'Greece, having been subjected, subjected her wild conqueror and introduced culture into boorish Rome.' The poet Horace, himself a Roman, can take a stylish pleasure in describing the Roman conquest of Greece, even though - or rather because - it piquantly entails the intellectual and artistic near-humiliation of the conqueror. Rome is notorious for its brutality, but it was not so brutal that it could not see that, when confronted by the poetry and sculpture of Greece, it must fall to its knees. The paradox of a conquest of iron mirrored and almost eclipsed by a converse conquest of discourse is deliciously Greenblattian. But in Marvellous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt is dealing with the Spanish conquest of the New World. This time the conqueror's assurance of superiority is brutally uniform: a superiority of arms, together with a superiority of spirit, consisting in the possession of the True faith, produce an inertly predictable result.

LRB 5 December 1991 | PDF Download