The starting point of Barlaeus’s two colonial poems is a narrative of Dutch colonial warfare and expansion as motivated by the necessity of self-defence and the justice of revenge against the Spanish monarchy. He relates how, caught in a stalemate after decades of war in their own territories, the Dutch made the bold move of taking the war to the Spanish territories. Spain appears invincible because of its colonial riches, and nothing will stop the Spanish if they are able to monopolise the sources of that wealth. For Barlaeus, the Dutch therefore have no choice but to follow in Spain’s colonial footsteps. Moreover, they also have the right to do so, because Spanish claims to exclusive dominion over the Americas are essentially unfounded. As it is phrased in Argo Batava:

Revisiting Grotius’s influential defence of Dutch interloping in Spanish and Portuguese colonial waters and territories, Barlaeus similarly states in Triumphus super capta Olinda that the land and the sea are to be shared also with ‘us’, the Dutch:

Grotius and Barlaeus were close acquaintances who were in frequent correspondence, and Barlaeus also sent Grotius copies of his publications – including the anthology in which his colonial poems were first published together.¹³ Clearly inspired by the argument of Mare liberum that the high seas cannot be claimed for exclusive use, Barlaeus poetically adopts Grotius’s legal scholarship to underline the legitimacy of Dutch incursions in the Atlantic world.¹⁴

Barlaeus models these incursions – and the overarching theme of imperial competition with the Spanish monarchy – after the famous rivalry between Rome and Carthage. The Romans drove Hannibal out of Italy by starting a war on Carthaginian land. Likewise, the Dutch, when attacked by the Spanish in their own lands, chose to take the offensive by targeting the basis of Spain’s financial might, its colonies.¹⁵ Argo Batava thus compares the admiral Piet Hein to the Roman general Scipio Africanus:

The poem about Olinda specifies the challenge to the Spanish monarchy. War is no longer waged in the Dutch heartland, but is removed to a distant world:

On the surface, Barlaeus thus represents the colonial pursuits of the Dutch Republic as a clear-cut case of Rome-inspired imperial competition in a Grotian vein. Also following Grotius, he adopts a Ciceronian perspective of the merger between self-interest and the common good to argue that war and gain go hand in hand.¹⁸ This perspective is clearly voiced in an imagined speech in Argo Batava, given by Piet Hein before the decisive confrontation with the Spanish treasure fleet. Hein, turned by Barlaeus into a loquacious Latin orator, presents two motivations towards battle: the preservation of the fatherland, and personal gain.

The message is that successful warfare and the wellbeing of the fatherland depend on both individuals and the state being motivated by a desire for gain. The specific wording Barlaeus uses (‘socio comes ibit honori utilitas’) betrays his indebtedness to Cicero’s discussion in De officiis of the relation between honestum, or what is morally good, and utile, or what is advantageous. For Cicero, the utilitas of society is the utilitas of its parts – in other words, what benefits society should also benefit individuals and vice versa.²⁰ This is because the greatest moral good (honestum) is that what is to the advantage (utilitas) of the community, the salus reipublicae. Barlaeus’s use of this Ciceronian framework is even more explicit in the later poem on Olinda, where he explicitly opposes utilitas and honestum (see below).²¹

Gloria Vivenza has noted how in the commentaries of early modern scholars, the meaning of utilitas began to shift from purely political to economic terms, namely the idea that ‘most of self-interested behavior has a positive return for others’.²² This conceptual shift in turn corresponded to the increased popularity in humanist circles of Thucydides, who, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, put three motivations for building an empire in the mouths of the Athenians: fear, honour, and profit.²³ We suggest that Barlaeus’s assertion that virtue should not be its own recompense but that ‘benefit will go hand in hand with honour’ employs the Ciceronian-Thucydidian conceptual framework to make sense of and justify the Dutch pursuit of colonial riches.

