Ovid, Etiquette, and the Uses of Latin Poetry in Colonial Mexico City

Carl P. Springer (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville)

This paper takes a close look at one of the very earliest editions of Ovid's poetry to be published in the Americas. In 1577, just a few decades after the introduction of printing in Mexico City, Antonio Ricardo, a printer from Torino, published this volume of poems for students at the Colegio Máximo of San Pedro and San Pablo.

While the works of the pagan poet Ovid come first in this volume, there can be no doubt that this is a Christian book. It also contains the "most elegant" poems of Gregory Nazianzus, translated from Greek into Latin, along with one of the hymns of the famous Christian Latin poet, Sedulius, Cantemus socii, Domino. The frontispiece includes an emblem that features the name of Jesus, suggesting strongly its Christian character in general and its association with the Society of Jesus in particular.

The prominent position of Ovid in a volume of poetry that carries the imprimatur of the "Archiepiscopus Mexicanus" probably has more to do with the content of the specific Ovidian poems printed here, namely, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, than with an attachment to Ovid's poetry in general. No doubt, early European colonizers in Mexico, especially those with strong attachments to the Roman Catholic church, could easily understand the longing of the exiled Ovid for the civilized comforts of Rome. It would have been harder to justify the inclusion, one suspects, of the Ars Amatoria in a book of this sort.

In addition to the Ovidian poems and the explicitly Christian poetry, the volume also includes Joannes Sulpicius Verulanus, De moribus in mensa servandis, as well as a short, anonymous, poem addressed Ad iuventutem that gives advice to be followed dum mensae accumbitis. This latter poem on table manners is a remarkable tour de force that not only offers such valuable dining tips as: Mappam mundam teneatis, but also reinforces a fine point of Latin syntax. Every line ends with a verb in the second person plural subjunctive.

In a sermon preached at the opening of classes at the Colegio Máximo in 1574, Pedro Mercado declared that Latin was "a door to the temple of the sciences and to the sanctuary of virtue." This volume helps us to see more clearly how the earliest European educators in Mexico went about teaching the poetic language and cultural values that they felt would provide their American students readiest access to the sciences and virtues that their teachers valued so highly.