Matthew Gorey, Wabash College
Within the field of early modern classical reception, Fray Antonio de Guevara occupies an unusual position. As the author of two wildly popular—and entirely fabricated—pseudo-biographical lives of Marcus Aurelius, the Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (1528) and its revised and expanded version, the Relox de príncipes (1529), Guevara was arguably the best-selling author of “classical” literature in the 16th century (Redondo 1976). Without taking into consideration his other commercially successful books on classical topics, the biographies of Marcus Aurelius alone were printed in over 200 editions over the course of the 1500s, and by 1617 they had been translated (in some cases multiple times) into German, French, English, Latin, Dutch, and Polish (Buescu 2009). Moreover, as both a Franciscan bishop and the official court chronicler to the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, Guevara was deeply involved in the politics of his day, and his engagement with classical antiquity often displayed a sharply critical attitude towards colonial domination and oppression (Rivero 2004).
In my paper, I will discuss a particularly famous pseudo-classical episode from Guevara’s Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio in which a German peasant from the Danube comes to the Roman senate and delivers a searing indictment of Roman imperialism before the emperor. After establishing the political implications of this scene, which Guevara’s contemporaries widely interpreted as an allegory for Spanish colonialism in the Americas (see, e.g., Lupher 2003, Laird 2015), I will trace how various translators and imitators handled this episode in the decades after the publication of the original Spanish text. I will show that with each new translation of (or homage to) this speech by the “peasant from the Danube,” beginning with Guevara’s own “translation” of the fictitious original Ancient Greek manuscript, authors around the world have repeatedly adapted the peasant’s critique to fit a variety of other colonial and imperial contexts, ranging from Portuguese India, to colonial Mexico, to the German states of the Holy Roman Empire.