To recapitulate: the ideological thrust of Barlaeus’s poems seems straightforward at this point, uniting patriotism, personal economic gain, and political advantage. For Barlaeus, the Dutch Republic must imitate the Spanish monarchy by building an empire and dominating global trade to save itself, but victory is not a matter of selfless sacrifice for the glory of the fatherland. Dutch citizens do not have to choose between honestum and utile: by partaking in belligerent naval excursions, or financially supporting the West and East India Companies, they will defend their country and perhaps even make a handsome profit. This attitude ostensibly reflects the change in the rhetoric used by the West India Company in the mid-1620s to attract investors, as pointed out by Benjamin Schmidt. Confronted with hesitant stockholders who doubted the political goals of the company, the wic directors shifted the stress from political themes to profitability, making ‘the pursuit of profit […] the mainstay of the wic’s program’.²⁴ At first glance, Barlaeus seems to echo this straightforward narrative of Dutch commercial imperialism.²⁵ However, the classical themes in his poems reveal a darker undertone undercutting this narrative of imperial success without moral cost.

As the title reveals, the poem Argo Batava honours the crew that captured the Spanish treasure fleet in the Bay of Matanzas in 1628 as modern-day Argonauts, and Piet Hein himself as a new Tiphys, the helmsman of the ship Argo. The myth of the Argonauts was elaborated in literary sources from Antiquity such as Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, Ovid’s Heroides (letters 6 and 12) and Metamorphoses 7.1-424, and Flaccus’s Argonautica. These texts tell the story of Jason, who journeys on the ship Argo with a group of heroes to steal the Golden Fleece and reclaim his throne. Tasked by King Pelias, Jason and his Argonauts face numerous challenges, including the clashing Symplegades rocks, harpies, and the deadly trials set by King Aeëtes of Colchis, where the fleece is guarded. With the help of Aeëtes’s daughter, Medea – who falls in love with Jason and uses her magic to help him – they succeed in stealing the fleece and fleeing Colchis unharmed. Their journey back is equally perilous, filled with more obstacles and betrayals.

The myth of the Argonauts had already become an ‘iconic example of a heroic mission to civilize wild lands and foreign cultures’ in antiquity itself.²⁶ It also symbolised scientific progress, as, according to tradition, the Argonauts were the first people to ever undertake a major sea voyage. As early as the fifth and fourth centuries bce, the myth was used as a model for Greek colonisation in Italy. Furthermore, it was the depiction of the Crusaders as Argonauts during the Middle Ages that inspired Duke Philip the Good in 1430 to found the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece.²⁷

In lauding the Dutch expedition as new Argonauts, Barlaeus gives a fresh spin to the ancient myth. The comparison of Piet Hein’s crew to the Argonauts is not just a topos, but a direct challenge to the imperial hegemony of Spain. Not only does Barlaeus compare Hein to Tiphys, he also prefaces his poem with five lines from Seneca’s tragedy Medea:

These lines had become famous after the first European explorations of the Americas. Columbus had read them as a prophecy of his own voyage (in his Libro de las Profecias), and had compared himself to Tiphys.²⁹ Spanish writers who described these explorations prefaced their poems or books with the same lines.³⁰ Pietro Martire d’Anghiera or Peter Martyr, in his De orbe novo, compared Magellan to the Argonauts, stressing how tiny the stretch of sea that the Argonauts crossed was in comparison to a circumnavigation of the earth. Now Barlaeus claimed that the Spanish explorers faced competition from another Tiphys and another set of Argonauts for the prize of fulfilling this newly forged prophecy.

