The New Science 9780300249606

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The New Science

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The New Science

Giambattista Vico

Translated and Edited by Jason Taylor and Robert Miner with an Introduction by Giuseppe Mazzotta

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Copyright © 2020 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@ yale.edu (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Angie Sheltz, Newgen. Set in Times New Roman MT type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940873 ISBN 978-0-300-19113-4 (paperback : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

e d i t o r s ’ p r e fa c e   ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s   i n t ro d u c t i o n  

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An Explication of the Picture Put Forward as the Frontispiece, to Serve as the Introduction to the Work  3 Chronological Table  34

Book One. On the Establishment of Principles  41 Annotations for the Chronological Table, in Which Is Made an Arrangement of Materials  43 On the Elements  74 On the Principles  109 On Method  114

Book Two. On Poetic Wisdom  123 On Wisdom in General  126 An Exposition and Partitioning of Poetic Wisdom  128 On the Universal Flood and the Giants  129 On Poetic Metaphysics, in Which Are Given the Origins of Poetry, Idolatry, Divination, and Sacrifices  132 Corollaries concerning the principal aspects of this science  139

viContents On Poetic Logic  145 Corollaries concerning poetic tropes, monstrosities, and transformations 147 Corollaries concerning the earliest nations speaking through poetic characters 151 Corollaries concerning the origins of languages and letters, and therein the origins of hieroglyphics, of laws, of names, of insignia of noble houses, of medallions, and of money; and, so, the origins of the earliest language and literature of the natural law of the gentile peoples 157 Corollaries concerning the origins of poetic locution, digression, inversion, rhythm, song, and verse  175 The additional corollaries that were proposed above  182 Final corollaries concerning the logic of the learned  190

On Poetic Morals, and Therein on the Origins of the Commonplace Virtues Taught by Religion Along with Marriage  193 On Poetic Economics, and Therein on the Earliest Families Comprised of Children 203 On the families comprised of familial servants prior to cities, without which it was completely impossible for cities to come into being 222 Corollaries concerning contracts completed by consent alone  234 Mythological canon  235

On Poetic Politics, by Which the Earliest Republics in the World Came to Be in the Strictest Aristocratic Form  236 All republics have come to be from certain eternal principles of fealties 248 On the origins of the census and the treasury  258 On the origins of the Roman assemblies  261 Corollary: It is divine providence which is the institutor of the orders of republics and, at the same time, of the natural law of the gentile peoples 263 Heroic politics, continued  266 Corollaries concerning the ancient Roman things and, in particular, the dreamed-up monarchical regime in Rome and the dreamed-up popular liberty instituted by Junius Brutus  280 Corollaries concerning the heroism of the earliest peoples  282 Epitomes of poetic history  287

On Poetic Physics  290

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On the poetic physics concerning man—that is, on heroic nature  292 Corollary on heroic sentences  297 Corollary on heroic descriptions  297 Corollary on heroic customs  298

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Contents On Poetic Cosmography  300 On Poetic Astronomy  307

An astronomical physico-philological demonstration of the uniformity of principles in all the ancient gentile nations  307

On Poetic Chronology  309 Chronological canon for giving the beginnings of universal history, which must have begun its course prior to the monarchy of Ninus, from which that universal history is presumed to start  312

On Poetic Geography  315 Corollary on Aeneas coming to Italy  323 On the naming and describing of heroic cities  325

Book Three. On the Discovery of the True Homer  329 On the Recondite Wisdom That Has Been Opined about Homer  331 On the Fatherland of Homer  335 On the Age of Homer  336 On the Unaccountable Faculty of Homer for Heroic Poetry  339 Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer  341 Philological Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer  346 Discovery of the True Homer  352 The lack of congruity and the lack of verisimilitude belonging to the Homer believed in up until now becomes, with the Homer herein discovered, agreeableness and necessity  352 The poems of Homer are found to be the two great treasure houses of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece  356 A rational history of dramatic and lyric poetry  357

Book Four. On the Course That the Nations Make  363 Three Kinds of Natures  365 Three Kinds of Customs  366 Three Kinds of Natural Law  366 Three Kinds of Governance  367 Three Kinds of Languages  367 Three Kinds of Characters  368 Three Kinds of Jurisprudence  369 Three Kinds of Authority  371 Three Kinds of Reason  372 Corollary on the wisdom of the ancient Romans in matters of state  373 Corollary: Foundational history of Roman law  374

viiiContents Three Kinds of Judgments  376 Corollary on duels and reprisals  379

Three Sects of Times  385 Additional Proofs Treating the Properties of Heroic Aristocracies  386 On Guardianship Over Boundaries  386 On Guardianship Over Orders  388 On Guardianship Over Laws  396 Additional Proofs Taken from the Moderating Which Happens of the Subsequent Constitutions of Republics Because of the Prior Ways of Governing 399 On the eternal and natural royal law through which nations come to rest under monarchies  400 Refutation of the principles of a political teaching based upon the system of Jean Bodin  402

Final Proofs Which Confirm That This Is the Course of Nations  406 Corollary: Ancient Roman law was a serious poem, and ancient jurisprudence was a severe poetry, within which are found the earliest roughed-out features of a legal metaphysics; and how for the Greeks philosophy came from the laws  409

Book Five. On the Recurrence of Human Things During the Resurgence That the Nations Make  419 The Recurrence Nations Make in Accordance with the Eternal Nature of Fealties; and, Consequently, the Recurrence of Ancient Roman Law in Feudal Law  425 A Depiction of the World of Nations, Ancient and Modern, with Observations Conforming to the Design of the Principles of This Science 437

Conclusion of the Work—Concerning an Eternal Natural Republic, Best in Each of the Kinds of Republic Ordered by Divine Providence  441

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Editors’ Preface

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“

f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Isaac Newton, whom Vico praises in The New Science as one of the two “foremost geniuses of our age.” This translation aims to become the standard English-language edition of Vico’s magnum opus. But should it attain this goal, it will do so only because the translators have stood on the shoulders of scholarly giants. All Anglophone readers of Vico owe a large debt to Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch’s translation, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, first published in 1948 by Cornell University Press. We have also benefited from the recent translation of David Marsh, published by Penguin in 1999. Why is another edition of Vico in English necessary? Any translation is a compromise between literalness and readability, aiming at the elusive goal of fidelity. Where Bergin and Fisch tend toward literalness, Marsh opts for superior readability and often achieves it. He does so, however, at the price of fracturing the unity of the text’s distinctive vocabulary—as, for example, by using six different English words to render the key term ingegno. It may seem, then, that readers should stick with the older translation, owing to its “reliability and readability,” as Donald Verene puts it. Despite its genuine merits, the Bergin and Fisch edition is marred by some defects. These suffice to warrant a new translation. In lieu of a tedious comprehensive listing, here is a small sample: 1. Omissions and mistakes. At the end of Book Two’s section on “Poetic Logic,” Vico asserts that many things in human life were discovered in Greece “prior to the arrival of the philosophers”—and adds that the grounds of his assertion will not be made visible until Book 3, “when we reason upon the age of Homer.” In their translation of §498, Bergin and Fisch omit this passage entirely, and thus obscure a link between Books Two and Three that Vico considers important. Near the end of the Book on Homer, Bergin and Fisch have Vico claim twice that “the philosophers” have written obscurely and ix

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confusedly about dramatic and lyric poetry. The charge, however, is clearly leveled at i filologi, “the philologists” (§905). 2. Misleading literalism. Bergin and Fisch render favoloso by “fabulous”; their text speaks throughout of “fabulous beginnings” and “fabulous history.” Given the connotations of “fabulous” in contemporary English, this translation is inevitably misleading. “Mythical beginnings” and “mythical history” are closer to the sense Vico intends; “mythical” is more faithful, if less literal. In a similar vein, Bergin and Fisch’s text speaks of “vulgar letters”—a translation that tends to evoke images of salacious correspondence. There is nothing “vulgar” in our sense of the term about letteri volgari. (The present text adopts “common alphabetic letters.”) 3. Simple inconsistencies in key terms. Often sapienza riposta is “esoteric wisdom”; sometimes it appears as “hidden wisdom” or “recondite wisdom.” Virtù is frequently “virtue,” but it becomes “valor” at §261, though Vico uses the Italian valor shortly thereafter at §277. Guisa is variously “manner,” “process,” “form,” “case,” “way,” and “fashion.” Beyond repairing the faults of previous editions, the present translation aims to capture an important feature of Vico’s style, well described by Giuseppe Mazzotta: The prose of The New Science is ceaselessly marked by digressions that slow down the rhythm of the narrative, by quick forward thrusts of the discourse through dazzling intuitions, by repetitions and sinuous falling back on formulas previously stated but which are now re-viewed from a new angle. This convoluted narrative technique is occasionally cumbersome but necessary. It conveys Vico’s sense of the complications within the order of causality. The positive links between cause and effect never function by a linear mechanism in this poetic-philosophical universe (The New Map of the World, p. 141).

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In the interest of remaining faithful to his “narrative technique,” we have generally refrained from breaking Vico’s longer sentences into a succession of short, choppy sentences. And when his style moves from seemingly unending chains of parataxis to Ciceronian periods, we attempt to carry this over into the translation as well. We have also preserved Vico’s own system of paragraphing, attested by the handwritten copy and preserved in the edition published in 1744 by Stamperia Muziana. Accordingly, the present text indents only where Vico indents—though it does use line spacing to give the modern reader necessary relief from large grey blocks of text. Because scholars have long been accustomed to cite The New Science by the paragraph numbers that originate in the Italian edition of Fausto Nicolini and that later editions and translations reproduce, these numbers appear in the margin of the text. The present edition contains significantly more annotations than previous translations. Vico’s erudition is breathtaking, and the intellectual terrain in which he situates himself is complex. Our aim is to enhance the reader’s awareness of the many voices with which he is in dialogue. Some of these

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voices are named explicitly. Many others are evoked by implicit allusions to texts, ancient and modern. Though by no means exhaustive, our annotations will give the Anglophone reader more help than she has had so far. A distinctive feature of this edition is its reproduction of a range of attributes that appear on the surface of the text printed in 1744. These are attributes that remain invisible to the reader of modern editions, whether in English or Italian. They include the following: 1. The practice of quoting passages from classical texts in Latin. Vico frequently indents these passages, separating them from the main text in a manner that interrupts it, breaking its flow. The effect is to give the quotations a prominence that is lost when they are merged seamlessly into the main text. Our text reproduces the Latin, followed by a parenthetical translation. 2. Using the Greek alphabet to reproduce Greek words and phrases. Though Vico’s Greek was inferior to his Latin, he judged it vital to present Greek terms in the original language. He rejected the option of transliterating them into the Roman alphabet. 3. Preserving the emphasis on words designating components within Vico’s “system,” particularly “Corollary” and (to a lesser extent) “Proof.” By respecting the 1744 edition’s typography—which closely tracks the handwritten manuscript—our edition gives the reader a more vivid perception of Vico’s desire to present the new science as a system, complete with axioms, postulates, demonstrations, and corollaries. 4. The 1744 text’s manner of giving emphasis to particular words, phrases, and even entire sentences by means of CAPITAL LETTERS. It seems that Vico wanted some things to STAND OUT. This feature may strike today’s reader as peculiar or excessive; it may initially be distracting. Nevertheless, it is worth preserving because it invites the reader to attend to what the author wanted to stress on the textual surface, even as it reminds her of its baroque otherness. 5. The custom of arranging selected lines of text in the shape of an inverted pyramid. This is often done to signal the beginning of a section. Many other printed texts of the period follow the same convention. 6. The styling of the titles of the five Books. To give one example: the words “DEL RICORSO” in the 1744 edition appear in type that is twice as large as the other nine words contained in the title of Book Five. Other translations print every word in capital letters of the same size, giving each term an equal value, as it were. Such a practice fits the streamlining conventions of modern scholarly editions. But it is squarely at odds with Vico’s own intention. Accordingly, we have sought to preserve (some of) the jagged edges of the 1744 printed text. Acquaintance with these six attributes of the 1744 edition will bring today’s reader closer to the experience possible for a reader of Vico’s time. Since these features are largely typographical, one might object that it is unnecessary to preserve them: what matters is not the text’s surface appearance, but its noetic reality. Against this objection, we can only mention the chasm

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separating its premises from Vico’s own suspicion of “Cartesian” attempts to move directly to intelligible content, as though the engagement of the senses and the imagination were irrelevant. A further improvement on previous English editions concerns the system of cross-references within the text. The system pioneered by Bergin and Fisch is at once helpful and misleading. Vico himself indicates a large number of cross-references, directing the reader backwards (“as we have demonstrated herein”) and forwards (“as we will see later”). Judging the repetition of these signaling phrases to be tedious, Bergin and Fisch omit most of them, preferring simply to cite an appropriate text by paragraph number. There are other passages where, though a cross-reference might be helpful, Vico does not explicitly indicate one. In passages of this second type, Bergin and Fisch supply cross-references in exactly the same manner as they do with respect to the first type. Their suppression of Vico’s signaling phrases leaves the reader no way to distinguish between the two types of passage. Unless she consults an Italian edition, she will not know whether Vico expressly intends the cross-reference. The present translation restores these signaling phrases, even as it preserves the system of referring to places in the text by paragraph number. One last difference should be mentioned. The present translation refrains from intruding some divisions into the text that modern editions introduce. For example, Bergin and Fisch’s Book Two begins with “[Prolegomena],” followed by an “Introduction.” The 1744 text, by contrast, simply dives into “On Poetic Wisdom”—leaving everything unlabeled until it treats “On wisdom in general.” Vico describes his largest textual divisions as “Books,” and subdivides the Books into parts marked by their headings, but without the specific cuttings implied by the terms “Section” and “Chapter.” The present edition, by dint of its greater fidelity to the 1744 text, is in some ways less cluttered than other modern editions. We have sought to be spare where Vico is spare, and baroque where Vico is baroque. In Book Three, the central book of The New Science, Vico contrasts two kinds of poets who stand in the shadow of the epic poet Homer: the Cyclic poets and the tragedians. At §856 he cites from Horace’s Ars Poetica three pieces of advice for tragic poets who draw from Homer’s great storehouse of inventive possibility, but do not thereby wish to create something that is merely derivative. In following this advice, tragic poets would implicitly distinguish themselves from what Vico clearly regards as the inferior performance of the Cyclic poets. This section of The New Science certainly does not offer a full-blown theory of translation. But it does offer useful advice for those who, like ourselves, come after an epic performance—in this case, The New Science—and whose work is necessarily shaped by that performance: S N L xii

1. Do not confuse translation with interpretation. While this edition offers a significant interpretative apparatus, we have tried to forbear from explaining Vico’s Italian in the act of rendering into English.

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2. Do not confuse fidelity with literalness. While we have wanted generally to be scrupulous in following Vico’s diction and syntax, we have throughout this translation tried to remain alive to the possibility that, at any given moment, the most exact rendering is not necessarily the most faithful one. 3. Do not confuse humility with servility. While a translator’s task is necessarily not of the first rank, it is still work to be undertaken with spirit, generosity, and high aspiration.

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Acknowledgments

T

he editors wish to express their deep gratitude to Professor Andrea Battistini for his permission to draw freely from his extensive footnotes to the Scienza nuova, contained in volume two of Giambattista Vico: Opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). His notes have been an invaluable help to our attempts to trace Vico’s many references and allusions to classical and modern texts. Readers of this translation who desire more annotation than we have had space to provide will certainly want to consult his edition of Vico’s works. We are grateful to Sarah Miller and Ash Lago of Yale University Press, who have been generous and patient with the editors throughout the long process of bringing into being this translation of The New Science. The frontispiece image on page 2 is from Giambattista Vico, Principj di scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni, 1744, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Introduction

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he importance of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in the history of modern thought has been generally acknowledged over the last century. Occupying him from 1723 until the end of his life, the Scienza nuova (The New Science) is widely vaunted for its originality. Yet to this day it is unclear to what extent Vico’s master work broke new ground and played a decisive role in modernity’s cultural debates. Among the many scholars who pay lip service to Vico as an authoritative thinker, there is little or no agreement over his central concern. Much less do they seem to identify and account for a consistent, unified philosophical outlook in the work. We frequently hear that Vico, in spite of the ever-fascinating topics he raises throughout (for example, history and primitive mythology; religion and poetry; and language, with crucial insights into metaphor, style, etymology, rhetoric, and political discourse), has written a distinctly unsystematic text. In view of widespread interpretive conflicts and contradictions, it follows that readers do not end up grasping either the core purpose of The New Science or the imaginative, rigorous coherence of the questions contained within the apparent puzzle of this exceptional work, which offers a radically new understanding and elaboration of poetic philosophy. Scholars have raised a number of legitimate questions confronting The New Science, and many remain unanswered or their answers are elusive. Does Vico pick up and align himself with the central doctrines of the philosophy of the Enlightenment? Or is he putting forward a critical reading of the Enlightenment? Is he a modern or an antimodern thinker? Is he attached to or detached from the achievements of classical culture? And—to mention a cliché of current philosophical arguments—does he bemoan the technological turn of modern times? Finally, how much does it matter that Vico also rejects Cartesian themes, such as the ostensible supremacy of the abstractions of

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rationality, so that mathematics becomes the “science of sciences” (as Isaiah Berlin, a distinguished scholar of Vico, puts it)? The focus on these contradictory elements in scholars’ efforts to line up Vico’s thought on one or the other side of current intellectual debates completely misses the fact that he presents his views as a distinct “new philosophy,” one that would include all possible branches of higher learning. What is this new philosophy? In practice, this is the question that lies at the heart of his concerns, and with it is bound up his project to produce an original vision and style of thought. To achieve this aim, he drew from the many sources he came into contact with, and this implies that he was drawn both to disagree with and to assimilate the ideas of many established schools of thought, ranging from the Renaissance neo-Platonists and neo-Aristotelians to the Epicureans and Stoics. He corrects them and is thereby is willing to borrow from them. And so Vico rejects rationalist Cartesian claims, on the grounds that rationality is only a partial element of the complexities of the mind. However, Vico goes on to juxtapose the values and abstractions of rationality, as well as the mixture of skepticism and belief characteristic of the Enlightenment, with one crucial, wide-ranging dimension of knowledge: history. His rigorous introduction of history as the supreme principle, in the light of which a possible knowledge of reality could be reached, depends on his familiarity with Roman and Greek traditions that converge in Augustine, a figure crucial to Vico’s thought. In works such as The Confessions and The City of God, as well as in his overtly biblical and theological texts, such as The Literal Reading of Genesis and On the Trinity, Augustine elaborates an idea of history that includes moral directives, as well as reflections on knowledge, memory, political philosophy, theology, and language. In all these works Augustine confronts the classical Roman tradition of thought and absorbs it into his understanding. Like Augustine, Vico thinks of the mind through the realities of history, which for him is steadily marked by the disordered activities engaging the mind, the will, the memory, and the passions of human beings. In fact, more than Augustine, Vico exemplifies his insights into the values of history by focusing on language and myth as privileged sources for the knowledge of history and of our own minds. Also like Augustine, Vico describes the possibility of discovering the knowledge of one’s own mind over and against skeptical doubts. In his well-known formula Si fallor sum, articulated at City of God 11.26, Augustine encapsulates his plan to comprehend the mind through the lenses of religious traditions, which both reflect and shape the inner life and the outer world of human culture. The significance of Vico’s Augustianism, sadly neglected by recent scholarship, is amplified by the fundamental importance that Vico attributes to the institutions of law, as well as to the myths elaborated by human creativity. It is within the framework of these concrete expressions of history’s movement in time—simultaneously real and symbolic—that Vico also opens up and explores wider issues: questions of piety and impiety; the impact of re-

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ligion on philosophy; and the importance of the various schools of philosophy (Stoic, Epicurean, Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, etc.). And yet in spite of— or perhaps because of—these sundry intellectual issues, the overall unifying purpose of The New Science remains to be carefully explored and defined. To do so, we must turn to a careful reading of the many signs making up and expressing the platform of Vico’s authorial intentions, which sustains his masterpiece. It is my sense that Vico wrote The New Science primarily to gauge, with remarkable clarity, the depth of the intellectual, moral, and political crisis of his time. He conducts a systematic critique of that crisis—as only a careful analysis of the text will show in contrast to the conventional, generalized abstractions of history on the part of some interpreters about a “philosophy of history”—in order to find a way out of it. His consciousness of the crisis emerges most powerfully in his consideration of the question of education— that is to say, the productive nexus of philosophy and culture. The centrality of this concern can be gathered from his prolific earlier work, before he turned to writing The New Science. Vico’s conviction about the vital necessity to rethink the foundations and purposes of education emerges from his autobiography, from his voluminous discussion of the history and practice of the law, and from a number of essays and lectures that he wrote on the contemporary state of universities, which Vico saw as inflicting narrow limits on thought across Europe and beyond. Vico was, above all, concerned to address both the decadence of the institutions and the staleness of culture in general, caught in the throes of shallow learning and the cult of commonplaces. Confronted with the intellectual decay and crisis of his time, Vico calls for a renewal of the traditions of thinking, teaching, and learning and for a retrieval of the intellectual life of the past, just as some of his muchadmired philosophical predecessors had done (particularly Plato, Augustine, and Bacon). His discussion of these themes always turns on the question of a necessary rethinking of the fundamental issue of education. A question logically forces itself on us. What end does education serve? Was it basically a personal concern that Vico mulled over, or did he propound a theory of general social interest? It ought to be remarked that the education theme does not explicitly appear in the 1744 edition, which is the one you are reading. In fact, this edition conspicuously omits, by Vico’s own editorial decision, one detail present in the 1725 edition: the dedication of The New Science to the “Academies of Europe.” Vico shaped the 1744 edition of the text in order to acknowledge their past achievements, and he focused on their rigorous critical thinking and only hinted at their current disintegration. To be sure, Vico’s profound interest in the problematic state of education in his era was not by any means sudden. A glance at his autobiography, The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, shows that education was his lifelong occupation; when he was no longer a student, he was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. His autobiography, which he wrote while

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revising The New Science, belongs by any generic definition to the genre of novels of education, or bildungsroman. Moreover, it is based on the didactic principle “I am what I will become.” More specifically, Vico’s autobiography, like most of its kind, tells the story of a self-education. It begins with a quick reference to Vico’s family origins and moves to an account of the child’s educational failures in school as he sought in vain to grasp the difficulties in the class lectures delivered by his philosophy teacher. Vico proceeds with the fairly dramatic central story of his life, how he attempted to obtain a law degree from the University of Naples, where he took an examination in the hope that he might win a prestigious job as a law professor, only to suffer a humiliating failure. And, finally, Vico’s autobiography culminates with his becoming the author of The New Science. His self-dramatization, as a sort of autodidact, suggests that Vico may have wanted to inspire his followers to adopt or imitate his commitment and imagination. Thus, throughout his text, Vico faithfully tells the story of his steady reading of the classics and the texts of the Italian Renaissance. He describes his choice of four philosophers, namely, Plato, the Greek philosopher who authored the Republic, with its brilliant mixture of the two related themes of utopia and education; Tacitus, the Roman historian and political thinker who came to be classified as the alternative to Machiavelli; Francis Bacon, the English political philosopher and theorist of science; and Hugo Grotius, the Dutch philosopher of law. Vico privileges them as steady points of reference, appropriately referring to them throughout his life as his “four philosophers.” Unsurprisingly, he selects his own major intellectual challenges—the question of science in the modern age, issues of politics and utopian thinking, natural law and larger issues of legal philosophizing through their works—and observes how these philosophers address such issues. Moreover, he engages these philosophers to discern his own role as a thinker about, for example, the study methods of his own time, articulated in overt contrast with Bacon’s ambitious political/educational plans in England. Vico’s autobiography ends with his choosing for himself a single intellectual model, a classical figure whom Petrarch and other early Renaissance humanists admired through a mythical aura: Socrates of Athens. For the humanists, Socrates understood and came to define for his own time the essential role of the philosopher. Socrates characterized philosophy as the path to acquire the virtues in all their complexities, and he taught his disciples the proper aim of philosophy: the inquiry into the intellectual stages leading to the acquisition of self-knowledge. His whole life was crowned, as is known, by a tragic and ironic event: he was killed by his own city on charges that he had violated its laws. An afterthought to the choice of Socrates as Vico’s model should be considered. Perhaps Vico, at the start of his own philosophical self-definition, understood the myth of Socrates in existential terms, wanting to believe that he resembled Socrates in a peculiar way. Socrates came to be a mirror that revealed to Vico his own inner condition. Like Socrates, who was known as

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a “stray dog,” Vico saw himself as a thinker unsure about his proper role and place within the political and intellectual economy of his city. Moreover, Vico hints at what will eventually emerge dramatically in The New Science. He was not yet aware of the tragic knot of politics and philosophy, which ends Socrates’ life, and which gets thematized in the philosophical text you are now reading: the systematic violence perpetrated by political powers against philosophers, and the repeated murdering of philosophers throughout history (for example, Seneca, the followers of Pythagoras, Giordano Bruno, etc.) by the absolute hegemony of tyrants. When we locate Vico’s volume within the intellectual context of his own time, we can decide whether his New Science calls for what Thomas Kuhn, in another context, means by a “scientific revolution.” This might imply that Vico’s text shares in the postmodernism of contemporary French thought— from Michelet to Levi-Strauss and Derrida—as if, like them, Vico espouses the view that the modern age is a time of delusion to be deconstructed, the delusion of a modernity that reduces history to a cult of the present, which he calls the “barbarism of reflection.” This might be taken to suggest that Vico endorses modern-day skepticism about the powers of human reason. In The New Science, Vico does not in fact argue for the supreme value of philosophy in relation to political power in modern discourse. Rather, Vico upholds the radically new principle of the centrality of poetry (which includes myth, rhetoric, language, history, and the concerns of the earlier humanists). His aim is to awaken the need to retrieve human creativity and freedom of imagination as the values in the theory of education (and culture) he articulates. A brief comment about the conspectus of senses of “poetry” may be helpful for placing in his ideas in context. In On the Study Methods of Our Time, published in 1709, Vico develops an inaugural oration that he delivered the year before at the University of Naples. The address purports to be a comparison of the educational method of the present and that of antiquity, for the sake of drafting a modern program of studies. It is noteworthy that Vico does not offer a sovereign method that can apply universally, everywhere, in contrast to Descartes, whose mathematical method amounts to an ambitious search for a rationally incontrovertible truth. Rather, Vico vindicates the intellectual legitimacy and rigor of a program of studies centered on poetry. Poetry for Vico comes to mean the spirit of memory, the language of the imagination and passions. It encompasses wide-ranging questions about traditions, origins, visions of the future, and the wisdom hidden in the folds and archives of language. I have been recalling preparatory texts that Vico wrote in the course of his intellectual maturation. These culminate in the awareness that an ideal structure of the university must embrace ethics, science, and the meditations on the bond, and possible rift, between politics and culture. In other words, tracing the path of Vico’s earlier thinking allows for a reading of key aspects of the encyclopedic New Science that demonstrate continuity further along

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that path. We must keep in mind at the outset the seemingly secondary, but actually fundamental purposes of Vico’s procedure. One of these consists in his teaching us how to read the subtleties in the language of texts, including his own, in the conviction that apparently secondary details can bring unexpected illumination of a text’s hidden intentions. For clarity’s sake, let me examine the text’s full title: The New Science: Principles of the New Science about the Common Nature of Nations. The thrust of almost every word in the title—“new,” “principles,” “nature,” and “nations”— evokes and promises a deliberate quest for new beginnings. The implicit intention is to convey that this is a book about origins. The adjective “new” itself suggests that beginnings and origins are not for Vico an end in themselves and dispels the possibility that the work centers on antiquarianism. On the contrary, the title makes clear that Vico’s project focuses on the question of the future. He couples the adjective “new” with the term “principles” (which suggests foundations) and with “nature” and “nations” (which implies the events of birthing and evokes the future and its inherent possibilities). The title, moreover, deploys a lexicon whose terms are easily identifiable in philosophical and scientific texts by Vico’s predecessors from the Renaissance and baroque periods. “Principles” is suggestive of Descartes, who, along with Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), wrote Principles of Philosophy (1644), a text whose key term signifies foundation stones of the scientific method—first causes of “all that is or can be in the world.” Similarly, the phrase “new science” alludes to a text by Galileo about his astronomical discoveries, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove science (Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations about Two New Sciences), a text that gives authoritatively modern principles and procedures of a new scientific culture. The linguistic and historical tangle of Vico’s title, as well as the semantic proximity of “nations” and “nature,” suggests that in its initial impulse and intellectual foundation, The New Science amounts to a plan to revive the historic phenomenon of the Renaissance. That this is in fact Vico’s aim is strongly suggested by the frontispiece introducing the text. The image was conceived by Vico himself. He was, after all, a man who lived in the city of Naples at a time when it was the home of painters who embody the quintessence of baroque art: Caravaggio, José de Ribera (who was called “Lo Spagnoletto,” “the little Spaniard”), and Luca Giordano, among others. About Vico’s image, meant to be a synthesis of the content of The New Science and how to view it, one can say what holds true of baroque art, an art that aims at drawing the real world into the imaginary world. Vico’s vision of the world of history—a world containing archaeological relics, ruins of monuments, enigmatic inscriptions, and globes, as well as disclosing shifting perspectives and the hybrid complexities of experiences—is best represented through the optics of baroque art. It is as though the aesthetics of the baroque confront and unveil the broken dreams of the Renaissance.

Introduction

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Historically, “Renaissance”—the sense of which is “rebirth”—has meant an age of extraordinary vitality and radical consciousness of modernity’s emergence from the shadows of the Middle Ages. This most creative epoch is said to have started in the 1300s and have come to an end around 1600. Vico writes his text, or so scholars have argued, in order to establish grounds for another rebirth of a historical period he sees as past. However, he mixes his Renaissance ideals with the aesthetics and deep creativity of the baroque epoch, a period that is neither as recognizably distinct from the Renaissance nor as lifeless as influential scholars such as Benedetto Croce have thought. In reality, the baroque is a truly new age characterized by unusually lofty creativity and by novelty in the sciences. It is an intellectual world identifiable with the revolutionary roles of Alberti, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Columbus, and their disciples, as well as the voices of great poets and musicians such as Tasso, Marino, Cervantes, Milton, Juan de la Cruz, and Scarlatti. In brief, both the Renaissance and the baroque, with their eclectic tastes, transgress the boundaries of self-enclosed, fragmentary, partial, and narrow visions. Both appear to Vico historically as times of inclusive culture, within which the dimensions of the sacred, seemingly pushed out of sight by secularizing forces in the previous century, reappear and seek to reconstitute into wholeness the seemingly contradictory aspects of knowledge, such as science and poetry. Such culture has the power to reshape, at its depths, the modern sense of education and knowledge. In the classical tradition, as established by Plato and Aristotle, philosophy and poetry are at odds with each other. In Book X of the Republic, Plato expels the poets from his utopia. In his Poetics, Aristotle shares his master’s view that philosophy is the privileged route to the pursuit of the significant values of human life. Indeed, he subscribes to Plato’s idea of the state and the role of the philosopher-king, and like him, he makes the necessity of a rational form of poetry the keystone of any reliable knowledge. Consider how Vico challenges the very premises of this tradition. Vico’s frontispiece brings the readers into the center of his intellectual and historical world and illuminates the purposes of his text. One sees Vico the educator at work as he glosses the image, showing us how to look at the painting. Accordingly, he reveals the use and importance of a revolutionary geometric technique—that of “perspective,” introduced in Florence by Leon Battista Alberti in his Della pittura (1435). Simultaneously an architect, a theorist of art, and a writer, Alberti pioneers “perspective” as a revolutionary transformation in the representation of what we see. Perspectival technique transforms the notion of space, which now appears less as a stable, fixed entity and more as that which can be manipulated into a variety of illusory, shifting forms. In this way perspective marks the beginning of modern subjectivity, vindicating the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every single point of view. Vico’s deployment of “perspective” (a term he uses at §3) puts into relief the power of images—their status in bringing into view the appearance of a

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world. It reveals and opens up Vico’s conviction that all knowledge (or, as the Greeks saw it, the link between the logos and the eide) is rooted in the imagination. The image, however, does not replace language: the two exist in a unified relationship. Focusing on the image and reading Vico’s explanation of it, the reader comes to realize that Alberti (along with Nicholas of Cusa and Augustine) are Vico’s phantom interlocutors, as much as Plato, Tacitus, Bacon, and Grotius, his four authors. More than that, we come to realize that “seeing” is the question that lies at the heart of the musings common to Vico and the painters. The image brings into focus the power of the eye—the eye of Providence up high; the reality of Homer, the blind but visionary poet of ancient Greece. Here Homer signifies the poet capable of seeing the phantoms he carries within himself—the memory of ancient Greece as brought to life in the Iliad and the Odyssey—rather than the mimesis of the natural or historical world. Moreover, the frontispiece shows that the way for human beings to see and grasp the mysteries of the world is to raise the human eye by first practicing the inward sight of Homer and then observing how Lady Philosophy refracts the divine light. Above all, we are taught to look up from the bottom (from the ground littered with the chaos) to the statue of Homer, from there to Philosophy, and finally to rest in God’s eye. In short, Vico radically reverses the intellectual premises of the classical world. For him poetry is an interlocutor with philosophy, with what Boethius or medieval allegoresis presents as Lady Philosophy, from whom light radiates, a provident light that is simultaneously outside and inside the unfolding history. And philosophy and poetry together lead us to the contemplation of a literally “pro-vidential” order—the all-seeing eye of God whom the blind poet experiences as a refracted light on his back and can imaginatively see. By means of the “new science,” we are able to go past Homer, glimpsing the interaction of aesthetics and knowledge. This new science conceived by Vico marks out the path to wisdom: scientia leads to sapientia—or, as the Greeks had it, episteme leads to sophia. Beyond its Introduction, the entire construction of The New Science evokes a number of mutually complementary rhetorical genres. It is written, in fact, as if it were an intellectual journey of discovery through distinct epochs of history: it reads as an epic whose hero is Vico himself, traveling from Book One to the end. His journey begins with speculations about the origins of the world and with a synoptic tabulation of the blurred but visible traces of universal history in chronological succession, from the Universal Flood recorded by the Hebrews, through the Chaldeans and Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans. All shifts and resemblances across geographical and temporal stages are duly stressed: silent about the story of the Garden of Eden, Vico prefers an exploration of human history, because human beings, as Vico holds, can only know what they themselves have made. The governing principle of this syntopicon of universal history is the concept of the three ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, the age of human-

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kind. We should take this emphasis on distinct ages of history as Vico’s way of providing context for the importance of experience (a word which etymologically means “journey”). This involves the learning of languages about myths, institutions, and ideas, which are the alphabet of Vico’s project. Besides having this novelistic structure, The New Science is also an “encyclopedia,” a word that means the “circle of knowledge.” From this viewpoint, The New Science seeks to retrieve “a mental language common to all nations” in the belief that “all the sciences, all the disciplines and arts are directed to the perfection of the human faculties” (Scienza nuova prima 11). In this way, the text can be read as a dictionary; a complete library; a museum; or a summa and a baroque encyclopedia, in which law, history, politics, poetry, mythology, and education are gathered. The chief guides in this journey of discovery are Vico’s four authors—Plato, Bacon, Tacitus, and Grotius—who have all written about paideia, the education of the soul. The Platonic foundation of Vico’s encyclopedia is articulated at the very beginning of Book Two on “Poetic Wisdom.” Taking the reflections on wisdom in Book Two as a basis, Vico shifts to the volume’s central Book Three, which deals with Homer. This shift is an overt acknowledgment of the centrality of poetry in the journey of knowledge, as well as a way of legitimizing the principle that human beings know most precisely what they have made. After discussing Homer, Vico devotes Book Four to “The Course That the Nations Make”—that is, to social realities and to politics. Here Vico wants to provide a global framework that gives coherence to the ideas of “natural law” as put forward by Grotius. His aim is to counter the theories of political power found in Machiavelli as well as in Hobbes’s De cive (On the Citizen), a work inspired by Machiavelli. Book Five centers on political philosophy as a science that considers the best regime for ordering the polis. A conclusion follows, taking Aristotle’s Politics as its point of departure. In the conclusion, Vico comes full circle back to Plato and Cicero, opposing a long line of political scientists that includes Zeno, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, as well as the natural-law theorists Pufendorf, Selden, and Grotius. Political philosophy is the telos, the aim or conclusion of the New Science. Vico’s questions are unavoidable. Who are the virtuous citizens? What is the value of particular regimes (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and their corresponding perversions (tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule)? Which is better, to be ruled by the best laws or by the best men? Here is Vico’s conclusion: Therefore, Epicurus, who is given to chance, is refuted by what men actually do, and with him his followers Hobbes and Machiavelli. Also refuted by what men actually do is Zeno, and with him Spinoza. On the contrary, what men actually do establishes favor for the political philosophers, whose prince is the divine Plato, who establishes that the human things are ruled by providence. Hence, Cicero was in the right when he was unable to reason with Atticus about the laws, unless Atticus were to quit being an Epicurean

xxviIntroduction and concede from the first that providence rules the human things. Pufendorf did not give recognition to providence among his hypotheses; Selden merely assumed it; and Grotius set it aside. However, the Roman jurists established it as the first principle of the natural law of the gentile peoples. . . . Consequently, let Bayle see if there can actually be nations in the world without some knowledge of God! And let Polybius see how much truth there may be in his statement that if there were philosophers in the world, there would have been no need in the world for religions (§§1109–10).

