Classical Tradition and the Alterity of the New World in Peter Martyr’s Letters to Pomponius Laetus

Peter Martyr of Anghiera has always been classified as a humanist, but more recently as an ‘anthropologist’, due to the originality of his thought and the novelty of his position on various aspects of history and culture of his time and on humankind. Both in De Orbe Novo Decades (1530) and in the Opus Epistolarum (1488-1525) a ‘New Humanism’ comes to light, which sees in the novelty of the encounter with the ‘Other’ a way to reconsider the traditional canons of human values.

The first reports of Columbus’ voyages were received by European humanists with enthusiasm, as evidenced by the lively correspondence between Peter Martyr and his friend and former teacher of Classics, Pomponius Laetus. The Opus Epistolarum is a work of extraordinary historical value and the dialogue with Pomponius Laetus gives Peter Martyr the opportunity to share his first impressions on the never visited New World with his friend. This paper aims to analyze the content of the first letters (from 1494 to 1499) between the two Italian humanists, in which classical tradition and disquisition on alterity are the central themes, and to discuss their first reactions after the discovery of the New World.

In the selected letters it will already be possible to detect Peter Martyr’s historical method, anthropological approach, and philosophy of history (providentialism) of the Decades. It will be discussed: i) the way Peter Martyr writes about native inhabitants’ traditions and myths, reworking on travel reports; ii) how his educational background, imbued with classical and Christian tradition, affects his considerations on the ‘new’ people. Moreover, he makes use of analogy in comparing the unaffected simplicity of the native inhabitants with the simplicity of the ancients, and in exalting the positive values of ‘new’ peoples, he recognizes equal dignity for all men, in a dialogue where the classical tradition meets the Christian one. Analogy and imagery of the classical myth (e.g. the ‘Golden Age’) and the ancient Greco-Roman world were widely used in antiquity to reconstruct lost ‘prehistories’ (e.g. Peter Martyr recalls the mythical Laestrygonians, to make his readers not surprised by the presence of cannibals in the New World), and Peter Martyr’s ethnographic narration finds its deepest roots in classical authors (Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Sallust, Virgil, Livy, Pliny the Elder, Seneca).