To James Madison from Carlo Giuseppe Guglielmo Botta, 10 January 1816 (Abstract)
From Carlo Giuseppe Guglielmo Botta, 10 January 1816 (Abstract)
§ From Carlo Giuseppe Guglielmo Botta. 10 January 1816, Paris. Would not dare to send a copy of his Camillus if JM had not already kindly received his Storia della guerra d’America.1 This may give Botta courage to place before JM the theme of his poem, which is independence and civilization. And to whom could these matters be more acceptable, than to the president of the United States of America? Thus asks JM to accept his poem Camillus, [not found] mere remains brought back to light and annexed to this letter. Requests this favor because of JM’s humanity in the past and his own infinite love for the prosperity of the United States.
RC (DLC). 1 p.; in Italian. Docketed by JM.
1. See Botta to JM, 12 Jan. 1810, 2:175 and n. His Il Camillo, o vejo conquistata, an epic poem in twelve cantos on Roman dictator Marcus Furius Camillus’s 396 BC conquest of the Etruscan city of Veii, was published in Paris in 1815 (Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. [Oxford, England, 1996], 615–16).