Vico thus ends his New Science with the rejection of political-philosophical atheism, crystallized by the doctrines of Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Polybius, against which Vico juxtaposes the political philosophy of Plato and Cicero. In the dualistic, oppositional value system that Vico constructs (appearing generally as the polarization of Plato and Machiavelli), the synthesis of Plato and Machiavelli desired by Vico’s friend Paolo Matteo Doria seems to be dismissed out of hand. Of more immediate concern, Vico explicitly banishes the atheistic philosophers from the realm of political philosophy, not because their science is wrong, but because their unbelief threatens the foundation of the state. Vico’s trenchant dismissal of atheological politics aligns him with the tradition of the “anti-Machiavel,” the likes of which include Tommaso Campanella, Innocent Gentillet, and Jean Bodin. All are thinkers who display a revulsion from the frightening elements of Machiavelli’s vision: his ideas about the nature of power and his belief that the words have no relationship to the things they name—in short, “Machiavellianism” as a synonym for the philosophical skepticism of the libertines. For Vico, language (or discourse) is the real foundation of the political arena; mistrust of language undermines the order of the city. That is why against Machiavellian politics, Vico juxtaposes Plato and Cicero, owing to their shared doctrine that a moral, political dialogic conversation is dependable. Within this context, Vico draws attention to the link between rhetoric and politics. His conclusion suggests the possibility of viewing materialist philosophy as a blasphemous, divisive discourse that undermines the order of the city and promotes distrust in language. As Socrates and Dante had taught (compare Inferno 26), rhetoric is the discipline by which cities are constructed and by which they are destroyed. And Vico knows too well that polemos, “war,” is carved indelibly in the echo of the etymology of polis. But the last line of The New Science says it all: se non siesi pio, non si può daddovero esser saggio—which must be translated as “if one is not pious, one cannot in truth be wise.”

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Giuseppe F. Mazzotta Yale University Author, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

The New Science

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PRINCIPLES OF THE NEW SCIENCE OF GIAMBATTISTA VICO ABOUT THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS IN THIS THIRD EDITION

Corrected, clarified, and notably expanded by the Author himself in a great number of places.

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An Explication

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An Explication of the Frontispiece

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Just as Cebes the Theban in his Table1 made a register of the moral things, so we offer one to see the civil things. This serves for the reader to conceive of THE IDEA OF THIS WORK before reading it and to bring it back to one’s memory more easily, with such help as the imagination affords, after reading it.

1

THE WOMAN WITH THE WINGED TEMPLES STANDING SOVEREIGN UPON THE GLOBE OF THE WORLD—that is, the world of nature—is metaphysics, just as the term “metaphysics” itself implies.

2

And THE LUMINOUS TRIANGLE with an EYE WATCHING FROM WITHIN, this is God in keeping with divine providence as an aspect of God; with a view to this aspect, METAPHYSICS, IN AN ATTITUDE OF ECSTASY, CONTEMPLATES GOD from above the order of the natural things, whereas up until now philosophers have contemplated God through this order. For in this work, metaphysics has risen above that natural order and contemplates in God the world of the human mind—that is, the metaphysical world—so as to demonstrate providence in the world of the human spirit—that is, in the civil world, or, rather, the world of nations—a world formed in its basic elements out of all those things represented with the HIEROGLYPHS placed at the bottom of the PICTURE. Accordingly, the globe—that is, the physical, or rather, the natural world—IS SUPPORTED ON ONLY ONE PART OF THE ALTAR, for philosophers have up until now contemplated divine providence only in terms of the natural order and so have demonstrated only one part of it, namely, the part to which men give reverence with sacrifices and other divine honors to a God who, as mind, is free and absolute lord over nature insofar as it is with his eternal counsel that God has naturally brought us into being and naturally preserves our being. However, they have not yet contemplated God in terms of that part of providence most proper to men, beings whose nature has as its principal property that of being sociable; it is in providing for this sociability that God has ordered and disposed the human things: one might suppose that men, who have fallen away from integrity and justice through original sin, who always intend different, and even conflicting, courses of action so as to serve their own advantage,2 would live in solitude like wild beasts; on the contrary, through those very courses of action, as different and as   There is an extant work called the Table of Cebes, attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Cebes the Theban (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.16), who is known primarily for appearing in Plato’s Phaedo. Cebes’s authorship of The Table is doubtful; it is likely by an anonymous author from the first or second century CE. 2   Utilità, a key term in the text. “Advantage” or “the advantageous” uniformly translates utilità in the singular; “advantages” is used for utilità in the plural. The adjective utile is translated by “advantageous” or “useful.” 1

6

The New Science conflicting as they are, men are drawn by that same advantage to live as men in keeping with justice, to preserve themselves in society, and to acknowledge their sociable nature; in this work, it will be demonstrated that this is the truth of the civil nature of man and thus the natural law. Guidance of divine providence of this sort is one of the things with which this science is principally preoccupied in its reasoning. Hence, on account of this aspect, this science comes to be a rational civil theology of divine providence.

3

ON THE BELT OF THE ZODIAC WHICH GIRDS THE GLOBE OF THE WORLD, ONLY TWO OF THE SIGNS APPEAR IN THEIR MAJESTY, or (as they say) IN FULL RELIEF, THOSE OF LEO AND OF VIRGO. In the first place, this is to signify that, for its principles, this science contemplates Hercules, given, first, that one finds that every ancient gentile nation tells of some Hercules as its founder. This science contemplates him in the greatest of his Labors, the one with him killing the lion which, in spewing flames, burned down the Nemean forest, and it is a Hercules adorned with the skin of this lion who was raised to the stars; and given, second, that one finds herein that this lion is the great ancient forest of the Earth, the forest which Hercules (whom one finds was a character standing for the political heroes, who must have come before martial heroes) set on fire and brought under cultivation. In addition, this is to offer the beginning of historical times, which started for the Greeks, from whom we have all that remains of gentile antiquity, with the Olympiads connected with their Olympic games, games which we have been told Hercules founded: these must have started with the Nemean games, introduced so as to commemorate the victory recording when Hercules slayed the Nemean lion; thus, historical times started for the Greeks when they started cultivating the fields. And, the sign of Virgo (whom astronomers, following the poets, depict as crowned in ears of wheat) means that Greek history started with the golden age, which the poets plainly tell us was the first age of their world; during this age and over the course of many centuries, they counted years in terms of the sowing of grain, which one finds was the earliest gold of the world. The golden age in Greece corresponds exactly to the Age of Saturn in Latium, so called from satis3—that is, from the Latin word meaning “sown ground.” The poets describe this golden age as a time when gods consorted on Earth with heroes, and their description is trustworthy: on the one hand, it will be shown herein [§375] that the earliest men of gentile antiquity, simple and rude and, because of the force of an ingenuity belonging to a vigorous imagination, encumbered with terrifying superstitions, truly believed that they saw gods on the Earth; on the other hand, it will be found that, on account of the uniformity   See also §§73, 549, 732. The origin of this etymology is possibly Augustine, City of God 7.2. It appears in Gerhard Johann Voss (1577–1649), Etymologicon linguae latinae, in Opera, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1695), p. 520. Voss was a friend of Hugo Grotius and a primary source of Vico’s etymologies.

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of ideas, those in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Latium, even though they lacked any knowledge of one another, raised gods and heroes up from the Earth in the same way, the gods which were the planets in motion4 and the heroes which were the fixed constellations. And so, the Age of Saturn—who is Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks, for whom χρόνος [chronos] means “time”—will offer alternative principles for chronology—that is, the study of time. It should not seem incongruous that THE ALTAR IS UNDER AND SUPPORTING THE GLOBE, for it will be found that the earliest altars of the world were raised by the gentiles to the earliest heaven of the poets; these poets, in their myths, are trustworthy in passing down to us that heaven ruled on Earth over men and left great benefits to humankind at a time when these earliest men (those in the childhood of an emerging humankind) believed that heaven was no higher than the tops of the mountains, just as even now children believe it to be little higher than the roofs of their houses; it will be found that later, as the Greek mind developed a great deal more, heaven was raised to the tops of the highest mountains like Olympus where, as Homer tells us, the gods were in his time; and it will be found that, eventually, heaven was raised above the spheres, as astronomy demonstrates for us, and Olympus was raised above the starry heaven where the altar thus was transferred to heaven to form its own constellation; as you can see, the passing of THE FIRE UPON THE ALTAR INTO THE NEIGHBORING HOUSE OF LEO, which, as was suggested above, was the Nemean forest Hercules set on fire so as to bring the land under cultivation; and the hide of the lion was raised to the stars as a monument to the victory of Hercules.

4

THE RAY OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE WHICH ILLUMINATES A CONVEX JEWEL ADORNING THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS denotes the clean and pure heart which metaphysics must have, one not befouled or polluted by pride of spirit or the baseness of bodily pleasures; because of the former, Zeno gave himself over to fate; because of the latter, Epicurus gave himself over to chance; and both, therefore, denied divine providence.

5

Furthermore, the ray denotes that knowledge of God is not limited to that knowledge itself, for if it were the case that metaphysics offered only private illumination about intellectual things, and only in this way regulated its moral things (this is how philosophers have acted up until now), this would have been signified with a flat jewel; but THE JEWEL IS CONVEX SO THAT THE RAY IS REFLECTED AND REFRACTED OUTWARD, for metaphysics knows of divine providence in public moral things—that is, in the civil customs with which the nations have come into the world and preserve themselves.   Vico’s term is erranti, an Italian rendering of the Latin erraticae or errones, terms used to describe the planets, as attested at Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 3.10.2 and 14.1.11.

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The New Science THE SAME RAY IS REFRACTED FROM THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS ONTO THE STATUE OF HOMER, the earliest author of gentile antiquity to come down to us, for on the strength of a metaphysics made chiefly from a history of human ideas and starting from the point at which men began thinking in a human way, it is finally possible for us to descend into the bewildered minds of the earliest founders of the gentile nations, all of whom had the most vigorous senses and the most capacious imaginations; through this—namely, the fact that they could use nothing but faculties of the human mind and reasoning which were in this condition, faculties which were completely stunned and stupefied5—principles pertaining to poetry are found which are not simply different from, but completely contrary to what they were hitherto thought to be, and these are found within the principles pertaining to poetic wisdom—that is, the knowledge [scienza] of the theological poets6—principles which have hitherto been hidden as a result of the same causes; this poetic wisdom was, without dispute, the earliest wisdom of the world for the gentiles. AND THE STATUE OF HOMER UPON A CRACKED BASE means the Discovery of the True Homer, which, in the first edition of The New Science, we sensed but did not understand and which, in this edition, has been reflected upon and fully demonstrated; the fact that this true Homer has until now been unknown has kept hidden from us the truth of things from the age of myth among the nations; and even more so the truth of the things from the age of darkness (which all have previously despaired of knowing); and, consequently, the truth about the earliest origins of the age of history. These are the three ages of the world which Marcus Terentius Varro, the most learned writer on Roman antiquity, left for us in writing in his great, and now lost, work entitled Rerum divinarum et humanarum.7

7

Furthermore, the statue indicates that, in this work, there is a new art of criticism8 which has hitherto been missing and which enters upon research into the truth about those who were authors of the nations   Storida e stupida. The phrase recurs at §§591, 809, 1106. As Battistini observes, Vico often tends to crystallize his thinking into euphonic formulas. 6   Throughout the text Vico will speak of the “theological poets”—a phrase that Vico means to indicate the primal unity of poetry and religion. The theological poets in Vico’s sense come much earlier than names that we tend to associate with poets, e.g., Homer. (See both the Table and later passages, particularly §901.) 7   Vico takes the notion of three times—“dark” (oscuro), “mythical” (favoloso), and “historical” (storico)—from Varro’s lost work Antiquitates rerum divinarum, by way of Censorinus’s De die natali 21.1. Censorinus was a Roman grammarian of the third century CE. 8   The “new art of criticism” (nuova arte critica) is the outcome of Vico’s marriage of philosophy and philology, a marriage which bears some comparison to that envisioned by in the fifth century CE by Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury. As Battistini notes, Vico intends the new critical 5

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An Explication of the Frontispiece themselves,9 nations which had to run their course over many thousands of years so as to be able to produce the sort of writers with whom the art of criticism has hitherto been preoccupied. Herein, philosophy proposes to examine philology—that is, the study of all the things depending upon human choice, namely, the histories of languages, of customs, of deeds, and of peoples, in peace as well as in war—and so proposes to examine things from which, on account of the deplorable darkness of their causes and the almost infinite variety of their effects, philosophy has, as it were, recoiled in horror from reasoning about; thus, philosophy reduces philology to the form of a science by discovering therein the design of an ideal eternal history in accordance with which the histories of all nations run their temporal course.10 As a result, in its second principal aspect, this science comes to be a philosophy of authority. This is because it is demonstrated—on the strength of alternative principles of mythology discovered in this work, which themselves are a consequence of the alternative principles of poetry found in this work—that myths were, strictly speaking, true histories of the customs of the most ancient gentile peoples of Greece; and, at first, these were myths about the gods, histories of times when men of a most rude gentile humanity believed that all things necessary or advantageous for humankind came from the gods; the authors of this poetry were the earliest peoples, all of whom are found to have been the theological poets, who indubitably tell us that they founded the gentile nations with these myths about the gods. And herein, with the principles of this new art of criticism, we will meditate upon determinate times and particular occasions of human necessities and advantages, to which the earliest men of gentile antiquity attended and by which they imagined, in keeping with the terrifying religions which they devised for themselves and in which they believed, first one god, then another. This natural theogony—that is, this account of a generation of the gods made naturally in the minds of the earliest men—allows for a rational chronology for the poetic history of the gods. And the myths about heroes are true histories of those heroes and their heroic customs; they are found to have flourished in all the nations in the age of their barbarism. Thus, the two poems of Homer are found to be two great treasure houses of discoveries about the natural law of the Greek gentile peoples while still in their barbarism. And this period of art as an alternative to both “abstract and nebulous” metaphysical criticism and “blind and diffuse” philological erudition. 9   Vico speaks of “authors of the nations”—similar to “founders” but with a different shade of meaning. For this usage, compare Virgil, Aeneid 8.134. 10   Vico’s claim to discover an “ideal eternal history upon which the histories of all nations run their temporal course” is among the most striking aspects of The New Science. Judging the status of the ideal history (Is it necessary? A hypothesis? An ideal type?), along with its relation to empirical history, is among the many challenges Vico’s text poses to its interpreters. For more on the ideal eternal history, see §§17, 29, 35, 114, 145, 245, 294, 349, 393, 915, 1004.

9

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The New Science time is determined in this work to have lasted among the Greeks up until the time of Herodotus, who is said to be the father of Greek history, but whose books are, for the most part, filled with myths and whose style retains, to a great extent, much that is Homeric; and all the historians who came after him keep to this heritage, using expressions somewhere between the poetic and the commonplace. By contrast, Thucydides, the first historian in the strict sense and the first serious historian of Greece, at the beginning of his account proclaims that up until the time of his father—which was the same as that of Herodotus, who was an old man when Thucydides was a child—the Greeks knew nothing whatsoever about their own antiquity, much less about that of foreigners,11 all of whose antiquity, with the exception of the Romans, we have from the Greeks; these antiquities are THE DENSE SHADOWS WHICH THE PICTURE SHOWS IN THE  BACKGROUND AND OUT OF WHICH, IN THE LIGHT OF THE RAY OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE REFRACTED FROM METAPHYSICS ONTO HOMER, COME TO LIGHT ALL THE HIEROGLYPHS; these signify the beginnings of this world of nations hitherto recognized only through their effects.

8

AMONG THESE HIEROGLYPHS, THE LARGEST IN APPEARANCE IS AN ALTAR, for the civil world starts among all peoples with religion, which was discussed somewhat before and will be discussed more fully shortly hereafter.

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ON THE ALTAR TO THE LEFT, THE FIRST THING TO APPEAR IS THE LITUUS—that is, the divining staff with which augurs took auguries and observed the auspices—which allows one to understand that, among the gentiles, all of the earliest divine things took their start from divination. For just as the providence of the Hebrews was a true providence (for they believed that God is an infinite mind and, consequently, that God sees all of time in a single point of eternity, whence God, either himself or through angels who are minds or through prophets, warned his people of things to come), so too the providence of the gentiles was an imaginary providence, for they imagined that the gods were bodies who, accordingly, warned the gentiles with sensible signs about things to come. Therefore, it is on account of this attribute of God—namely, his providence—that all of humankind universally gave the same name, “divinity,” to the nature of God and did so on the basis of the same idea, described in Latin as divinari, “to warn of what is to come.” However, this was done in keeping with the fundamental distinction just stated, and upon this distinction depends all the other essential differences demonstrated in this science between the natural law of the Hebrews and

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  See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2.

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the natural law of the gentile peoples,12 a law which the Roman jurists defined as what divine providence orders and to which the customs of human life conform. Hence, from what was just said, a LITUUS of this sort indicates in a single stroke the beginning of the universal gentile history. It is demonstrated by proofs from physics and philology that this history started with the Universal Flood; for two centuries after this flood, as mythical history recounts, heaven reigned on Earth and made for many great benefits to humankind. And through the uniformity of ideas among those in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, in Latium, and in other gentile nations, there arose, in the same way, many religions, and each religion had its own Jove; for it is proven that, at the end of this time and after this flood, heaven must have flashed lightning and thundered, and from the lightning and thunder of each of their Joves, these nations started to take the auspices; this multiplicity of Joves, which led the Egyptians to say that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient of all, has hitherto been a source of wonder for philologists. And with these same proofs, it is demonstrated that the antiquity of the religion of the Hebrews surpassed that of all the religions that founded the gentile peoples and, consequently, it is demonstrated that the truth of Christianity surpasses all these religions. ON THE SAME ALTAR BEFORE THE LITUUS IS SEEN WATER AND FIRE, AND THE WATER IS CONTAINED IN A SMALL URN, for sacrifices amongst the gentiles came from divination because of a custom common to all of them, which in Latin is called procurare— that is, making sacrifice in order to understand auguries with a view to following divine warnings, that is, the commands of Jove. From these divine things among the gentiles later came all the human things.

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The first of the human things were marriages, signified by THE TORCH LIT AT THE FIRE ON THE ALTAR AND RESTING AGAINST THE SMALL URN; marriages, as all the political theorists agree, are the seedbed from which families emerge, just as families are the seedbed from which republics emerge. And, so as to denote this, the TORCH, although it is a HIEROGLYPH representing the human things, is assigned a place on the altar along with water and fire, which are hieroglyphs representing divine ceremonies—exactly as was done in the ancient Roman practice of observing weddings aqua et igni [“with water and fire”]—for these two things which are shared in common—and a perennial supply of water more so than fire because it is more ­necessary

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  Throughout the text, Vico insists upon the difference between the Hebrews and gentiles, along with the distinction between sacred and profane history. The “natural law of the Hebrews,” as Battistini notes, is the law transmitted by Moses, or what theological tradition knows more commonly as the “Old Law” (lex vetus). 12

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The New Science for life—these two things were later understood to be the things through which divine counsel brought men to live together in society.

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The second of the human things is burial (on account of this, in Latin, the word humanitas, in its primary and proper sense, is derived from the word humando, meaning “to bury”13), and burial is represented by A FUNERAL URN PLACED OFF TO THE SIDE IN THE FORESTS, which points to the fact that burial is found to have existed even back in times when the human race was eating fruits in the summer, acorns in the winter. And D.M., the letters which are inscribed ON THE URN, means “to the good souls of the buried.”14 This expression shows the consensus common to the whole of humankind about the tenet later demonstrated to be true by Plato, namely, that the human soul does not die with its body but is immortal.15

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This URN indicates, furthermore, the origins among the division of the fields among these same gentiles, from which will be found the origins of distinctions among cities, among peoples, and, eventually, among nations. For it will be found that the races—first, the race of Ham, then, the race of Japheth, and finally, the race of Shem—came to be without the religion of their father, Noah, a religion which they renounced and which alone in what was then the state of nature was able to hold them with marriage in the familial society; and they became lost because they went astray—that is, from feral wandering throughout the great forest of the Earth—driven through their pursuit of shy and reluctant women and driven through their flight from wild animals, which the ancient forest must have had in abundance; and they became scattered, driven through their search for food and water; and on account of all this and at the end of a long period of time, they had arrived at a bestial state; it is at that point—on certain occasions ordered by divine providence upon which this science meditates and which it discovers—that a few of these men were struck and aroused by a terrible awe at the divinity of some heaven or some Jove which they devised for themselves and in which they believed; eventually, these few stopped wandering and hid in certain places where they settled with certain women and, through their fear of this apparent divinity, practiced the custom of marriage in religious and chaste carnal unions, conceived certain children,16 and so founded families. And in connection with their being settled there for a long period of time and  Traditionally, humanitas was derived from homo, “human being.” The derivation of humanitas from humando appears to be one of Vico’s more fanciful etymologies, which he nonetheless insists upon throughout The New Science, as Battistini notes. 14   “D.M.” stands for Dis Manibus, “to the gods of the lower world.” On the Manes, see Augustine, City of God 8.26 and 9.11. 15   See, for example, Plato, Phaedo 107a. 16   “Certain children”—that is, children recognized by fathers and mothers to be their offspring. 13

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in connection with the burials of ancestors, they are discovered to have founded and divided up the first domains of the earth; as lords over these domains, they were called giants, a word which in Greek means “sons of the earth”—that is, descendants of the buried—and consequently, they supposed themselves to be nobles because they deemed nobility itself, in that earliest state of the human things and in keeping with correct ideas, as belonging to those who have been begotten in a human way out of fear of some divinity; and from this human way of begetting [generare umanamente] and from nowhere else came the expression “the human race” [l’umana generazione]. Hence, the noble households, which grew out of families of this sort through such begetting, spoke of themselves as the first gentile peoples. It is from this point of time of utmost antiquity, since it is the starting point of the subject matter, that the doctrine of the natural law of the gentile peoples starts. This must be regarded as another principal aspect of this science. Now, these giants, for reasons both physical and moral, to say nothing of the authority of history, are found to have had unusual strength and size; and since the causes of this strength and size do not obtain for those who believe both in the true God, creator of the world, and in the prince of the whole of humankind, Adam, the Hebrews were, from the beginning of the world, of a correct bodily size. So after, first, divine providence and, second, solemnized marriages, the universal belief in the immortality of the soul, which starts with burial, is the third of three principles upon which this science reasons about the origins of all the countless things that it treats in their variety and diversity. OUT FROM THE FOREST WHERE THE URN IN PLACED, A PLOUGH ADVANCES INTO THE OPEN. This shows that the Fathers of the earliest gentile peoples were the first men of fortitude in history, whence are found the Herculean founders of the earliest gentile nations mentioned above [§3] (Varro counted some forty different versions, and among all of them the Egyptians said that their Hercules was the most ancient), for these different Herculean founders had dominion over the first lands of the world and brought them under cultivation. Hence, the first Fathers of the gentile nations were men of justice on account of their believing piety, that of observing the auspices which they believed were the divine commands of Jove (Ious, as Jove was called in Latin, comes from the archaic word for law, ious, which later contracted to ius17), whence justice among all the nations is naturally taught with piety; and they were men of prudence because they made sacrifices so as to procure—that is, in order to understand well—the auspices and   For the derivation of ius from Ious, see Voss, Etymologicion, p. 318. This particular etymology occurs throughout The New Science; Vico appeals to it for his grounding of the origins of law and right in religion. See also §§398, 433, 489, 516. 17

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The New Science to take good counsel through the commands of Jove about what they ought to work at in life; and they were men of temperance because of marriage. And they were, as has been indicated here, men of fortitude. Consequently, they allow for alternative moral principles whereby the recondite wisdom of philosophers might be reconciled with the commonplace wisdom of lawgivers.18 Through these principles, all the virtues put down roots in piety and in religion: through these two things alone are the virtues effectual in their work, and, as a consequence of these two things, men must propose as the complete good that which God wills. So too are given alternative principles for economic doctrine,19 so that children still in the power of their fathers should be deemed still in the familial state; consequently, they are to be formed and settled20 in all their studies in nothing other than piety and religion. And since they do not yet have the capacity to understand the republic and its laws, they instead revere and fear their fathers as living images of God and, from this, are found later to be naturally disposed to follow the religion of their fathers, to defend the fatherland which preserves their families, and so to obey laws ordered to the preservation of religion and the fatherland. It is in this way that divine providence has ordered the human things by its eternal counsel: first, families would be founded with religion and, from them, republics would arise later with laws.

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THE PLOUGH LEANS ITS HANDLE WITH A CERTAIN MAJESTY ON THE FACE OF THE ALTAR, so as to allow one to understand that ploughed lands were the earliest altars of gentile antiquity and so as to denote, furthermore, the natural superiority which the heroes believed they had over their socii [“associates”], whom, we will see a bit hereafter, are signified by THE RUDDER IN AN ATTITUDE OF OBEISANCE NEAR THE BASE OF THE ALTAR; it will be demonstrated that it is upon this natural superiority that the heroes rested all their claims to, their knowledge [scienza] about, and consequently their administration of the divine things, namely, the divine auspices.

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THE PLOUGH EXPOSES ONLY THE TIP OF THE PLOUGHSHARE AND HIDES THE MOLDBOARD (before men understood the use of iron, this moldboard must have been curved wood hard   Here and elsewhere, “commonplace wisdom” translates sapienza volgare. “Vulgar” in modern English carries associations that are simply foreign to the noun volgo, the adjective volgare and the adverb volgarmente; in each instance, the meaning is closer to “common.” Accordingly, the present text employs a small number of terms built from “common” to translate vulgo, volgare, and volgarmente, even though “common” is also used to render the adjective comune. The two exceptions to this policy are lingue volgari and parlari volgari, translated as “vernacular languages” and “vernacular tongues,” and volgari tradizioni, translated as “folk traditions.” 19   See the note at §520 on dottrina iconomica. 20   “Formed and settled” = formarsi e fermarsi, a play on words that Vico repeats (as Battistini notes) several times in the text, e.g., §679 and §708. 18

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enough to be able to turn the earth and plough it; the word for moldboard in Latin was urbs, from which comes the archaic word urbum, meaning “curved”21) so as to signify that the earliest cities, all of which were founded in cultivated fields, arose with families which had, for a long time, retired and hid in the midst of the horrors of woods made sacred by religious observances; these woods are found to exist among all the ancient gentile nations and conform with an idea common to all the nations (the gentile peoples of Latium spoke of them as lucus, meaning “burnt land within a wooded enclosure”). These are the woods condemned by Moses22 to be burned wherever the people of God extended their conquests, and this was done on account of the counsel of divine providence, lest those who had already come into their humanity would be confounded anew with wanderers who remained in that unholy sharing of things and women in common. A RUDDER IS SEEN ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE SAME ALTAR: this signifies the origin of the migration of peoples by means of seafaring. And THE RUDDER SEEMS TO BOW AT THE FOOT OF THE ALTAR: this signifies the ancestors of those who later were the authors of these same migrations. These ancestors were, in the first place, men of impiety, recognizing no divinity whatsoever; in addition, they were unholy, being unable to distinguish parentage among themselves through marriage, so that sons often would lie with their mothers, and daughters with their fathers; and, finally, because they were like wild beasts without any understanding of society in the midst of this infamous sharing of all things in common, they were solitary, and so weak, and ultimately miserable and unhappy because they were in need of all the goods required to preserve a secure life; and so, in their flight from the evils proper to this experience of conflict produced by that feral sharing of all things in common, they had recourse, for their own escape and safety, to the cultivated lands of men of piety, chastity, and fortitude, who were also men of power since they had already united in familial society. It will be found that, because of these lands, cities throughout all the world of the gentile antiquity used to be called ARAE [“ALTARS”]; these must have been the earliest altars of the gentile nations, and the first fire lit upon these altars was the one which allowed for the clearing of the forests and the bringing of them under cultivation, and the first water was that of the perennial springs, needed so that those who were to found humanity would no longer wander in feral error in search of water, but instead would settle in one land with boundaries for a long period of time and thus become unaccustomed to going about wandering. And because these altars are found to have been the earliest asylums of the world (which Livy defines   This etymology comes from Varro, De lingua latina 5.143, as transmitted by Servius Honoratus, Festus, and Pomponius, but probably known to Vico through Voss, Etymologicon, p. 657. 22   See Deuteronomy 12:3 and Exodus 34:13. 21

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The New Science in general terms as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”],23 when he tells that it was within the asylum which was opened in the lucus that Romulus founded Rome), and the earliest cities, as a consequence, were almost all described as altars. Add to this minor discovery another major one, namely, that among the Greeks—from whom, as was stated above [§7], we have everything that remains of gentile antiquity—the first Thrace or Scythia, the first Asia and India, the first Maurentania or Libya, and the first Europe or Hesperia—that is to say, respectively, the first North, the first East, the first South, and the first West—and along with these, the first Ocean, all these came into being within Greece itself; then, later, the Greeks, after they went throughout the world, gave names of this sort to the four parts of the world and to the ocean which surrounds it from their resemblance to those places. These discoveries, we say, offer alternative principles for geography, which, like the alternative principles for chronology previously indicated, are the two eyes of history needed so as to read the ideal eternal history which was mentioned above.

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To these altars, then, those who were impious, wandering, and weak had recourse in order to protect their lives from those more vigorous, and those men of piety and fortitude killed the violent and took into their protection the weak who, because they brought nothing but their lives, were received in the status of familial servants because of they were supplied with the means of sustaining life. It was principally from familial servants [famoli] of this sort that the word “families” [famiglie] was derived; these familial servants are the precursors of those who, in later times, became slaves by being captured in war. Consequently, like many branches from one trunk come the origins of many things: there is, as was seen [§17], the origins of the asylums; the origins of those families from which cities later arose, as will be more fully explained below [§25]; the origin of flocking to cities so as to live as men secure from the unjust and violent; the origins of jurisdictions exercised within their proper territories; the origins of extending power through the use of justice, fortitude, and magnanimity, the most luminous virtues of princes and states; the origin of coats of arms, which are found to have had, for their display, those first sown fields as the first fields of arms; the origins of fame [fama], from which the aforementioned term “familial servants” [famoli], is derived, and the origins of glory, which eternally rests upon the help given to humankind; the origin of true nobility, which naturally comes to be from the exercise of moral virtue; the origins of true heroism, which comes from dominating the proud and succoring those in danger, a heroism in which the Roman people surpassed all others on the earth, thus becoming lords over the world;24  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.   An allusion to Aeneid 6.853, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. See also Scienza nuova prima §1099. 23

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and, finally, the origins of war and peace in that war starts in the world for self-defense, in which the true virtue of fortitude consists. And, in all these origins, one discovers the design of the eternal basis for republics, upon which even states acquired by violence and fraud must stand so as to endure, just as those acquired by those virtuous origins later collapse because of fraud and because of force.25 And this basis for republics is founded upon the two principles eternal to this world of nations, the mind and the body of the men who compose the nations. This is because men consist of these two parts, one of which is noble and, as such, must command and the other of which is base and must serve; and because of corrupt human nature, without the help of philosophy (this cannot succor but a very few), the generality of men cannot act in their private lives in such a way that the mind of each one commands rather than serves the body; because of this, divine providence has ordered the human things to accord with that eternal order whereby those in republics who use their minds command and those who use their bodies obey. THE RUDDER IS BOWING AT THE FOOT OF THE ALTAR. For these familial servants, because they are men without God, have no common share in the divine things, and, consequently, have no share with the nobles in the community constituted by the human things; and principally they have no claim to observing the solemn nuptials which in Latin are called connubium [“marriage”], whose solemnity rests, in large part, upon the auspices; on account of the auspices, the nobles supposed themselves to be of divine origin and considered their familial servants to have the bestial origins of those who were begotten from unholy couplings. This distinction between a more noble and a less noble nature is found equally among those in Egypt, in Greece, and in Latium, and it consists of a belief in that natural heroism about which we are told quite explicitly in ancient Roman history.