However, there is a remarkable difference between the Spanish use of the prophecy and that of Barlaeus. Spanish writers paired these lines with biblical prophecies, and their interpretations were guided by eschatological optimism about the reunion of East and West and the conquest of Jerusalem. Later writers who mythicised the voyages of Columbus drew a parallel between the ‘second coming’ of Tiphys in the guise of Columbus and the Second Coming of Christ.³¹ Accordingly, they ignored the fact that Seneca’s verses are set in a deeply pessimistic context. The choir in Medea who sing these verses consider the Argonauts’ daring voyage as an act of trespass which led to the end of a Golden or Silver Age and the beginning of an Age of Iron. In fact, they sing sarcastically about the prize won by the Argonauts:

The Age of Iron is an age of war and commerce, money and poverty, gain and deceit. This description contrasts with that of a happier time, when people had no riches but lived contentedly with little:

The Spanish writers not only disregarded this pessimistic view of the Argonauts’ exploration, they also neglected an otherwise very famous classical text that referenced future Argonauts, namely Virgil’s fourth eclogue. This eclogue, prophesying the birth of a child who will inaugurate a new Golden Age, was often read in parallel with Christian prophecies. This poem, too, speaks of a ‘second Tiphys, and a second Argo to carry chosen heroes’ (‘Alter erit tum Tiphys et altera quae uehat Argo / delectos heroas’).³⁴ However, it depicts these as a temporary setback on the way to a new Golden Age, while the child is still young. During this time, there will still be ‘a few traces of ancient wrong’ (‘Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis’),³⁵ which means that people will still sail the sea, build fortified cities, devote themselves to agriculture, and wage war.³⁶ However, after the child will have grown into a man, overseas trade will come to a halt, as every land will produce everything needed to the local population in abundance.

As much as these classical prophecies seemed to refer to the early modern discovery of new continents, their original context was difficult to reconcile with messianic expectations and an optimistic conception of history. Rather, these verses testify to a pessimistic outlook on human technologies, in a cyclical conception of history where Golden Ages without technology give way to Iron Ages of continuous competition, rivalry, and warfare.

Although Barlaeus praises the Dutch maritime triumphs in the highest tones, his poems incorporate much more of the ambivalence of these classical references, accentuating not the coming of a Golden Age but rather the harsh conditions of the Iron Age.³⁷ In the classical narrative, the tragedy of the Iron Age is that only the first Argonauts enter it by free choice; as soon as one people begins to sail the seas, steal, and wage war, the others have no choice but to follow suit. In his depiction of the imperial competition between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish monarchy, Barlaeus adopts this perspective. The Spanish have installed a system of war and extraction of natural resources that will give them the upper hand in any future confrontation, unless their adversaries imitate their modus operandi and start looking equally hard for colonial riches. Yet that desire for gain, however necessary it may be as the driving force behind Dutch maritime warfare, is morally ambiguous. This is the implication of a crucial passage in Triumphus super capta Olinda:

These lines follow upon a description of how the Spanish king, ‘drunk with power’, proclaims according to his motto that he will go plus ultra, and how the people of the north then rise up to stand in his way, cutting through the seas, burning palaces and looting the riches of Mexico. While doing so, however, they seem to approach a dangerous moral precipice. For the phrase ‘Laxat regna sitis lucri’ is ambiguous: ‘laxat regna’ could mean either that the thirst for gain opens the borders of the Spanish empire to others, namely to the Dutch, but it could also mean that it weakens empires from the inside out. The Spanish thirst for gain has allowed them an empire, and the Dutch thirst for gain now enables them to pierce the walls of that empire and take some of the booty for themselves. At the same time, this profit-seeking could weaken empires from the inside. In that case, the impulse that allowed the Spanish and the Portuguese to build their empires was also what made them vulnerable. And that should be a warning to the Dutch.

