Herodotus And Vespucci Analysis

The epic of human history can be best described as a story of various worlds colliding. Even in ancient times, civilizations brushed up--or collided head on--against other civilizations, creating larger and larger pictures of the known world. As these peoples interacted, classical scholars wrote down the stories heard and knowledge learned into their own works, though the tales they recorded often showed fanciful versions of the edges of the map. One modern author, Christopher Grafton, argues in his book New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery that these ancient texts of discovery would go on centuries later to influence famous figures of the Age of Exploration, among them Amerigo Vespucci. Upon a closer examination of the textual relationship between Vespucci and one classical author, Herodotus, one finds that while both Herodotus and Vespucci claim the edge of the world as a marvelous …show more content…
According to Grafton, Vespucci inherits classical scholarly tradition about what lies at the edges of the world, depicting his America as full of both “happy, naked savages, and evil, threatening cannibals”, a description familiar from scholarly tradition (83). Future editors of Vespucci’s letters on the Americas developed this idea even further, distorting facts like how many human bodies a cannibal consumes in order to emphasize the barbarity of the native population. Vespucci’s New World is therefore, as Grafton says, a marvelous but also monstrous place to visit. Additionally, Grafton argues that Vespucci uses the technique of alienation, as classical authors like Herodotus did before him, in order to paint a picture of the New World as a place utterly foreign to a European sense of mind (84). Consequently, Grafton’s theory depicts Herodotus and Vespucci as having relatively similar content and