Andrés Bello and the Classical Tradition. Some Problems for it Assessment

Abstract

Andrés Bello is perhaps the greatest humanist of Hispanic America. Poet, philologist, linguist, educator, philosopher, jurist, legislator, politician and journalist, his vast work rests on a solid classical formation that is evident in each and every one of its facets. Formed during the final years of colonial scholasticism in Caracas, where he was born in 1781, he completed and deepened his education in London during the first decades of the nineteenth century and developed most of his vast work in Santiago de Chile, where he died in 1865. His life cycle thus reaches almost a century, during which important changes were observed in the evolution of classical studies and of European thought in general. This approach attempts to identify some of the problems that have prevented us from correctly assessing the essential place occupied by the classical tradition in the work of Andrés Bello.