Deities, demons or decoration? Asian religions in two Jesuit Latin martyr epics

This paper explores the representation of Greco-Roman and Asian deities and demons in two Jesuit neo-Latin epics: Francesco Benci’s Quinque martyres libri VI (Rome, 1592 [Venice, 1591]), on the martyrs of Cuncolim (1583), and Bartolomeu Pereira’s Paciecidos libri XII (Coimbra, 1640), on the martyrdom of his cousin, Francisco Pacheco, in Japan (1626). Both poets orient to Virgil, but where Benci channels the spirit of Trent in his cautious handling of the apparatus of pagan poetry, Pereira invites us into a more florid metaphysical landscape. The Olympian gods are joined in the Paciecis by the gods of Japan, as well as by personifications of the virtues and vices. A comparison of these two poems, separated by half a century, is suggestive of a diversity of approaches to divine (and infernal) machinery in Jesuit epic. A unifying element is the more didactic parsing, vis-à-vis Virgil, of the passions of the protagonists.