This moral undertone can be glimpsed in the phrase ‘utilitas fines metitur honesti’ (‘Self-interest tests the limits of what is honourable.’). It seems that self-interest indeed balances a fine moral boundary: it can function as an impetus to do the right thing, namely to tear down the monopoly of evil empires, but it also comes dangerously close to moral corruption of the new, emerging empire. Here, utilitas or benefit in terms of self-interest is no longer the happy companion of what is morally right, but challenges ethical principles. Also, it is now defined purely economically as the thirst for profit (‘sitis lucri’). This mercantile twist may be linked to the ambivalence that the Ciceronian concept of utilitas held towards the moral value of trade. To Cicero, trade was of so little consequence that he only gave it a short mention in his chapter on utilitas; in general, he thought it difficult to reconcile with honestum. While some early modern commentators criticised this view, at least with regard to rich and powerful merchants who were considered pillars of society, Barlaeus shared Cicero’s doubts regarding mercantile activity.³⁹ Indeed, despite the compliments Barlaeus paid to the Amsterdam merchants in his speech on the mercator sapiens in 1632, he essentially sought to rein in the commercial urges of profit-seeking, trying ‘to please his audience while simultaneously warning it against the risks of the commercialization of society’.⁴⁰ Thus, his exemplary wise merchant should seek philosophical knowledge less to increase his gains than to learn to temper his desire for profit and keep in mind the common good.

This moral ambivalence about the necessity of pursuing profit is foreshadowed in the colonial poems written a few years before Barlaeus’ speech on the mercator sapiens, most distinctly when the poems talk about the extraction of gold from mines, Spain’s main source of colonial revenues. Argo Batava describes gold as the thing that the Dutch most desire, but also as something that was hidden away deep in the earth for a reason. In the poem, Barlaeus presents an imagined speech given by Frederick Henry motivating the Dutch to combine trade with warfare, in which he lets the Stadholder speak about the American treasures as a wonderful opportunity, there for the taking by those who are brave enough:

However, when Frederick Henry then turns to the Spanish quest for gold, the tone changes:

Triumphus super capta Olinda echoes this sentiment:

Both of these sections echo Ovid’s description of the Iron Age in the first book of the Metamorphoses, which starts with the creation of the world and humans. Four human ages have passed: a Golden Age of plenty without labour, a Silver Age where winters forced people to hide in houses and practice agriculture, a Bronze Age with war but without crime, and finally an Iron Age that sees the beginning of crime, deceit, and greed. This was the time when people began to sail the seas, divide the land into private plots, and mine the earth for precious metals. These metals then incite new crimes:

Appropriating this Ovidian language, Barlaeus presents the Dutch as following on the heels of the Spanish and Portuguese in entering a new phase of the Iron Age, one in which mining on a larger scale than ever seen before fuels warfare on a grander scale than before. In this new age, everyone who falls behind will be trampled.

This is not only a much more pessimistic interpretation of the classical prophecies about the Argonauts as they were used in the Spanish monarchy by people such as Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas,⁴⁵ it also departs from the self-representation of Dutch colonial interloping that developed at the end of the sixteenth century. As Schmidt has shown, this self-representation imagined the Dutch as standing side by side with the native Americans in resisting the tyranny of the Iberians.⁴⁶ Dutch colonial enterprise was pictured as the liberation of native peoples from the Spanish monarchy, for which they required something in return (such as a monopoly contract on spice trade). This narrative still held sway in 1630, as exemplified by a celebratory epigram on the capture of Olinda published by the minister and poet Samuel Ampzing. The epigram, rendered both in Latin and Dutch, directly addresses the ‘West Indians’ and tells them that God has taken revenge for the Spanish cruelty against them by sending the Dutch. ‘God now sees your misery and the injustices you suffer / and opens a door to freedom for you.’⁴⁷ Ampzing then calls on them to trade and enter into treaties with the Dutch, and to present a united front against the Spanish monarchy.

