An Ethiop's Aethiopica: Heliodorus and Juan Latino's Austriad

Abstract

This essay addresses the question of how Juan Latino, an Afro-Hispanic author, self-fashioned or depicted himself as a figure worthy of admiration for his Spanish readers; and how he foregrounded his imitation of other Western classical texts so as to further authorize his writings. It proposes that Juan Latino alludes and utilizes Heliodorus's Aethiopica, a recently discovered and popular Greek/Byzantine novel, in order to cast himself as a wise, virtuous and eloquent Ethiop and as someone who is well suited to write an epic of the historic battle of Lepanto. He does so through contrastive oppositions. He also affirms Western values and Western art, evincing its presence in Ethiopia. He rejects the universality of the supremacy of one color of skin by underlining the opposing opinion: In the Aethiopica the people in this African kingdom despise white skin. Thus, Juan Latino's epic affirms the relativity of a scale in color by again pointing to the ways kings of Spain and Ethiopia judge whiteness and blackness.