can be found in L. Volkmann, Hieroglyph, Emblem, and Renaissance Pictography, trans. R. Raybould, Leiden–Boston, 2018, chapter 4, ‘Resonances from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ and Appendix: ‘Hieroglyphs and Emblems in Printers and Publishers Marks (Signeten)’.

  101. Villerias’ close reading of the fourth Georgic is evident thanks to some intertextual relations between it and Guadalupe (particularly in the second book): Guad. 2.20 = Georg. 4.124; Guad. 2.112 = Georg. 4.4; Guad. 2.285= 4.208; Guad. 3.266 = Georg. 4.27. I took the references from Osorio’s edition.

  102. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper for calling my attention into this. It is well known that within his famous satire The Battle of the Books, which is part of the Prolegomena of his Oeuvre A Tale of a Tub (1704 = Oxford, 1999), Jonathan Swift composed a fable of a spider and a bee that is an allegorical satire of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. The spider represents the moderns and, in particular, the modern conception of poetics that, like a cobweb, is made of arachnid substance and dirt and that builds complex architectural systems giving poison to its enemies. The bee, the symbol of ancient poetics, master of honey and wax, takes its poetic matter from nature and pollinates flowers. On the relationship of this fable to Swift’s critical opinion about poetic inspiration, see C. H. Hinnant, ‘The “Fable of the Spider and the Bee” and Swift’s Poetics of Inspiration’, Colby Library Quarterly, 20, 3, 1984, pp. 129–36, who interprets the fable in relation to Francis Bacon’s criterion for judging scientific discovery.

  103. Ovid’s scholars agree on interpreting Minerva’s and Arachne’s ekphrases as metapoetic representations of his Metamorphoses. Although Ovid seems to align more with Arachne’s tapestry than with Minerva’s, the contrast of both is meaningful to understand Ovidian art. See P. Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, Cambridge, 2002, p. 177 and n. 13; C. Martindale, ‘Reception’, in A Companion to the Classical Tradition (n. 3 above), p. 308; and B. Pavlock, The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Madison, 2009, pp. 4–6.

  104. Ovid’s presence (not only the Metamorphoses but also the Fasti) in the Latin poem Guadalupe is conspicuous.

  105. Villerias’ manifold intertextual borrowings from Latin poetry in Guadalupe fit well to the Senecan eclectic poetics.

  106. I take the concept of ‘topography of situatedness’ from The Postclassicisms Collective (n. 2 above), p. 149. They understand situatedness as ‘the contingent dynamics of relationality that inform and structure the object of knowing’ (ibid., p. 157).

  107. Interview of July 22, 1999 done in Chenalhó to a Displaced Woman of Las Abejas presented by M. Tavanti, Las Abejas. Pacifist Resistance and Syncretic Identities in a Globalizing Chiapas, New York, 2013, pp. 4–5.

  108. Interview of July 22, 1999 done in Chenalhó by ibid., p. 5.

  109. The rebellion was related by Fray Gabriel de Artiga, provincial superior of the Dominican order; his text is gathered by Francisco Jiménez’ Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, vol. 3 (1715–1720 unpublished), Guatemala, 1931, book 6. The text and all other pertinent documents (among them the declarations of two indigenous leaders after their arrest) can be found in J. de Vos, La guerra de las dos vírgenes: La rebelión de los Zendales (Chiapas 1712), documentada, recordada, recreada, Mérida, 2011. On this rebellion much has been written. See, among others, R. Wasserstrom, ‘Ethnic Violence and Indigenous Protest: The Tzeltal (Maya) Rebellion of 1712’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12, 1, 1980, pp. 1–19; V. Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King. The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual, Austin, 1981, pp. 55–69; K. Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Tzeltal Revolt of 1712, Tucson, 1992; J. P Viqueira, Indios rebeldes e idólatras: Dos ensayos históricos sobre la rebelión india de Cancuc, Chiapas, acaecida en el año de 1712, Mexico, 1997; ‘Causas de una rebelión india: Chiapas, 1712’, in Chiapas, los rumbos de otra historia, ed. J. P. Viqueira and M. H. Ruz Sosa, Mexico, 2004; and ‘Una memoria en disputa: Cancuc tras la rebelión de 1712’, in Espacios y patrimonios, ed. N. Sigaut, Murcia, 2009; also L. G. Rivera Acosta, ‘Cosmovisión y religiosidad entre ‘los soldados de la virgen. La rebelión maya de 1712’, Estudios Mesoamericanos, 7, 13, 2012, pp. 59–65.

  110. ‘Of the thirty-two towns that participated in the revolt, Tzotzil was the language of fifteen, Tzeltal was the language of fourteen, and Chol was spoken in the remaining three. In other words, approximately equal numbers of Tzotzil and Tzeltal towns participated in the so-called Tzeltal Revolt’ (Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ (n. 110 above), p. 61).

  111. On the causes of the rebellion, see Viqueira, ‘Una memoria en disputa’ (n. 110 above).

  112. Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ (n. 110 above), p. 63.

  113. N. Quezada, ‘La virgen de Cancuc’, Tlalocan 9, 1982, pp. 303–12, presented a document found in the AGN that contains an inquisition expedient dated 1743 where the proliferation of stamps with the image of the Virgin of Cancuc in Chiapas is reported, a fact that terrified the authorities due to the subversive power that this Virgin had proved in the past.

  114. More about María Candelaria can be found in J. P Viqueira, María de la Candelaria, india natural de Cancuc, Mexico, 1993.

  115. The phrase is reported by Jiménez, Historia de la provincia (n. 110 above), p. 271.

  116. A complete description of all the miracles and apparitions are described in Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ (n. 110 above).

  117. See A. Porro, ‘Un nuevo caso de milenarismo maya en Chiapas y Tabasco, México, 1727’, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 6, 1978, pp. 109–17.

  118. On the complex competitive relations and rivalry between the different prodigious images of other virgins and of other cults (the Wholy Trinity, the Apostle Peter, etc.) and the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe (the Virgen de Ocotlán, de la Luz, de San Juan de los Lagos, de Macana, de los Remedios, del Carmen, de los Dolores, among others), see Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe (n. 16 above), chapter 6, especially pp. 84–92.

  119. This investigation was supported by the research project UNAM-PAPIIT <IN402122>. I thank Professors Rosa Andújar, Claudio García Ehrenfeld, Ana Laura Zavala, and Leonor Hernández Oñate for their many useful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Contact, Colonialism, and Comparison” Conference. I would like to thank the organizers, Malina Buturovic, Kathleen Cruz, and Linda McNulty Pérez, and specially Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Joshua Hartman for their comments and remarks. I am thankful also to Professor K. C. Harloe for her exceptionally helpful reading of my text and for copy-editing it, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and constructive comments.

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This study was funded by UNAM-PAPIIT (Grant No.: IN402122).

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    Bernardo Berruecos Frank

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Berruecos Frank, B. Classical Traditions and Internal Colonialism in Early Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Text, Translation, and Notes on Three of Villerías’ Greek Epigrams.. Int class trad 29, 281–306 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-021-00609-z

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