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Finally, THE RUDDER IS AT SOME DISTANCE FROM THE PLOUGH, WHICH IS IN FRONT OF THE ALTAR AND SHOWS HOSTILITY TOWARDS THE RUDDER, MENACING IT WITH ITS TIP. For familial servants, who had no share in dominion over the lands over which the nobles were lords, as has been discussed, and who grew weary that they must always serve the nobles as lords, eventually, after a long period of time, challenged this dominion over the lands and, on account of this, rebelled and turned against the heroes in agrarian disputes of this sort, which will be found [§583] to be more ancient than and vastly different from those read about in later Roman history. And, at that time, the many leaders of these companies of familial servants

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  Vico knows the dyad “fraud and force” from Cicero, De officis 1.13.41. See also Machiavelli, Prince 7; Discourses on Livy 2.13; Florentine Histories 3.13. 25

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The New Science rose up and were defeated by the heroes (as the serfs of Egypt often were by the priests, according to the observations of Peter van der Kuhn26 in his De republica Hebraeorum), and afterwards, so as not to be oppressed and to find refuge and safety along with those in their party, committed their fortunes to the sea and went to find unoccupied lands on the shores of the Mediterranean to the west, the coasts of which, at that time, were uninhabited. This is the origin of the migration of peoples already humanized by religion from the Near East, from Egypt, and, in the Near East, especially from Phoenicia; this later came to pass in Greece as a result of the same causes. This is the fashion in which migration comes to be: not because of invasions of other peoples27 (these are not possible by sea) and not because of a jealous regard for preserving distant acquisitions by establishing colonies (for we do not read of any nations from the Near East, from Egypt, or from Greece extending their power to the West) and not because of trade (for we do not find coasts in the West which are inhabited at this time). Instead, the law of the heroic age made it necessary for bands of men of this sort from these nations to abandon their own lands, which they naturally would not abandon but for some extreme necessity. And it was with colonies of this sort—which accordingly will be named “overseas colonies of the heroic age”—that humankind also spread throughout the sea to the rest of our world, just as it had spread for a long time previously throughout the earth by wandering in feral error.

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STANDING FURTHER OUT IN FRONT OF THE PLOUGH IS A TABLE INSCRIBED WITH THE ANCIENT LATIN ALPHABET RESEMBLING (as Tacitus tells us28) THE ANCIENT GREEK ALPHABET and, A LITTLE BELOW THAT, THE MORE RECENT ALPHABET WHICH REMAINS FOR US. This is to denote the origins of the languages and letters that are called vernacular, both of which are found to have come about at a stage long after the founding of nations and, in the case of letters, at a stage long after that of languages. To signify this, THE TABLE LIES ON A FRAGMENT OF A COLUMN OF THE CORINTHIAN ORDER, the most modern of the architectural orders.

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THE TABLE LIES QUITE CLOSE TO THE PLOUGH AND FAR FROM THE RUDDER so as to signify the origins of native languages, each of which was first formed in its own land, the land where those who were authors of the nations finally found, by lot, a settled life far from their feral wandering, those who had been, as was said above [§13],   Peter van der Kuhn (1568–1638), Dutch Hebraist and professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden. The reference is to De republica Hebraeorum 1.5. 27   “Invasions from other peoples”—a likely allusion to Bacon’s inundatio barbarorum (Novum Organum 1.77). 28  Tacitus, Annals 11.14.3. 26

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scattered and dispersed29 throughout the great forest of the Earth; these native languages, after a long period of time, blended with languages from the Near East, Egypt, and Greece because of those migrations of peoples to the coasts of the Mediterranean and to the Ocean indicated above [§20]. And this allows herein for the alternative principles of etymology so frequently tested throughout this entire work, through which the origins of native terms are distinguished from those which are undoubtedly of foreign origin with the following important distinction. The etymologies of native languages are histories of the things signified by words following the natural order of ideas,30 an order in which, first, there were forests; then, cultivated fields and huts; later, small houses and villages; subsequently, cities; and finally, academies and philosophers: thus, things must progress in accordance with this order from their earliest origins. By contrast, the etymologies of foreign languages are merely the histories of the words which one language has received from another. THE TABLE SHOWS ONLY THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE ALPHABETS AND LIES FACING THE STATUE OF HOMER. For letters (as Greek tradition has it in the case of Greek letters) were not discovered all at one time. And it is necessarily the case that at least some of them had not been found at the time of Homer; this is demonstrated by the fact that none of his poems were left in writing. However, the origins of native languages will be given a distinct treatment later [§§31–35].

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Finally, IN THE PLANE MOST ILLUMINATED OF ALL (for the hieroglyphs placed there signify the most recognizable of the human things) the ingenious illustrator31 displays, IN A CAPRICIOUS ARRANGEMENT, a ROMAN FASCES, a SWORD, a PURSE LEANING ON THE FASCES, a SCALE, and the CADUCEUS OF MERCURY.

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Of these HIEROGLYPHS, the first is a FASCES. For the earliest civil power arose out of the union of the patriarchal power of the Fathers; among the gentiles, these Fathers were men wise in the art of divining from auspices; they were priests through their procuring the auspices— that is, by their understanding—the auspices in keeping with sacrifices;

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  “Scattered and dispersed” = sparsi e dispersi, another of Vico’s euphonic crystallizations, as Battistini notes. 30   Well before Heidegger, Vico proposes that etymologies, far from being of interest merely to grammarians, are of potentially immense philosophical significance. This does not mean for Vico that we grasp the essential being of things by etymology. Rather, etymologies are a useful tool for helping us to understand the mentalities of the first human beings, whose way of seeing the world “is completely impossible for us to imagine and only with great toil permitted for us to understand” (§34; see also §§338, 378, 700). 31   The artist is Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1681–1745), Neapolitan architect, sculptor, and painter. 29

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The New Science and they were kings—most certainly monarchs—who commanded what they believed was willed by the gods in keeping with the auspices and who, consequently, were subject to no one other than God. So, for this union of patriarchal power, there is the fasces, a bundle of divining rods, which are found to be the earliest scepters of the world. These Fathers, during the agrarian revolts of which we spoke above [§20], were naturally moved, so as to resist the companies of familial servants rising up against them, to unite and to close ranks in the earliest orders, those of regnant senates—that is, senates composed of those who were kings in their respective families—under the leadership of certain heads of those orders, those found to be the first kings of the cities of the heroic age; ancient history also tells us, although far too darkly, that, in the earliest world of peoples, these kings were created naturally, a creation whose fashion is meditated upon and found herein. Now, those regnant senates, so as to calm the companies of familial servants rising up and to reduce them to obedience, conceded to them an agrarian law, which is found to have been the first of all laws to have come into being in the world; and the familial servants who were reduced to obedience by this law naturally composed the earliest plebs of the cities. What was conceded by the nobles to those plebeians was the natural domain over the fields, while civil domain remained among the nobles, who were the only citizens of the cities of the heroic age; and from these arose eminent domain in the midst of these orders; these were the first civil powers—that is, the sovereign powers of peoples. All three kinds of domain were formed and distinguished from each other with the cominginto-being of republics, which though expressed differently in different forms of speech are found, by one idea for all nations, to have been called Herculean republics, or republics of curetes—that is, republics of those armed in public assembly. And, consequently, this clarifies the beginnings of the famous ius Quiritium [“law of the Quirites”].32 Later interpreters of the Roman legal code believed this law to apply properly only to those who were citizens of Rome, since this was the case in later times. However, it is found that what was law in ancient Roman times was the natural law of all gentile peoples of the heroic age. And, consequently, like many streams from a great source, surge up many origins. There is the origin of cities, which arose from families composed not only of children but also of familial servants. Hence, it is discovered that cities are naturally founded upon two communities—one community of the nobles, who command, and another of the plebs, who obey—and from these two parts is composed the whole of the polity—that is, the system of civil governance. It is demonstrated

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  For a fuller explanation of the ius Quiritium, see §595.

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that these earliest cities could not have come into being from families composed only of children, neither these early cities nor any city whatsoever. There are the origins of the public power belonging to the public realm, which came into being from the union of the private power of sovereign Fathers in the familial state. There are the origins of war and peace: hence, all republics first came into being from an impetus in arms and were later composed by laws; the nature of these two human things rests upon the eternal property that wars are waged in order that peoples may live securely in peace. There are the origins of fealties, for by one kind—rustic fealties—plebeians were subject to the nobles, and by another kind—noble, or military, fealties—nobles who otherwise were sovereign in their families were subject to the greater sovereignty of their heroic orders; and it is found that regimes during barbarian ages have always arisen in the world from these fealties, and this clarifies the history of the new regimes of Europe which arose in the more recent barbarian age,33 but which is darker for us than the first barbarian age of which Varro speaks. For those first fields were given by the nobles to the plebeians in connection with a burden imposed upon them, the burden of paying a tithe (called the Tithe of Hercules among the Greeks) or that of the census (an order found to have been instituted by Servius Tullius for the Romans) or that of a tribute; this burden also carried with it the obligation for the plebs to serve the nobles in time of war at their own expense, as one can plainly read in ancient Roman history. And it is here that the origin of the census is discovered, which is later the basis upon which popular republics rest: this has cost me more effort than all of my other research on Roman things, namely, discovering the fashion in which the census of Servius Tullius, found to be the basis of aristocratic republics, changed and became the basis for popular republics, a change which has made everyone to fall into the error of believing that Servius Tullius had instituted the census as an order belonging to popular liberty. And from this same beginning came the origins of commerce, which, in the same fashion of which we have just spoken, started with the exchange of lands in connection with the start of those cities; it is called commerce [commerzi] because of the first payments [mercede] that came into being in the world, namely, because of the fields that the heroes granted to the familial servants, under the law of which we have spoken, so that those servants would serve them. There are the origins of the public treasuries which, in connection with the coming-into-being of republics, were precursors of what were called public treasuries [aerari] in the proper sense of the term, as derived from aes, aeris; in Latin, this means “bronze,” but in the sense of “money”—that is, it is to be understood in terms of the necessity to supply public money to the plebeians   The “more recent barbarian age” corresponds to the period more familiarly known as the “Middle Ages.” 33

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The New Science during war. There are the origins of colonies, which are found to be, at first, companies of rustics who served the heroes in exchange for sustaining their lives; later, they were companies of vassals who cultivated the fields for themselves but under the weight of the real and personal burdens already discussed above; these are what will be called the “inland colonies” of the heroic age in order to distinguish them from the “overseas colonies” of which we have spoken above [§20]. And, finally, there are the origins of republics, which came into being in the world in a strictly aristocratic form, under which the plebeians had no share in civil law. And, consequently, it is found that the Roman regime had once been aristocratic, but that the regime fell during the tyranny of Tarquinius Superbus, who governed the nobles so poorly and who so nearly destroyed almost the entire Senate that Junius Brutus took what had been done to Lucretia as an occasion to arouse the plebs against Tarquinius; and after he had freed Rome from a tyrant, he reestablished the Senate and returned the republic to the orders of its earliest beginnings; and by replacing one king for life with two annual consuls, he did not introduce liberty for the people, but reaffirmed the liberty of those who were lords.34 This liberty is found to have lasted until the Publilian law, with which the dictator, Publilius Philo, declared that the Roman republic had come to have a popular constitution, for which he was called the People’s Dictator;35 aristocratic liberty finally expired with the Petelian law, which completely freed the plebs from the law of rustic fealty which gave nobles the right of private incarceration held over plebeians who were debtors.36 In these two laws are contained the two major turning points of Roman history, but no one—not among the political theorists or the jurists or the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code—has reflected upon them because of the myth that the Law of the Twelve Tables came from a free Athens so as to institute the orders of popular liberty in Rome; these two laws declare that these orders were instituted internally in keeping with the natural customs of Rome (this myth about the Twelve Tables was discovered in a work of mine published many years ago, Principles of Universal Law37). Hence, because laws must be interpreted in a way congruent with the order of constitutions of republics, principles of this sort derived from Roman governance allow for alternative principles for Roman jurisprudence.

  As Battistini notes, Vico’s conclusion here is identical to that drawn by Machiavelli at Discourses on Livy 1.2. 35   The Publilian law advanced the cause of the plebs by giving them the right to make laws in assembly, thereby binding the nobles to the decisions of the Comitia Populi Tributa. For Publilius as the “People’s Dictator,” see Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.12.14. 36   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.28. 37   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727). 34

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THE SWORD WHICH IS LEANING ON THE FASCES denotes that the law of the heroic age was a law of force, but a force checked by religion, which is the only thing that can hold force and arms to duty when judicial laws have not yet been invented or when they have been invented, but are no longer binding; this heroic law is exactly the same as that of Achilles, the hero of whom Homer sings to the peoples of Greece as a model of heroic virtue, which rests all claims upon the force of arms.

27

And here is discovered the origin of duels which, just as they certainly had wide currency in the more recent barbarian age, are also found to have had currency in the earliest barbarian age. In such times, the powerful were not yet domesticated enough to vindicate offences and wrongs against them by recourse to judicial laws, and so they would try these offences in the courts of certain divine judgments; there, they invoked God as witness and appealed to God as judge of the offense, and they deferred with such reverence to the verdict given by the fortune of the one struck down (whichever of the two it was) that, even if the one originally wronged was vanquished, he was considered the guilty party. Such is the lofty counsel of divine providence that in barbarous and savage times, when there was no understanding of legal right, they might approximate such legal right by looking instead to the favor or disfavor of God, so that these private wars would not sow the seeds of wars that would eventually culminate in the extinction of humankind. This sensibility, so natural to a barbaric age, cannot be founded on anything other than an innate concept which men have of divine providence itself, to which they ought to conform when they see the good oppressed and the wicked prospering. These were the causes of their believing that the duel was a kind of divine cleansing. Hence, as much as duels are forbidden in our present humanity, which has instituted with laws the orders of criminal and civil courts, to the same extent they were believed necessary in barbarous times. In this, the fashion in which duels, or private wars, came to be, is found the origin of public wars waged by civil powers, subject to no one but God because God delivers a verdict by means of the fortune of the victors so that humankind may rest upon the certainty of civil states, which is the principle behind what is called the “external justice” of wars.38 THE PURSE, WHICH IS ALSO LEANING ON THE FASCES, demonstrates that commerce of the sort practiced through the use of money did not start until long after civil power was founded. As a result, one does not read about any use of coinage in either of the two poems of Homer. This same HIEROGLYPH indicates the origin of this coinage. It is found to come from the origins of coats of arms which—as was ­indicated above   “External justice” as mentioned here may be compared to the “inner justice” discussed at §350. 38

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The New Science in connection with first fields of arms—are discovered to have signified the rights and claims of nobility pertaining to one family more than another. From here later come into being the origins of public insignia, or insignia of peoples, insignia which later were still raised as military insignia and served as mute words in military training; and, eventually, they were imprinted by all peoples on money. And this allows for alternative principles for the science of medallions and, consequently, alternative principles for what is called the science of blazonry (this is one of three places which we have found satisfactory in the first edition of The New Science).39

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THE SCALE AFTER THE PURSE allows one to see that after aristocratic governance—that is, governance during the heroic age—came governance belonging to the human age: of these, the first kind is popular government, in which peoples eventually understood that our rational nature—that is, our true human nature—is equally in all human beings; natural equality of this sort (through causes meditated upon in the ideal eternal history and encountered point for point in Roman history) drew the heroes step by step into the civil equality of popular republics, which is signified by the BALANCE because in popular republics, as the Greeks used to say, the course of everything is determined by lot, or put in the balance. However, eventually, since free peoples are not able to maintain themselves in civil equality with laws both on account of factions among the powerful and because they tend to destroy themselves by civil wars, they naturally arrive, so that they might be safe, at the royal natural law which is found to be common to all peoples at all times when a popular constitution becomes corrupt (for the royal civil law, which the Roman people are said to have demanded so as to legitimate the Roman monarchy in the person of Augustus, was demonstrated in my Principles of Universal Law40 to be a myth; this and the demonstration about the myth of the Twelve Tables coming from Athens are the two places for which we consider that work not to have been uselessly written); and arriving at this royal natural law, which is the natural custom of human gentile peoples, they seek shelter under the monarchy, the second kind of human government. As a result, these final two forms of government, which are both human, change back and forth between each other in our present humanity, but neither of the two naturally returns to the aristocratic state, in which only the nobles command and all others obey (hence, there remain in the world today only a few aristocratic republics: Nuremberg in Germany; Ragusa in Dalmatia; Venice, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy). For these are the three kinds of state which divine providence, in keeping with these natural customs of nations, has made come into the world, and it is in keeping with this natural order that one follows after the other. For the other types of state—those which are mixtures of these

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three—these a human providence makes emerge because the nature of nations does not support them; for this, Tacitus—who saw only the effects of the causes indicated above and reasoned about more fully below [§1004]—characterized them “as more worthy of being praised than capable of being achieved and, even if by chance they do remain for a time, they are not long-lasting.”41 By this discovery, alternative principles are given to political doctrine, principles not only different from, but completely contrary to those which have been imagined up until now. THE CADUCEUS IS THE LAST OF THE HIEROGLYPHS so as to suggest that the earliest peoples, in heroic times when the natural law of force ruled, regarded one another as perpetual enemies because of continuous robbery and piracy. And, just as in the earliest barbarous times, heroes considered it a title of honor to be called a thief, so too, in the recent return to barbarous times, the powerful thought it an honor to be spoken of as pirates: for since there were eternal wars among them, there was no need to declare war. However, later with the arrival of the human governments, both popular and monarchical, because of the law of human gentile peoples, heralds were introduced for declaring war, and governments started to limit periods of hostility with peace. And this too is on account of the lofty counsel of divine providence, for in the times of their barbarism when nations new to the world must mature, they were confined to their own borders lest, ferocious and unconquerable, they might cross those borders to be exterminated by each other in wars. However, after that, during this same age, the nations grew and found themselves altogether domesticated and, as a result, tolerant of the customs of one another: hence, it became easy for a conquering people to spare the lives of the conquered in keeping with the just laws of the victors.

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So, this NEW SCIENCE—A METAPHYSICS MEDITATING, IN THE LIGHT OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE, UPON THE NATURE COMMON TO THE NATIONS—has discovered THE ORIGINS OF THINGS DIVINE AND HUMAN among the gentile nations, and so has established A SYSTEM OF NATURAL LAW OF THE GENTILE PEOPLES which proceeds with the greatest uniformity and consistency through the three ages which the Egyptians left to us and on account of which they said their world had already fully and previously run its course: namely, the age of the gods, in which gentile men believed that they lived under divine governance and that all things had been commanded to them by auspices and by oracles, the oldest things of profane history; the age of heroes, in which heroes reigned everywhere in aristocratic republics through a certain difference in human nature by which they supposed themselves superior to their plebeians; and, finally, the

31

 Tacitus, Annals 4.33.1. This passage, as Battistini notes, is often cited by critics of “mixed” forms of government, such as Bodin and Hobbes. 41

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The New Science age of men, in which all acknowledged that they were equal with respect to human nature and, on account of this, gave currency, first, to popular republics and, eventually, to monarchies, both of which are forms of human government, as has been said just above [§29].

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In agreement with these three sorts of nature and government, three kinds of language are spoken, of which the dictionary of this science is composed. The first is language in the time of families, when gentile men were newly arrived to their humanity: this is found to have been a mute language of signs and objects which have a natural correspondence to the ideas which they are meant to signify. The second was spoken through heroic devices—that is, the similes, analogies, images, metaphors, and natural descriptions which made up the bulk of the heroic language found to have been spoken in the time when heroes reigned. The third was human language through words agreed upon by peoples, over which the people are absolute lords, a language proper to popular republics and monarchical states because the people determine what sense the laws must have for the plebs as well as for the nobles. Hence, among all the nations, once the laws had been translated into the vernacular languages,42 the science of the laws was no longer only in the hands of the nobles—it is found that the nobles previously among all the nations had a secret language for these laws, as if they belonged to sacred things, and it is also found that the nobles throughout the nations were priests. This is the natural reason for the arcana with which the Roman patricians surrounded the laws up until the rise of popular liberty. These are exactly the same three languages which the Egyptians described as previously spoken in their world, corresponding, in number as well as order, to the three ages through the course of which their world had previously passed: there was hieroglyphic language—that is, the sacred, or secret, language—expressed through mute actions and well suited to religions for which their observance is more important than speech about them; symbolic language—or language expressed through likenesses—which we have just seen is the language in the heroic state; and, finally, epistolary language—that is, the vernacular [volgare] language—which served Egyptians in the common [volgari] usages of life. These three languages are found among the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Egyptians, the Germans, and all the other ancient gentile nations, although hieroglyphic writing was preserved longest among the Egyptians because they were closed off from foreign nations for a longer period of time than others; it is on account of this same cause that hieroglyphics are found to persist among the Chinese to this day. And consequently, this use of hieroglyphics among other nations dem  “Vernacular languages” translates lingue volgari. For the appropriateness of rendering volgare by “vernacular” in the context of languages, see §443 and §556. 42

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onstrates the vanity of the Egyptians imagining themselves to be of the greatest antiquity. Therefore, here are given clear principles for both language and letters, which philology has despaired of finding. And I will put to the test the extravagant and monstrous opinions that philologists have had about these beginnings up until now.

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I will examine the unfortunate cause of which their opinions are the effect, namely, that the philologists have believed that spoken languages came into being first among nations, followed later by written letters whereas—as has been briefly indicated and will be proven fully in this book [§§428–472]—they were born as twins, and letters proceeded at the same pace as language through its three kinds. And these principles are encountered point for point in the causes of the Latin language reasoned about and discovered in the first edition of The New Science (this is the second of three places for which we do not regret the publication of that book43). It is though reasoning about these causes that you, dear reader, will be able to examine the many discoveries about ancient Roman history, government, and law in a thousand proofs in this book. With this as a model, those who have erudition in Near Eastern languages, in Greek, and, particularly, in German from among the languages currently spoken (for it too is a parent language) will be able to make discoveries about antiquity beyond any of their own and our expectations. A principle pertaining to these origins of both language and letters is found to have been that the earliest peoples of gentile antiquity, on account of a demonstrated necessity, were by nature poets who spoke through poetic characters. This discovery of poetic characters, which is the master key of this science,44 has cost us the stubborn research of almost an entire lifetime devoted to letters insofar as the poetic nature of those earliest men is for our gentle nature completely impossible to imagine, and it is only with great toil that we are permitted to understand it. These poetic characters are found to have been certain imaginative g­ enera—that is, images of either gods or heroes drawn, for the most part,  See Scienza nuova prima §§368–379.   Vico’s conception of “poetic characters” ranks among the most distinctive proposals of The New Science. Poetic characters are types rather than individuals, even if they are spoken of as individuals. So, for example, “Achilles” does not denote a particular man, but rather a certain fusion of strength and anger. The poetic character represents imaginatively (compare §381 on the “imaginative universal”) what later humanity tends to represent intellectually, by means of the generic concept. Vico’s claim is not merely that the first humans use poetic characters in their expression. More fundamentally, they think in poetic characters (see §§416, 532, 1001). 43 44

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The New Science from living substances and formed by their imagination—and, under such genera, they placed all the species, or particulars, belonging to it; it is exactly the same with the myths told in human times—that is, those told in New Comedy:45 in this case, there are intelligible genera—that is, genera formed by the reasoning of moral philosophy—from which the comic poets form imaginative genera, which are nothing other than the best ideas about each genus of men—that is, one of the stock personae of comedy. Consequently, divine or heroic characters of this sort are found to have been myths [favole]—that is, true speeches [favelle vere]—and in them are discovered allegories containing a sense—not yet analogical but still univocal, not yet philosophical but still historical—which belongs to that age of the Greek peoples. Moreover, because such genera—for myths are, in their essence, ­genera— were formed by the most vigorous imaginations, as well as by men with the weakest powers of reasoning, in them is discovered the true poetic sentences, which must consist of sentiments clothed in the greatest passions and, accordingly, filled with sublimity and awakening wonder. Furthermore, it is found that there are two sources for all poetic expression, namely, the poverty of speech and the necessity of explaining and making oneself understood; from these comes the vividness of heroic speech, which immediately followed the mute speech used in the divine times, those gestures and objects that had a natural correspondence with the ideas they are meant to signify. Finally, it is found that languages in Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, and Latium, on account of the natural and necessary course of human things, started with heroic verse and, from there, passed over to iambics and, eventually, settled in prose; and this gives certainty to the history of the ancient poets and provides reasons to explain why, in German, particularly in Silesia, a province made up entirely of rustics, versifiers naturally come into being and why, in Spanish, French, and Italian, the first authors wrote in verse.

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From three languages of this sort is composed a mental dictionary, which gives the proper significance of words expressed differently in all the different languages; it has been used herein [§§145, 161–162] everywhere it is needed, and, in the first edition of The New Science, a full test of it was made in a particular case where we proposed the following idea:46 meditating upon the eternal properties of the Fathers—properties which, on the strength of this science, the Fathers had to have had in the familial state and during the time of the earliest heroic cities, when languages were formed—the proper significance of words in fifteen dif  That is, the comedy of Menander, about which Vico comments further in Book Three (§§806, 808, 906, 911). 46  See Scienza nuova prima §§387–389. 45

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ferent languages, dead as well as living, were found in cases where a word was used differently, depending on one property or another (this is the third place for which we are pleased the first edition of this book was published). Such a lexicon is found to be necessary for knowing how to speak the language of the ideal eternal history upon which the histories of all nations run their temporal course and for being able to draw upon authority scientifically in order to confirm our reasoning on the natural law of the gentile peoples and, consequently, on each specific kind of jurisprudence. Along with these three languages—the languages proper to the three ages in which the three kinds of governance acquired currency, in conformity with three types of civil nature, governance which changed during the course which the nations make—a jurisprudence is found congruent with each age, proceeding in the same order as the three ages.

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The first of these is found to have been a mystical theology, which acquired currency at a time when the gods commanded the gentiles. The men wise in this jurisprudence were the theological poets said to have founded gentile humanity; they interpreted the mysteries of oracles, whose responses, throughout all the nations, were in verse.

37

Subsequently, the mysteries of the commonplace wisdom of this sort were found to have been hidden in myths. And while we meditate upon what caused the philosophers of later times to have such a strong desire to pursue the wisdom of the ancients, we also meditate upon what in these myths occasioned these philosophers to meditate on the most lofty things of philosophy and upon the impropriety of their imposing their own recondite wisdom upon these myths. The second kind is found to have been a heroic jurisprudence, all about scrupulousness with words (the scrupulousness is found to belong to the prudent Ulysses) and this jurisprudence has regard for what the Roman jurists called civil equity and for what we call “reason of state”;47 because their jurisprudence conformed to their narrow ideas, they naturally deemed their law to be one whose existence, scope, and character is connected with the explication of words; similarly, even today, one can observe rustics and other rude men, in their disputes over words and the sense of words, stubbornly insisting that their case rests upon the words themselves. And this is because of the counsel of divine providence, so that gentile men, who did not yet have the capacity for the universals, which are what good laws must be, would instead be drawn to observe the laws universally from the particularity of their words. And if, on account of such civil equity, it turned out, in some cases, that the laws were not only inflexible but also even cruel, they naturally bore this because they deemed their laws naturally to be this way. Furthermore, a supreme   See the note at §320 on “reason of state.”

47

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The New Science private interest drew them to observe the laws; this interest is found to be the same for the heroes as their interest in the fatherland since they alone were its citizens. Hence, they did not hesitate for the safety of their fatherlands to consecrate themselves and their families to the will of the laws. These laws, along with the safety of the fatherland which they held in common, kept safe the certain and private monarchical reign the heroes had over their families. By the same token, such great private interest, combined with a supreme arrogance proper to barbarous times, formed their heroic nature, and from this nature came those heroic actions on behalf of the safety of their fatherlands. These heroic actions are inseparable from the insufferable pride, the deep avarice, and the pitiless cruelty with which the Roman patricians treated the unfortunate plebeians, as we plainly read in Roman history at a time which Livy himself says was the age of Roman virtue and of the greatest flourishing of popular liberty yet dreamed of in Rome; and it will be found that this public virtue is nothing other than the good use which providence made of grievous, foul, wild private vices48 so that cities might be preserved during times when the minds of men attended to particulars, since they were naturally not able to understand a common good. This allows for alternative principles to demonstrate the argument treated by St. Augustine in his De virtute Romanorum,49 and these principles dispel the opinions that the learned have held up until now about the heroism of the earliest peoples. Civil equity of this sort is found to have naturally had currency among heroic nations both in peace and in war, and the clearest examples of it are drawn from the history of both the earlier and the more recent age of barbarism; and the Romans practiced this civil equity in their private affairs as long as there was an aristocratic republic, which is found to have been the case up until the time of the Publilian and Petelian laws, before which civil equity was practiced entirely in keeping with the Law of the Twelve Tables.

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The last kind of jurisprudence is that of the natural equity, which reigns naturally in free republics, where the people look out for a particular good which is the same for everyone and, without intending it, are brought to decree universal laws; accordingly, they naturally desire these   The juxtaposition of “private vices” and “public virtue” recalls Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, though it is not clear that Vico (who did not read English) would have been able to read Mandeville. Other comparable notions include Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” and Wilhelm Wundt’s “heterogenesis of ends.” None of these necessarily exhaust what Vico means by “providence.” 49   There is no work by Augustine which bears this title. Vico may be alluding to City of God 5.12, a chapter about the mores Romanorum. 48

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laws to be liberally adaptable to the ultimate circumstances of deeds, which demand equal advantage, the aequum bonum (this is the subject of the last stage of Roman jurisprudence and, in the time of Cicero, was starting to be shaped by the edicts of the Roman praetors). And this jurisprudence is also connatural to monarchies, perhaps even more so in that monarchs have accustomed their subjects to attend to their own private advantages while the monarchs busy themselves with a concern for all the public things; and in that they intend for all nations subject to them to be equal to each other relative to the laws so that all these nations will have an equal interest in the state. Hence, the emperor Hadrian reformed the entire heroic natural law of Rome to accord with the human natural law of the provinces and decreed that jurisprudence be practiced in terms of the Perpetual Edict, which Salvius Julianus composed almost entirely from provincial edicts.50 Now (so as to gather together all the primary elements of this world of nations from the HIEROGLYPHS which signify them) THE LITUUS, THE WATER, AND FIRE ON THE ALTAR, THE FUNERAL URN WITHIN THE FOREST, THE PLOUGH LEANING ON THE ALTAR, THE RUDDER PROSTRATE AT THE FOOT OF THE ALTAR signify: divination; sacrifices; the earliest families formed by children; burials; the cultivation of fields; the division of these same fields; asylums; the later families formed from the oppression of familial servants; the earliest agrarian disputes and, as a consequence, the earliest inland colonies; and, when these were done, the earliest overseas colonies, which came with the migration of peoples; all of these events came to pass during what the Egyptians called the age of the gods, which Varro (either because he did not know of this or because he overlooked it) called the dark age, as was suggested above [§§6, 25]. The FASCES signifies the first heroic republics; the distinctions made among the three domains— namely, the natural, civil, and sovereign domains—the first civil powers; and the first, unequal alliances following from the first agrarian laws, through which these earliest cities were composed upon the rustic fealty of plebeians subject to the noble fealty of heroes who, although themselves sovereign, became subjects of the greater sovereignty of regnant orders of the heroic age. The SWORD LEANING ON THE FASCES signifies the public wars these cities made, which started because of theft and piracy, for duels—or private wars—must have come into being much earlier—as will be demonstrated [§§959–964]—during the familial state; the PURSE signifies the devices of the gentry—or the insignia of the noble households—which passed over to medallions—the first insignia of peoples—which, consequently, passed over to military insignia and, eventually, to money (the use of money assumes the exchange of m ­ ovable  The Edictum perpetuum, a revision of the Edictum praetoris, was composed and decreed under the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). See Eutropius, Breviarium ab Urbe condita 8.17. 50

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The New Science goods because the exchange of real estate in connection with natural payments in produce and toil started earlier in the age of the gods with the first agrarian laws, upon which the republics came into being). The SCALES signify laws of equality—that is, laws in the proper sense of the term. And, finally, the CADUCEUS signifies wars publically declared and brought to an end with peace. All these HIEROGLYPHS are at a DISTANCE from the ALTAR. For they are all civil things from times when the false religions were in the gradual process of fading away, a process starting with the heroic agrarian disputes which gave their name to the age of heroes of the Egyptians and which Varro called the age of myth. THE TABLE WITH THE TWO ALPHABETS IS PLACED BETWEEN THE DIVINE AND HUMAN HIEROGLYPHS, for the false religions started to fade away with the advent of letters, which is the beginning of philosophy; this is different for true religion—that is, our Christian religion—which is, instead, confirmed humanly for us by the most sublime philosophies, namely, by the Platonic and by the Peripatetic to the extent that it conforms to the Platonic.

