Eat Thy Neighbour: What Can Cannibalism Teach Us About Reading Neo-Latin Texts?
At first sight, José Rodrigues de Melo’s 1781 De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus (“On the Agriculture of Brazil”) finds an easy analogue in Virgil’s Georgics. In the first two books, the reader is taught to sow, reap, and prepare manioc (cassava root); the third depicts the (secret) life of cows and the final one outlines tobacco production. These Arcadian scenes from the Brazilian countryside are nevertheless marred by underlying threats, most notably natives who have only just ceased practicing cannibalism (2.353–54). That cannibalism was abhorrent to early modern Europeans is apparent from its dual usage as both a marker of uncivility and justification for conquest: although the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) had given Isabella I of Spain free rein to “overthrow the barbarous nations” of the New World, she decreed in 1503 that no Indians were to be hurt or captured except “a certain people called ‘cannibals.’”
De Melo’s warning thus accords with his stated intention: to teach “ignaros…agricolas”, “naive farmers”, the hard truth about settling in Brazil (1.3–4). As translators, however, we were struck by his graphic excursus on cannibalism (2.283–352), which comes across as violent rather than didactic. Does De Melo draw inspiration — so we wonder — for his horrifying images from Classical or colonial sources? How does he adapt these sources to fit his pragmatism and ideology, and what can his writing process teach us about reading neo-Latin literature?
Chronological evidence would seem to guide us towards Classical sources, for De Melo’s poetry was published during what Andrew Laird (2014) dubs the “neo-Classical” era, the third out of four neo-Latin literary movements in the Americas. First among these is Renaissance Latin, exemplified in Brazil by José de Anchieta’s 1563 De gestis Mendi de Saa, an epic on the life and deeds of a local governor. This movement gave way to Baroque Latin, an ornate style popular in the seventeenth century. The representative Brazilian text from this period is António Vieira’s Clavis Prophetarum (left incomplete upon the author’s death in 1697), an eschatological treatise on the return of Christ. By the time De Melo published the De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus, neo-Classicism was in full swing; in the previous year, Prudêncio do Amaral had completed a cognate work on sugarcane, the De Sacchari Opifico Carmen (1780). These poems, however, constitute the “final flourish” of Brazilian neo-Classicism (Coroleu and Fouto (2015)). By the early nineteenth century, public taste had turned towards non-fiction works — which Laird simply terms “Modern Latin” — describing a range of subjects from anthropology and linguistics to natural phenomena such as Johann Baptist Emanuel Pohl’s botanical compendium Plantarum Brasiliae icones et descriptiones hactenus ineditae (1827).
Despite being rooted in neo-Classicism, however, De Melo does not borrow from Classical sources on cannibalism, such as Herodotus’ archetypal account of the Issedones’ funerary customs:
ἐπεὰν ἀνδρὶ ἀποθάνῃ πατήρ, οἱ προσήκοντες πάντες προσάγουσι πρόβατα, καὶ ἔπειτα ταῦτα θύσαντες καὶ καταταμόντες τὰ κρέα κατατάμνουσι καὶ τὸν τοῦ δεκομένου τεθνεῶτα γονέα, ἀναμίξαντες δὲ πάντα τὰ κρέα δαῖτα προτίθενται· (4.26)
Whenever a man’s father dies, all the nearest of kin bring beasts of the flock, and having killed these and cut up the flesh they cut up also the dead father of their host, and set out all the flesh mingled together for a feast.
Herodotus’ account portrays endocannibalism, the eating of members belonging to one’s own group, as well as mortuary cannibalism: the patriarch is consumed respectfully as part of his funeral. In contrast, De Melo’s poem features exocannibalism, for the menu consists of non-family members: “bello captos…hostes,” “prisoners of war” (2.285). Nor are these victims ingested out of reverence; on the contrary, they are fattened for the kill in a process so dehumanising that De Melo metaphorically compares them to farm hogs:
Atque saginandos mandarent matribus, aevo
Provectis. Illae inclusos in carcere tetro
Nutribant, in hara veluti cum villica pascit,
Procuratque suem siliquis et furfure, donec
Pinguescat […] (De Melo 2.286–92)
They send them to the old matrons for force-feeding. These women feed the captives in their foul prison, just as farmers’ wives feed pigs in their enclosures with pods and bran until the beasts grow fat.
These differences were deliberate, for the Jesuits not only read but also esteemed Herodotus’ works; a fellow priest, Jean Hardouin, theorised in his Prolegomena Ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum (1729) that all works of Classical literature — except Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, and selected works by Pliny, Vergil, and Horace — were medieval fabrications. The model behind De Melo’s description of cannibalism might therefore not be sought in the Old World, for he instead draws upon New World material in the form of epistles by fellow Jesuit missionaries such as Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–70). De Melo directly borrows the metaphor of force-fed swine (2.286–92, as cited above). What is more, details of how the victim is led to his death “bound around his waist with a rather long rope” (“cincta latus fune oblongo”, 2.306) are lifted wholly from another line in da Nóbrega’s 1549 account. In addition, De Melo does not limit himself to a single colonial intertext, but also supports José de Anchieta’s 1554 claim that the natives fuel their cannibalistic orgies with “copious libation[s] of wines which they make from roots” by adding “dirty jars of Brazilian wine” (“dolia vini sordida Brasilici,” 2.345–52) to his description.
These similarities should not, however, encourage the impression that De Melo merely synthesizes colonial missives into verse. On the contrary, he actively adapts his historical intertexts for both practical and ideological reasons. Da Nóbrega could mention sex without attracting scandal due to his matter-of-fact style, but De Melo’s poetic fantasies could easily have been misconstrued in a more salacious manner. In particular, he omits Da Nóbrega’s observation that the captive whilst prepared for sacrifice is “given the daughter of the chief man or whoever most pleases him.” Nor does the polygamy implied in another of Da Nóbrega’s letters make its way into the De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus. In De Melo’s text, therefore, not “daughters” but rather “anus,” “old women,” force-feed the captive and dance nude in his death-procession; on account of their advanced age, their “indecent breasts” come across as grotesque rather than titillating (2.309–13). De Melo likely excluded these details to bypass the strict guidelines of Jesuit censors, who, as Jacqueline Glomski (2015) notes, customarily redacted or even rejected prurient manuscripts. His edits were thus also motivated by Catholic ideology, which condemns overtly erotic literature for providing “occasions of sin.”
This delicate negotiation of the licit and the illicit offers us a valuable lesson about reading neo-Latin literature in general. We are too often tempted to characterize early modern works as cut-price Classical imitations; a 1940 editor thus printed the De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus along with do Amaral’s poem as the “Brazilian Georgics.” However, De Melo’s poem is far from merely derivative: he moves away from classical models in favor of Jesuit accounts and excises sexual material because of practical and ideological concerns. This fits with Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie’s observations that “reception and authorship are not antithetical” (2015). As such, the texts of De Melo and his fellow neo-Latin authors should not be read as static artifacts belonging solely to either the Classical or colonial age: rather, they transcend time by harnessing shared historical intertexts to express contemporary anxieties and identities.
Martin Dinter is Senior Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at King’s College, London. Astrid Khoo is an undergraduate at King’s College, London. They have collaborated before.
