| The myth of Rome, resurrected among the ruins of antiquity by the Renaissance, was characterized by the antithesis of New Jerusalem and West Babylon, and its expressions were often entangled in the tumultuous struggles among political interests, religious credos, and moral values. Early Modern Spanish Literature engaged actively in the discourse of Rome, refashioning the ancient symbol with modern sensibilities.;Mateo Aleman's portrayal of Rome in Guzman de Alfarache demonstrates a grotesque subversion of order, peace and happiness and a caricature of Eden as the war zone between God's law and grace and Satan's seduction and perversion. It displaces Heaven into the depraved world of "enganador enganado", and thereby twists the teleological implication of man's fall into the cyclical mechanism of its vicious re-enactments. The Persiles distinguishes the Augustinian concept of civita dei from the Virgilian myth of urbs romae, playfully revealing the artificiality and rhetorical functions of the city's symbolism, and examining the power of myth in constructing and propagating ideals. Gracian's allegorical vision of Rome conveys a taste for irony that arises from the curious combination of two contradictory attitudes toward contemporary society and culture, from the sway between a stoic insistence on man's mission and ability to approach perfection and an obsessive feeling of futility and insignificance. It produces a neurotic laughter of a fool that most appropriately indicates the basic tone of Gracian's discourse of Rome, contrasting with the melodramatic rhythm of tension and relief in Cervantes, or the exasperated pitch of denunciation in Aleman.;Each author's particular rendering of the ancient symbol manifests an inclination or endeavor to question, modify, or shatter the established arch-types in the idea of Rome and the conventions of its expression. All together they seem to indicate the instability and fading of a central authority and the ideological disintegration initiated from a deep rupture in the origin of the cultural consciousness and movement that called itself Renaissance. |
