| Sumario: | This essay analyses three epigrams, that are among the only original compositions known to us so far written in ancient Greek in New Spain, composed by the largely unknown eighteenth-century Mexican poet José de Villerías y Roelas and transmitted only through a single largely unpublished manuscript. I present an edition, a translation, and an analysis of Villerías' compositions, focussing mainly on the literary themes and lexicon that conforms the poet's use of Greek in his epigrams devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to Segura y Troncoso and Zoïlus, and on the motives and ideological implications that his poetic images reveal. Finally, the closing discussion considers how the use of Greek language and the revamping of classical traditions in the early eighteenth-century Mexico can be analysed as intellectual phenomena that are deeply related to the colonial dynamics of internal colonialism and class conciliation, a circumstance that is symbolically depicted in an important material element of Villerías' manuscript (MS 1594), the emblem on its first page showing a bee trapped in a spiderweb.
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