?? Cervantes was from Alcala de Henares and, after much travel, spent most of his life in and near Madrid. He wrote a play about the Roman siege of Numantia, El cerco de Numancia, but he had no connection with that long-ruined city, which was a desolate place many centuries before his day.

Numantia, however, was much admired both in Roman and in later times, for the Celtic stand to the death against the Romans. It has standing among people literary-minded enough (or Spanish enough) to know about it, as a symbol of freedom and uncompromising resistance to tyranny.

Quixote, not the author.

Yes. I R neither, but the comparison was something like the don's absurd legends growing to mythic proportions, then dying with him. So Mankar's cultivated an image of himself that's capable of igniting revolution - que Dagon - and challenge the security of the Empire. When he dies, this revolutionary he's created dies with him.

Not him, either. The ingenious hidalgo was from a place in La Mancha (which is not near historical Numantia) "whose name I do not care to recall" and has no association with Numantia whatsoever. It's important that Quixote is from the most prosaic region of Spain (as Dorothy is from Kansas), not from a place with any hint of past, present, or future heroism.

The sole mention of Numantia in Quixote is in an exceedingly obscure discussion of whether writers of Cervantes' day were guilty of "writing without paying any attention to good taste or the rules of art" (Ch. 48). And it is only Cervantes' play, not any place or ideal of Numantia that is meant there.



Fair enough, but it's a connection without support in literary criticism, an obstacle that would never stop MK anyway.

Most of what I remember was MK saying, why does everyone remember the windmills? I'm pretty sure he said the relationship was in the way the two perpetuated a myth that couldn't survive past death.

And, I didn't say Numantia was Quixote's home. I said Quixote was the mold for Mankar. The "who" in my edited sentence was directed at the don. I thought Cervantes was from Numantia, that's where I was wrong.