Gladiators of Altera Roma: Aztec Warriors in the European Imagination

After wresting control of the Mexica Empire in 1521, its Spanish invaders began to make sense of the world they encountered through a classical lens, so much so that some contemporary scholars have described their perception of the Aztec capital as an “Altera Roma.” The process culminated in the work of Mexican Jesuit philosopher Francisco Xavier Clavijero who published a wildly popular history of the Aztecs while exiled in Italy. It was the circulation and reproduction of Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (Cesena, 1780), including its engravings of Mesoamerican cultural traditions, that fostered a powerful perception of the Aztecs for its European readership. One of Clavijero’s most influential prints identifies for the first time ever an image of “Gladiatorial Sacrifice” featuring figures in a scene that could have been plucked directly out of the Roman Colosseum. This paper examines the process by which related images and the language around a specific ritual involving Nahua warriors in combat—the tlacaxipehualiztli—were curated, merged, and translated beginning in the sixteenth century to produce, by Clavijero’s time, a polished, neoclassicized view of the heroic Aztec gladiator.