Similar sentiments can be detected in another celebratory poem closely related to Argo Batava, also published in 1629 in honour of the capture of the silver fleet: Argo-nauta Batavus.⁴⁸ Written by Franciscus Martinius, who was at the time an eighteen-year-old pupil of the Latin School in Kampen, this poem shares Barlaeus’s idea that the Spanish monarchy has to be attacked in the colonies, and that colonial conquest is a matter of self-defence. However, like Ampzing’s epigram, it speaks about the uniting of forces between indigenous people and the Dutch and ignores any thought of material benefit accruing to the soldiers, who are promised only honourable victory or an honorable death.⁴⁹ The poem does not make any allusions to the Iron Age and it calls Hein a new Iason, not a new Tiphys, which weakens a possible connection to Seneca’s lines.⁵⁰

In contrast, any trace of the idea that the Dutch and the native Americans are allies is absent from Barlaeus’s two poems. For Barlaeus, successful resistance to the Spanish monarchy comes down to the imitation of Spain’s methods – and entails the moral dangers of such methods. As his poems sing the praise of the Republic’s conquests and triumphs, they do not necessarily frame this show of power in morally positive terms, let alone as a liberation of suppressed natives, and instead explicitly call for a project of colonization.

As Schmidt has shown, the idea of establishing settler colonies in the Americas, as initially advocated by the colonial ideologue Willem Usselincx, gradually disappeared to the background in wic literature in the 1620s.⁵¹ Yet the prospect of settler colonialism is clearly present as a future horizon in Barlaeus’s poems, which suggest that the Dutch should imitate the Spanish model not only by combining commerce with mining and warfare, but also by planting colonial settlements, following the traces of Ancient Rome. In Argo Batava, as the Dutch land in Cuba, it is not as the Argonauts led by Jason that they descend from the ships, but as the Trojan migrants headed by Aeneas:

‘Stant littore puppes’ (‘The ships (…) stand on the shore’) are Virgil’s words to describe Aeneas’s landing in Gaeta at the end of the Aeneid book vi. This reference is remarkable, because Aeneas landed in Italy with a very different purpose to that with which the Argonauts landed in Colchis. So, what exactly is it that the Dutch are going to do in America, according to Barlaeus? Will they merely snatch Spanish silver and take it home, or do they also have the intention of establishing a permanent settlement? In the poem on Olinda, this intention is explicitly expressed through another comparison with Aeneas but also, strikingly, by alluding to Rome’s rival Carthage.

At the end of Triumphus super capta Olinda, Hendrick Lonck, the commander of the Dutch fleet, gives a speech to motivate his soldiers before their assault of the fortified city of Olinda, again emphasizing both the eternal glory they will win for the fatherland and the rewards that await them. One of these rewards refers to the Roman practice of turning occupied territory into colonies and distributing houses and land among the veterans. No longer is the prize for those who fight for the fatherland the mere alleviation of poverty at home but a new and more prosperous existence abroad:

The Dutch, in short, did not come to Brazil to steal all the gold and be gone, but to establish a permanent Dutch settlement overseas. Barlaeus clearly thinks of this colony in Roman terms: conquered land that is given to veterans as a reward. It seems as if in this way he seeks to resolve the double-sidedness of the desire for gain as both a good motivation and a moral danger. The Dutch do not just take the golden fleece and depart, they do not come as thieves, but as settlers, as what Barlaeus alleges to be rightful inheritors of Portuguese dominion over indigenous land. Such a colony, in turn, serves as a bulwark against retaliation or further expansion by the Spanish monarchy. Here, Barlaeus makes a surprising move and compares Olinda to Carthage:

While this comparison between Olinda and Carthage makes sense if the Spanish monarchy is considered as the successor to the Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic as the opponent who stands in the way of total imperial control, it is also an unsettling comparison because Carthage’s fate – complete destruction – does not bode well for Olinda. The irony of history may be that a year later, Olinda would be abandoned and burned down by the Dutch in favour of a different location for their colonial capital in nearby Recife. But more interesting is the question whether we see here another expression of a pessimistic, cyclical view of history that also surfaces in Barlaeus’s use of the narrative of the Argonauts. Alternatively, one could consider that after the destruction of Carthage, the surrounding lands became the first Roman colony outside of Italy, in the new province of Africa proconsularis. In this interpretation, the conquest of Olinda is, in Barlaeus’s poetic rendering, the first of many Dutch colonies.