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Hence, the whole idea of this work can be captured in the following summary: THE SHADOWS IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE PICTURE are the subject matter of this science (material which is uncertain, unformed, dark), presented in the Chronological Table and in the annotations on it. THE RAY OF LIGHT BY WHICH DIVINE PROVIDENCE ILLUMINATES THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS is the axioms, definitions, and postulates which this science takes as the Elements of its reasoning, first, about the Principles upon which it is established and, second, about the Method by which it is guided: all of these things are contained in Book One. THE RAY WHICH THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS REFLECTS ONTO THE STATUE OF HOMER is the light proper to the poetic wisdom of Book Two, by which the true Homer is clarified in Book Three. From the Discovery of the True Homer, all the things which compose the world of nations come to be placed in a clear light. The progression from their origins according to the order in which THE HIEROGLYPHS COME TO LIGHT FROM THE TRUE HOMER: this is the Course of Nations about which Book Four reasons. And having arrived finally AT THE FOOT OF THE STATUE OF HOMER, they start again and run through the course again following the same order, about which the final Book Five reasons.

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And (so as to conclude by restricting the idea of the work to the briefest of summaries) THE ENTIRE FIGURE represents three worlds, following the order by which the human mind of gentile antiquity was ­elevated from Earth to heaven.

An Explication of the Frontispiece ALL THE HIEROGLYPHS SEEN ON THE EARTH denote the world of nations, to which men applied themselves prior to anything else. THE GLOBE IN THE MIDDLE represents the natural world, which the physicists examined later. THE HIEROGLYPHS WHICH ARE ABOVE THIS signify the world of minds and of God, which the metaphysicians contemplated last of all.

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Chronological Table A description based on the three epochs of the Egyptians, who said the whole world had previously r

HebrewsB

ChaldeansC

ScythiansD

PhoeniciansE

EgyptiansF

Universal Flood. Zoroaster, or the rule of the Chaldeans.G Nimrod, or the confusion of languages.I Dynasties in Egypt. Hermes Trismegistus the Elder, or the age of gods in Egypt.M

The calling of Abraham.

God gives written laws to Moses. Hermes Trismegistus the Younger, or the age of heroes in Egypt. S

Ninus rules with the Assyrians.

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Dido of Tyre leaves to found Carthage.X

previously run its course through three ages: the age of gods, of heroes, and of human beings.A

Greeks

Romans

The Year of the The Year World in Rome 1656 1756

Iapetus, from whom come the giants.H One of these giants, Prometheus, steals fire from the sun. K Deucalion.L

1856

The golden age—that is, the age of gods in Greece.N

Hellenus—son of Deucalion, grandson of Prometheus, great grandson of ­Iapetus—through his sons spreads three dialects in Greece.O Cecrops the Egyptian brings twelve colonies into Attica, out of which Theseus later composes Athens.P Cadmus the Phoenician founds Thebes in Boetia and introduces common alphabetic letters into Greece.Q

2082

2448 Saturn, or the age of the gods in ­Latium. R

2491

Danaus the Egyptian expels the ­Inachids from their rule in Argos.T Pelops the Phrygian rules in the Peloponnesus.

2553

The Heraclids spread throughout the Aboriginal peoples. whole of Greece and make there the age of heroes.V The Curetes in Crete, in Saturnia—that is, in Italy—and in Asia establish the rule of priests.V

2682

2737

Chronological Table (continued)

HebrewsB

ChaldeansC

ScythiansD

PhoeniciansE

EgyptiansF

Tyre is renowned for its skill in sailing and for its colonies.

Sancuniates writes histories in common alphabetic letters.Aa

The rule of Saul. Seostris rules in Thebes.Cc

Psammeticus opens Egypt only to Greeks from Ionia and Caria.Hh

Cyrus rules in Assyria with the Persians.

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Greeks

Romans

Minos, the first legislator among the gentile peoples and first pirate of the Aegean. Orpheus, and with him the age of the theological poets.Y Hercules, with whom the heroic times in Greece culminate.Z Jason begins naval warfare with the war in Pontus. Theseus founds Athens, and establishes the orders of the Areopagus.

The Year of the The Year World in Rome 2752

The Arcadians.

Hercules with Evander in ­Latium, or the age of heroes in Italy.

The Trojan War.Bb The wandering of heroes, especially of Odysseus and Aeneas.

2800

2820 Rule in Alba.

Greek colonies in Asia, Sicily, and Italy.Dd Lycurgus gives laws to the Lacedaemonians. The Olympic games, first instituted as an order by Hercules, then, after being inter­rupted, reestablished by Isiphilus.Ee The founding of Rome.Ff Homer, who came at a time when com­ Numa is king. mon alphabetic letters had not yet been found and who did not see Egypt.Gg Aesop, vulgar ethical philosopher.Ii

The Seven Sages of Greece, one of whom, Solon, institutes orders of popular liberty in Athens; another of whom, Thales the Milesian, starts philosophy with physics.Kk Pythagoras, about whom, while he was Servius Tullius is living, Livy says not even his name king.Mm Ll would have been in known in Rome. The Peisistratid tyrants are expelled from Athens.

2830 2909 2949 3120 3223

1 3290

37

3334

3406

3468 3491

225

Chronological Table (continued)

HebrewsB

ChaldeansC

ScythiansD

PhoeniciansE

EgyptiansF

Idanthyrsus is king of Scythia.Pp

Note: In the 1744 edition, Vico marks the first twenty-three sections of the notes on the Chronological Table with a letter, from A to Z (omitting J, U, and W), and the remaining twenty-two sections with two letters, Aa to Yy (again, omitting Jj, Uu, and Ww). Nicolini substituted Roman numerals for Vico’s letters. 

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Greeks

Romans The Tarquin tyrants are expelled from Rome.

Hesiod.Nn Herodotus. Hippocrates.Oo The Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, who writes that up until his father, the Greeks knew nothing of their own antiquities, and hence he proposed to writing about this war.Qq Socrates begins rational moral philosophy. Plato flourishes in the field of metaphysics. Athens shines in all the arts of cultivated humanity.Rr Xenophon brings Greek arms into the heart of Persia and is the first to know with any certainty about things of the Persians.Ss

The Year of the The Year World in Rome 3499

245

3500 3530

Law of the Twelve Tables.

3553

303

3583

333

The Publilian law.Tt

3658 3660

416

The Petelian law.Vv The war at Tarentum, where the Latins started to become familiar with the Greeks. Xx The second Carthaginian War, from which Livy starts a Roman his­ tory which is certain, although he con­ fesses not knowing about three major circumstances.Yy

3661 3708

419 489

3849

552

Alexander the Great in Macedonia overthrows the Persian monarchy, and Aristotle conducts himself to the Near East to observe in person what the Greeks had previously said about things were myths.

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On the Establishment of Principles1

  Vico’s use of the word princìpi recalls the Latin principia generally and invites a comparison to works by Descartes (Principia philosophiae, 1644) and Newton (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 1687). But Vico’s princìpi should not be construed simply as abstract formulae, as suggested by his own words much later in the text: “For this is the nature of principles, that they give the first things their start and bring the last things to their end” (§1093).

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Annotations for the Chronological Table, in Which is Made an Arrangement of Materials A.2 This Chronological Table puts on display the world of ancient nations, which winds its way down from the Universal Flood of the Hebrews through to the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans up until their second Carthaginian war. And on the table appear greatly renowned men or deeds determined to have been at certain times or in certain places by the community of learned: in fact, either these men or deeds did not exist at the times or in the places in which they were commonly determined to have been or they never existed in the world at all. And out of the deep, dense shadows where they have lain buried emerge significant men and the most important deeds from whom and by which have come to pass the greatest moments of human affairs. All this is demonstrated in these ANNOTATIONS so as to allow for an understanding of how much the humanity of the nations has beginnings that are uncertain or misplaced or faulty or foolish.

43

Moreover, this table proposes something entirely contrary to the Canon of Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek Chronology by John Marsham:3 there, he wishes to prove that the Egyptians preceded all the nations of the world in their polity and their religion and that the sacred rites and civil orders which they passed on to other peoples were received with some few emendations by the Hebrews.

44

In this opinion, Marsham is followed by Spencer4 in his treatise, On the Urim and Thummim: there he opines that the Israelites had learned from the Egyptians the whole of their science of divine things by means of the sacred kabbalah. Finally, Van Heurn5 praises Marsham in his Antiquities of Barbarian Philosophy: there, in the book entitled On Chaldea, he writes that Moses, learned in the science of divine things because of the Egyptians, passed on this learning to the Hebrews in his laws.   See the note on the Chronological Table for an explanation of the letter coding presented in Book One. 3   John Marsham (1602–1683), English chronologist and politician. The reference is to his 1672 work Canon chronicus aegyptiacus, hebraicus graecus. 4   John Spencer (1630–1695), English cleric and author of Dissertatio de Urim et Thummim, published in Cambridge in 1670. 5   Otto van Heurn (1577–1648), Dutch theologian and author of Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo, published in 1600. What Vico calls the “Chaldaicus” is the first part of the work. 2

44

The New Science Standing in contrast to this is Hermann Wits,6 in a work entitled Aegyptiaca, sive de Aegyptiacorum Sacrorum cum Hebraicis Collatione. He deems the first gentile author to give the first certain observations about the Egyptians to have been Dio Cassius,7 who flourished under the philosopher Marcus Antonius.8 In this, he can be confuted by the Annals of Tacitus9: there, Tacitus tells us that Germanicus went to the Near East and, after that, to Egypt so as to see the famous antiquities of Thebes; once there, he made one of their priests explain the hieroglyphs written on some monuments, which the priest foolishly related to him, foolishly in that he related that these characters preserved a recorded memory of the limitless power which their king, Ramses, had in Africa, in the Near East, and in Asia Minor, a power equal to that of the Romans, which at that time was very great. On this passage (perhaps because it runs contrary to his argument) Wits is silent.

45

But, certainly, the fruit of such limitless antiquity was not much recondite wisdom among the inland Egyptians. We say this because at the time of Clement of Alexandria,10 as he tells us in his Stromata, were circulating what were called their priestly books (some forty-two in number), and these contained the greatest of errors in philosophy and astronomy; because of these myths, Chaeremon, the teacher of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, is often exposed by Strabo.11 The things pertaining to Egyptian medicine are found by Galen, in his book On Hermetic Medicine, to be obvious prattle and pure imposture.12 Their morals were dissolute: they not only tolerated—that is, permitted—harlots, but even made them honorable. Their theology was full of superstition, trickery, and witchcraft. And even the magnificence of their monuments and pyramids could well have been a function of their barbarousness, which comports well with greatness; indeed, Egyptian sculpting and casting is even today accused of being quite unpolished. For refinement is the fruit of philosophy; hence, Greece, a nation of philosophers, is alone in shining forth in all the fine arts which human ingenuity has ever found: painting, sculpture,   Hermann Wits (1636–1708), Dutch theologian and author of Aegyptiaca, published in 1683. 7   Dio Cassius (155–235 CE), Roman administrator and historian, author of an eighty-volume history of Rome. 8   Here Vico’s pen has slipped—he means Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), Roman emperor whose reign began in 161 and lasted until his death. 9  Tacitus, Annals 2.60. 10   Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 CE), Christian theologian. 11   Strabo (64 BCE–23 CE), Greek historian and geographer whose Geographica is an important text for Vico. The reference to Dionysius the Areopagite is incorrect; Chaeremon was in fact the teacher of another Dionysius, perhaps a first-century grammarian from Alexandria. 12   Galen of Pergamon (129–201 CE), Greek physician in the Roman Empire. 6

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casting, and the art of engraving (the most refined of all the arts because it must abstract from the surfaces of the objects it imitates). On the coast, however, this ancient wisdom of the Egyptians was raised to the stars by Alexander the Great by the founding of Alexandria: this city united African acuity with Greek refinement and produced philosophers who were brilliant about divinity; from this, Alexandria became so famous for the splendor of lofty divine wisdom that the Museum of Alexandria was more celebrated than previously were the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the Cynosarges combined,13 and it was called the mother of sciences. On account of such excellence, it was named by the Greeks πόλις [polis], just as Athens was named ῎Αστυ [Astu] and Rome urbs.

46

As a consequence of this came Manetho—that is, Manethone14—the high priest of Egypt, who translated all of Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology, in exactly the same way that Greek philosophers had previously done with their myths, which will be found herein to have been their most ancient histories. Hence, one can understand that what came to pass for Greek myths also came to pass for Egyptian hieroglyphs. In addition to such ostentation concerning its lofty wisdom, grant also that this was a nation which, because of its own natural vanity, was taunted with being gloriae animalia [“animals for glory”]; and grant that it was in a city which was the great emporium of the Mediterranean and, via the Red Sea, of the Ocean and the Indies; grant also that among their disgraceful customs was (as Tacitus tells us in a golden passage) novarum religionum avida [“an avidity for new religious practices”];15 and grant that this was on account of their prejudiced opinion about, first, their boundless antiquity, of which they vainly boasted over all other nations of the world and about, consequently, their having had ancient mastery over a greater portion of the world. Granting all this, and that they did not know of the fashion in which uniform ideas about the gods and heroes came into being in different places among the gentiles without one people having any knowledge of another—this will be fully demonstrated below [§§196–198])—when such a nation heard from the nations who came to them for coastal trade about all the false divinities spread through the rest of the world, they believed, first, that those divinities arose in their own Egypt and that their own Jove Ammon was the most ancient of all (even though every gentile nation had one) and, second,   The Cynosarges was a public gymnasium and sanctuary of Hercules, just outside Athens. Antisthenes, disciple of Socrates and reputed founder of Cynicism, lectured there. 14   Manetho, reputed Egyptian priest who lived in the third century BCE, author of Aegyptiaca. 15   The phrase does not seem to appear in Tacitus. 13

47

46

The New Science that the different versions of Hercules in all the other nations (Varro counts forty of them16) took the name from their Egyptian Hercules (so Tacitus tells us of both the first and the second belief17). And with all the favorable judgments with which Diodorus Siculus,18 who lived in the times of Augustus, showers the Egyptians, even he does not allow them more than two thousand years of antiquity, and all those judgments have been overturned by Jacques Cappel19 in his Sacred and Foreign History: Cappel deems them similar to those which Xenophon had previously connected with Cyrus and which (we would add) Plato20 often devised about the Persians. Finally, this foolishness concerning the most profound wisdom of the Egyptians is confirmed by the imposture of that Poimandres, passed off as part of the Corpus Hermeticum, but discovered by Casaubon21 to contain learning which was no more ancient than that of the Platonists and was articulated in the same idiom used by the Platonists; and this remnant was judged by Saumaise to be a disordered and badly composed collection of things.

48

What made for this false opinion of Egyptians—that they were of such great antiquity—is a property of the human mind—namely, its being indefinite—and on account of this, it often believes without bounds, concerning the things which it does not know, that they are greater than things as they actually are. On account of this, the Egyptians were similar in this respect to the Chinese, who grew to be such a great nation while they were closed off from all foreign nations, just as the Egyptians, up until Psammeticus,22 had been closed off and just as the Scythians, up until Idanthyrus,23 had been: concerning those Scythians, there is a folk tradition that they bested the Egyptians in the prize of greatest antiquity. And such a folk tradition is necessary, and must have had its impetus at the point where universal profane history starts; according to   The reference to forty Herculeses appears not in Varro but in Marcus Servius Honoratus’s commentary on Aeneid 8.564. 17  Tacitus, Annals 2.60.2. In the passage Tacitus speaks only of Hercules, not of Jove Ammon. Compare Scienza nuova prima §458, which speaks only of Hercules. 18   Diodorus Siculus (80 BCE–20 BCE), Greek historian and author of Historical Library. 19   Jacques Cappel (1570–1624), French theologian and student of the relations between Homer and Hebraic culture. Cappel was the author of Historia sacra et exotica ab Adamo usque ad Augustum, printed in 1613. 20   See Plato, Alcibiades I, 120e–122c, and Laws 3, 694e–695e. 21   Isaac Causabon (1559–1614), French philologist and author of De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis. 22   An Egyptian pharaoh. 23   Scythian king mentioned by Strabo and Herodotus. 16

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Justin,24 this tradition proposes, as a rival beginning prior to the monarchy of the Assyrians, two powerful kings—King Tanaus the Scythian and King Sesostris the Egyptian—who up until now have made the world appear much more ancient that it actually is. The tradition has it that, first, Tanaus went through the Near East with a great army to subjugate Egypt, a country which, by its nature, is not easily prone to armed invasion; and then, Sesostris with forces correspondingly great went to subjugate Scythia, a country which lived unknown to the Persians (they had extended their monarchy to the Medes on the Scythian border) up until the times of the one called Darius the Great, who declared war on King Idanthyrsus (this Idanthyrsus is found to have been so barbarous that, in an age when Persia was at its most humane, he responded to Darius with the five real words of five objects, since he did not even know how to write with hieroglyphics). And these two kings, in all their power, traversed Asia with the two great armies and did not make a province of either Scythia or Egypt, but instead left Asia in such liberty that later there arose there the first of the four most famous monarchies in the world, that of Assyria. It is on account of this, perhaps, that the Chaldeans did not fail to enter into the midst of this dispute over the greatest antiquity, also an inland nation and, as we will demonstrate [§55], more ancient than the other two; the Chaldeans foolishly boasted about their preserving astronomical observations going back well over twenty thousand years. This perhaps was the impetus for Flavius Josephus the Jew25 believing erroneously that the observations described on two columns (one made of marble, the other of brick) were antediluvian and erected against two floods and for his having seen the one in Syria made of marble. Such was the great importance for ancient nations of preserving memories of astronomical observations, the meaning of which was completely dead to the nations that came after them! Hence, this column has been consigned to the museum of credulity.

49

However, it has been found that the Chinese write with hieroglyphs just as anciently the Egyptians did and just as, even more than the Egyptians, the Scythians did, who did not even know how to write. And, since they did not have an exchange with other nations for many thousands of years by which they could have been informed about the true antiquity of the world, just like a man who, while sleeping, is closed up in a small, dark room and, in horror at the darkness, believes with certainty that the room is much larger than what he can touch with his hands, so the Chinese (and the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans too) did the same in the darkness of their chronology.

50

  Marcus Iunianius Iustinus, second-century Latin historian who lived in the Roman Empire, author of Historiarum Philippicarum libri XLIV. 25   Titus Flavius Josephus (37–c. 100 CE), Roman-Jewish scholar and author of Jewish Antiquities. 24

48

The New Science Moreover, grant that the Jesuit father Michele Ruggieri26 declares that he himself has read books printed in China before the coming of Jesus Christ and grant too that Father Martini,27 also a Jesuit, in his History of the Chinese, confers a very great antiquity upon Confucius, which has induced in many the atheism related by Marten Schoock28 in his treatise The Universal Flood (on account of which, perhaps, Isaac de La Peyrère,29 author of History before Adam, abandoned the Catholic faith and subsequently wrote that the flood spread only over the lands of the Hebrews). Nevertheless, Nicolas Trigault,30 who is better informed than Ruggieri and Martini, writes in his Christiana expeditione apud Sinas that printing among the Chinese was discovered not more than two centuries before it was in Europe and that Confucius flourished not more than five hundred years before Christ. And the Confucian philosophy is consistent with the priestly books of the Egyptians in that its few points on things of nature are rude and gullish, and also it completely revolves around a commonplace morality—that is, a morality which commands a people by the laws.

51

It is from reasoning of this sort concerning the empty opinion which these gentile nations had about their antiquity (and the Egyptians, above all, had this opinion) that we must start investigations into all that is knowable about gentile nations. It is, first, so as to know with science that all-important beginning—namely, where and when the gentile nations had their start in the world—and, second, so as to assist with reasoning which is still human all that is believable in Christianity. So, it starts from the fact that the Hebrew people were the earliest in the world, a people whose prince, Adam,31 was created by the true God at the creation of the world. And so, the first science that ought to be learned is ­mythology32— that is, the interpretation of myths—because, as we will see, all of the gentile histories have mythical beginnings and because myths were the earliest histories of the gentile nations. And it is with a method of this   Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), Jesuit from Naples and author of Nuovi avisi del Giapone con altri della Cina del LXXXIII e del LXXXIV, printed in 1586. 27   Martino Martini (1614–1661), author of Sinicae historiae decas prima, printed in 1658. 28   Marten Schoock (1614–1659), Dutch author of Diluvium Noachi universale. 29   Isaac de La Peyrère (1596–1676), French author of Systema theologicum ex Preadamitarum hypothesi (1655). Known for claiming that there were humans before Adam, and thereby doubting the antiquity of the Jews, La Peyrère is an important figure for Spinoza and modern biblical criticism. 30   Nicholas Trigualt of Douay (1577–1628), Jesuit missionary and author of De christiana expeditione, printed in 1615. 31   The description of Adam as principe may be an allusion to Machiavelli’s striking description of Moses as a prince (The Prince 6). 32   As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Vico defines mythology in the way that traditional discussions of the liberal arts define grammar, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 114–115. 26

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sort that we must recover the beginnings of both the nations and the sciences which emerged from these nations and from nowhere else, as will be demonstrated throughout this entire work [§§239–245]; it is in the public necessities or advantages of peoples that the sciences had to have their starting points, and it is only later, by particular men of acuity applying reflection to them, that the sciences were perfected. And from here must start the universal history which all the learned say is lacking in its proper beginnings. And, in doing this, the antiquity of the Egyptians will be a great help to us in that they have saved two great fragments no less wondrous than their pyramids—that is, two great philological truths. The first (told by Herodotus33) is that the Egyptians reduced the whole of time that previously ran its course to THREE AGES: first, the age of GODS; second, the age of HEROES; and, third, the age of MEN. The second of these truths is that, throughout this whole time, there were THREE LANGUAGES spoken, corresponding in number and order to these three ages: first, HIEROGLYPHIC, or speaking through sacred characters; second, SYMBOLIC, or speaking through heroic characters; and, third, EPISTOLARY, or speaking through characters of popular convention (as reported by Scheffer34 in De Philosophia Italica). Concerning this division of times, about Marcus Terentius Varro (because of his limitless erudition, he is deserving of the title by which he was called, “most learned of the Romans,”35 and was called this at the time when the Romans were most enlightened—that is, in the time of Cicero) it is necessary to say not that he did not know to follow this division, but that he did not wish to follow it: perhaps this is because he understood about Rome what will be found through these principles to be true for all ancient nations—namely, that all the things divine and human were native to Latium—and hence he inquired into the Latin origins of all these things in his great work, Rerum Divinarum et Humanarum, of which the injustice of time has deprived us (this shows how much Varro believed in the myth of the Law of the Twelve Tables having come from Athens to Rome!36). And Varro himself divided the whole time of the world into three periods, namely, dark times, which is the age of gods of which the Egyptians spoke; next, mythical times, which is the Egyptians’ age of heroes; and, finally, historic times, which is the Egyptians’ age of men.  Herodotus, Histories 2.36.   Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), Swedish humanist born in Strasbourg, professor of eloquence and government at Uppsala University. The text to which Vico refers (full title De natura et constitutione philosophica Italica) was published in Uppsala in 1664. 35   For this title, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.95 and Augustine, City of God 6.2. 36   As Battistini observes, the exclamation mark consistently signals an “ironic utterance” about a position that Vico takes himself to have overthrown. 33 34

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53

Furthermore, the antiquity of the Egyptians will help us with those two vain memories, memories themselves derived from the vanity of nations observed by Diodorus Siculus37—namely, that every nation, whether they were barbarian or human, considered itself to be the most ancient of all and preserved memories of their antiquity back to the beginning of the world (this, we will see, was the privilege only of the Hebrews). The first of these two memories, as we observed [§47], is that the Egyptian Jove Ammon was the oldest of all the other Joves of the world; the second is that all the other versions of Hercules of the other nations had taken their name from their Egyptian Hercules: this says that all nations, first, passed through an AGE OF THE GODS whose king was believed by all nations to be Jove and, later, passed through an AGE OF HEROES who considered themselves the children of gods, the greatest of whom was believed to be Hercules.

54

B. The first column in the Chronological Table is erected for the Hebrews who (through the very weighty authority of Flavius Josephus the Jew38 and Lactantius Firmianus,39 which they will reach later [§94]) lived unknown to all the gentile nations and yet reckoned correctly an account of the times through which the world runs, an account which today is accepted as true by the strictest textual critics in keeping with the calculation of Philo the Jew;40 if it varies from that of Eusebius,41 the difference is not more than one thousand, five hundred years (a very small period of time compared to the great differences among the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Egyptians and, in our own day, the Chinese). This ought to be an unassailable argument for the Hebrews being the earliest people of our world and for their having preserved, in sacred history, truthful memories of their antiquity back to the beginning of the world.

55

C. The second column is planted for the Chaldeans. This is both because geography shows that the most inland monarchy in all the habitable world was in Assyria; and because this work demonstrates that inland nations are populated first and, later, maritime nations. And, certainly, the Chaldeans were the wise men of gentile antiquity, whose prince is accepted by the community of philologists to be Zoroaster the Chaldean. And we have no scruples about saying that universal history takes its beginning from the monarchy of the Assyrians: the Assyrians must have started in forming themselves from the Chaldean   Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 1.9.   On Flavius Josephus, see the note to §49. 39   Lactantius Firmianus (c. 250–c. 325), Christian author of Institutiones Divinae and advisor to Constantine I, the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity. 40   Philo the Jew (c. 25 BCE–50 CE), Hellenistic Jewish philosopher from Alexandria. 41   Eusebius of Caesarea (265–339), Roman historian and so-called father of Church history. Eusebius places the date of the world’s creation at 5202 BCE. 37 38

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people and, from there, must have grown into a very large body and become the Assyrians under Ninus, who must have founded that monarchy not from a people led in from the outside, but from one which came into being within Chaldea itself; with this, Ninus dispensed with the name Chaldea and put forward Assyria instead; it must have been the plebs of that nation on whose strength Ninus rose to monarch (this will be demonstrated in this work that this custom is the same in the civil life of all nations, as it certainly was in Rome). This universal history, moreover, recounts for us that Zoroaster was killed by Ninus:42 it will be found [§737] that, in saying this, heroic language means that a Chaldean regime, which had been aristocratic and for which Zoroaster was the heroic character, was overturned by means of the popular liberty of the plebs of a people; we will see that, in heroic times, the plebs were a nation different from that of the nobles, and it is with the favor of this nation that Ninus established himself as monarch. Otherwise, if these things were not thus, the following monstrosity of chronology in Assyrian history would emerge: within the lifetime of a single man, Zoroaster, Chaldea would have risen from lawless vagabonds to become an empire so great that Ninus would found upon it the greatest monarchy. Without these beginnings, to grant that Ninus was the one who started universal history made it seem as if the monarchy of Assyria came into being all at once, like a frog in a summer rain shower. D. The third column is founded for the Scythians, who defeated the Egyptians in the dispute over the greatest antiquity, as the witness of a folk tradition tells us [§48].

56

E. The fourth column is established for the Phoenicians, prior to that of the Egyptians, to whom the Phoenicians brought from Chaldea experience with the quadrant and science concerning the movements of the pole star, about which there is a folk tradition; and it will be demonstrated later [§§66, 83, 440] that they also brought with them common alphabetic characters.

57

F. On account of all the things upon which we reasoned above, the Egyptians (whom Marsham in his Canon wants to say were the most ancient of all nations) deserve to be the fifth column in this Chronological Table.

58

G. Zoroaster is found in this work to have been a poetic character for the founders of the peoples in the Near East. Hence, there are discovered as many of these founders scattered throughout that great portion of the world as there are versions of Hercules in the corresponding Western portion; and perhaps those versions of Hercules which Varro observed in Asia as having a Western aspect (such as the Tyrian or Phoenician

59

  See Augustine, City of God 21.14.

42

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The New Science Hercules) were versions of Zoroaster in the Near East. But the vanity of the learned, who want what they know to be as ancient as the world, makes one particular man filled with the most profound, recondite wisdom and attaches to him the oracles of philosophy—that is, to teaching of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists—giving the veneer of old age to teaching which is quite new. But the vanity of the learned did not settle here: it also swelled with pride from devising a succession of schools of wisdom representing each of the nations. So, Zoroaster was teacher to Berosus (standing for Chaldea); Berosus to Hermes Trismegistus (standing for Egypt); Hermes Trismegistus to Atlas (standing for Ethiopia); Atlas to Orpheus (standing for Thrace); and, finally, Orpheus settled with his school in Greece. But a little hereafter [§93], it will be seen just how easy these long journeys were for the earliest nations, nations which, on account of their still recent wild origins, lived everywhere unknown even to those on their own borders and would not have known each other except as war occasioned or trade caused contact.

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But concerning the Chaldeans, these same philologists, bewildered by the various folk traditions that they collected, do not know whether they are particular men, or whole families, or an entire people or a nation. These doubts are all resolved by the following principles. First, there were particular men; then, whole families; later, an entire people; and, finally, a great nation upon which was founded the monarchy of Assyria. And their wisdom was, first, that of commonplace divination, by which they divined what was to come from the trajectory of the movements of the stars at night; later, their wisdom was that of judicial astrology, such that among the Latins a judicial astrologer was still called a Chaldean.43

61

H. These giants, in keeping with both the natural histories found in Greek myths and the natural and moral proofs drawn from civil histories, will be demonstrated [§§369–373] to have existed naturally among all the earliest gentile nations.

62

I. This confusion of languages came to pass in a miraculous manner, whence it was that in an instant so many different tongues were formed; and it was on account of this confusion of languages that the Fathers wished for the purity of a sacred, antediluvian language that gradually came to be lost. This must be understood as pertaining only to the languages of the peoples of the Near East, among whom Shem propagated humankind. But, as for the nations in all the rest of the world, the need must have proceeded differently insofar as the races of Ham and Japheth must have been dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth in feral wandering for two hundred years and, roaming forlorn and in solitude, they

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43

  See, for example, Cicero, De divinatione 2.42.88 and 2.47.98.

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must have produced children with a feral education stripped of any human custom and deprived of any human speech; as such, they were in a state of brute animals. And this is exactly the amount of time which needed to run its course so that the earth, after it had dried out from the dampness of the Universal Flood, could send into the air the dry evaporation which can generate the lightning; as a result, these men, stunned and terrified, would be abandoned to the false religions of so many Joves that Varro counted some forty different versions, out of which the Egyptians said that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient of all; and, as a result, they would strike upon a kind of divination by which they divined what was to come from thunder and lightning and the flight of eagles, which they believed to be the birds of Jove. But among those in the Near East, there came into being a more refined kind of divination, that of observing the motions of the planets and the aspects of the stars; hence, Bochart44 wishes to call Zoroaster—­ renowned as the first wise man of gentile antiquity—a contemplator of the stars; and, just as the first commonplace wisdom came into being among those in the Near East, so too the first monarchy arose among them, which was that of Assyria. It is through reasoning of this sort that we ultimately come to overturn all those recent etymologists who wish to trace all languages in the world back to origins in the Near East whereas all those nations which came from Ham and Japheth, first, founded their native languages inland and, later, when they came down to the sea, started to have some experience with the Phoenicians renowned on the shores of the Mediterranean and the ocean for their skill at sailing and for their colonies (so we demonstrated in the first edition of The New Science45 that this was the case for the origins of the Latin language and, on the model of Latin, must be understood to be the case for all other languages).

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K. In this myth is perceived the former rule of heaven rule on earth, a time when heaven was believed to be as high as the peaks of mountains, as held in a folk tradition which also relates that this rule left many great benefits to humankind.

64

L. In Deucalion’s time, Themis—that is, divine justice—had a temple upon Mount Parnassus, and she judged on earth the things pertaining to men.

65

M. This is the Hermes whom Cicero relates in his De natura deorum46 was called Thoth by the Egyptians, from which the Greeks derived θεός [theos]; this Theuth found the letters and laws of the Egyptians; and

66

  Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), Protestant theologian, teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet, and author of Geographia sacra seu Phaleg et Chanaan (1646). 45  See Scienza nuova prima §§368–373. 46  Cicero, De natura deorum 3.22. “Thot” appears in Cicero’s text; “Theuth” is found at Plato, Philebus 18b and Phaedrus 274c. 44

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The New Science these, according to Marsham, were taught to the other nations of the world. And yet, the Greeks did not use hieroglyphs to write their laws, but used common alphabetic letters, letters which opinion up until now has said Cadmus brought to the Greeks from Phoenicia47 even though (as we will see [§679]) letters were not employed for more than seven hundred years after Cadmus; it is within this time period that Homer arrives, who in none of his poems uses the term νόμος [nomos] as Feith48 observed in his Homeric Antiquities) and who entrusted his poems to the memory of his rhapsodes because in his time common alphabetic letters had not yet been found (as Flavius Josephus the Jew resolutely maintains against Apion the Greek grammarian49) and, indeed, after Homer, the Greek letters that developed were quite different from Phoenician letters.

67

But these difficulties are minor in comparison with the following. How can one discover a nation which has no laws but which has already been founded? And how, within Egypt itself, were there dynasties already founded prior to this Hermes? As if letters were essential for laws, and as if the laws in Sparta were not really laws, a place where, because of the laws of that famous Lycurgus, knowledge of letters was prohibited! As if such civil orders were by nature impossible, orders conceiving laws in speech and, indeed, making them public in speech; as if we did not actually find just these two sorts of assembly in Homer,50 one called the βουλή [boule¯ ]—a secret assembly where the heroes assembled in order to consult in speech about the laws—and the other called the ἀγορά [agora]—a public assembly in which, moreover, they made public the laws in speech! As if, finally, providence had not provided for this human necessity so that, on account of the lack of letters, all nations in their barbarity would be founded, first, upon what is customary and, later, becoming more gentle, would be governed by laws, just as in the return to barbarism in Europe, the first laws of the new nations came into being from what is customary, of which the feudal customs were the most ancient of all. This should be remembered for what we will say later [§§599–602], that fealties were the earliest springs for all the laws which came later among all nations, both ancient and modern; consequently, the natural law of the gentile peoples has been established not yet by laws, but by these same human customs.

