Historians have long recognized that the classical heritage of ancient Rome contributed to the development of a vibrant society in Spanish South America, but was the impact a one-way street? Although the Spanish destruction of the Incan empire changed the Andes forever, the civil society that did emerge was not the result of Andeans and Creoles passively absorbing the wisdom of ancient Rome. Rather, Sabine MacCormack proposes that civil society was born of the intellectual endeavors that commenced with the invasion itself, as the invaders sought to understand an array of cultures. Looking at the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people who wrote about the Andean region that became Peru, MacCormack reveals how the lens of Rome had a profound influence on Spanish understanding of the Incan empire.

Tracing the varied events that shaped Peru as a country, MacCormack shows how Roman and classical literature provided a framework for the construal of historical experience. She turns to issues vital to Latin American history, such as the role of language in conquest, the interpretation of civil war, and the founding of cities, to paint a dynamic picture of the genesis of renewed political life in the Andean region. Examining how missionaries, soldiers, native lords, and other writers employed classical concepts to forge new understandings of Peruvian society and history, the book offers a complete reassessment of the ways in which colonial Peru made the classical heritage uniquely its own.

Addressing problems of objectivity and authenticity, Sabine MacCormack reconstructs how Andean religion was understood by the Spanish in light of seventeenth-century European theological and philosophical movements, and by Andean writers trying to find in it antecedents to their new Christian faith.

This text argues that if the making of the Latin Middle Ages could be captured in a single dialogue, the encounter between Vergil (70-19 BC), the greatest Roman poet, and Augustine of Hippo (356-430 AD), teacher of rhetoric and Christian bishop, would aptly illustrate the historical moment. Sabine MacCormack argues that Augustine's reckoning with the complex cultural legacy of Vergil is reflected in an array of influential texts, including his early philosophical dialogues, the Confessiones, and the prose epic De civitate dei. Throughout his long life, Augustine returned to Vergil as one of a handful of authors who defined what was worth understanding and why, and he used Vergil in formulating many of his own arguments. In this text, MacCormack captures the intellectual and religious encounter between Augustine and Vergil. She opens a door not merely on the formation and content of Augustine's ideas, but also on the meaning of Vergil's poetry at a time of political and religious change.