This continues the novel's theme of the unchanging round of conquest and revolution that constitutes history. On that level Antonia is a "relic" because she belongs to the bygone politics of a specific time and place, much as Giorgio Viola was "a drifting relic" of the Garibaldi campaigns.

The reader who knows Antonia, however, might find it hard to believe that she would consent to be "disregarded" by the revolutionaries of her time, no matter how old. I sense perhaps another level to this line, relating to the allegory of her as idealism. The end of the novel concerns the People's quest for the utopian classless society, an "anarchist" society according to this Note, which in the context of Nostromo means above all a society without idealism. In that final "Dawn" (note the capital), she would indeed have no place.