While Barlaeus does not make any explicit references to other examples of Dutch colonial settlement in the 1620s, either in Southeast Asia (Batavia, Banda) or New Netherland, the final lines of the poem may point to that second reading as they adopt a prophetic tone, contemplating the future and mixing military triumphalism with a civilizing mission for the native peoples which ultimately converges on economic gain.

Throughout Barlaeus’s two poems, there are but few mentions of Amerindians fearfully looking on as the Dutch rage, burn, and plunder. Here, having introduced the Roman theme of permanent colonies with veteran settlers, Barlaeus ends with alluding to the equally Roman discourse of civilising ‘barbaric’ people, people whose labour will presumably be exploited to guarantee the annual harvests of sugar – the prime produce of the New World.⁵⁷

In the narrative that connects colonial settlement with a civilising mission, settler colonies function essentially as a safety valve for domestic decadence, as they propel citizens’ ambitions elsewhere and thus alleviate social pressures at home by creating new opportunities abroad. As recent scholarship in the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies emphasises, settler colonialism can hence be characterised an ideological phenomenon that directly links the perceived problems of the metropole with the prospect of an alternative life overseas, aiming to solve social ills by moving them to another faraway place.⁵⁸ Hypothetically, a comparable line of thought may be discerned in Barlaeus’s poetry: as the lust for colonial gain threatens to unsettle the domestic moral balance, the project of establishing permanent colonies overseas offers an escape route which, while increasing colonial profits through the sugar industry, potentially harnesses settlers and indigenous peoples alike against the disruptions of the Iron Age.⁵⁹

On a more concrete level, Barlaeus’s poems clearly connect metropole and colony by linking the ongoing struggle for Dutch independence at home with the pursuit of colonisation abroad. Indeed, the nexus between the metropolitan and colonial contexts is made evident in the anthology of Barlaeus’s poetry published in 1631.⁶⁰ In the second book of this anthology, Argo Batava and Triumphus super capta Olinda bookend a series of six epic poems. The book opens with Argo Batava and the capture of the Spanish treasure fleet, which provided the funds for the subsequent sieges of Wesel (Vesalia capta) and Den Bosch. It includes three poems about Den Bosch: a panegyric on prince Frederick Henry, a poem describing the siege, and a fictitious poetic letter from Frederick Henry’s wife Amalia of Solms to her husband on the battlefield, in the style of Ovid’s Heroides. At the end, the scene again moves across the ocean to the capture of Olinda in Brazil. The anthology thus illustrates how Barlaeus’s poetry could be used as a frame in which Dutch metropolitan history was inextricably connected to military campaigns in the Americas.

Barlaeus’s two poems from 1629 and 1630 are both implicitly pessimistic and at the same time ostentatiously triumphalist by expressing praise for Dutch heroes and their military exploits, befitting the genre of the panegyric epic poem. This ambivalence revolves around the evaluation of profit as a motivating passion and motor that drives imperial success – but also as a device that carries the seeds of moral failure. For Barlaeus, the lust for gain explains the dynamic of imperial competition, as citizens and soldiers, motivated by the desire for glory but mostly by self-interest, engage in colonial warfare, piracy, trade, and colonization. They chase after vast quantities of bullion that had to be mined in order to wage such wars and also after opportunities to seize enemies’ ships, open up new trading routes, and establish overseas settlements to outcompete their imperial rivals. Appropriating the classical narratives of the Argonauts and the contest between Rome and Carthage, Barlaeus hints that the Dutch can succeed in outdoing the Spanish monarchy but – blinded by the lust for gold – may not be able to escape the concomitant moral decline.

