Theorizing aggregative reception: Virgil’s Fama in Lusophone epic

Abstract Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, which analyses the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy which emerged in colonial Brazil, for its dialoguing with the ancient poetic tradition. She has published articles on topics ranging from religious language in Augustan poetry to the legacy of Virgil in Portuguese epic and Brazilian poetry. She held the Andrew Heiskell/Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize in Ancient Studies at the American Academy of Rome in 2021–2022 and a Loeb Prize Fellowship in 2024–2025. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception. The appearance of Fama in The Lusiads is of tremendous importance for cementing her status as a fixture of Lusophone epic and for coining a Portuguese lexicon for her representation, but it is by no means the end of her story. This article seeks to identify a topos of receptive engagement here termed ‘aggregative reception’ through a case study of the appearances of Fama, the divine personification of ‘rumour’, in five Portuguese epics published over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, each one interesting in its own right for its unique contribution to an expansive vision of Virgil’s monstrous figure: Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s Ulisseia, ou Lisboa Edificada (1636), António Sousa de Macedo’s Ulyssippo, Poema Heróico (1640), Miguel Mauricio Ramalho’s Lisboa Reedificada (1780), Vicente Carlos de Oliveira’s Lisboa Restaurada (1784), and Teodoro de Almeida’s Lisboa Destruída, Poema (1803). By reading the appearances of Fama in Portuguese epic together as not competing, but rather complementary, diffused across texts, aggregative reception offers a framework for reading receptions sympathetically by accommodating, and even encouraging, a diachronic consideration of the afterlife of a topos with its contextualization in a literary longue durée. The consideration of her appearances as cooperative allows for apparent inconsistencies to present opportunities for increasing complexity.