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Now, so as to attain to something which has great moment for the Christian religion—that Moses would not have learned from the Egyptians the sublime theology of the Hebrews—this seems to be opposed

  For such “opinion,” see Herodotus, Histories 5.58.   Everhard Feith (c. 1585–c. 1625), Dutch humanist and author of Antiquitatum homericarum libri IV. 49   See Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12. 50   See Homer, Iliad 2.53 and 2.207. 47 48

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by a chronology which alleges that Moses comes after this Hermes Trismegistus. However, this difficulty—putting to one side the other reasons above [§§44–45] which militate against it—is completely defeated by the principles confirmed in that truly golden passage in De mysteriis Aegyptiorum of Iamblichus,51 where he says that the Egyptians attributed all the discoveries necessary or advantageous for human civil life to their Hermes. As a result, he must have been not some particular man, rich in recondite wisdom, who was later consecrated as a god; instead, he was a poetic character representing the earliest men of Egypt wise in this commonplace wisdom, those who founded, first, the families and, later, the peoples of which that great nation was composed. And with a view to that same passage from Iamblichus just drawn upon, because the Egyptians stand by their division of the ages into three—the ages of gods, heroes, and men—and because Trismegistus was their god, accordingly, the life of this Hermes must have run the course of the entire age of the gods of the Egyptians. N. One particularity that mythical history tells us about the golden age is that the gods consorted on earth with men. And, so as to give certainty to principles of chronology, we meditate in this work upon a natural theogony—that is, the generations of the god—made naturally in the imaginations of the Greeks on certain occasions of human necessities or advantages, which suggested to them that they had received succor or were assisted in the time of the early childhood of a world startled by the most terrifying religions (in that world, no matter what men saw, or imagined, or even themselves did, they apprehended in these the divinity). And, by making twelve smaller ages from the famous twelve gods of the those who are called the Greater Gentes—that is, from those gods consecrated by men in the time of families—it is determined with a rational chronology of poetic history that the divine age lasted nine hundred years, from which are given the beginnings of universal profane history.

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O. From this Hellenus,52 the native Greeks were called Hellenes. But the Greeks in Italy were called Graii and their land Γραικία [Graikia], from which they came to be called Graeci by those in Latium. This shows how much the Greeks of Italy knew of the name of the original Greek nation across the sea, from which they themselves had come as colonists to Italy! For the term Γραικία is not found in later Greek writing (as was observed by Jacques Le Paulmier53 in his Description of Greece).

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  Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325 CE), Syrian Neoplatonist. The reference is to On the Mysteries of the Egyptians 1.1. 52   Hellenus, father of the Greeks, on whom see Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.38.1 and Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.2–3. 53   Jacques Le Paulmier de Grentmesnil (1583–1670), French philologist. The reference is to Greciae antiquae descriptio 1.2. 51

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P. However, Strabo54 deems Attica unable, on account of the harshness of its land, to accommodate foreigners who might otherwise have come to inhabit it so as to prove that Attic is first among the dialects native to Greece.

72

Q. And Cadmus brought there Phoenician letters, from which Boeotia, because of its literate founding, ought to have had greater ingenuity than all the other nations of Greece. Instead, it produced men of such bewildered minds that “Boeotian” became proverbial for a man who was obtuse in his ingenuity.

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R. This is the age of the gods, whose start for the nation of Latium corresponds in its properties to the golden age of the Greeks, for whom the earliest gold is discovered by our mythology [§544–548] to have been the harvest, by whose reckonings the earliest nations counted years over the course of many centuries; and the Saturn of Latium is so called from satis—that is, from the Latin word meaning “sown ground”55—and Saturn is called Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks, for whom χρόνος [chronos] means “time,” from which comes what we are calling chronology.

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S. This Hermes the Younger must have been the poetic character for the age of heroes among the Egyptians, an age which for the Greeks did not come until after the nine hundred years it took for the age of gods in Greece to come to an end. However, for the Egyptians, this ran its course in the time of just a father, a son, and a grandson. We observed in Assyrian history, in the person of Zoroaster, something analogous to this anachronism in Egyptian history.

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T. These royal successions are the great canons of chronology: if Danaus56 held the rule in Argos (a rule during which nine kings from the house of Inachus were lords) and if that rule ran its course over three hundred years (following the rule of the chronologists), then it must have been over the course of almost five hundred years that the fourteen Latin kings ruled in Alba.

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However, Thucydides says that during heroic times kings expelled one another from the throne every day: Amulius expels Numitor from the rule in Alba, and then Romulus expels Amulius and restores Numitor. This came about on account of the ferocity of those times and because heroic cities were without walls and fortresses were not yet in use, as we will encounter again herein [§§645, 1014] in the return to barbarous times.  Strabo, Geographia 9.1.8.   On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3. 56   See Hyginus, Fables 168; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.1.5; Strabo, Geography 8.6.9. 54 55

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V. These two great fragments of antiquity were observed by Denis Pétau57 to be cast within a period of Greek history prior to the heroic times of Greece. And the Heraclids—that is, the sons of Hercules—spread throughout the whole of Greece more than a hundred years before the arrival of Hercules, their father, who would have had to have been born many centuries prior to that so as to propagate so many generations.

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X. We put Dido at the end of the heroic times of the Phoenicians, as someone expelled from Tyre because she was defeated in a heroic dispute, as she herself admits in her leaving Tyre because of the hatred of her brother-in-law.58 This great multitude of Tyrian men is spoken of as a woman in the heroic idiom because they were weak and defeated men.

78

Y. This Orpheus—he who reduced the wild beasts of Greece to h ­ umanity— is found to be a vast den of a thousand monstrosities.

79

He came from Thrace, the fatherland of savage devotees of Mars, not of humane philosophers (for the Thracians were, for all later times, so barbarous that Androtion59 the philosopher removes Orpheus from the number of sages simply because he was born in Thrace). And it is from these beginnings that he arrives so learned in the Greek language that he composes in verses of wondrous poetry; with these, he domesticates through their ears barbarians so barbarous that, although already composed into nations, were not restrained by their eyes from setting fire to a city full of wonders. And the Greeks he found there, still wild beasts, are the same people whom Deucalion, one thousand years before, had taught piety by his reverence and his fear of divine justice; in keeping with this fear, in front of the temple to divine justice upon Mount Parnassus (this later was the dwelling of the Muses and Apollo, the arts and the god of humanity) Deucalion together with his wife, Pyrrha, and both with their heads covered—signifying marriage, the chastity of a human way of coupling—threw over their shoulders the stones which were at their feet—that is, peoples rendered stupid by their formerly feral life—and, by doing this, made these stones become men60— that is, by the orders of household discipline in the familial state. These are the same Greeks whom Hellenus seven hundred years before had brought into association with language and among whom had spread, through his three sons, the three Greek dialects; and the house of Inachus, we demonstrated, had founded its rule three hundred years before and continued   Denis Pétau (1583–1652), French Jesuit theologian from Orléans who taught in many places, including La Flèche. His work on chronography may have inspired Vico to include the Chronological Table in the Scienza nuova. 58  Virgil, Aeneid 1.341. Virgil, however, portrays Pygmalion as Dido’s brother, not her brother-in-law. 59   Androtion, Greek rhetorician, disciple of Isocrates, contemporary of Demosthenes in the fourth century BCE. Androtion is known as the possible author of an important historical work on Attica. 60   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.381–415. 57

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The New Science through a succession of kings. To these Greeks, at last, comes Orpheus to teach them humanity, and he brought Greece away from a time found to be so wild toward such national splendor that he is the companion of Jason on the naval expedition for the golden fleece (naval expeditions and navigation are the last discoveries of peoples), and he is accompanied by Castor and Pollux, the brothers of Helen, for whom that famous Trojan War was waged. So, in the life of a single man, so many civil things are done that the course of two thousand years would hardly be enough! This great monstrosity of chronology in Greek history in the person of Orpheus is analogous to the other two observed above [§§55, 68], the first in Assyrian history in the person of Zoroaster and the second in Egyptian history in the two persons of Hermes. It is on account of this, perhaps, that Cicero in De natura deorum61 suspects that there never was any such Orpheus in the world.

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To these quite great chronological difficulties are added other moral and political difficulties which are not minor. Orpheus founds the humanity of Greece upon the following examples: an adulterous Jove; a Juno who is the enemy unto death of the virtue of Hercules; a chaste Diana who propositions the sleeping Endymion at night; an Apollo who responds in oracles and vexes unto death the virtuous maiden, Daphne; a Mars who (as if it were not enough for the gods to commit adultery on earth) carries it out into the sea with Venus. Nor does such unbridled lust among the gods content itself with forbidden couplings with women: Jove burned with a profane love for Ganymede. Nor does it even stop here: it continues all the way to bestiality, and Jove transforms into a swan in order to lie with Leda. It is this very lust, exercised upon men and beasts, which absolutely makes for the infamous profanity of a lawless world. The many gods and goddesses in heaven do not contract marriages, and the one marriage did come about—that of Jove to Juno—is barren, and not only barren, but also filled with cruel conflicts (such that Jove hangs his virtuous and jealous wife in the air and himself delivers Minerva from his head); and, finally, Saturn devours any children he makes. Such examples, powerful because they are examples by the gods (let these myths contain all the recondite wisdom desired from Plato up to Bacon of Verulam in our own time in his De sapientia veterum62) taken as they are would corrupt people of the most well-established customs and incite them to become as bestial as those wild beasts of Orpheus: this is how congruent such examples are, how well suited they are to lead men away from being wild beasts to humanity! This is of a piece with that reproach which St. Augustine makes of the gods of gentile antiquity in his City of God,63 a reproach instigated by the  Cicero, De natura deorum 1.38.107.  Bacon’s De sapientia veterum was published in 1609. 63  Augustine, City of God 2.7. See also Confessions 1.16.26. 61

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Eunuch64 of Terence: Chaerea, scandalized by a painting of Jove who lies with Danae in a shower of gold, adopts an ardor he did not have before to violate a slave girl for whom he was impassioned because of a most violent love. But these hard rocks of mythology are avoided by principles of this science, which will demonstrate that such myths, at their beginnings, were all true and strict and worthy of founders of nations; and they will demonstrate that later (in part, because the passing of many years obscured their significance and, in part, because of the changing of customs which, once strict, became dissolute because men, so as to console their consciences, wished to sin with the authority of the gods) such myths took on the befouled significance which they came to have for us.

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And the harsh storms of chronology will be cleared up by the discovery of poetic characters,65 one of which was Orpheus, who, regarded in his aspect as a theological poet, used these myths in their primary significance, first, to found and, later, to reaffirm humanity in Greece. This character is most conspicuous in the contests of the heroes with the plebs of Greek cities; hence, that age is distinguished by theological poets such as Orpheus himself, Linus, Musaeus, and the Amphion who by means of self-moving stones—that is, by means of bewildered plebs—raised the walls of Thebes which Cadmus had founded three hundred years previously. In exactly the same way Appius,66 grandson of the decemvir, at about as much time after the founding of Rome, stabilized the heroic constitution for the Romans by singing to the plebs about the strength of gods in the auspices—auspices whose science the patricians kept for themselves. It is from these heroic contests that the heroic age had its name. Z. The same difficulties recur with Hercules if he is taken as a true man, a companion of Jason on the expedition to Colchis, and is not taken, as he will be found to be [§514], a heroic character representing the founders of peoples in the aspect of his labors.

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Aa. Also named Sanchuniathon and called the “historian of truth” (as Clement of Alexandria refers to him in his Stromata67), Sancuniates wrote Phoenician history in common alphabetic characters at a time when the Egyptians and the Scythians, as we saw above, were writing in hieroglyphs, just as the Chinese even today are found to write; and the Chinese, no less than the Scythians and the Egyptians, boast of their prodigious antiquity because in the darkness of their self-enclosure and of their not consorting with other nations, they did not see the true light

83

  See Terence, Eunuch 584–591.   See the note at §34 on poetic characters. 66   That is, Appius Claudius Caecus (“the blind,” 340–273 BCE), censor who oversaw the first aqueduct in Rome. See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.40–41. 67   In fact, Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparatio Evangelica 1.10. 64 65

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The New Science of historical time. And Sancuniates wrote in common Phoenician characters at a time when common alphabetic letters had not yet been found among the Greeks, as was said above [§66].

84

Bb. The war, as it is told by Homer, is judged by perceptive critics never to have been waged in the world. And Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia (who wrote about the war in prose as historians of their own time) are sent by these same critics to be kept in the library of imposture.68

85

Cc. This king brought under his power the three other dynasties of Egypt and is found to be the king Ramses of whom the Egyptian priest tells Germanicus in Tacitus.69

86

Dd. These colonies are one of the very small number of things in which we do not follow the authority of chronology, on the strength of a more powerful reason; hence, we put the colonies of Greece sent to Italy and Sicily two hundred years after the Trojan War and so three hundred years before the time in which they have been put by the chronologists—that is, near the time in which the chronologists put the wanderings of heroes such as Menelaus, Aeneas, Antenor, Diomedes, and Ulysses. This should evoke no wonder when the chronologists themselves vary as much as four hundred and sixty years concerning the date of Homer, the author who is closest to things of this sort in Greece. The reason for not following the chronologists is that the magnificence and refinement of Syracuse at the time of the Carthaginian Wars did not have anything to envy of Athens, even though delicacy and splendor of customs are introduced much later on islands than on the mainland; and in Livy’s time, Croton induces compassion in him70 because of the small number of its inhabitants, a place once inhabited by many millions.

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Ee. For it is found that Hercules counted years by the number of harvests, Isiphilus by the number of circuits of the sun through the signs of the zodiac. Hence, with these two starts comes the certainty of the historic times of the Greeks.

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Ff. But just as the sun clears away the clouds, so too a golden passage by Varro in St. Augustine in the City of God 71 clears away all the magnificent opinions which have been held until now about the beginnings of Rome (and about the beginnings of all the other cities which   A library housed, presumably, within the “museum of credulity” that Vico mentions at §49. 69  Tacitus, Annals 2.60.3. 70   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 23.30 and 24.3. 71   Augustine mentions the small size of old Rome at City of God 3.15, but the passage does not mention Varro. Vico mentions Sallust in this connection at Scienza nuova prima §3. 68

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have been capitals of the most famous nations): Rome, under kings who ruled there for two hundred and fifty years, gave manumission to more than twenty peoples and did not extend their power more than twenty miles. Gg. About this first light of Greece, we have been left in the dark by Greek history in its two principal parts—namely, geography and chronology—given that nothing of certainty has reached us about either his country or his dates. In Book Three, Homer will be found to be altogether different from what he has been believed to be up until now.

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But whoever he might have been, he certainly was not someone who saw Egypt: this is someone who tells us in the Odyssey72 that the island where the Pharos of Alexandria is now was no further away from the mainland than an unloaded ship with a tailwind from the north could sail in a whole day. Nor did he see Phoenicia: there, he tells us,73 the island of Calypso called Ogygia74 was so far away that Mercury, not just a god, but a winged god, reached it only with the greatest difficulty, as if it were the same distance from Greece (where on Mount Olympus, as he sings in the Iliad,75 the gods resided) as America is from our world. So, if the Greeks in the time of Homer had traded with Phoenicia and Egypt, all trust in both of his poems would have been lost. Hh. Hence, it is because of Psammeticus that Herodotus starts to give an account of things of greater certainty about the Egyptians.76 And this confirms that Homer did not see Egypt. And such notions Homer does have about Egypt and other countries in the world, from what he tells us, either come from things and deeds within Greece itself, as will be demonstrated in our poetic geography [§§741–769], or come from the traditions of Phoenicians, Egyptians, Phrygians who brought their colonies to Greece, traditions which altered over a long period of time, or come from the stories of Phoenician travelers who were merchants on the coasts of Greece long before the time of Homer.

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Ii. In our Poetic Logic, it will be found [§§424–425] that Aesop was not a particular man in nature, but rather an imaginative genus—that is, a poetic character representing the socii, or familial servants of the heroes, who certainly existed prior to the seven sages of Greece.

91

Kk. And Thales starts with a principle that is too simple, the principle of water, perhaps because he had observed gourds grow with water.

92

 Homer, Odyssey 4.355–57. The Pharos of Alexandria is a lighthouse built during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphius (280–247 BCE). 73  Homer, Odyssey 5.46 and 5.55. 74   That is, the island of Perejil, near the Strait of Gibraltar. 75   Iliad 1.18. 76  Herodotus, Histories 2.154. 72

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The New Science Ll. Livy77 himself puts Pythagoras in the time of Servius Tullius: this is how little Livy held as true that Pythagoras had been Numa’s teacher about divinity! And in the time of this same Servius Tullius, which was almost two hundred years after Numa, Livy says that they were times of such barbarism in inland Italy that it would have been impossible for the name of Pythagoras, much less Pythagoras himself, to have been able to travel through so many peoples of such diverse languages and customs and to reach Rome from Croton. Hence, one understands just how quick and easy78 the long travels of Pythagoras himself must have been, travels in Thrace to the disciples of Orpheus, to the mages in Persia, to the Chaldean diviners in Babylonia, to the gymnosophists in India; and then, upon his return, travels to the priests in Egypt and, having traversed Africa at its widest, to the disciples of Atlas in Mauretania and, from there, having crossed the sea, those to the druids in Gaul; and it is from these travels that he returned to his own fatherland rich, as Van Heurn79 says, in a barbarian wisdom brought from those same barbarous nations for which Hercules of Thebes had killed monsters and tyrants in order to spread humanity in the world, nations to which in an equally distant age later those same Greeks boasted that they had taught humanity, although evidently not to such profit that they did not still remain barbarous. This is how much seriousness and weight there is in the succession of schools of barbarian philosophy of which Van Heurn speaks, the same Van Heurn to whom we alluded just above! [§59]

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Who can say if the authority of Lactantius80 is necessary here, who resolutely denies that Pythagoras was a disciple of Isaiah, especially when such authority is rendered all the weightier by a passage from Josephus the Jew in his Jewish Antiquities81 which proves that the Hebrews in the times of Homer and of Pythagoras lived just as unknown to their inland neighbors as they did to those nations far across the sea? For to Ptolemy Philadelphus, who wondered at the fact that no poet or historian ever made any mention of the Mosaic laws, Demetrius the Jew responded that those who attempted to speak of them to the gentiles had been somehow miraculously punished by God, as was Theopompus (who lost his senses) and Theodectes (who lost his sight). Consequently, the same Josephus generously confesses the obscurity of the Hebrews and offers the following reason: “We,” he says, “do not inhabit the coasts, nor do we delight in trading and in consorting with foreigners because of trade”; reflecting on this custom, Lactantius says  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.18.2–3.   “Quick and easy”—one of several instances of antiphrasis in The New Science. Vico’s meaning is that the journeys were slow and difficult. 79   See the note on Van Heurn at §44. 80  Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 4.2. 81   In fact, Contra Apionem 1.12. 77 78

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that such was the counsel of divine providence that the religion of the true God would not be profaned by commerce with gentiles (and, in saying this, Lactantius is followed by Peter van der Huhn in his De republica hebraeorum82). All this is confirmed by a public confession in the life of the Hebrews themselves, who every year made a solemn fast on the eighth day in ­Tebet—that is, in December—on account of the Septuagint translation: when the translation was published, there were three days of darkness throughout the entire world (according to the rabbinical books examined by Casaubon83 in his Notes on the Annals of Baronius, by Buxtorf84 in his Jewish Synagogue, and by Hottinger85 in his Philological Thesaurus). As for the Greek Jews—those called the Hellenists, among whom was Aristeas,86 who was said to be the head of the translation—because they attributed the divine authority to the translation, the Jews in Jerusalem conceived a mortal hatred for them. However, by the nature of these civil things, it is impossible that the prophets would cross over boundaries forbidden to them even by the most humane Egyptians (they were so inhospitable that, long after they opened Egypt to Greeks, they were still forbidden from using a pot, a spit, or a knife that was Greek, or even meat cut with a knife that was Greek); it is impossible that the prophets would travel over harsh and dangerous paths having no common language with the Hebrews (they were already wont to be mocked by gentiles for not pointing out a well even to a foreigner who was dying of thirst); it is impossible that the prophets would profane before foreigners, men new and unknown to them, their sacred teachings when priests from all nations of the world guarded such teachings as arcana to be kept even from the common run of their own plebs (hence, among all peoples such teachings had the name “sacred” [sagra] in the sense that they were “secret” [segreta]). And the result of this is a most luminous proof of the truth of the Christian religion: that Pythagoras and Plato, on the strength of a most sublime human science, raised themselves to some recognition of divine truths which these Hebrews learned from the true God. And, in turn, there comes to be a weighty refutation of the errors of the recent mythologists who believe that myths are sacred history corrupted by the gentile nations and, above all, by the Greeks.  See De republica hebraeorum 1.4.   On Casaubon, see the note at §47. 84   Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629), German Hebraist and author of Synagoga Iudaica. 85   Johannes Henrich Hottinger (1620–1667), professor of Old Testament theology in Holland and Switzerland, and an expert on Eastern languages, including Arabic. 86  See Contra Apionem 2.4.46. 82 83

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The New Science Granted, the Egyptians consorted with the Hebrews during their captivity; nevertheless, in keeping with a custom common to all first peoples which we will demonstrate herein [§§676, 958, 1050]—namely, that of considering the defeated to be men without gods—the Egyptians made a mockery rather than took account of Hebraic religion and history; as the sacred book of Genesis tells us,87 they were wont to ask the Hebrews in derision why the God to whom they gave adoration would not come to free them from Egyptian hands.

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Mm. This is the king who, by a common error, was believed until now to have instituted the order of the census in Rome as a basis of liberty for the people, whereas it will be found herein [§§619–623] that the census was the basis for liberty for those who were lords. This error accords with that other error, the result of which is that it was also believed until now that, during times when a sick debtor was required to appear on an ass or in a cart before the praetor, Tarquinius Priscus instituted as orders the insignia, the togas, the devices, the thrones of ivory (ivory that came from the tusks of elephants, which the Romans called Lucanian oxen because they had seen them for the first time in Lucania during the war with Pyrrhus) and, finally, the thrones of gold. The majesty of Rome shown in this kind of splendid display came during times when the popular republic was at its most luminous.

97

Nn. By proofs that we will make [§§440–445] concerning the time in which writing, as commonly regarded, was found among the Greeks, we put Hesiod at about the time of Herodotus or somewhat before, although chronologists (too resolute in their boldness) place him thirty years before Homer,88 on whose dates authors vary by four hundred and sixty years. Besides the chronologists, Porphyry89 (according to Suidas90) and Velleius Paterculus91 want Homer to have preceded Hesiod by a great amount of time. As for the tripod which Hesiod consecrated on Helicon to Apollo with the inscription92 that he had defeated Homer in song: even though Varro,   No such passage occurs in Genesis. It is not clear what Vico has in mind here. 88   In making Homer older than Hesiod, Vico reverses his earlier stance, for which see Scienza nuova prima §§310, 443, and De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1 (Cristofolini 389[4], BV 48). 89   Porphyry (234–305 CE), Neoplatonic philosopher and editor of the Enneads of Plotinus. 90   Suidas, alleged author of the Lexicon, compiled between 976 and 1025. 91   Velleius Paterculus, Historiae 1.7. 92   For the inscription, see Antologia palatina 7.53. The Antologia palatina is a collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. 87

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according to Aulus Gellius,93 recognizes it, it should be kept in the museum of imposture because it is of a piece with the impostures which forgers frequently make in our time so as to elicit profit by means of fraud. Oo. This is the Hippocrates put by the chronologists in the time of the seven sages of Greece.

98

However, partly because his biography is too colored by much that is myth (he is reckoned to be the son94 of Asclepius and the grandson of Apollo) and partly because it is certain that he is the author of works written in prose in common alphabetic characters, he is accordingly put here around the time of Herodotus, who similarly wrote in prose in common alphabetic characters and composed his history almost entirely out of myths. Pp. This is the Idanthyrsus who responded to Darius the Great (Darius had threatened him with war) with five real words95; these words, as will be demonstrated herein [§§401, 431, 434], the earliest peoples must have used prior to using spoken words and, eventually, written words. These real words were a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow of an archer. Herein, with perfect naturalness and propriety, the significance of these words will be explained [§435]; and so, it is tedious to report what St. Cyril of Alexandria96 relates about the council which Darius held concerning this response (he himself exposes how ridiculous the interpretations were which Darius’s counselors gave to the words). This is the king of those Scythians who defeated the Egyptians in the contest for the greatest antiquity, and, at this late date, he did not even know how to write with hieroglyphs! As a result, Idanthyrus must have been like one of the Chinese kings who, up until a few centuries ago, were shut off from all the rest of the world and foolishly boasted of an antiquity greater than the world itself; who, after such a long period of time, are still found to write with hieroglyphs. And although, on account of the great mildness of the climate, they have a most refined ingenuity with which they make works which are wondrously refined, nevertheless, they do not yet do the shading in painting against which highlights can stand out (and, on account of this, their paintings lack in depth and sharp relief and so are quite clumsy);   Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 3.11.3. Vico may draw the citation of Aulus Gellius from Marsham, Canon chronicus, pp. 433–436. 94   In fact, a descendant (and not a direct one). 95   See Herodotus, Histories 4.131. On “real words,” compare Bacon, De augmentis scientarum 6.1 (Works, ed. J. Spedding and R. L. Ellis, 14 vols. [London: Longman, 1857–1874], 1:651). 96   A lapse on Vico’s part; he means Clement, Stromata 5.8. 93

99

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The New Science and the porcelain statuettes which come from there reveal the skill of the Chinese in foundry to be as rude as that of the Egyptians; from this, the skill of Egyptians in painting must be deemed as rude as that of the Chinese today.

100

Among these Scythians there is that Anacharsis97 who is the author of Scythian oracles, just as Zoroaster was the author of Chaldean oracles (these must have originally been the oracles of diviners which later, on account of the vanity of the learned, were turned into the oracles of philosophers). If it is the case that from the Hyperboreans—either those from Scythia or the other, more ancient ones who came into being in Greece itself—came the two most famous oracles of gentile antiquity, the oracles at Delphi and Dodona98 (this is what Herodotus believed and, after him, Pindar99 and Pherenicus,100 followed by Cicero in his De natura deorum101), then it is perhaps on account of this that Anacharsis was proclaimed a famous author of oracles and was counted among the most ancient soothsaying gods, as we will see in the Poetic Geography [§745]. Let it suffice for understanding how learned Scythia had been in recondite wisdom that the Scythians used to stick a knife in the earth and give adoration to it as a god,102 for by doing this, they could justify the killings which they were about perform; and that it is from this savage religion came those virtues, moral and civil, of which we are told by Diodorus Siculus,103 Justin,104 and Pliny,105 and which are raised to the heavens by Horace!106 Hence, Abaris, intending to institute orders in Scythia conforming with the laws of Greece, was killed by Caduidas, his brother. So greatly did Abaris107 profit from the barbarian philosophy of Van Heurn108 that he did not even understand on his own the laws suited to domesticating a barbarian people into a humane civility, but instead had to learn them from the Greeks! And it is exactly the same for the Greeks in relation to the Scythians, as was said a little before [§§89–90] of the Scythians in relation to the Egyptians: on account of the emptiness of giving their wisdom-rumored origins in the antiquity of foreigners, they   Anacharsis, disciple of Solon, mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 1.8. 98   Near Dodona, a city of Epirus, in northwestern Greece. 99  Pindar, Olympians 3.28–29; Pythians 10.30. 100   Pherenicus of Heraclea Pontica, an epic poet of uncertain epoch. 101  Cicero, De natura deorum 3.23.57. 102   That is, as to Mars, the god of war; see Herodotus, Histories 4.62. 103   Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.43–44. 104   Marcus Iunianius Iustinus, Historiae philippiacae 3.5–7 and 3.9–15. 105  Pliny, Natural History 4.13. 106  Horace, Carmina 3.24.9–24. 107   In fact, Anacharsis; see Herodotus, Histories 4.76. 108   On Van Heurn, see the note at §44. 97

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deserved, in truth, the reproach which they themselves dreamed up an Egyptian priest making of Solon (related by Critias according to Plato in his first or second Alcibiades109), that the Greeks were always children. Hence, we can say that, on account of such vanity by the Greeks in relation to the Scythians and the Egyptians, they lost as much true merit as they gained in vainglory. Qq. He was a young man at a time when Herodotus was an old man (old enough to be his father) and he lived in the most luminous time of Greece, that of the Peloponnesian War, of which he was a contemporary and of which, accordingly, he wrote the history so as to write things which were true. It was said by him that the Greeks, up until the time of his father—that is, until the time of Herodotus—knew nothing about their own antiquity: what, then, is our estimate of what they tell us about foreign things, especially given that what the Greeks tell us about the gentile antiquity of barbarian peoples is the full extent of our knowledge about it? What is our estimate of the ancient Roman things up until the time of the Carthaginian Wars, Romans who, up until that time, gave their attention to nothing but farming and the exercise of arms, especially when Thucydides establishes the above truth about his Greeks, who so quickly became philosophers? Unless, perhaps, we wish to say that these Romans had some specific privilege from God.

101

Rr. At this time is brought from Athens to Rome110 the Law of the Twelve Tables, which is just as uncivil, rude, inhumane, cruel, and savage as my Principles of Universal Law111 demonstrated it to be.

102

Ss. This is just as St. Jerome observes in his On the Book of Daniel.112 And it was on account of the advantages of commerce that the Greeks started under Psammeticus to have some knowledge of things in Egypt, whence at this time Herodotus starts to write things of greater certainty about the Egyptians; it was after Xenophon that for the first time, on account of the necessity of war, the Greeks started to have some knowledge of things of greater certainty about the Persians, about whom Aristotle (brought there by Alexander the Great) writes113 that before him the Greeks spoke only in myths, as is indicated in this Chronological Table [§47].

103

It is in this fashion that the Greeks started to have a certain reckoning for foreign things.   In fact, Timaeus 22b.   As Battistini notes, Vico’s assertion that an embassy to Athens brought laws back to Rome is clearly ironic, since he rejects the claim that civilized Athens could possibly serve as the origin of such crude and inhumane laws. 111   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727). 112   See Jerome, Commentary on the Prophet Daniel V (PL 25:518). 113   No such passage appears in an extant Aristotelian text. 109 110

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Tt. This law was decreed in Year 416 of Rome and contains the most important turning point in Roman history, the point at which, by means of this law, the Roman republic declared its constitution changed from aristocratic to popular, whence Publilius Philo, who was its author, was called the People’s Dictator.114 This has not been pointed out because it was not known how to understand the language of the law. Later, it will clearly be demonstrated by us [§§619–623, 662–665, 945] that this was actual; it is enough, here, that we see it as an idea serving as a hypothesis.

105

This law has lain unrecognized, and so has the subsequent Petelian law115 (equal in importance to the Publilian law) because the following three words have not been defined: “people,” “regime,” and “liberty.” With a view to these words, it has been believed because of a common error that the Roman people up until the time of Romulus were constituted by citizens who were both nobles and plebeians, that the Roman regime was monarchical, and that the orders instituted by Brutus were for the liberty of the people. These three undefined terms made everyone— critics, historians, political theorists, jurists—fall into error because none of the present republics can give us an idea of heroic republics, which were of the strictest aristocratic form and, therefore, completely different from those in our time.

106

Romulus, within the asylum opened in the lucus, founded Rome upon those with the status of clients—that is, those under the protection of others—in which each paterfamilias held those who fled to this asylum in the condition of day-laboring rustics who did not have the privilege of citizenship, and so had no share in civil liberty; and because they had fled so as to save their lives, the Fathers protected their natural liberty by partitioning them up to cultivate the different fields of the Fathers. The public foundation for the territory of Rome must have been composed of those fields, just as the Senate was composed by Romulus of these Fathers.

107

Later, Servius Tullius instituted the order of the census by permitting to the day laborers bonitary domain116 over fields, which were the property of the Fathers; they were to cultivate them for themselves under the burden of the census, with the obligation to serve the Fathers at their own expense during war (this conforms with how the plebeians actually served the patricians in the context of what was up until now dreamed to be popular liberty). This law of Servius Tullius was the first agrarian law of the world, instituting the census as an order which was the basis  Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.12.14. On the Publilian law, see the note at §26.   On the Petelian law, see §26 and §115. 116   Bonitary domain is maintained only by “continuous physical possession” of the fields (see §984); it can be revoked any time, at the whim of the Fathers. On the difference between “natural” bonitary domain and its “civil” forms, see §266. 114 115

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of heroic republics—that is to say, the most ancient aristocracies of all the nations. After this, Junius Brutus, by expelling the Tarquin tyrants, restored the Roman republic to its beginnings, and by instituting the order of the consuls (two, as it were, aristocratic kings, as Cicero calls them in his Laws,117 elected annually instead of one king for life), he reinstituted orders for the liberty of those who were lords from their tyrants, but not yet liberty of the people from those who were their lords.

108

However, when the nobles poorly kept the agrarian law of Servius for the plebeians, the plebeians created the tribunes and made the nobility swear to their legitimacy; these tribunes defended for the plebs their share of the natural liberty of bonitary domain over the fields. Thus, on account of this, when the plebeians desired to take back the civil domain from the nobles, the tribunes of the plebs expelled Marcius Coriolanus from Rome for having said that the plebeians should go and work in the dirt—that is to say, given that they were not content with the agrarian law of Servius Tullius and wished for a fuller agrarian law, they should be reduced to being the day laborers of Romulus. Otherwise, would it not be stupid haughtiness for the plebeians to despise agriculture (we certainly know the nobles themselves considered it an honor to practice agriculture) and for so slight a cause to agree to a war so cruel that Marcius, so as to avenge his exile, had come to ruin Rome, were it not for the pious tears of a mother and wife which held him back from this impious enterprise? On account of all this, when the nobles sought to take back the fields from the plebeians after the plebeians had cultivated them and had no civil course of action for vindicating their claim to the lands, at that point the tribunes of the plebs made an appeal to the Law of the Twelve Tables (by it no affairs other than these are disposed, as was demonstrated in my Principles of Natural Law118), and by this law, the nobles permitted a quiritary domain over the fields to the plebs, a civil domain which, by the natural law of the gentile peoples, is permitted to foreigners.

109

And this is the second agrarian law of the nations of antiquity. Consequently, the plebeians became aware that they still were not able to pass on the fields intestate to their relatives because they did not have familial relations in the forms of direct, paternal, or tribal kinship—which, at the time, were the ways through which legitimate succession passed— because they did not celebrate solemn marriages; they also became aware that none of them were able to dispose of the fields by testament because they did not have the privilege of citizens; therefore, they made an appeal for the connubium of the nobles—that is, a legal claim to contract  Cicero, De legibus 3.3.8.   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 717–727).