Steeped in the classical models from Antiquity, Barlaeus’s ambivalent rendering of the interplay between glory and self-interest would take centre stage in his treatise on Dutch Brazil from 1647, in which he claims that the Dutch ‘differ from the Greeks and Romans in this aspect: for the latter their main goal was glory, for the former it was utility; for us the striving for glory is combined with the striving for profit’.⁶¹ This tentative approval of profit-seeking evidently aimed to overcome the Ciceronian moral challenge of recruiting economic self-interest to the side of the common good, separating it from the moral connotations of the sin of greed. Barlaeus hesitantly moves towards the idea that the pursuit of economic self-interest can serve as a counterbalance to destructive passions, which in Albert Hirschman’s classic analysis in The Passions and the Interests involves a crucial component of the intellectual justification of capitalism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁶² Yet Barlaeus, still influenced by classical and Christian models of thought that were suspicious of trade, does not fully embrace mercantile activity: after referring to the Romans and the Greeks, he also makes a comparison with the ancient Germanic people, who in contrast to the Romans never succumbed to decadence, ‘for they admitted no traders at all, while in our country, merchants make up the ruling class and much of the populace. The German tribes feared that so many luxury goods and so much affluence in general would lead to weakness and moral decline.’⁶³

It is important to note that the moral problem in Barlaeus’s classically inspired humanist worldview does not concern those who fall victim to Dutch violence, but the corrupting influence of luxury on the Dutch themselves. His hesitant solution to this problem amounts to a form of Christian self-identification, suggesting that the Dutch may avoid the fate of the ancients because, as stated in his treatise from 1647, ‘perhaps our religious beliefs or sense of righteousness strengthen us to resist wrongdoing’.⁶⁴ In the poems from 1629 and 1630, however, there are no traces of this possibility of redemption. Instead, we catch Barlaeus in the middle of the shift where the Dutch turned from self-proclaimed victims of Spanish tyranny into colonial aggressors and slave-traders. Barlaeus only partially engages with this shift, connecting the victim narrative, in which everything the Dutch Republic does is motivated by the necessity of self-defence and revenge, with an implicit acknowledgment that the Dutch are fighting evil with evil, and that their desire for gain may have disastrous consequences.

Why did Barlaeus infuse his epideictic poetry with this ambivalent message? What did he want to achieve? The available evidence does not offer any definite answers to these questions, as Barlaeus remained silent about his intentions in writing – and the intended audience of – his two poems on Dutch colonial enterprise. What his poetry betrays, however, is that Barlaeus couched this enterprise in a classicizing language as a quest for gold and settlement – a project of mining natural resources through colonization that had little to do with the actual policies developed by the wic in the 1620s. It could be argued that Barlaeus deliberately sought to steer the wic towards a more openly imperial policy while warning for its possible consequences. Yet it is more likely, considering Barlaeus’s position as an outsider with no direct connections to concrete discussions in the wic boardroom, that his writing merely reflected his intense indebtedness to the classics and the resulting unease about what he saw happening in his own day. Barlaeus evidently employed his formidable knowledge of the classics to gain the attention and patronage of the upper echelons of Dutch society – a strategy that served him well, given his success at the court of Frederick Henry and his eventual appointment at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre. The poems he wrote on Dutch colonial enterprise can be regarded simply as elements of this strategy. Still, as in the case of his opening lecture for the Athenaeum a few years later, Barlaeus – ever a true humanist – could not help but obliquely inserting elements of classically inspired caution in his text to alert his audience of the possible threats that modernity could have in store.

Indeed, while references to classical narratives might often serve a purely ornamental purpose, here they carry profound significance. It is these narratives that enable two distinct interpretations of Barlaeus’s colonial poems of 1629 and 1630: as either imperialist propaganda or as a cautionary warning. The references to Aeneas and Roman settler colonialism may appear as clear-cut allusions to the Roman model of imperial success, but they become unsettled when Olinda suddenly prefigures Carthage and not Rome, thus signalling the possibility of imperial defeat. Similarly, the Argonauts and Seneca’s prophecy about future new Argonauts could be used to celebrate naval heroes, and even to herald the last phase in salvation history, but this required the suppression of much of the classical context of deep pessimism about progress in history. By reinserting references to this context, Barlaeus hints that the Dutch Golden Age might turn out to be an Age of Iron.