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Herodotus And Vespucci Essay

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But while Herodotus and Vespucci use similar strategies in evoking the marvels of the far reaches of the world, what of the darker shadows on the edge? Both authors do claim that monstrous things can hide on the fringes of maps, and as Grafton points out, Vespucci’s descriptions of his “monsters” often echo older texts like the Histories. For example, both Europeans of Vespucci’s day and Herodotus’s Greeks loathed cannibalism, so cannibals serve as appropriate menaces for the reader seeking knowledge about the world’s farther regions. In his Histories, Herodotus writes that a people called the Padaei have a custom that “when a man falls sick, his closest companions kill him because, as they put it, their meat would be spoiled if he were …show more content…

Therefore, these monsters exist hazily in the Histories, but still exist. In contrast, Vespucci’s monsters remain only people. In his letters, the cannibals seem the most monstrous in actions, but they do not appear physically abnormal to Vespucci’s eyes as a dog-headed man would be to Herodotus or the Libyans. Vespucci characterizes the peoples of the New World, cannibals included, as having “big, solid and well proportioned bodies”, a far cry from having eyes in the chest (48). While other tribes not mentioned as practicing cannibalism attack Vespucci, he describes the tribe of cannibals as being “of a quite courteous disposition and fine stature”, noting that they do not devour their own people or women in stark contrast to Herodotus’s own cannibals (Vespucci 9). As a result, in Vespucci’s work, select actions create monsters, not immutable physical qualities. While a nuanced difference, it proves vital one when considering where the authors sit in history. Herodotus’s Greece did not seek widespread colonization of the lands where dog-headed peoples reside, and so Herodotus may leave his monsters to the mists of rumor. Vespucci, however, resides at the forefront of a wave of conquest that eventually reshapes both the New and Old Worlds irrevocably. He goes to the Americas with a divergent agenda than the one Herodotus

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