117 118

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The New Science solemn nuptials, which is what connubium means—the most solemn part of which were the auspices, which were the property of the nobles.119 The auspices were the great source of all Roman rights, both private and public, and so, when the Fathers shared in common with the plebeians, their legal claim to nuptials (this, in the definition of the jurist Modestinus, is omnis divini et humani iuris communicatio120 [“the sharing in all rights divine and human”], which is nothing other than citizenship itself), the Fathers granted to the plebeians the privilege of citizens. Consequently, following the progression of human desires, the plebeians took from the Fathers for themselves a common share in all that depends upon the auspices with respect to legal claims in the private realm, such as claims to paternal power, to direct kinship, to paternal kinship, to tribal kinship and, through these rights, claims to legitimate succession, to disposing by testament, and to guardianship. After this, they appealed for what depends upon the auspices with respect to legal claims in the public realm, and they took a common share in the imperium—the power—first, of the consulship and, eventually, of the priesthood and the pontificate and, with these, of the science of the laws.

111

In this fashion, the tribunes of the plebs, on the basis of that for which they had been created—of protecting the natural liberty of the plebs— were gradually led to make pursuit of the whole of civil liberty. And the census was instituted as an order by Servius Tullius, when it, subsequently, put in place the provision that the plebeians would no longer make payments privately to the nobles, but to the treasury so that the treasury would tend to the expenses of the plebeians in war, went naturally from being the basis of liberty for the lords to form the census that was the basis of liberty for the people—the fashion of this transformation will be found herein [§§619–623].

112

By taking similar steps, these same tribunes advanced the power of the plebeians to decree laws. For the Horatian and Hortensian laws were not able to accord to the plebs that their plebiscites would be obligatory for the whole people except in particular emergencies. During the first of these, the plebs had withdrawn to the Aventine in Year 304 of Rome, at a time when—as is   This is Vico’s novel reinterpretation of the lex Canuleia, passed in 445 BCE and claimed by Livy to give plebs the right to marry nobles (Ab urbe condita 4.1.2). Vico’s counterclaim, elaborated at §598, is that what the plebs actually sought was not the ability to marry nobles, but to enjoy iustae nuptiae among themselves—that is, to marry with the same rights as possessed by the nobles. (See Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 267.) More substantive gains by the plebs, on Vico’s account, would have to wait for the Publilian law and the Petelian law (see note at §26). 120   Herennius Modestinus, student of Ulpian, flourished around 250 CE. The reference is to Digest 23.2.1. 119

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stated here as a hypothesis but herein will be shown to be actual [§§104, 582–598]—the plebs were not yet citizens. During the second emergency, they withdrew to the Janiculum in Year 367 of Rome when the plebeians were still contending with the nobles for a common share in the consulate. However, it was on the basis of the two aforementioned laws that the plebs eventually advanced towards decreeing laws that were universally binding. It must have been on account of incidents of great unrest and revolt in Rome that there was a need to elect Publilius Philo as dictator (dictators were not elected except in cases of extreme danger to the republic). In this case, Rome had fallen into so great a disorder as to nurture within the body politic two supreme legislative powers without there being any distinction between them in terms of when, where, and on what each would legislate, by means of which Rome must have been quickly coming to certain ruin. Consequently, Philo, so as to remedy so great a civil illness, instituted orders such that, with respect to whatever the plebs decreed by plebiscite in the Comitia Tributi [“the tribal assemblies”] was OMNES QUIRITES TENERET [“held for all the quirites”], was obligatory for all the people in the Comitia Centuriati [“centuriate assemblies”]—that is, in those assemblies where omnes quirites [“all the quirites”] gathered—for the Romans never used this designation, quirites, except for public gatherings, nor is the singular form of the noun ever used in common Latin speech. With this formula, Philo intended to say that it would not be possible to order laws which were contrary to the plebiscites. Because of everything to which the nobles had already agreed, the plebs were by the law completely equal in every respect to the nobles; and by a final effort, which the nobles were not able to resist without bringing ruin upon the republic, the plebs became superior to the nobles in that they could decree, without the authority of the Senate, laws general for the entire people; and that the Roman republic had naturally become one of popular liberty, Philo declared to such with this law, and for this he was called the People’s Dictator. In conformity with this change in the nature of the Roman constitution, he gave the two ordinances contained, in the other two headings of the Publilian law. The first concerned the authority of the Senate, which previously had been the authority of those who were lords. It was by such authority that, for whatever the people first proposed, DEINDE PATRES FIERENT AUCTORES [“the Fathers would subsequently have authority”]; as a result, the election of consuls by the people prior to the Senate was simply public testimony to the merits of the candidates, and the ordering of laws by the people prior to the Senate was simply a public demand about legal rights. However, this dictator ordered that, henceforth, the Fathers would give authority to the people, which was now sovereign and free IN INCERTUM COMITIORUM EVENTUM

113

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The New Science [“while the vote of the assembly was undetermined”]; as such, the Fathers were guardians to a people which was now lord over Roman power; he ordered that if the people wished to decree laws, it would decree them in keeping with the formulations conveyed to it by the Senate, but if it wished otherwise, it would exercise its sovereign will and “antiquate”— that is, would declare that it did not wish anything new. As a result of all this, whatever henceforth the Senate ordered concerning public affairs would be either directions they gave to the people or commissions the people gave to them. Finally, what remains is the ordinance concerning the census: for the whole time previous to this ordinance, since the public treasury belonged to the nobles, only the nobles were elected as censors, but later, because of this law, the treasury became the patrimony of the whole people, and Philo ordered in the third heading of the law that the plebs would have a common share in the office of censor; this was the only magistracy remaining in which the plebs did not have a share.

114

If, consequently, one reads previous Roman history in keeping with this hypothesis, one will find a thousand proofs for it sustaining all the things about which that history tells us, things which because of the three aforementioned terms121 have had neither any common foundation nor any apt correspondence to one another as particulars. Because of this alone, the hypothesis accordingly ought to be accepted as true. However, if one considers it well, it is not so much a hypothesis as it is a truth meditated upon in idea which will later be found by authority to be actual. And, given what Livy says in general terms—that asylums were the VETUS URBES CONDENTIUM CONSILIUM [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”]—when he tells that it was within the asylum opened in the lucus that Romulus founded Rome, this hypothesis gives the history of all the other cities of the world, which up until now we have despaired of knowing. Rome is a test for an ideal eternal history upon which we have herein meditated [§349] and upon which we have discovered the histories of all nations run their temporal course.

115

Vv. This second law—the so-called De nexu [On Debt]—was issued in Year 419 of Rome (and so three years after the Publilian law) by the consuls, Caius Poetelius and Lucius Papirius Muggillanus; and it contains the second major point in the Roman things. After this law, the plebeians were released from the claim of fealty, of being liege vassals for the nobles because of debts; through this, the nobles held the plebeians, often for their entire lives, to labor for them in their private prisons. However, the Senate retained the sovereign domain that it had over the grounds subject to Roman power, power which had already passed to the people; and, as long as Rome was a free republic, they held on to these

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  The three terms mentioned at §105: “people,” “regime,” “liberty.”

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grounds by force of arms through what they called senato consulto ultimo [“the senatorial decree of last resort”]. Hence, whenever the people intended to distribute these grounds by means of the agrarian laws of the Gracchi, the Senate armed the consuls, who declared as rebels, and killed, the tribunes of the plebs who had been the authors of these laws. This kind of great effect is sustained only by a legal system of sovereign fealties that are subject to a greater sovereignty. This system is confirmed by a passage of Cicero122 in one of his Against Catiline speeches, where he affirms that Tiberius Gracchus, by means of his agrarian law, was damaging the constitution of the republic and that, with legal justification, he was executed by Publius Scipio Nasica through the law by which the consul armed the people against the authors of such a law, expressed in the legal formula, QUI REMPUBLICAM SALVAM VELIT CONSULEM SEQUATUR [“he who wants the republic safe should follow the consul”]. Xx. The cause of this war was that the Tarentines had badly treated, first, Roman sailors who had landed on their shores and, then, Roman ambassadors, for the Tarentines gave the excuse that (as Florus said it123) qui essent, aut unde venirent ignorabant [“they did not know who the Romans were or whence they came”].

116

This is how well known the earliest peoples were to each other, even those confined to the same narrow strip of land! Yy. About this war, even Livy, the same Livy who professed that from the second Carthaginian War he would write about Roman history with somewhat more certainty, promising to write of a war more memorable than any waged by the Romans (and as a consequence of such unprecedented greatness, the memory he leaves in his writing ought to have the greater certainty of all things of greater repute), even this Livy did not know (and openly says that he did not know) about three of the most weighty circumstances. First,124 he did not know under whose consulship Hannibal marched from Spain against Italy after having fought at Saguntum. Second,125 he did not know by which Alps Hannibal reached Italy: the Cottian or the Pennine. Third,126 he did not know with how great a force he came; on this, one finds in the ancient annals such variation that some have written six thousand cavalry and twenty thousand infantry, others twenty thousand of the former, eighty thousand of the latter.

117

By all the reasoning in these Annotations, one sees that everything that has reached us from the nations of gentile antiquity up until the

118

 Cicero, In Catilinam 1.1.3.  Florus, Epitoma 1.13.5. 124  Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.15.3–4. 125  Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.38.6. 126  Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.38.2. 122 123

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The New Science times determined by this Table is altogether most uncertain. Hence, we enter upon all this as we would upon things called nullius [“belonging to no one”], for which the rule for a legitimate claim is occupanti concedentur [“it goes to the first occupant”]. And, given this, we believe that we are violating the rights of no one if we reason in a way which is different from, and at times entirely contrary to, the opinions which have been held up until now about the BEGINNINGS OF THE HUMANITY OF THE NATIONS, and, in doing so, we reduce them to principles of science; through these principles, the deeds of certain history are traced to their earliest origins, origins by which these deeds are sustained and through which they are brought into agreement with one another; these deeds up until now have seemed to have no common foundation nor any continuity of sequence—that is, no coherence among themselves.

On the Elements 119

So as to give form, then, to the materials previously arranged herein in the Chronological Table, we now propose here the following Axioms,127 both philosophical and philological, and some few reasonable and discrete postulates along with some clarificatory definitions: these, like blood in a living body, must course through and animate those materials in all the reasoning which this science does about the common nature of the nations.

120

1. Man, on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure of all things.128

121

This Axiom is the cause for two common human customs: first, that fama crescit eundo [“fame increases as it goes along”]; and, second, that minuit praesentia famam [“the presence of something decreases the fame it has”].129 Fame has, indeed, made quite a long journey since the beginning of the world and is the perennial spring of all the grandiose opinions that have been held up until now about a most distant antiquity, unknown to us on account of that property of the human mind noticed by   Since Vico identifies the procedure of The New Science with geometry at §349, it is appropriate to take Spinoza’s Ethics as a textual model for Vico’s axioms. Noting this does not settle, but merely opens, a host of interpretive questions about Vico’s relation to both geometry and Spinoza. 128   This first Axiom is unique to the text published in 1744; it does not appear in the 1730 edition. Here Vico alludes to the homo mensura doctrine, attributed to Protagoras at Plato, Theaetetus 152a. Later texts also suggest themselves for comparison, e.g., Hobbes’s Leviathan: “For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves” (chapter 2). 129  Virgil, Aeneid 4.174–75 and Lucretius, De rerum natura 6.341. 127

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Tacitus in his Life of Agricola in the phrase omne ignotum pro magnifico est [“everything unknown is taken for something great”].130 2. It is a second property of the human mind that, whenever men are unable to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they evaluate them relative to things that are known and present.131

122

This Axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors taken up by whole nations and all the learned concerning the beginnings of humanity, insofar as it is during their own enlightened, cultivated, and grand times, when the nations started to notice and the learned started to reason about these beginnings, that they evaluated the origins of humanity, which must have been modest, rude, and most obscure.132

123

Within the genus of vanity are the two species indicated above [§§53, 59], first, the vanity of the nations, and, second, the vanity of the learned.

124

3. Concerning the vanity of the nations, we have learned that golden saying of Diodorus Siculus,133 that every nation, whether Greek or barbarian, has had the vanity to consider itself earlier than all other nations in discovering the conveniences of human life and of preserving a memory of the things of their own back to the beginning of the world.134

125

This Axiom dispels, by fiat, the vainglory of the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, that they were the founders of humanity in the ancient world.

126

However, Flavius Josephus the Jew cleanses his own nation of this with that magnanimous confession we heard above [§94], that the Hebrews had lived hidden from all the gentiles. And sacred history renders certain that the world is, as it were, a youth in comparison with the old age it is  Tacitus, Agricola 30.3.   Compare to Bacon’s “Idols of the Cave” (see Novum Organum 1.42). 132   The 1730 edition adds: “This same Axiom demonstrates that vanity is the daughter of ignorance and self-love; it swells us insofar as we are so possessed by the ideas we have of our own selves and of our things and, because of them, we regard, like madmen, things that we do not understand.” Given its origins in self-love and ignorance, boria is aptly translated (here and throughout) by “vanity,” a term used in English by Bacon, with similar resonances. 133   See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 1.9. 134   Vico’s polemic against the “vanity of nations” should be understood as a rejection of two claims: (1) Cultural institutions must have originated with a single nation, older than the others and (2) Later nations must have acquired their institutions from the older nation by a process of diffusion. Against diffusion theories, Vico will argue that nations develop independently, though in parallel fashion, thanks to the “common nature of the nations.” Vico’s idea of autonomous parallel development suggests that two nations will exhibit a similar succession of customs, without requiring the assumption that one nation must have “borrowed” from the other. 130 131

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127

4. To this vanity of the nations is here joined the vanity of the learned, who want what they know to be as ancient as the world.

128

This Axiom dispels all the opinions of the learned concerning the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients.135 It convicts of imposture the oracles of Zoroaster the Chaldean and Anacharsis the Scythian which have not come down to us; and also the Poimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the Orphics—that is, the poems of Orpheus—and the Golden Hymns of Pythagoras, as all the more discerning textual critics agree. And it rebukes as impertinent all the mystical meanings given by the learned to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the philosophical allegories given to Greek myths.

129

5. Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and support fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his corruption.136

130

This Axiom dismisses from the school of this science the Stoics, who wished to deaden the senses, and the Epicureans, who make the senses the rule of judgment; and both deny providence, the former making it so that they are drawn along by fate, the latter abandoning themselves to chance; and the latter hold the opinion that the human soul dies with the body; both ought to be called monastic—or solitary—­philosophers. And this Axiom admits to the school of this science the political philosophers,137 and principally the Platonists, who agree with all the lawgivers on three principal points: that there is divine providence; that the human passions should be moderated and made into human virtues; and that the human soul is immortal. As a consequence, this Axiom will give the three principles of this science.

131

6. Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and so cannot be fruitful except to the very few, who wish to live in the republic of Plato and not to return to the dregs of Romulus.138

132

7. Lawgiving considers man as he is so as to make good use of him in human society, as from ferocity, avarice, ambition—the three vices which carry across the whole of humankind—it makes the military, the market, and the court and so the strength, the wealth, and the wisdom of 135   Here Vico rejects a position associated with the prisca theologia tradition, found both in Bacon’s On the Wisdom of the Ancients (see §328) and his own On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. 136   Axioms 5 through 15 treat philosophy, as is clear from §163. 137   Here Vico speaks of i filosofi politici (“the political philosophers”), and not simply i politici (“the political theorists”), as he so often does elsewhere. 138   See Cicero, Ad Atticum 2.1.8.

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republics. And out of three great vices that would lay waste to the entire human race upon the earth, it makes civil felicity. This Axiom proves that there is divine providence, and that it is a divine, lawgiving mind which from the passions of men (all of whom are intent upon their own private advantages, through which they would live like wild beasts in their separate solitudes) makes the civil orders, by which they live in human society.

133

8. Things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there.

134

This Axiom alone, given that humankind has lived, since all recorded memory, of the world, and continues to live tolerably well in society, puts an end to the great dispute in which the best philosophers and moral theologians have contended with the skeptic Carneades and with Epicurus, a dispute which even Grotius did not settle, namely, whether law exists in nature, or whether human nature is sociable, which mean the same thing.139

135

This same Axiom, combined with Axiom 7 and its corollary, proves that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues out of the passions. However, God aided man, naturally, with divine providence and, supernaturally, with divine grace.

136

9. Men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the certain, for if the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge [scienza], the will, at least, can repose in consciousness [coscienza].140

137

10. Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes science about the true. Philology observes authority in human choice, whence comes consciousness of the certain.

138

This Axiom, by its second part, defines as philologists all the grammarians, historians, textual critics who are occupied with knowledge of the languages and deeds of peoples, both internally, in their customs and laws, and externally, in their wars, peace treaties, alliances, travels, commerce.

139

This same Axiom demonstrates that just as the philosophers, who did not give certainty to their reasoning with the authority of the

140

139   It may appear that in the quarrel of Hobbes and Aristotle on natural sociability (compare Leviathan 17 with Politics 1.1, 1253a), Vico simply takes Aristotle’s side. But such a judgment needs to be complicated by considering the possibility that for Vico, human origins are nonsocial, even as humans appear necessarily, without any conscious calculation, to become social. In that case, Vico’s position would be that of neither Aristotle nor Hobbes. 140  At De antiquissima 1.3, Vico contrasts scientia with conscientia. Scientia involves a grasp of the genus or form by which a thing is made; conscientia belongs to things whose genus or form we cannot demonstrate, and so is less certain. In the present text, coscienza may be translated by either “conscience” or “consciousness.”

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141

11. Human choice, which by its nature is most uncertain, is given certainty and made determinate by the common sense of men concerning human necessities or advantages, which are the two sources of the natural law of the gentile peoples.141

142

12. The common sense is a judgment without reflection sensed in common by a whole order, a whole people, a whole nation, or the whole of humankind.

143

This Axiom together with the following definition will give a new art of criticism, concerning the authors of nations; these nations must have had to run a course of more than a thousand years so as to bring forth the writers with whom criticism up until now has been occupied.

144

13. Uniform ideas, coming into being among entire peoples unknown to one another, must have some common impetus for what is true.

145

This Axiom is a great principle which establishes the common sense of humankind as the criterion of judgment taught to nations by divine providence so as to define what is certain concerning the natural law of the gentile peoples; the nations give certainty to this law by understanding the underlying unities in this law, upon which they all agree even with the different variations. Hence comes a mental dictionary for giving the origins of all the differently articulated languages; by it is conceived the ideal eternal history, which gives the temporal histories of all the nations. The axioms proper to this dictionary and to this history are proposed below [§§161–162, 239–245].

146

This same Axiom overturns all the ideas that have been held up until now concerning the natural law of the gentile peoples, which was believed to have emerged from some first nation, from which the others received it. Of this error, the Egyptian and the Greeks offer their own bad example, emptily boasting that they disseminated humanity throughout

141   “The natural law of the gentile peoples” consistently translates Vico’s phrase il diritto natural delle genti. As the reader encounters Vico’s “natural law of the gentile peoples,” she will want to keep three things in mind: (1) It bears the closest of relations to custom; “it amounts to orders instituted by means of what is customary” (§309); (2) Though customary, it is neither “mere custom” nor “positive law” in contrast to “natural law.” Vico means to subvert traditional distinctions between ius naturale and ius gentium; (3) It is not the same as, and sometimes contrasted with, both “the natural law of the Hebrews” (§9 and §313) and the “natural law of the philosophers, or of the moral theologians” (§1084).

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the world. This error certainly must have made for the coming of the Law of the Twelve Tables to Rome from Greece.142 However, in this fashion, it would have been a civil law shared with other peoples through a human provision and not a law which, by means of those customs of human life, was ordered naturally by divine providence in all nations. This will be the first of the continuous labors to be made in these books: to demonstrate that the natural law of the gentile peoples came into being privately for each people without one knowing anything of the other; and that later, by the occasions of wars, embassies, alliances, and commerce, it was recognized as common to all of humankind. 14. The nature [natura] of things is nothing other than their coming-intobeing [nascimento] at certain times and in certain fashions; these times and fashions always being of such a kind, it follows that the things will come to be in such a way and not otherwise.143

147

15. The intrinsic properties of subjects must be produced by the modifications or fashions by which the things come into being; it is through this that we are able to establish as true that the nature—or the coming-intobeing—of those things is of such a kind and not otherwise.

148

16. Folk traditions must have a public impetus for what is true, whence these traditions came into being and are preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time.144

149

This will be the second great labor of this science: to find this impetus for the true, which, with the passing of years and the changing of languages and customs, becomes covered over by the false.

150

17. Common ways of speaking should be thought to offer the weightiest of testimony about the ancient customs of peoples, which had currency at the time when their languages were formed.

151

18. The language of an ancient nation that preserves itself as regnant until it arrives at its perfection should be a great testimony about the customs of the earliest times of the world.

152

  Vico’s claim that the Law of the Twelve Tables is purely of Roman origin, rather than having been imported to Rome from Athens, is one instance of his general aim to provide an alternative to “diffusion” theories (on which see the note at §125). 143   Vico makes a strong connection between a thing’s “nature” (natura) and its “coming-to-be” (nascimento). It may be useful to compare Vico’s claim to a statement of Aristotle: “He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a city or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them” (Politics 1.2, 1252a24–25). 144   Axioms 16 through 22 treat philology, as is clear from §163. 142

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This Axiom assures us that with regard to the natural law of the gentile peoples (a law at which, without contention, there were none wiser of all the nations in the world than the Romans), philological proofs drawn from ways of speaking Latin are the weightiest. For the same reason, those learned in the German language are able to do the same since German retains the same property as the ancient Roman language.

154

19. If the Law of the Twelve Tables were the customs of the gentiles of Latium (which started to gain currency in the age of Saturn and which, although they changed elsewhere, were inscribed in bronze by the Romans and guarded religiously by the Roman jurists), then this law offers a great testimony about the ancient natural law of the gentiles of Latium.

155

That this is so, we demonstrated to be actually true many years ago in my Principles of Universal Law;145 it will be seen with even greater illumination in these books.

156

20. If the poems of Homer are civil histories of the ancient Greek customs, then they will be the two great treasuries of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece.

157

This Axiom is for now assumed; herein146 it will be demonstrated by what is actual.

158

21. The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation must make, a nation that was still crudely barbaric when the philosophers arrived; because of this arrival, the nation passed immediately to the peak of refinement and kept safe and intact their mythical history, both divine and heroic. Whereas the Romans, who in their customs advanced at the correct pace, completely lost sight of the history of their gods (hence, what the Egyptians speak of as the age of gods, Varro calls the dark times for the Romans), and the Romans preserved in commonplace speech their heroic history, extending from Romulus up to the Publilian and Petelian laws, which will be found to be a mythological history in continuity with the age of heroes in Greece.

159

That this is the nature of the human civil things is confirmed by the French nation, for, in the midst of the barbarism of the twelfth century, there opened the famous Parisian school, where the celebrated teacher of the Sentences, Peter Lombard,147 offered teachings on the most subtle scholastic theology; and there remains, like a Homeric poem, the history by Turpin, Bishop of Paris, abounding in all the myths about those heroes of France called paladins, who filled those later romances and   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).   In Book Three, “Discovery of the True Homer.” 147   Peter Lombard (1096–1150), author of the Sentences, a four-volume compilation of theology commented upon by later masters, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham. 145 146

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poems; and, through this premature passage from barbarism to the most subtle science, French remains a most refined language, so refined that of all the living languages, it seems to have restored in our times the Atticism of the Greeks and, moreover, is better than any other language at the reasoning of science, just as Greek was. And both Greek and French retain those diphthongs proper to a barbarian language, still rigid and unable to combine consonants with vowels.148 As confirmation of all that we have said about both languages, we would add an observation which I am able to make all the time about the young (who are at the age when memory is vigorous, imagination is lively, and ingenuity is on fire, faculties fruitfully exercised by the study of languages and plane geometry without dominating, by such exercises, the acerbity of minds connected to the body, which one can say is the barbarism of the intellect): if the young, at this crude stage, pass on to the too-subtle study of a metaphysical art of criticism and algebra, they become too attenuated in their manner of thinking for the full scope of life and are rendered incapable of great labor.149 However, by meditating further on this work, we discovered another cause for this effect, one that is perhaps is more proper to it. Romulus founded Rome in the midst of other more ancient cities in Latium and founded it by opening the asylum, which Livy defines in general terms as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”];150 for while violence still persisted, he naturally ordered the Roman city on the same basis on which the earliest cities of the world were founded. Hence, since Roman customs developed from these same beginnings in times when the vernacular languages of Latium had become quite advanced, it must have come to pass that Roman civil things (the likes of which Greek peoples articulated in heroic language) were articulated in vernacular language. Hence, Roman history has been found to be a mythology in continuity with the heroic history of the Greeks. And this must be the cause of the above effect, for the Romans were the heroes of the world insofar as Rome subdued the cities of Latium, then Italy, and lastly the world (heroism being forever young among the Romans) whereas, among the other peoples of Latium from whose   Vico’s claims about Greek and French here recalls a discussion in chapter 7 of his early work De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), contrasting the subtlety of the French language in ratiocination with the power of the Italian language to arouse images (Battistini 138–143). 149   Similar reflections, inviting comparison to what we would now call “developmental psychology,” may be found in the earlier writings. See particularly De ratione 3–5 (Battistini 104–125) and De antiquissima 7.4 (Taylor 112–125), as well as the pedagogical digression found within the first part of his autobiography, published in 1725 (Battistini 16–18). 150  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5. 148

160

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The New Science c­ onquest came the greatness of Rome, that heroism must have started to grow old.

161

22. It is necessary that there be, in the nature of human things, a mental language common to all the nations which uniformly attends to the substance of the things achievable within the sociability of human life and articulates that substance with as many different modifications as these things are able to have throughout their many different aspects. This is what we experience as true in proverbs—that is, with the maxims of commonplace wisdom—which are understood to be the same in substance even though they have as many different aspects as there are nations, ancient and modern.

162

This language is proper to this science, by whose light, if they attend to it, those learned in languages will be able to form a mental dictionary common to all the differently expressed languages, living and dead. We offered a test of this dictionary in a particular case in the first edition of The New Science151 where we proved that the names of the earliest paterfamilias in a great number of languages, dead and living, were given to him on account of the different properties that he had in the familial state and the first republics, at a time when languages were formed. We will, to the extent our spare erudition permits, make use herein of this dictionary in all the things upon which we reason.

163

Of the propositions stated above, Axioms 1, 2, 3, and 4 offer the foundations for refutations of all the opinions held up until now concerning the beginnings of humanity. These refutations depend upon the lack of verisimilitude, absurdity, contradiction, and impossibility in these opinions. The next propositions, from Axiom 5 to 15, offer foundations for the true, and serve to meditate upon that world of nations in its eternal idea through that property, noted by Aristotle, of any kind of science— namely, that science must be concerned with what is universal and what is eternal.152 The last propositions, from Axiom 15 to 22, offer the foundations for the certain and do the work of seeing actualized in deeds this world of nations upon which we have meditated in idea, the correct method of philosophizing made certain by Francis Bacon and transferred to human civil things from the natural things upon which he labored in his book Cogitata visa.153

164

The propositions proposed until now are general and establish this science as a whole; those which follow are particular and establish this science in the parts which, in its different materials, it treats.  See Scienza nuova prima §389.   See Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.6, 1003a12. 153   The full title of Bacon’s text is Cogitata et visa de interpretatione naturae, composed from 1607 to 1609. 151

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23. Sacred history is more ancient than all of the most ancient profane history which comes down to us, for it tells, most articulately and over a long period of more than eight hundred years, of the state of nature under the Patriarchs—that is, in the familial state—upon which, it is agreed by all the political theorists, peoples and cities arose later. Of this state, profane history has little or nothing to tell, and much of that is confused.

165

This Axiom proves the truth of sacred history, contrary to the vanity of the nations of which Diodorus Siculus speaks above [§125]. This is insofar as the Hebrews have preserved so articulately their memory back to the beginning of the world.

166

24. The Hebraic religion was founded by the true God upon a prohibition against divination, the divination upon which arose all the gentile nations.

167

This Axiom is one of the principal causes for dividing the entire world of ancient nations into the Hebrews and the gentiles.154

168

25. The Universal Flood is demonstrated not through the philological proofs of Marten Schoock (for these are too slight) nor through the astrological proofs of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who is followed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (these are too uncertain, or rather false, since they are derived from the Alphonsine Tables,155 refuted by the Hebrews and now by Christians, who have disproved the calculations of Eusebius and Bede and who today follow the calculations of Philo the Jew). Instead, the Universal Flood is demonstrated by means of physical proofs observed in the myths, as will be perceived herein in later Axioms.156

169

26. The giants had, by nature, huge bodies (those whom travelers at the foot of America in the country of the so-called Patagonians have found to be gullish and most savage). Leaving to one side, as empty or inappropriate or false, the reasons for these bodies which the philosophers adduced (collected and followed by Jean Chassagnon157 in his De gigantibus), we, instead, adduce causes, partly physical and partly moral, observed by Julius Caesar and by Cornelius Tacitus158 where they tell of the gigantic stature of the ancient Germans; and we connect those causes to the feral education of their children.

170

27. Greek history, from which we have everything that we do have of the rest of gentile antiquity except for that of Rome, takes its beginnings from the flood and from the giants.

171

  The distinction between the Hebrews and the gentiles runs through The New Science. Assessing Vico’s handling of the distinction is a primary challenge for his readers. 155   Astronomical tables compiled under Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284). 156   Axioms 41–42. 157   Jean Chassagnon (1531–1598), Protestant writer and author of De gigantibus eorumque reliquiis, published in 1580. 158  Caesar, De bello gallico 4.1; Tacitus, Germania 20.1. 154

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These two Axioms display that all of earliest humankind was divided into two species, first, that of the giants and, second, that of men of correct bodily stature; the former were the gentiles, the latter the Hebrews. This distinction cannot have arisen from anything other than the feral education of the former and the human education of the latter; ­consequently, the Hebrews had an origin different from the one all the gentiles had.

173

28. Two great fragments from Egyptian antiquity, which were observed above [§53], have reached us. The first of these is that the Egyptians reduced the whole of time prior to them to three ages: namely, the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. The second is that throughout these three ages, there arose three spoken languages corresponding to the aforementioned three ages: hieroglyphic—or sacred, language; symbolic language—or language using likenesses—which is the heroic language; and epistolary language—or the vernacular [volgare] language of men using conventional signs for sharing the common [volgari] needs of their life.

174

29. Homer, in five passages from his two poems which will be cited herein [§437], mentions a language more ancient than his own, which was certainly heroic language; and he calls this “the language of the gods.”

175

30. Varro had the diligence to gather up thirty thousand names of gods159 (this is, indeed, how many the Greeks counted); these names correspond to the many different needs of life—whether natural or moral or economic or, eventually, civil—from those earliest times.

176

These three Axioms establish that the world of peoples everywhere started from religions, which will be the first of the three principles of this science.

177

31. Whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, the only means powerful enough to reduce them is religion.160

178

This Axiom establishes that, in a state of lawlessness, divine providence offered a beginning from which the savage and violent might be led to humanity and the nations might be ordered among them by awakening in them a confused idea of divinity which, in their ignorance, they attributed to something with which it did not fit; and so, by means of terror at this imagined divinity, they started to put themselves back into some order.   The source of this claim (made also at Scienza prima nuova §303) appears to be Augustine, City of God 3.12 and 7.6, though Augustine does not mention “thirty thousand.” The source of the claim that the Greeks counted thirty thousand gods is likely Hesiod, Works and Days 253. 160   Compare Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.11. 159

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Book One Such a beginning of things among his own savage and violent men is something Thomas Hobbes did not know how to see, for he went looking to find such beginnings, going astray into the chance of his Epicurus. Hence, with an effort as magnanimous as its result was unhappy, he believed he would augment Greek philosophy with that great portion which it certainly was missing (as George Pasch161 reports in his De eruditis huius saeculi inventis), that of considering men from the perspective of whole society of humankind.

85 179

And while it is the case that Hobbes would not have thought of this unless the Christian religion had given him the impetus, what that religion decrees for the whole of humankind is not only justice, but also charity. And, consequently, here begins the refutation of that false statement of Polybius,162 that had philosophers arisen in the world, there would have been no need for religions: for if republics had not arisen in the world (republics which could not have coming into being without religion), there would not have been philosophers in the world. 32. Men ignorant about the natural causes that produce things, when they cannot explain them, even by similar things, give those things their own nature. So, for example, the common run163 [il volgo] say that the magnet is in love with the iron.

180

This Axiom is a small part of Axiom 1: that the human mind, on account of its indefinite nature, whenever it is overthrown by ignorance, makes itself the measure of all of which it is ignorant.

181

33. The physics of the ignorant is a commonplace metaphysics, by which they render the causes of things of which they are ignorant unto the will of God without considering the means by which the divine will is served.164

182

34. A true property of human nature is that one noticed by Tacitus,165 where he says mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes [“minds

183

  Georg Pasch (1661–1707), native of Danzig and teacher of ethics at Kiel.   See Polybius, Histories 6.56.10–11. What Polybius actually says in this passage is more complicated. The founders of the Roman republic, he claims, wisely introduced religion into every aspect of life for the sake of the multitude, which is “fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger” and so must be restrained by “invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry.” Though Polybius does allow that such a course would “perhaps have not been necessary had it been possible to form a city of wise men,” he does not actually claim that a state of philosophers would eliminate the need for religion as such. 163   “Common run” translates il volgo. See the note at §14 on volgo and volgare. 164   This Axiom invites comparison to Spinoza’s claim (in the Appendix of Part 1 of the Ethics) about those who “will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance” (trans. Curley, A Spinoza Reader, pp. 112–113). 165  Tacitus, Annals 1.28.2. 161 162

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The New Science once struck by fear are prone to superstition”]: so once men have been startled by some terrifying superstition, they invoke it in everything that they imagine, see, and even do.

184

35. Wonder is the daughter of ignorance, and the greater the effect admired, the more the wonder grows in proportion.166

185

36. The more vigorous the imagination, the weaker reasoning is.167

186

37. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passions to things without sense; and it is a property of children to take inanimate things in their hands and, playing with them, to talk with them as if they were living persons.

187

This philological-philosophical Axiom proves that men in the childhood of the world were by their nature sublime poets.

