Lisboa, ?nueva Roma? El modelo romano en los orígenes de la épica culta portuguesa

Abstract

Os Lusíadas is an epic in which the Roman model plays a decisive role. One of the readings the text most intensely proposes has to do with the interpretation of the city of Lisbon, and of the poem itself, as cultural and political translationes (transfers, translations and repatriations) of Rome. Through the means of Bacchus’s figure, however, Camões questions that modelling procedure, suggesting that it may amount to an error. Sucesso do Segundo Cerco de Diu, an epic exactly contemporary with Camões’s and actually finished sooner, points towards a very different interpretive path. Corte‑Real’s poem avoids the identifications with the model of Rome, and even goes as far as rejecting those identifications when the related historical documents seem to require them most. This is what happens, by way of example, in the story of D. João de Castro’s victory parade in the city of Goa.