Barbarians in their Language but Greek in their Manners. Representing the Andeans in the 16th Century José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León In the writings about the age of discovery we often find that Native Americans are classified as barbarous due to their lack of letters.1 From Herodotus to José de Acosta we can recognize a mixture of communities around the world that were sanctioned not only as different but altogether inferior because they did not speak the language or, as it happened during the age of discoveries, did not have writing as a cultural technology.2 The barbarian appears as the natural man, deprived of malice but equally deprived of agency and therefore understood, classified and finally colonized by the European. The barbarous men that I study in the Andean context counterbalance this perspective. They are barbarians, but they are far from having the appearance of the wild man, and of course they speak their minds. Against the universal overestimation of the written language, they remain in the realm of the oral. The prestige of the oral is evident in their performances. In the Andes they confront and speak to the legitimate representatives of the king of Spain. In this oral realm the supposed superiority of the literate vanishes and the European interlocutor is forced to recognize the wisdom and truth contained in the words of the barbarian. The latter becomes an equal and therefore the European can speak through him. This is not necessarily ventriloquism since the ultimate goal of this rhetoric exercise is to advance the cause of the Andean man, always against the greed of the conquistadors. This essay has a starting point in the conviction that reading in context is the only way to allow texts to reveal their content in a thorough manner. In this essay I have the intention of pointing to a group of writings from the Age of Discovery that tell us fascinating anecdotes or stories that are close to historical facts. Taken in isolation [End Page 53] they can be interpreted in many diverse ways or considered simply entertainment or ornamental pieces. But things happen culturally and not as exceptions. Giving a historical dimension to this set of texts opens the possibility to bring them to a fruitful dialogue that will ultimately reveal traces of a history that none of them in isolation could have told. In the following pages I want to demonstrate that a famous anecdote, which was created at the heart of the Habsburg court in Castile, ended up as a model or master narrative that served the purpose of criticizing and denouncing the extremes of the colonial expansion promoted by the same royal house. At the same time, I will show how certain literature circulated creatively in a Transatlantic context and proved to be malleable enough to be adapted to new circumstances. In On the Wings of Time, a book about the classical tradition in the early historiography of the Andes, Sabine MacCormack reviews the chronicles of several authors to conclude that the classical heritage has allowed them a better understanding of the New World. Far from being an imposition or a tactic to silence local voices, the knowledge of the classics revealed itself as a tool to understand peoples and cultures that were different and as a medium to convey information about them that was easy to grasp and understand by a European audience. Even conquerors with little or no education have enough hearsay information to comprehend the parallels proposed by the authors of these chronicles. But our interest falls naturally on those observers and first writers of the New World who were trained in universities and other institutions and benefited from a wide range of humanistic culture. This is true, evidently, for the members of the Church, but it also is for young adventurers who were friends of books and knowledge, like Pedro Cieza de León, or self-taught autodidacts like Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala or Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. An education in the classics, we must keep in mind, was no guarantee of an open mind or a philanthropic attitude towards the conquered. For example...