188

38. There is a golden passage in Lactantius Firmianus168 where, in reasoning about the origins of idolatry, he says rudes initio homines Deos appellarunt sive ob miraculum virtutis (hoc vero putabant rudes adhuc et simplices), sive, ut fieri solet, in admirationem praesentis potentiae, sive ob benficia quibus errant ad humanitatem compositi [“human beings, in their crude beginnings, called someone a god either on account of the wondrousness at his virtue (primitive and simple human beings truly thought virtue to be wondrous) or, as is wont to happen, out of admiration for the power of the one present, or on account of the benefits which brought them together in their humanity”].

189

39. Curiosity is a property connatural to man, the daughter of ignorance who begets knowledge [scienza], and whenever wonder makes our minds open, curiosity takes as its custom to ask straightaway, whenever it observes an extraordinary effect in nature (like a comet, a parhelion or a midday star), what such a thing means or signifies.

190

40. Witches are at the one and the same time replete with terrifying superstitions and exceedingly savage and brutal; as a result, if need be, so as to solemnize their witchcraft, they will commit impious murders and dismember the loveliest of innocent infants.

191

All the propositions starting from 28 up until 38 uncover the beginnings of divine poetry—that is, poetic theology—and those from 31 on give the beginnings of idolatry, and those from 39 on give the beginnings   See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2, 982b.   Compare Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 2 (“De prophetis”): “Those especially strong in imagination are less suited for purely understanding things, whereas those who are strong in intellect and especially cultivate it, keep their power of imagining under greater control.” 168   See Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 1.15. 166 167

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of divination; and, finally, Axiom 40 gives the beginnings of sacrifice in bloody religions, which started from the earliest crude and most savage men with oaths and human victims who, as we have in Plautus,169 continued to be commonly called saturni hostiae [“victims of Saturn”]. And there were sacrifices to Moloch among the Phoenicians, who cast into the midst of flames infants consecrated to the false divinity. Some of these consecrations are preserved in the Law of the Twelve Tables. These are the things which give the correct sense to the phrase: primos in orbe deos fecit timor170 [“fear has made the earliest gods on Earth”]

For false religions did not come into being from the imposture of someone else, but from the credulity of oneself; this is so with the unfortunate oath and the sacrifice which Agamemnon made of his pious daughter, Iphigenia, about which Lucretius impiously exclaims: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!171 [“such are the evils religion enjoins!”]

The oath and sacrifice revolve towards the counsel of providence, which thus intends to domesticate the sons of Polyphemus and reduce them to the humanity of Aristides, Socrates, Laelius, and Scipio Africanus. 41. It is postulated (and it is a discrete postulate) that for many hundreds of years, the earth was saturated with the dampness of the Universal Flood and could not emit dry exhalations—that is, the materials igniting in the air to generate lightning.172

192

42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants, and every gentile nation has a Jove.

193

This Axiom contains the physical history, preserved in myths, that there was a Universal Flood over the entire earth.

194

This same Axiom, together with the preceding postulate, must make determinate that within the course of so many years, the impious races of the sons of Noah had arrived at a feral state; and by a feral wandering, they were scattered and dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth; and by a feral education, giants came and were found among them at a time when heaven first flashed lightning after the flood.

195

  The phrase Saturni hostiae does not appear in modern editions of Plautus. It is likely, as Battistini suggests, that Vico took it from a 1684 edition of Plautus that included the commentary of German philologist Johann Gronow (1611–1678). 170  Statius, Thebaid 3.661; Voss, Etymologicon, p. 209. 171  Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.101. 172   See Aristotle, Meteorology 2.9, 369b and Seneca, Natural Questions 2 and De Ventis 12.2. 169

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43. Every gentile nation has its own Hercules, who was the son of Jove. And Varro, most learned in antiquities, in counting them arrives at forty.

197

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the heroism of the earliest peoples, a heroism born of the false opinion that the heroes come from a divine origin.

198

This same Axiom together with the preceding one (the first Axiom gives so many versions of Jove, the second so many versions of Hercules among the gentile nations) in addition demonstrates that they could not be founders without religion nor become great without virtue. Grant that when they were starting out, these nations were wild and closed off from one another and, accordingly, they knew nothing of one another. Therefore, with a view to the Axiom173 that “uniform ideas, coming into being among peoples unknown to one another, must have a common impetus for what is true,” these Axioms give us another great principle: that the first myths must have contained truths of civil life and, accordingly, must have been histories of these earliest peoples.

199

44. The first wise men of the Greek world were the theological poets, who undoubtedly flourished prior to the heroic poets, just as Jove was the father of Hercules.

200

This Axiom, together with the two preceding ones, establishes that the gentile nations, given that they all had their own versions of Jove, their own versions of Hercules, were all poetic in their beginnings; and it establishes that among them, first a divine poetry came to be and, later, a heroic poetry.

201

45. Men naturally tend to preserve memories of the laws and of the orders which hold them within their own society.

202

46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings.

203

All the axioms from Axiom 42 on give the principle pertaining to our historical mythology.

204

47. The human mind naturally tends to take delight in uniformity.174

205

This Axiom, when proposed for myths, is confirmed by the custom of the common run: in devising myths suited to men who are famous for something or other and who are situated in such and such circumstances, they devise these myths so as to fit the condition of those human beings.175 These myths are ideal truths conforming to the merit of those for whom the common run devises such myths, and these ideal truths are   Axiom 13.   Compare Bacon, New Organon 1.45. 175   See Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451a and Bacon, Cogitata et visa 13. 173 174

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false to what is actually the case only to the extent that they do not give those men as much as they fully merit. As a result, if one reflects well on this, poetic truth is metaphysical truth and, in comparison with this, physical truth that does not conform with it should be considered false. From this comes the following important consideration on poetic reasoning: the true captain of war is, for example, the Godfrey whom Torquato Tasso devises, and all the captains who do not in every respect conform with Godfrey are not true captains of war. 48. It is the nature of children that it is by the ideas and names of men, women, and things which they have known first that they later apprehend and name all the men, women, and things which have some similarity or relationship to the first ones.

206

49. There is a golden passage (the one drawn upon above [§68] from Iamblichus in his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum) which says that the Egyptians declared all discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life to come from Hermes Trismegistus.

207

This statement, assisted by the preceding Axiom, will return, back to the divine philosopher, Iamblichus, that whole sense of sublime natural theology which he gave to the mysteries of the Egyptians.

208

And these three Axioms give the principles pertaining to poetic characters, which constitute the essence of myths. The first demonstrates the natural inclination of the common run to devise them, and to devise them with decorum. The second demonstrates that the earliest men—as the children of humankind who were not capable of forming intelligible genera of things—had by natural necessity to devise poetic characters— which are imaginative genera, or universals—to which they could reduce the particular species resembling each genus; on account of this resemblance, the ancient myths could not devise anything except with decorum. Exactly in this way did the Egyptians reduce all their discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life—that is, the particular effects of civil wisdom—to the genus of the “civil wise man” which they imagined as Hermes Trismegistus; for they did not know how to abstract the intelligible genus, “civil wise man,” much less how to abstract the form, “civil wisdom,” in which these Egyptians were wise.

209

This is how much the Egyptians at that time, who had so enriched the world by their discovering what is necessary or advantageous for humankind, were philosophers, and how much they understood of universals— that is, of intelligible genera! This last Axiom, in following the preceding ones, is the principle pertaining to true poetic allegories, which, for myths, gives a univocal, not analogical, significance to the different particulars comprehended under their poetic genera. Accordingly, these allegories are called diversiloquia—

210

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50. In children, memory is most vivacious; consequently, their imagination is exceedingly lively, since the imagination is nothing other than memory extended or composed.

212

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the vividness of the poetic images, which the earliest world in its childhood must have formed.

213

51. For every faculty that men do not have by nature, they can succeed by the persistent study of an art. However, in poetry, success by means of art is completely denied to someone who does not already have the faculty by nature.

214

This Axiom demonstrates that, since poetry founds the gentile humanity from which, and from nowhere else, come all the arts, the earliest poets were poets by nature.

215

52. Children avail themselves of imitation quite capably, for we observe that they mostly play at mimicking whatever they are capable of apprehending.

216

This Axiom demonstrates that the world in its childhood was one of poetic nations since poetry is nothing other than imitation.

217

This Axiom gives the principle for the following: that all the arts— concerning the necessary, the advantageous, the convenient, and even, in good part, the humanly pleasant—were discovered in the poetic centuries prior to the coming of the philosophers. For the arts are nothing other than imitations of nature and, in a certain way, real poems.

218

53. At first, men sense without noticing; then, they notice with a troubled and agitated spirit; finally, they reflect with a clear mind.

219

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to poetic sentiments, which are formed by passionate and affective sensation; these are different from philosophic sentiments, which are formed by the rational reflection. Hence, the more the latter rise to the level of universals, the more they apprehend the true; the more the former appropriate particulars, the more certain they are.

220

54. Men, confronted by things which are doubtful or obscure, but pertinent to them, naturally interpret them in keeping with their own natures and, consequently, in keeping with the resultant passions and customs.

221

This Axiom is the great canon for our mythology: with it, the myths of the earliest wild and crude human beings are found completely strict, a quality well suited to the founding of nations emerging out of a savage bestial liberty; afterwards, with the passage of many years and changes

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to customs, these myths were distorted from their proper meaning or form,176 were altered or were darkened during times that were dissolute and corrupt, even prior to Homer. For although religion was, in those times, still important to men in Greece, they were afraid of having gods as opposed to their prayers as they were to their customs, and so they attached their customs to the gods and gave a sense to those myths that was incongruous, befouled, and most obscene. 55. There is a golden passage in Eusebius177—particular to the wisdom of the Egyptians, but rising to a level of generality applicable to the wisdom of all the other gentiles—where he says primam Aegyptiorum theologiam mere historiam fuisse fabulis interpolatum; quarum quum postea puderet posteros, sensim coeperunt mysticos iis significatus affingere [“the first theology of the Egyptians was simply a history dressed up with myths, for which later generations, subsequently becoming ashamed of them, gradually started to devise a mystical significance”]; this is what was done by Manetho—that is, Manethon—the high priest of Egypt, who translated all of Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology, as was said above [§46].

222

These two Axioms are the two great proofs pertaining to our historical mythology; while they are the two great whirlwinds for refuting opinions about the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,178 they are, at the same time, the two great foundations for the truth of the Christian religion, which in its sacred history tells us nothing about which to be ashamed.

223

56. The first authors among the peoples in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Latium and, in the return to barbarism, the first writers in the new languages of Europe are found to have been poets.

224

57. Those who are mute explain themselves through gestures and objects which have a natural correspondence to the ideas they wish to signify.

225

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the hieroglyphs, with which all the nations in their earliest barbarism are found to have spoken.

226

This same Axiom is the principle pertaining to the natural speech, which Plato in his Cratylus,179 and after him Iamblichus180 in his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum, conjectured was spoken at one time in the world; and with them, the Stoics and Origen181 in his Contra Celsum are in

227

 Translating impropriate as “distorted from their proper meaning or form,” as suggested by Elio Gianturco’s 1950 review of Bergin and Fisch’s translation. 177   See Eusebius, Preparatio evangelica 1.2. 178   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. 179   See Plato, Cratylus 423c–e. 180  Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians 7.4. 181  Origen, Contra Celso 1.24 (PG 11:702–706), 5.4 (PG 11:1186). 176

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The New Science a­ greement. And because they are speaking like diviners, they were opposed by Aristotle in his Periermenia182 and by Galen183 in his De decretis Hippocratis et Platonis, and this dispute is discussed by Publius Nigidius in Aulus Gellius.184 This natural speech must have been succeeded by poetic locutions: images, similes, metaphors, and natural properties.

228

58. Those who are mute issue unformed sounds while singing. And those who stutter, also while singing, loosen their tongues enough to enunciate.

229

59. Men vent great passions by expressing them in song such as we experience in the depths of sorrow and the peaks of joy.

230

These two Axioms allow for the supposition that the authors of the gentile nations—since they had come to the feral state of mute beasts and, as a consequence of that same bewilderment, only returned to their senses under the spur of the most violent passions—must have formed their earliest languages in singing.

231

60. Languages must have started with monosyllabic words since, in the present abundance of articulate tongues into which they today are born, children still start with monosyllabic words, even though the tissues of the organ necessary for articulating speech is quite supple in children.

232

61. Heroic verse is the most ancient of all, and spondaic verse is the slowest; and it will be found herein [§449] that when heroic verse came into being, it was spondaic.

233

62. Iambic verse is the one most similar to prose, and the iamb is the “swift foot,” as it comes to be defined by Horace.185

234

These two last Axioms allow one to conjecture that ideas and languages went along, quickening at the same pace.

235

All these Axioms—starting from Axiom 47, together with those proposed as principles for all the others186—complete the account of poetic reason in all its parts: myth; custom and the decorum belonging to it; sentiments; expression and the vividness belonging to it; allegory; song; and, lastly, verse. And the last seven Axioms, in addition, persuade us that speech was first in verse and that later speech was in prose for all the nations.  Aristotle, On Interpretation 2, 16a. Vico’s orthography is a departure from the more usual Peri Hermeneias. 183  Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis libri noveni 1. 184   Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.4. Publius Nigidius (98–45 BCE), author of the Commentarii grammatici, was a friend of Cicero, as well as a Pythagorean. 185  Horace, Ars poetica 252. 186   Axioms 1–22. 182

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63. The human mind is naturally inclined to see itself with the senses, from without and embodied; only with great difficulty, and by means of reflection, does it come to understand itself in itself.

236

This Axiom gives the universal principle pertaining to etymology in all languages: names are taken from physical objects and the properties of physical objects in order to signify things pertaining to the mind and the spirit.

237

64. The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of things.187

238

65. The order of human things proceeds so that, first, there are forests; later, lodges; thereafter, villages; then, cities; and finally, academies.

239

This Axiom is a great principle pertaining to etymology: it is in accordance with this series of human things that the history of words in native languages must be told. So, we observe in the Latin language that almost the entire corpus of its terms has origins pertaining to forest life or rustic life. So, for example, the word lex [“law”] must at first have been a gathering together of acorns, from which we believe is derived the word ilex—that is to say illex, meaning “an oak tree” in Latin—for just as it is certain that an aquilex is “someone gathering together water,” the oak tree produces the acorns for which the swine come together. Later, lex was a gathering together of vegetables, from which these vegetables were called legumina. Then, at a time when the common alphabetic letters with which one would write down laws had not yet been found, the necessity of civil nature dictates that lex must have been a gathering together of citizens—that is, the public assembly in which the presence of people was the law which solemnized the testamenti [“the last testaments”] which were made calatis comitiis [“when the assembly was convened”]. Finally, the gathering together of letters and making with each word, as it were, a sheaf of letters was called legere [“reading”].188

240

66. Men, at first, sense what is necessary; later, they tarry with what is advantageous; then, they notice what is convenient; later still, they d ­ elight

241

187   Compare Spinoza, Ethics 2.7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” For an earlier (and perhaps clearer) statement of the claim, one may consider the following passage from the Diritto Universale: “Philology is the study of speech and concerns itself with whatever deals with words while recounting their history and narrating their origin and progress. It classifies them according to the various stages of the language, so as to grasp their proper and figurative meanings and their usage. But since the ideas of things are depicted in words, philology must first look to grasp the history of things. Thus, philologists justly write commentaries on republics, the customs of nations and peoples, the laws, institutions, branches of learning, and artifacts” (De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1 [Cristofolini 387, BV 46]). 188   See Vico’s extension of this etymology to intelligere at §363.

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242

67. The nature of peoples, at first, is crude; later, strict; subsequently, benign; then, refined; finally, dissolute.

243

68. Within humankind, the first to arise are the huge and gullish (those like Polyphemus); later arise the magnanimous and haughty (those like Achilles); thereafter arise either the valorous and just (those like Aristides and Scipio Africanus) or, closer to ourselves, those who make an appearance with a great show of virtue accompanied by great vices and who make a reputation among the common run for true glory (those like Alexander and Caesar); later still arise the morose, the reflective (those like Tiberius); and finally arise the mad, the dissolute, the impudent (those like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian).

244

This Axiom demonstrates that those first to arise were needed for man to obey man in the familial state and for disposing him to obey the laws in the state to come, the civil state; the second ones, who naturally did not cede to their equals, were needed for establishing, upon those families, republics in their aristocratic form; the third ones were needed for opening the path to popular liberty; the fourth ones were needed for introducing monarchy; the fifth were needed for establishing it; the sixth ones were needed for overturning it.

245

This Axiom, with the preceding ones,189 gives the first part of the principles pertaining to the ideal eternal history upon which all nations run their temporal course in their springing forth, progress, maturity, decadence, and end.

246

69. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

247

This Axiom demonstrates that, by the nature of human civil things, the public school of princes is the morality of peoples.

248

70. Let us concede something which is not repugnant to nature and which herein later [§§520–521, 553] will be found to be true in actuality: in the profane state of a lawless world, only a very few at first—those who were more vigorous—retreated to form the families by which and for which the fields were brought under cultivation. And many others, in a much later age, afterwards retreated, taking refuge in the lands cultivated by these Fathers.

249

71. Native custom (and, above all, the custom of natural liberty) does not change all at once, but in stages and over a long period of time.

250

72. If, as has been posited, all nations started from the worship of some divinity, then the Fathers in the familial state must have been wise men in 189

  Axioms 25–27.

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the art of divining from auspices; and priests who made sacrifices in order to procure the auspices—that is, to understand them well; and kings who brought the divine laws to their families. 3. There is a folk tradition that the first ones to govern the world were kings.

251

74. There is another folk tradition that those worthiest by nature were created as the first kings.

252

75. There is still another folk tradition that the first kings were wise men. Hence, Plato, in an empty prayer, had a desire for those most ancient times when philosophers ruled or when kings philosophized.190

253

All these Axioms demonstrate that united in the persons of the first Fathers were wisdom, priesthood, and ruling, and that ruling and priesthood were dependent on wisdom, although not the recondite wisdom of philosophers but the commonplace wisdom of lawgivers.191 And, therefore, later the priests in all nations were crowned.

254

76. There is a folk tradition that the first form of government in the world was monarchy.

255

77. However, Axiom 67, along with the others that follow, particularly the corollary to Axiom 64, allows that the Fathers in the familial state must have exercised a monarchical power subject only to God, not only over the persons but also the possessions of their children, and even more so over the familial servants who had sought refuge in their lands; and so, they were the first monarchs of the world, which sacred history allows us to understand were called patriarchs—that is to say, fathers who were princes. This monarchical law was preserved for them by the Law of the Twelve Tables for the entire time of the Roman republic. They say: PATRIFAMILIAS IUS VITAE ET NECIS IN LIBEROS ESTOS [“the paterfamilias had the right of life and death over his children”]. As a consequence of this, quicquid filius acquirit, patri acquirit [“whatever the son acquires, he acquires for his father”].

256

78. The families could not have been so-called, with the proper meaning of their origin, except as derived from those familial servants of the Fathers in what was then the state of nature.

257

  See Plato, Republic 5, 473c–d.   The distinction between “recondite wisdom” (sapienza riposta) and “commonplace wisdom” (sapienza volgare), along with the challenge of attaining a truthful reconciliation of the two, is a major theme of The New Science. Particularly relevant to the theme are §§14, 37, 360, 779, as well the whole of Book Three—an extended attempt to deny that the Homeric poems contain recondite wisdom, contrary to the assumptions of many readers (then and now).

190

191

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79. The earliest socii—associates who, in the proper sense of the word, are companions whose goal was the sharing of advantage among ­themselves—cannot be imagined nor understood prior to those who, so as to have a safe life, sought refuge from the earliest Fathers and who, having received life by taking refuge, were obliged to sustain it by cultivating the fields of those Fathers.

259

These are found to be the true associates of the heroes, those who, later, were the plebeians of heroic cities and, eventually, were the provinces of sovereign [principi] peoples.

260

80. Men come naturally to a system of benefits whenever they discern that through it, they might either maintain or gain a good and great part of their advantage—that is, of the benefits which they can hope for in civil life.

261

81. It is a property of men of fortitude not to relinquish through idleness what they have gained by virtue. Rather, they yield because of either necessity or advantage, but little by little, and as little as possible.

262

From these two Axioms are perceived the perennial springs of fealties, which are called, with Roman elegance, beneficia [“benefices”].

263

82. Scattered throughout all the ancient nations are found clienti [“clients”] and clientele [“clientships”], which we understand with terms no more congruent than “vassals” and “fealties”; nor do those who are erudite about fealties find more congruent terms for explaining these than the Roman ones, clienti and clientelae.

264

These last three Axioms along with the preceding twelve starting from Axiom 70192 uncover the principles pertaining to republics coming into being out of some great necessity, determined herein [§§582–598] to be the necessity that the familial servants made for each paterfamilias; and on account of this, those same republics naturally came to take their aristocratic form. Insofar as the Fathers united in order so as to resist those familial servants revolting against them, and insofar as they remained united so as to contain those servants and to reduce them to obedience, they conceded to the familial servants a kind of rustic fealty and themselves found the sovereign power they had within the family (this cannot be understood except in terms of a system of noble fealties) subject to the sovereign power they had in civil life from their very ruling orders; the heads of these orders were called kings, and the most spirited must have been made heads during the revolts of the familial servants. Such an origin for cities, even if it were offered only as a hypothesis—it is herein [§§553–569] discovered to be actual—must, of necessity, be ac-

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  In fact, from Axiom 68.

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cepted as true on account of its naturalness and simplicity, and on account of the infinite number of effects in civil life which are supported by it as their proper cause. For in no other fashion can one understand, in the world, how from powers in families was formed civil power; or how from private patrimonies was formed the public patrimony; or how is it is found that the materials for republics are arranged into orders— first, the order of the few, who command, second, the order of the many plebeians, who obey—the two parts which, together, comprise the subject of politics. The generation of the civil state from families containing only children will be demonstrated herein [§§553–569] to have been impossible. 83. That law concerning the fields establishes the first agrarian law of the world, and it is not possible to imagine or understand another law which could have been more restricted by nature.

265

This agrarian law distinguishes the three domains which can exist in the nature of civil life for three kinds of persons: the bonitary domain for the plebeians; the quiritary domain—preserved by arms and consequently noble—for the Fathers; and eminent domain for the order which is lord—that is, sovereign power in aristocratic republics.

266

84. There is a golden passage in Aristotle193 in his Politics where he counts as one of the different republics the heroic regime, the regimen in which kings administered the laws at home, administered wars abroad, and were the heads of religion.

267

This Axiom squares completely with two heroic regimes of Theseus and of Romulus (as one can observe, of the former, in Plutarch’s194 biography of Theseus and, of the latter, in Roman history) if one supplements Greek history with the point in Roman history when Tullus Hostilius administers the law in his accusation against Horatius.195 And the Roman kings were also kings of the sacred things, the so-called reges sacrorum [“kings of sacred things”]; hence, once the kings were expelled from Rome, for the sake of certainty in the divine ceremonies, they created someone also called rex sacrorum, who was the head of the ­fetiales—that is, “the heralds.”

268

85. There is a golden passage in Aristotle in the same book196 which reports that ancient republics did not have laws for punishing offences or for correcting private damages. And he says such were the customs of barbarian peoples, for peoples have their start in barbarism because they have not yet been domesticated by laws.

269

 Aristotle, Politics 3.14, 1285a.   See Plutarch, Life of Theseus 24. 195   Horatius was accused of treason by Tullus, the third king of Rome, but acquitted by the people. For the episode, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5. 196  Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b. 193 194

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270

This Axiom demonstrates the necessity of duels and reprisals in barbarian times, for in such times judicial laws are lacking.

271

86. Also golden is that passage in the same book of Aristotle where he says that in ancient republics the nobles swore to be the eternal enemies of the plebs.197

272

This Axiom makes explicit the cause of the proud, avaricious, and cruel customs of the nobles towards the plebeians, about which we plainly read in ancient Roman history: during that long period (up until now dreamed of as a time of popular liberty) the nobles imposed taxes on the plebeians who served the nobles at their own expense in wars. The nobles taxed them into a sea of usury, and when the plebeians, in this condition of abject drudgery, were no longer able to satisfy them, the nobles held them shut up for their entire lives in private prisons so as to pay back the nobles with labor and toil. And in those prisons the nobles beat them in tyrannical manner with rods on their bare shoulders like the lowliest of slaves.

273

87. Aristocratic republics are extremely temperate about going to war so as not to make warriors of the multitude of plebeians.

274

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to justice in Roman arms up until the time of the Carthaginian Wars.

275

88. Aristocratic republics keep wealth within the order of the nobles, for wealth contributes to the power of this order.

276

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to Roman clemency in victory: in victory, they took only the arms of the defeated and, subject to a tolerable tribute, left the defeated in their bonitary domain over everything. This is the cause of the Fathers always resisting the agrarian laws of the Gracchi, for they did not wish to enrich the plebs.

277

89. Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.

278

90. Peoples will necessarily conduct themselves heroically in war if they train themselves by sparring over honors among themselves in peace, some through keeping those honors for themselves and others through making themselves worthy of their pursuit.

279

This Axiom is one principle pertaining to the heroism of the Romans from the expulsion of tyrants up until the Carthaginian Wars; during this time, the nobles naturally consecrated themselves to the safety of their country, by which they held all the honors of civil life safely within their order, and the plebeians engaged in the most signal enterprises so as to prove themselves worthy of the honors of the nobles. 197

 Aristotle, Politics 5.9, 1310a9.

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91. Sparring for equality with respect to justice, which trains the orders of the city, is the most powerful means for aggrandizing the republics.

280

This Axiom is the other principle pertaining to the heroism of the Romans, a heroism assisted by three public virtues: the magnanimity of the plebs in wanting to have a share in the civil rights for themselves by means of the laws of the Fathers; the strength of the Fathers in guarding those laws within their own order; and the wisdom of the jurists in interpreting those laws and directing them, thread by thread, toward the advantageous in new cases which asked for legal reasoning. These are the three causes proper to the distinction which Roman jurisprudence has had in the world.

281

All those Axioms starting from Axiom 84 put forward a Roman history in its correct aspect. The following three Axioms, for their part, also work towards this end.

282

92. The weak want laws; the powerful withhold them; the ambitious, so as to create a following, promote them; princes, so as to make the powerful equal to the weak, protect them.

283

This Axiom, in its first and second parts, is the spark for the heroic contests of aristocratic republics, in which the nobles wish for all the laws to be arcana within their order so that the laws depend on their decision and are administered with a royal hand. These are the three causes Pomponius the jurist draws out, when he tells us that the Roman plebs desired the Law of the Twelve Tables at a time when they were weighed down, in their phrase, by ius latens, incertum et manus regia [“a hidden, arbitrary law and a royal hand”];198 and this is the cause of the reluctance of the Fathers in giving them this law, when they say mores patrios servandos, leges ferri non oportere [“the customs of the Fathers must be preserved, the law should not be enacted”], as Dionysius of Halicarnassus199 relates it (he is better informed than Titus Livy about Roman things because he was instructed by the publications of Marcus Terentius Varro, who was acclaimed “the most learned of the Romans”; and someone, in this circumstance, diametrically opposed to Livy, who tells us concerning the nobles that, in his words, desideria plebis non aspernari200 [“there was a desire not to reject the plebs”]). Hence, on account of these, and other bigger, contradictions observed in my Principles of Universal Law,201 since there is such great opposition on this matter among authors who first wrote about it five hundred years later, it will be better not to believe either of the two. Even more so since, during the same time period, it was not believed by Varro (in his great work, Rerum divinarum et humanarum,202 Varro offered origins native to Latium for all the Roman

284

  Digest 1.2.2.3 and 6.   Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 10.3. 200  Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.31. 201   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727). 202   Drawn from Augustine, City of God 6.3–4. 198 199

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The New Science things, divine and human) nor was it believed by Cicero (in his On the Orator,203 Cicero makes Marcus Crassus204 say in the presence of Quintus Mucius Scaevola,205 prince of the jurists of his age, that the wisdom of the decemvirs greatly surpassed that of Draco and Solon, who gave laws to the Athenians, and that of Lycurgus, who gave laws to the Spartans: this is tantamount to saying that the Law of the Twelve Tables did not come from either Sparta or Athens). And we believe we are hitting what is truth in nothing but the fact that Cicero made Mucius be among those present at the conversation for only the first day. In Cicero’s time, this myth about the Law of the Twelve Tables was so widely received among men of letters and born of the vanity of the learned, who designate wisest those origins whose wisdom is what they profess (Cicero intends to show this when he makes Crassus say the words, fremant omnes, dicam quod sentio206 [“although they grumble, I will say what I feel”]). And if Crassus had said anything false concerning the history of Roman law (there could be no objection to an orator speaking about the history of Roman law, something which was part of the wisdom of the jurists since, at that time, orators and jurists were two different professions), Mucius would have certainly reproached him, just as, according to Pomponius,207 he had reproached Servius Sulpicius, who was among those present at the conversation, saying turpe esse patricio viro ius in quo versaretur ignorare [“it was a disgrace for a patrician to be ignorant about the law in which he was trained”].

285

But more than Cicero and Varro, Polybius gives us an unassailable argument for not believing either Dionynius or Livy, who indisputably knew more about politics than those two and was some two hundred years closer to the decemvirs than those two. In Book Six, Chapter 4, and many places following in the edition of Jakob Gronov,208 he puts aside his steady advance to contemplate the constitutions of the most famous free republics of his times. And he observes that the Roman constitution was different from that of Athens and Sparta, and more different from the constitution of Athens than from that of Sparta, even though those who compare Attic with Roman law would suggest that the laws for instituting the orders of popular liberty already previously founded by Brutus came from Athens rather than Sparta. And yet Polybius, by contrast, observes that there are similarities between the Roman and Carthaginian constitutions, even though no one has ever  Cicero, De oratore 1.44.197.   In fact, Lucius Licinius Crassus (140–91 BCE), teacher of Cicero, and also known as “Crassus Orator.” 205   Quintus Mucius Scaevola Augur (c. 159–88 BCE), teacher of Cicero and Atticus. 206   See Cicero, De oratore 1.44.195. 207   Digest 1.2.2.43. 208   Jakob Gronov (1645–1716), Dutch philologist. 203 204

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dreamed that the Carthaginian constitution had free orders because of Greek laws. This is so far from the truth that in Carthage there was a law expressly forbidding Carthaginians from knowing Greek letters. So how is it that one of the wisest writers about republics does not engage in such natural and obvious reflection, and how does he not investigate the explanation for this difference? How are the Roman and Athenian republics different if their orders were instituted by the same laws, and how were the Roman and Carthaginian republics similar if their orders were instituted by different laws? Hence, so as to absolve him of such gross negligence, the one thing necessary to say is that, in the age of Polybius, this myth—that Greek laws had come from Athens for the purpose of instituting orders for the governance of free peoples—had not yet come to be in Rome. This same Axiom, by its third part, opens the way for the ambitious in popular republics to bring in monarchy by echoing that natural desire of the plebs who, not understanding universals, want a law for every particular circumstance.

286

Hence, when Sulla, head of the nobles, defeated Marius, head of the plebs, and reinstituted orders in the popular constitution for aristocratic governance, his remedy for the multitude of laws was the quaestiones perpetuae [“permanent tribunals”].209 This same Axiom, in its fourth and last part, is the secret reason that Roman princes, starting with Augustus, made countless laws in private cases. And it is the secret reason the sovereigns and powers of Europe everywhere, in kingdoms and in free republics, accepted the corpus of Roman civil law and the corpus of canon law.

287

93. Given that the door to honors in popular republics is so completely opened by the laws to an avaricious multitude which gives decrees, nothing remains in peacetime except to contend for power, no longer with laws but with arms. And they contend for the power to decree laws so as to enrich themselves (in Rome, these were the agrarian laws of the Gracchi). Hence there come to pass, at the same time, civil wars at home and unjust wars abroad.

288

This Axiom confirms, by way of contrast, the heroism of the Romans during the whole period prior to the Gracchi.

289

94. Natural liberty is fiercer inasmuch as its goods are more properly connected to one’s own body, and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary for life.

290

This Axiom, in its first part, is another principle pertaining to the natural heroism of the earliest peoples; in its second part, it is the natural principle pertaining to monarchies.

291

209

  See Cicero, Brutus 27.106.

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95. Men, at first, love to escape from subjection and desire equality: behold the plebs in the aristocratic republics which eventually change to popular republics. Later, they are forced to surpass their equals: behold the plebs in the popular republics corrupted into republics of the powerful. Finally, they wish to put themselves above the laws: behold anarchy—that is, popular republics unrestrained—a tyranny than which there is no worse because there are as many tyrants as there are audacious and dissolute citizens. And it is at this point that the plebs, having been made aware that they own the evils they suffer, so as to find a remedy, move towards safety under a monarchy: this is the natural royal law by which Tacitus210 legitimates the Roman monarchy under Augustus, saying qui cuncta bellis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium ACCEPIT [“who with the title of prince subjected an entire world worn out by civil wars to his power”].

293

96. Because of the native lawless liberty of the nobles, when the first cities were composed from families, those nobles were reluctant about both restraints and burdens: behold the aristocratic republics in which the nobles are the masters. Later, because the plebs have grown greatly in number and have had been made into warriors, they are induced to suffer both laws and burdens equal to those of their plebs: behold the nobles of popular republics. Finally, so as to keep safe their life of convenience, they naturally incline towards subjection under one man: behold the nobles under the monarchies.

294

These two Axioms, along with the other previous ones starting from Axiom 66, are the principles pertaining to the ideal eternal history of which we spoken above [§245].

295

97. One can concede that it does not offend reason to postulate that, after the flood, the earliest men first resided in the mountains; at some later time, they came down to the plains; and, after a long time, they eventually felt secure enough to conduct themselves to the shores of the sea.

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98. According to Strabo,211 there is a golden passage in Plato212 where he says that after the particular floods of Ogyges and Deucalion, men resided in caves in the mountains, and he identifies them as the sons of Polyphemus213 whom elsewhere he recognizes as the earliest paterfamilias in the world; later, they resided at the foot of mountains, and they are suggested by the figure of Dardanus, who built Pergamum, which later became the fortress of Troy; eventually, they resided on the plains and are discerned in the figure of Ilus, by whom Troy was taken to the plains near the sea and for whom it was called Ilium.214  Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.  Strabo, Geography 13.1.25. 212   See Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e. 213   See Homer, Odyssey 9.112–114. 214   See Homer, Iliad 4.508; 5.460; 6.512; 24.700. 210 211

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99. There is also an ancient tradition that Tyre was, at first, founded inland and, later, was conveyed to the shore of the Phoenician sea. Similarly, it is certain history that it was transported from the shore to an island close to it, and that, subsequently, Alexander the Great reattached it to the mainland.

