HUMAN SACRIFICE AND SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY ECONOMICS:

Whereas human sacrifice in Virgil in inseparable from Aeneas mission, Tasso and his imitators repeatedly oppose Christian imperialism to the practice of human sacrifice, and see such imperialism as culminating in the abolition of cannibalistic sacrifice in the New World. The contrary view?? That European civilization itself embodied forms of sacrificial barbarity appears not only in the well-known condemnations of conquistador atrocities but, in England, in critical accounts of the growing culture of measurement, enumeration, and monetary exchange. Answering the contention that the East Indies trade did not justify the sacrifice of lives that it entailed, Dudley Digges responded by citing Neptunes justification in the Aeneid of the sacrifice of Palinurusto the cause of empire: unum pro multis [dabitur caput]. Not all authors were, however, so complacent. Particularly in the late seventeenth-century, authors such as Dryden, Otway, and Aphra Behn came to see the burgeoning trading economy as embodying systems of exchange which, in reducing the individual to an economic cipher, recreated the primal exchanges of human sacrifice. In Venice Preservd (1682), for example, Otway depicts an advanced, seventeenth-century trading empire