The Old Lawgiver
Read the full text in our reader
Torna Baco, dizendo: " Não conheces O grã legislador que a teus passados Tem mostrado o preceito a que obedeces, Sem o qual fôreis muitos batizados? Eu por ti, rudo, velo; e tu adormeces! Pois saberás que aqueles, que chegados De novo são, serão mui grande dano Da lei que eu dei ao néscio povo humano.
Bacchus returns, saying: "Do you not know the great lawgiver who has shown your forebears the precept you obey, without which many of you would be baptized? For your sake, dullard, I keep watch, and you fall asleep! Then know this: those who have newly arrived will be a very great harm to the law I gave to the foolish race of men."
Bacchus, disguised as a Muslim holy man, appears in a dream to a local priest at Calicut and stirs him against the newly arrived Portuguese. Here he taunts the priest for sleeping while the god himself keeps watch.
Bacchus, still wearing the mask of a revered Muslim teacher, works on the sleeping priest by flattery and reproach at once. He credits an unnamed "great lawgiver" with the faith the priest lives by, warns that without it the locals would already be Christians, and then plays the wounded protector: I stay awake for you while you doze. Every line drives toward the last, where he brands the newcomers a threat to the law he claims to guard.
The trick a first reader misses is who is actually speaking. This is a pagan Roman god impersonating a Muslim holy man to defend Islam against Christians. Camões has Bacchus call the Koran-giver (Muhammad, never named) the lawgiver of "the foolish human people" and the faith a thing he himself bestowed. The god is not defending any real religion; he is defending his own cult against Gama's mission, and the poem lets him damn Islam and Bacchus in the same breath.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 8.49 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 8.49 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/8.49/