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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 311
singers, such as Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli, sang for
the local magnates.
This trend to neoclassicism in the North was the expression
of one of the main cultural facts in the first decades in Brazil,
driven by the prosperity of new economic elites, but also by
strong ideologies brought in by the positivist doctrine of
Auguste Comte, which enjoyed a great success and inspired
many political movements, including our early Republic. In
this doctrine, a place was reserved for classical references,
with the consequent growth of an iconography supporting our
close contact with the Mediterranean, its gods, leading figures
and symbolic traditions. Beneath the grandeur of columns and
the classical orders are the ideas of discipline, authority, and the
solemn glory of the State. The preferred classical texts were
above all Caesar and Cicero, who could inspire the notions of
civic devotion and discipline, so much aspired to by our oligarchic
leaders. One side-effect of this trend was the great
prestige of Fustel de Coulanges, whose Ancient City became
so popular that it is still a stunning presence in every used
bookstore and a recurrent plague among undergraduate students.
The great role that work assigned to the paterfamilias
well suited our paternalist leaders, the fathers of the newborn
Republic, later called República Velha, the first stage of Brazilian
republican tradition.
3. epilogue
It is true that there was a wave of neoclassical architecture and
ideology in many parts of the world at the end of nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In some cases, arts
and architecture can work well as self-referential traditions,
reproducing their own rules and canons as a closed system. In
this case, however, the aesthetic project was intimately connected
to the whole ideological project of the local elites, who
wished to show both their own greatness and their close contacts
with the mainstream tradition that linked our distant city
to the very root of western civilization, within the Mediterranean.
Furthermore, at many times, classical studies have been a
useful device for the elites in South America, helping to demonstrate
their distinctiveness and to provide it with recognizable