The Dutch Iron Age

Colonial Ambivalence in Two Latin Poems by Caspar Barlaeus

Abstract

This article analyses two thus far unstudied Latin poems by the prominent humanist scholar Caspar Barlaeus (1584-1648): Argo Batava (1629), which celebrates the Dutch capture of the Spanish treasure fleet in 1628; and Triumphus super capta Olinda (1630), on the conquest of the Portuguese settlement Olinda in Brazil in 1630. These two poems, we argue, give significant clues regarding the ambivalence that characterised Barlaeus’s views regarding the Dutch pursuit of empire. By discussing these poems together within the contexts of the early modern reception of the classics and the development of Dutch empire in the Atlantic world, we show how Barlaeus’s baroque poetry mixed triumphalism with pessimism and celebrated as well as criticised Dutch colonialism as a project of laudable yet dangerous ambition. In creatively appropriating the classical narratives of the Argonauts, Aeneas’s arrival on Italian soil, and the imperial contest between Rome and Carthage, Barlaeus hinted that the Dutch Republic could succeed in outdoing the Spanish monarchy and in establishing settlements overseas but, blinded by the lust for gold and profit, would not be able to escape the perils of living in an Iron Age.