The essays in this volume are prime examples of a novel direction in colonial Latin American history, archaeology, and art history: a broad rethinking of convergences and multidirectional links between classical antiquity and indigenous cultures of the Americas. These essays, based on papers presented at a symposium held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, feature an exemplary and thoughtful dialogue among specialists in history, archaeology and classical studies, and art history. Common strands regarding imperial dominance and its representations are first laid out in an introduction by John M. D. Pohl and Claire L. Lyons, while an initial chapter by Walter Scheidel reviews methodological issues about the comparative analysis of empires.

Two chapters address imperial iconographies. Eulogio Guzmán scrutinizes “the image” of Mexico-Tenochtitlan's Templo Mayor, which anchored collective memories about the consolidation of Mexica might; ingeniously, he compares Mexica objects and architecture to the iconography of the sovereign in Hobbes's Leviathan. Jonathan Edmonson chronicles the imperial architecture of the mighty Augusta Emerita (Mérida). After citing Mérida's memorialization by Antonio de Nebrija (as lofty ruins) and by Francisco de Montejo the Younger (who bestowed its name on colonial Yucatan's administrative center), Edmonson explores how the victorious Romans erected this city to memorialize their victory over Asturian and Cantabrian forces.

Although interspersed, chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9 carry out a lively art historical dialogue. Emily Umberger deftly reviews Mexica monuments that represent imperial might. Moving swiftly between well-known sculptures, such as the Teocalli of Sacred Warfare and the Tizoc stone, and other works in subject Nahua polities, Umberger locates a narrative of environmental disaster and renewal in the iconographic record, beginning with the disastrous flooding of the Mexica capital in 1499, and ending with renewed fertility at the Basin of Mexico on 2-Reed (ca. 1507). John M. D. Pohl compares the received narrative of Hernando Cortés as Quetzalcoatl to the deployment of deities from classical antiquity in the Renaissance, focusing on Alfonso V of Aragón, conqueror of Naples—a city whose foundational myth features the siren Parthenope.

Moving across a broader canvas, Thomas B. F. Cummins highlights how “one might think of comparisons” in terms of classical and Mexica sculpture. Cummins notes the inclusion of Huitzilopochtli (Sahagún's “another Hercules”) and Hercules (deployed to celebrate Charles V's triumphs) in a funeral sculpture for Charles V in Mexico City, and then notes a key distinction in the Spanish reception of Mexica and Andean imagery. While the former was an anthropocentric tradition comparable to Classic aesthetics, the latter was multifarious and resisted reduction. He then chronicles potential comparisons between Mexica and classical art. In addition to highlighting the uncanny resemblance between an Ehecatl sculpture holding a snake and depictions of the unfortunate Trojan priest Laocoön, Cummins analyzes a headless figurine in a depiction of the Templo Mayor in the 1524 edition of Cortés's second letter to Charles V, which may echo an illustration in one of the Aeneid's oldest surviving sources—a Laocoön with arms stretched out. The chapter ends with an exemplary repurposing: the rebirth of Bramante's circular stairway design for a Vatican theater, never built, as a staircase in Quito's Plaza de San Francisco.

Cecelia F. Klein rethinks European depictions of what she calls “the slash”: the opening of the chest of sacrificial victims by Mexica priests. Klein departs from a rethinking of “simultaneous illustration,” the term Kubler and Gibson coined for Mesoamerican pictorial scenes that portray several events in the same space but not chronologically. After proposing that this convention derived from early modern European engravings, Klein surveys the European imagining of Mexica human sacrifice. This is an enticing journey that comments on the staging of sacrificial scenes by Diego Valadés, Theodore de Bry, Bernard Picart, Jean Frédéric Prévost, and Désiré Charnay, and ends with the European fascination with depicting the roasting of small children, along with a note on the potential role of blood libel narratives.

Chapters 6 and 7 dissect Sahagún's classical models. Andrew Laird presents an erudite comparison between Greco-Roman deities and Nahua ones, intending to locate classical models that informed the work of Sahagún and other missionaries. Laird argues that a list of 12 important Roman gods, recorded by Livy and others, were in Sahagún's mind as he discussed Nahua deities. Departing from the work of Lluís Nicolau i d'Olwer, he notes similarities in the recounting of an omen of conquest, a weeping woman associated with Cihuacoatl, with Plutarch's story of a crying oracle that foretold the death of the god Pan and the end of human sacrifices. Laird then argues that Sahagún merged Pan's omen and Cihuacoatl's weeping because he identified Cihuacoatl as an echo of Eve, “our mother.” In any case, Laird judiciously concludes that analogies between Mexica and Greco-Roman deities would “hardly contribute” to missionary understandings about the nature of Nahua deities. Along a parallel trajectory, Guilhem Olivier goes beyond d'Olwer in arguing that Sahagún's footnotes were essential, not incidental, and discusses changes in comparisons also discussed by Laird, such as Huitzilopochtli (from Mars to Hercules) and Chalchihuitl Icue (from Neptune to Juno). Olivier turns to euhemerism (the thesis that Greek gods originated as historical figures, later deified), here as a basis for Sahagún's ideas about cihuapipiltin, women who died in first childbirth and later became goddesses. Olivier, like Laird, asserts that Sahagún's ranked listings of Nahua deities evinces a European order; in addition, he astutely observes how little we know yet about reasons for Sahagún's demotion or erasure of important deities, such as Xiuhteuctli (god of time) or Mictlanteuctli (lord of the Underworld). Wisely, Olivier cites Lafitau, who contended that the “customs of the savages” could help him better understand classical antiquity.

As a fitting coda, Leonardo López Luján reviews fascinating links among New Spain, Italy, and Spain. Beginning with a 1747 pamphlet on excavations at Herculaneum, perhaps the first publication on archaeology in New Spain (but based in part on apocryphal letters), López Luján discusses the significance of these explorations. He also discusses other early observers of Mesoamerican archaeology who were firmly rooted in classical antiquity as they commented on eighteenth-century investigations of Mesoamerican sites such as El Tajín and Xochicalco.

In the end, if Mexico-Tenochtitlan was “another Rome” and its deities “other” Jupiters or Junos, this impressive volume deftly addresses why these similes mattered, and how they established both foundational conceptions and misunderstandings about Mesoamerica in European minds.