297

The preceding postulate and the two Axioms which come after215 uncover the fact that first inland nations were founded and later maritime nations.

298

And the postulate and Axioms allow for a great argument for demonstrating the antiquity of the Hebrew people, namely, that this people was founded by Noah in Mesopotamia, the most inland country of the early habitable world and so was the most ancient of all the nations. This is confirmed by the fact that the earliest monarchy was founded in Mesopotamia, the one which the Assyrians founded upon the Chaldean gentiles; from the Chaldeans came the first wise men of the world, whose prince was Zoroaster. 100. Men cannot be induced to abandon their own lands, which are naturally dear to their natives, except by what is ultimately necessary for life; nor can they be induced to leave them for a time except by greed to enrich themselves through trade or by covetousness to preserve what they have acquired.

299

This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the migration of peoples made by the heroic maritime colonies; made by the inundations of barbarians about which only Wolfgang Latius216 has written; made by the last known Roman colonies; and made by the European colonies in the Indies.

300

This same Axiom demonstrates for us that the lost races of the three sons of Noah must have come to a bestial wandering, for they fled from wild beasts which the ancient forest must have had in abundance; and they pursued shy and reluctant women who, in that wild state, must have been especially reluctant and shy; and, later, they went in search of pasture and water. By all this, they are discovered dispersed over the entire earth at the time when the heavens first flashed lightning after the flood, whence each gentile nation started from its own Jove. For if they had remained in their humanity, like the people of God remained, they would, like the people of God, have stayed in Asia, which, on account of both the vastness of that part of the world and the scarcity of men, they had no necessary reason to abandon, since it is not a natural custom to abandon one’s native country on a whim.

301

101. The Phoenicians were the first sailors of the ancient world.

302

  Axioms 97 and 98.   Wolfgang Latius (1514–1565), physician and historiographer of Ferdinand I, and author of De aliquot gentium migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, linguarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis (first edition 1557). 215 216

104 303

The New Science 102. The nations in their barbarism were impenetrable, and they must have been broken into from without by war, or spontaneously opened themselves up from within to foreigners because of the advantages of commerce (so did Psammeticus open up Egypt to the Ionian and Carian Greeks, who must have been second only to the Phoenicians in renown for maritime business, whence from their great riches was founded in Ionia the temple to the Samian Juno and in Caria was erected the mausoleum of Artemis, two of the seven wonders of the world; the glory resulting from such business rested, in later times, with those in Rhodes, in the mouth of whose port was raised the great Colossus of the Sun, counted among the aforesaid wonders of the world). So too the Chinese, with a view to the advantages of commerce, have recently opened up China to us Europeans.

304

These three Axioms give the principle pertaining to a second etymological method, that for words whose origin is certainly foreign, a method different from the one of which we spoke above [§162] for native words. In addition, one can, with these Axioms, give the history of nations subsequent to other nations bringing colonies into foreign lands. For example, Naples was originally called Sirena, a Syrian word, which is an argument for Syrians—that is, Phoenicians—having established prior to others a colony there for reasons of trade. Later, it was called Parthenope, a heroic Greek word; eventually, it was called Naples in the vernacular Greek language. These words are proof that the Greeks had come there later so as to open up associations for business. This must mark the arrival of that language which mixes Phoenician and Greek, a language said to have delighted the emperor Tiberius more than pure Greek. In exactly the same way, on the shores of Tarentum, there was a colony called Siris, whose inhabitants were called Sirites; later, it was called Polieion by the Greeks, named for Minerva Polias, who had a temple there.

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305

This Axiom, in addition, gives principles pertaining to the science supporting the argument written by Giambullari,217 namely, that the Tuscan language is Syrian in origin: this language can only have come from the most ancient Phoenicians—the earliest sailors in the ancient world, as the Axiom just above has proposed—for, in later times, this glory belonged to the Carian and Ionian Greeks and, eventually, came to rest with the Rhodians.

306

103. One can postulate that it is necessary to concede that some Greek colony was brought to the shore of Latium which, subsequently defeated and destroyed by the Romans, is buried in the shadows of antiquity.

307

If this is not conceded, then anyone who engages in reflection and combination concerning antiquity will be bewildered about why Roman   Pierfrancesco Giambullari (1495–1555), one of the founders of the Florentine Academy and author of Origine della lingua fiorentina, altrimenti il Gello (1549). 217

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history tells of Hercules, Evander,218 Arcadians, and Phrygians being inside of Latium; of Servius Tullius as a Greek; of Tarquinius Priscus as the son of Demaratus the Corinthian; of Aeneas as the founder of the Roman people. Certainly, Tacitus observes the resemblance of Latin letters to Greek: this resemblance is from the times of Servius Tullius, when the Romans, in the judgment of Livy, would not have heard the name of even someone as famous as Pythagoras, who was teaching at his celebrated school in Croton; the same Romans who did not start their acquaintance with the Greeks of Italy prior to the occasion of the war with Tarentum, which led to the later war with Pyrrhus and the Greeks across the sea. 104. It is worth considering the statement of Dio Cassius,219 that what is customary is like a king, but the law is like a tyrant; this must be understood in terms of what is customary being reasonable, and of the law not being animated by natural reason.

308

This Axiom in its effects puts an end to that otherwise great dispute, namely, whether law exists in nature or in the opinions of men; this is the same as the dispute put forward in the corollary of Axiom 8, namely, whether human nature is sociable.

309

For grant that the natural law of the gentile peoples amounts to orders instituted by means of what is customary (which Dio says gives decrees like a king, through what is pleasing) and not orders instituted by laws (which Dio says gives decrees like a tyrant, through force). Grant that this is, first, because the natural law coming to be from those human customs comes from THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS—a subject to which this science is equal—and, second, because that law preserves human society—for there is not one thing more natural, because there is not one thing more pleasing, than giving observance to natural customs. Granting all this, human nature, from which such customs come, is sociable. This same Axiom, along with Axiom 8 and its corollary, demonstrates that man is not unjust by nature in an absolute sense, but by nature is fallen and weak: consequently, it demonstrates the first principle of the Christian religion—that is, an uncorrupted Adam, who was ideally and perfectly good as he was created by God—and, consequently, it demonstrates the Catholic principles of grace, a grace which works in man as one for whom there is a privation, not negation, of good works; and so, as one for whom there is a potency which is ineffectual; accordingly, there is an efficacious grace which, accordingly, cannot do its work w ­ ithout the   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.5.2.   Vico seems to have confused Dio Cassius (on whom see the note at §44) with Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–115 CE), Greek orator, writer, philosopher, and historian of the Roman Empire. The passage Vico cites is from Discourse 76, “On Custom,” though its direct source (as Battistini notes) is almost certainly Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.10. 218 219

310

106

The New Science principle of free choice; that choice is aided naturally by God by means of his divine providence, as was said above [§136] in the second corollary to Axiom 8; with respect to divine providence, the Christian religion agrees with all the other religions. It was upon this, rather than upon any other thing, that Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf220 ought to have founded their systems and so been in agreement with the Roman jurists, who defined the natural law of the gentile peoples as having been instituted by divine providence.

311

105. The natural law of the gentile peoples comes from the customs of nations, nations which conform with one another in a human common sense, without any reflection and without any one nation taking another as its example.

312

This Axiom, along with the statement by Dio to which we referred in the preceding Axiom, establishes that providence is the institutor [l’ordinatrice] of the natural law of the gentile peoples, because she is the queen of the affairs of men.

313

This same Axiom establishes the differences among the natural law of the Hebrews, the natural law of the gentile peoples, and the natural law of the philosophers. For the gentiles have only the ordinary aid of providence, whereas the Hebrews also have the extraordinary aid of the true God, on account of which the whole world of nations is divided by them into Hebrews and gentiles. And the philosophers reason more perfectly on this natural law than the gentiles practice it with their customs; philosophers, however, did not arrive until more than two thousand years after the gentiles founded that law. On account of not observing these three differences, the three systems of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf must fall.

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106. Doctrines must start from when the matters which they treat start.

315

This Axiom, placed here with the view to the particular subject matter of the natural law of the gentile peoples, is used universally for all the subject matter treated herein—hence, it could have been proposed with the other general axioms221. However, it is put here because the natural law, more than any other particular subject, makes one able to see its truth and the importance of making use of it. 220   Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), author of De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and one of Vico’s “four authors,” as named in his Autobiography. John Selden (1584– 1654), English jurist and scholar of Jewish law, and author of De iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinam Hebraeorum (1640). Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), German jurist, economist, and statesman, and author of De iure naturae et gentium (1672). Vico refers to the trio as the “three princes” of the teaching of the natural law of the gentile peoples (see §§329, 350, 493). 221   That is, the first twenty-two Axioms, as §164 makes clear.

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107. There are gentiles who had a start earlier than the cities. In Latin, they are called the gentes maiores—that is, the ancient noble households like those of the Fathers from whom Romulus composed the Senate, the Senate by which he composed the city. By contrast, those, in Latin, called gentes minores are the later noble households founded after the city, like those of the Fathers from whom Junius Brutus, after the expulsion of the kings, replenished the Senate, nearly depleted by the deaths of the senators killed by Tarquinius Superbus.222

316

108. There was such distinction among the gods. On the one hand, there were the gods of the greater gentiles—that is, the gods consecrated by the families existing prior to cities—of which were certainly twelve among the Greeks and Latins, and it will be proved [§§489–634] that there were twelve among the Assyrians—that is, the Chaldeans—and among the Phoenicians and Egyptians. That number of gods was so famous among the Greeks that they were understood with a single word, δώδεκα [do¯deka] and were gathered together in a confused manner in a Latin distich to which we referred in our Principles of Universal Law.223 Therefore, herein, in Book Two, in keeping with a natural theogony—that is, an account of generation of the gods made naturally in the minds of the Greeks—the gods issue forth in the following order: JOVE, JUNO, DIANA, APOLLO, VULCAN, SATURN, VESTA, MARS, VENUS, MINERVA, MERCURY, NEPTUNE. On the other hand, there are the gods of the lesser gentiles—that is, the gods consecrated by later peoples, such as Romulus, whom after his death the people of Rome named the god Quirinus.

317

Through these three Axioms, the three systems of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf are found wanting in their principles, which start from nations that regard one another a part of that society of all of humankind. The principle among all the earliest nations, as we will demonstrate herein [§§520–552], starts from the time of the families under the gods of the gentiles called “greater.”

318

109. Men with limited ideas deem the law to be only as much as what is said expressly by its words.

319

110. Golden is the definition that Ulpian assigns to civil equity: probablis quaedam ratio non omnibus hominibus naturaliter cognita [this is natural equity] sed paucis tantum qui prudentia usu doctrina praediti didicerunt quae ad societatis humanae conservationem sunt necessaria [“a kind of probable reasoning not naturally familiar to all human beings . . . but to those few who, preeminent in practical wisdom, practice, or learning,

320

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.10.   In fact, the Diritto universale quotes three lines (rather than a distich) from Lucilius, the earliest known Roman satirist. See De constantia iurisprudentis 2.20 (Cristofolini 515[1]). 222 223

108

The New Science teach what is necessary for the preservation of human society”]. This is what is called in fine Italian “reason of state.”224

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111. The certain, as it pertains to laws, is an obscurity of reason sustained solely by an authority, which we experience in their practical application as harsh, but whose practical application is necessary so that the laws are certain—this word signifies “particularized” in good Latin or, as the Schools say, “individuated”; in this sense, certum [“the certain”] and commune [“the common”] are opposite terms in a more elegant Latin.

322

This Axiom, along with the two definitions following it, constitutes the principle pertaining to narrow reason, whose rule is civil equity: men, in the barbarism of particular ideas, naturally acquiesce to the certainty of civil equity—that is, to the determinate particularity of its words— and deem that such a law must belong to them.225 Hence, what Ulpian says in such cases, that lex dura est sed scripta est [“the law is harsh, but it is written”],226 you could say in Latin, with greater beauty and more legal elegance, as lex dura est sed certa est [“the law is harsh, but it is certain”].

323

112. Men of intelligence deem the law to include the whole of what is called “equal advantage in cases.”

324

113. The true, as it pertains to laws, is a certain light and splendor by which natural reason illuminates them, whence, the same jurists used to say verum est [“it is true”] for aequum est [“it is equal”].227

325

This definition and Axiom 111 are particular propositions to make particular proofs in the matter of the natural law of the gentile peoples; they come from the general Axioms 9 and 10, which treat the true and the certain228 in a general way to draw conclusions in all of the materials that are treated herein.

326

114. The natural equity of a human reason, fully expressed, is a practice of wisdom for the doing of what is advantageous [faccende dell’utilità]. 224   The expression “ragion di Stato,” though often referring to a cluster of ideas associated with Machiavelli, occurs nowhere in Machiavelli’s texts. It is the key term of the title of the Jesuit Giovanni Botero’s book Della ragion di Stato, published in Venice in 1589, as well as the topic of Scipione Ammirato’s 1594 Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Book 12, Discourse 1, “Della ragione di Stato”). 225   For a particular example, see §191 on child sacrifice. 226   Ulpian (c. 170–223 CE), Roman jurist of the first importance for Vico. The citation is an inexact reference to Digest 40.9.12.1. The formulation that appears in the text reads durum est, sed ita lex scripta est. 227   Vico makes a similar claim about the verum and the aequum at Scienza nuova prima §242, and much earlier at De antiquissima 2; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. Jason Taylor (Yale University Press, 2010), 46[47]. 228   On the relation between the true and the certain, compare to Vico’s more elaborate treatment at De uno Proloquium (Cristofolini 35[30–31]; BV 39–40) and De uno 82–83 (Cristofolini 101; BV 40–42).

109

Book One Given this, wisdom, in its full amplitude, is nothing other than the science of making use of things, the use which they have in nature. This Axiom, along with the other two definitions following it, constitutes the principle pertaining to benign reason, ruled by natural equity, which is connatural to gentile nations. From this public school, it will be demonstrated, come the philosophers.

327

These last six propositions together confirm that providence was the institutor [l’ordinatrice] of the natural law of the gentile peoples; it is providence that permits that because the nations, during the course of many centuries, had to live without any capacity for the true and for natural equity (philosophers later gave greater clarity to this), they instead attended to the certain and to civil equity, which scrupulously guards the words of the orders and the laws, and by these words would be led to observe the orders and laws in a general way, even in cases where they seem harsh, for nations are thus preserved.

328

And these same six propositions, unknown to the three princes229 of the doctrine of the natural law of the gentile peoples, made that all three err together when establishing their systems. For they believed that natural equity in its ideal perfection had been understood by the gentile nations from their earliest starting points, and they believed this without reflecting that it took two thousand years for philosophers to arrive in any of these nations and without granting one people the privilege of the particular assistance of the true God.

329

On the Principles Now, so as to make an experiment testing whether the propositions enumerated so far as ELEMENTS of this science should give form to the MATERIALS arranged at the beginning in the Chronological Table, we beseech the reader to reflect upon all that has been written concerning the principles pertaining to any subject matter whatsoever from the whole of what may be known about things divine and human in gentile antiquity; and, in combining all this, to reflect whether it makes for any incongruity with these propositions, either in the whole of them, or in a majority, or even in a single proposition (for if so much as one proposition is incongruent, then all of them are, for each is congruous with all the others). It is certain that the reader who makes such a comparison will perceive that the things written up until now are, all and all, the commonplaces of a confused memory, the fancies of a poorly regulated imagination having no share in the intellect, which itself has been made idle by the two kinds of vanity enumerated in the Axioms above.230

229 230

  That is, Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf.   Axioms 3 and 4.

330

110

The New Science For, on the one hand, the vanity of the nations (each of them thinks that it was the earliest in the world) makes us dispirited about discovering the principles of this science among the philologists. On the other hand, the vanity of the learned (who want their wisdom to have been fully understood since the beginning of the world) puts us in despair about discovering these principles among the philosophers. Consequently, for this inquiry we must reckon as if there were no books in the world.

331

However, in this dense night of shadows, which cover over the earliest antiquity so distant from ourselves, there appears an eternal light which cannot be extinguished because of a truth which cannot, in any way, be called into doubt: that this civil world has certainly been made by men. Hence, these principles can be discovered, because they must be discovered, within the modifications of our own human mind.231 The following must induce wonder in anyone who reflects upon it: all the philosophers have so studiously pursued science of the natural world (since God made it, only God has science of the natural world) and have given no care to meditating upon this world of nations—that is, the civil world—about which, since men have made it, men can pursue science.232 This extravagance is the effect of the wretchedness we noticed in the Axiom233 concerning the human mind, that this mind, immersed and buried in a body, is naturally inclined towards sensing bodily things and must employ great strength and toil so as to understand itself as itself, in the same way that the bodily eye, which sees all the objects outside of itself, has need of a mirror so as to see itself.

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332

Now, given that this world of nations has been made by men, let us see upon what things men from perpetuity have agreed and always do agree. For such things can give us the universal and eternal principles that must belong to every science, upon which everything arises, and which preserves everything in nations.

333

We observe that all the nations—whether barbarous or humane, and in spite of being founded in vastly different ways on account of immense 231   Because human beings have made the civil world, they can know its principles, discovering them within the modifications “of our own human mind.” This claim by Vico is recognizably an application of the verum/-factum principle that he announces in his 1710 metaphysical book: “the true and the made are convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). (See De antiquissima 1.1; On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 16[14].) In the 1710 work, Vico deploys the verum-factum principle to elaborate a hierarchy of sciences, ordered from “most constructed” to “least constructed”—but stops short of applying the principle directly to the civil world. 232   Here and throughout, the key term scienza is translated by “science,” reserving “knowledge” for cognizione. Readers will want to look for both genuine continuities and deep differences between Vico’s use of the term scienza and the connotations of present-day “science.” 233   Axiom 63.

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distances from one another in place and time—are guardians of three human customs. They all have some religion, they all contract solemn marriages, and they all bury their dead. Nor among the nations—no matter how wild and crude—are any human actions observed with more searching ceremonies or with more sacred solemnities than religions, marriages, and burials. With a view to the Axiom234 that uniform ideas coming into being among peoples unknown to one another must have some common beginning in the true, it must have been stated to all of them that in these three things is the start of all humanity and that they, accordingly, must guard over them in the most sacred way lest the world become savage and return anew to wilderness. Accordingly, we have taken these three eternal and universal customs as the three first principles of this science. And do not let modern travelers accuse the first of our three principles of being false, those who tell us of the peoples of Brazil, of the Kaffir of Africa, and other nations of the New World (and Antoine Arnauld235 believes the same of those who inhabit the island called Antilles) that they live in society without any knowledge of God. Persuaded, perhaps, by them, Bayle236 affirms in his treatise, On Comets, that it is possible for peoples to live in keeping with justice without the light of God, which is more than Polybius affirmed in that statement for which he is praised, that had philosophers arisen in the world who lived by the strength of reason and not that of laws, there would have been no need for religion.237 These are the tales of travelers promoting their books with prodigious accounts. Certainly, in the case of Andreas Rüdiger238 (in his pompously entitled Divine Physics, which intends to find that one middle way between atheism and superstition), it was suggested by the censors at the University of Geneva (a quite weighty suggestion in that it comes from a place where, because it is a popular free republic, there must have been somewhat greater freedom in writing) that in expressing such sentiments Rüdiger spoke with too great an assurance, which is to say, with no small audacity.   Axiom 13, inexactly quoted.   Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Jansenist theologian and mathematician, member of Port-Royal. 236   Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), author of Pensées Diverses sur l’Occasion de la Comète (1681), as well as the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697). 237   On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179. 238   Johannes Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731), German philosopher and physicist. Author of Philosophica synthetica (1707), De sensu veri et falsi (1709), and Physica divina (1716), among other works. Vico’s description of the book’s intention is a paraphrase of the book’s full title: Physica divina: recta via, eademque inter superstitionem et atheismum media, ad utramque hominis felicitatem ducens. 234 235

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The New Science For all nations believe in a providential divinity; hence, one can find no more than four primary religions throughout the entire course of the time and throughout the breadth of this civil world. The first of these is that of the Hebrews and, consequently, the second is that of the Christians, both of whom believe in a divinity who is an infinite free mind. The third is that of the gentiles, who believe in many gods, each of whom is imagined to be composed of a body and a free mind; hence, when they intend to signify the divinity which rules over and conserves the world they say deos immortales [“the immortal gods”]. The fourth and last is that of the Mohammedans, who believe in a God who is an infinite free mind in an infinite body, for they look forward to the pleasures of the senses as rewards in the next life.

335

No nation has believed in a god who is all body, or in a god who is all mind, but which is not free. Consequently, neither the Epicureans (who allowed for a god who is only body and, along with this body, allowed for chance) nor the Stoics (who allowed for a god who is an infinite mind subject to fate in an infinite body and, in this respect, would have been followers of Spinoza) are able to reason about republics and their laws (Spinoza himself talks about the republic as if it were a society of merchants).239 On account of this, Cicero was right, in speaking to Atticus as an Epicurean, when he told him that he could not reason with Atticus about the laws unless he conceded that there is divine providence.240 This shows how poorly these two sects, the Stoics and Epicureans, comport with Roman jurisprudence, which puts divine providence first among its first principles.

336

Next, there is the opinion that the actual, certain couplings of free men with free women outside of the solemnity of marriages do not contain any natural harm: this has been reproved by all nations in the customs by which they religiously celebrate marriages and in the customs of defining couplings outside of marriage as a bestial sin, albeit one of a lesser rank. Insofar as such parents are not held in kinship by the necessary bond of law, they come to forsake their natural children. These children, whose parents can separate at any time, are abandoned by both and lie exposed to be devoured by dogs. And unless either a public or private humanity raises them up, they must grow without having anyone to teach them religion or language or any other human custom. Hence, inasmuch as this is what becomes of these children, they make this world of nations—one

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239   This might be a general allusion to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). It may also be a more specific reference to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus 7.8, published posthumously in 1677. 240   Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21.

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enriched and adorned with the fine arts of humanity—into the great forest of antiquity, the one through which the savage brutes of Orpheus wandered in profane, feral error when sons exercised a bestial lust upon their mothers and fathers upon their daughters; this is the infamy of a profane, lawless world which Socrates tried to prove is forbidden by human nature (but with reasoning from natural causes hardly proper to such proofs, for such couplings are naturally abhorrent to all nations and are not practiced by any save those, like the ancient Persians, in their final stage of corruption). Finally, as for the great principle of humanity which is burial, imagine a feral state in which human cadavers lie unburied upon the earth as food for crows or dogs: it is certain that, together with such bestial customs, there must come to be fields which are uncultivated, to say nothing of cities which are uninhabited; men would live in the fashion of pigs, coming to eat acorns gathered from the midst of the rotting of their own dead kin. Hence and with great reason, burials were defined with that sublime expression FOEDERA GENERIS HUMANI241 [“the covenants of humankind”], and, with less grandeur, were described to us by Tacitus242 as HUMANITATIS COMMERCIA [“the transactions of our humanity”]. Furthermore, the following is a tenet with which all gentile nations certainly agree, that souls will remain upon the earth restless and come to wander around their unburied bodies; consequently, souls do not die with their bodies, but are immortal (we are persuaded that such was once the consensus of the peoples of barbarian antiquity by the peoples of Guinea, as Hugo von Linschooten243 attests; by the peoples of Peru and Mexico, as Acosta244 attests in his De indicis; by the peoples who inhabit Virginia, as Thomas Harriot245 attests; by the peoples who inhabit New England, as Richard Whitbourne246 attests; by the peoples who inhabit the kingdom of Siam, as Joost Schouten247 attests). Hence, Seneca concludes quum de immortalitate loquimur non leve momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos aut colentium; hac persuasione publica utor248 [“when we are speaking about immortality, it is of great weight for us that this immortality is the   See Florus, Epitome 1.41.1; Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.19.3.   See Tacitus, Annals 6.19.3. 243   Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611), Dutch merchant, trader, and historian. 244   José de Acosta (c. 1539–1600), Spanish Jesuit and author of The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590). Vico’s reference is to p. 107 of a 1596 edition of the text published in Venice. 245   Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), English astronomer and physicist, sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles. 246   Richard Whitbourne (1579–1626), discoverer of Newfoundland. 247   Joost Schouten (c. 1600–1644), Dutch administrator in present-day Indonesia, burned at the stake for alleged homosexual activity. 248   An inexact rendering of Seneca, Moral Letters 117.6. 241 242

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The New Science c­ onsensus of human beings, who either fear or worship those under the earth; I myself employ this public conviction”].

On Method 338

In order for the ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES that have been taken up by this science to be complete, it remains for us in Book One to reason about the METHOD this science must use. For grant that this science must start where the subject matter starts, just as was proposed in the Axiom above:249 we have thus sought for this starting point, following the philologists, among the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, among the rocks of Amphion,250 among men born from the furrows of Cadmus251 or the hard oak of Virgil;252 and we have sought for it, following the philosophers, among the frogs of Epicurus, among the cicadas of Hobbes, among the simpletons of Grotius,253 among those of Pufendorf254 who are cast into the world without care or aid from God, as gullish and savage as the giants called Patagonians who they say have been discovered on the strait of Magellan—that is to say, we sought for it among the sons of Polyphemus of Homer, in whom Plato255 recognizes the first Fathers in the familial state. Such are the beginnings of humanity that the philologists and philosophers have offered this science! And grant that we must take our starting point in reasoning from the place where these men started to think in a human way and where, in their brutal savagery and unrestrained bestial liberty, there was no other means for domesticating the former and restraining the latter than some terrifying thought of some divinity, the fear of which, as was said in the Axiom above,256 is the only means powerful enough to reduce a ferocious liberty to duty. Granted all this, so as to retrieve the fashion in which this earliest of human thinking came into being in the world of gentile antiquity, we have encountered difficulties so harsh that it has cost us well over twenty years of research257 to descend from this gentle human nature of ours to a human nature so completely savage and brutal that   Axiom 16.   See §81. 251   For the legend of Cadmus as founder of Thebes, see Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.1–130. 252   See Virgil, Aeneid 8.315. 253   See Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis 2.2. 254   See Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2. 255  Plato, Laws 678c–681e. 256   Axiom 31. 257   This passage, which first appears in the 1730 New Science, is likely an allusion to Vico’s On the Most Ancient of Wisdom of the Italians, published twenty years earlier. Though this text resists any simple summary, part of its explicit intention is to discover recondite wisdom in the origins of the Latin language. 249 250

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we are completely forbidden from imagining it and only with great toil are we permitted to understand it.258 It is because of all this that we have to begin from the sort of knowledge of God of which no men are deprived, no matter how wild, savage, and brutal. Such knowledge, we will demonstrate, is the following: fallen man, in despair of all succor from nature, desires for a thing superior to nature which will save him. But this thing which is superior to nature is God. And this is the light which God has cast over all men.

339

This is confirmed by the following common human custom: aging libertine men, because they sense the loss of their natural strength, naturally return to religion.259 But these earliest men, who were later the princes of the gentile nations, must have engaged in thinking driven by the strong spurs of the most violent passions, which is the thinking of beasts. Consequently, we must proceed from a commonplace metaphysics—the one noted in the Axioms above260—and we will find that it was the theology of the poets. From this, we will seek that terrified thinking about some divinity which put some mode and measure upon the bestial passions of these forlorn men and rendered those passions human. From such thinking must have come into being the conatus261 proper to the human will, that of keeping under restraint the motions which the body imposes on the mind, either by completely quieting these motions, as a wise man does, or by at least directing them to better uses, as a civil man does. This restraint of the motion of bodies is certainly the effect of the freedom of human choice, and so of the free will, which is the house and home of all the virtues and, above all, of justice; when informed by justice, the will is subject to all that is just and to all the laws dictated by the just. For to give conatus to bodies would be tantamount to giving them 258   Here Vico rejects the claim (sometimes attributed to him) that the historian’s task is to empathetically “imagine” her way into the mentality of earlier times and nations. On the contrary, gentile antiquity cannot be imagined, even if it can be understood (but only with much difficulty). Vico repeats the claim at §378 and §700, calling it an “important observation” in the latter passage. 259   Compare to what the aged Cephalus tells Socrates, near the beginning of Plato’s Republic. The mythoi told about Hades, once laughed at, “now make his soul twist and turn because he fears they might be true” (330d–e). 260   Axiom 33. 261   Vico would certainly know the doctrine of conatus from Spinoza’s Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 6: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere (conatur) in its being.” It is possible that he also knows the doctrine from the Latin writings of Hobbes; see, e.g., De corpore 15.2. Also relevant are the occurrences of “endeavor” throughout Leviathan, particularly chapter 6.

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The New Science freedom to regulate their own motions, whereas it is the case that all bodies are agents of necessity in nature. And the things which the mechanists call “power,” “force,” and “conatus” are the insensate motions of bodies, by which they approach their center of gravity (as ancient mechanics would say) or by which they depart from their center of motion (as modern mechanics would say).

341

However, men, on account of their corrupted nature, are tyrannized by self-love, on account of which they pursue principally their own advantage. Hence, when they intend to keep everything advantageous for themselves and no share for companionship, it is not possible for them to place their passions under conatus so as to direct them towards justice. Consequently, we establish that man in the bestial state loves only his own safety; when he takes on a spouse and has children, he loves his own safety along with the safety of families; when he arrives at civil life, he loves his own safety along with the safety of the city; when he extends power over people other than his own, he loves his own safety along with the safety of those nations; and when nations unite in war, peace, alliances, or commerce, he loves his own safety along with the safety of the whole of humankind. In all these circumstances, man principally loves his own advantage. Therefore, it must be by nothing except divine providence that he is held within these orders to pay homage, in keeping with justice, to the orders of familial, civil, and finally human society. When, with a view to these orders, man cannot pursue what he wills, he wills, at least, to pursue that portion of the advantageous which is his due, that which is what is called “the just.” Hence, the rule for everything just among men is divine justice, which is administered by divine providence so as to preserve human society.

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Therefore, this science, in one of its principal aspects, must be a rational civil theology of divine providence, which seems to have been lacking up until now. For either philosophers have completely failed to recognize divine providence (as is the case with the Stoics and the Epicureans, the latter of whom say that it is the blind concurrence of roiling atoms, the former of whom say that it is a deaf chain of cause and effect dragging along everything that men do) or philosophers have considered divine providence only in the order of natural things (from here comes the natural theology they call metaphysics, in which they contemplate this attribute of God and confirm it in the physical order in which is observed the motions of bodies, such as the motion of the spheres and the elements, and in the final cause beyond the other lesser natural things observed). And philosophers also ought to have reasoned about divine providence in the economy of the civil things and by means of the term which properly specifies providence, “divine,” derived from divinari [“to divine”]— that is, to understand either “what is hidden to men” (hidden in the sense of “what is to come”) or “what is hidden within men” (in the sense of

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the conscience [coscienza]262). This—the divine things—is what properly occupies the first part of the subject of jurisprudence, upon which the other, accompanying part—the human things—depends. Hence, this science must be a demonstration, so to speak, of the history of providence in what is actual, for it must be a history of the orders which providence has given (without any human discernment or counsel, and often contrary to what human beings have proposed) to this great city of humankind; the orders which providence has posited, although this world was created in time and is particular, are nevertheless universal and eternal. Because of all this, within the contemplation of that infinite and eternal providence, this science discovers certain divine proofs by which it is confirmed and demonstrated.

343

Insofar as divine providence has omnipotence as its minister, it ought to articulate its orders in ways as easy as natural human customs. Insofar as it has infinite wisdom as its counselor, whatever it disposes ought to be perfectly ordered. Insofar as it has its own immeasurable goodness as its end, whatever it orders ought to be directed towards a good which is always superior to any good proposed by men. Because of all this, in the deplorable obscurity of the beginnings of nations and in the countless variety of their customs and on the basis of a divine argument which contains all the human things, no more sublime proofs are possible than these, which give us the naturalness, the order, and the end that are the preservation of humankind. These proofs turn out to be luminous and distinct263 when we reflect upon how great is the facility by which these things come into being and upon the occasions (often quite far apart and sometimes completely contrary to what men propose) from which these things come and harmonize among themselves: such are the proofs to which omnipotence ministers. In combination with this reflection, look upon the order in which the things which ought to come into being now do come into being at their proper times and in their proper places and by other things defer their coming into being until their time and place, in which consists, as Horace264 revealed, the beauty of order: such are the proofs which eternal wisdom arranges. And, finally, consider whether we are capable of understanding whether by those occasions, places, and times, it would have been possible for different divine benefits to have come into being by which, the needs and infirmities of men such as they are, it would have been possible to ­conduct

  See the note at §137 on coscienza. In the present context, “conscience” is more appropriate than “consciousness.” 263   Luminose e distinte—an echo of Descartes’s “clear and distinct.” Similar echoes can be heard at §§367, 390, 444, 502, 905. 264  Horace, Ars poetica 42–45. 262

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The New Science human society in a better way toward the good and to preserve it: such are the proofs which the eternal goodness of God will give.

345

Hence the proof proper to this work will be the one made continuously herein by combining such considerations and reflecting upon whether the human mind, within the series of possibilities which it is permitted to understand and to the extent that it is permitted to understand, can think of a greater or lesser or alternative number of causes than that from which issue the effects of this civil world. Doing this will prove for the reader to be a divine pleasure265 in this mortal body, that of contemplating, in the divine ideas, this world of nations throughout the whole extent of its places, times, and varieties. And the reader will find the Epicureans convinced by what is actual that their chance cannot wander about madly and always find a way out; and the Stoics convinced that the eternal chain of causes with which they want to bind the world itself hangs from the omnipotence, wisdom, and benevolence of a good and great God.

346

These sublime natural theological proofs will be confirmed for us by the subsequent kinds of logical proofs which, in reasoning about the origins of things divine and human in gentile antiquity, will reach those earliest origins beyond which it is foolish curiosity to ask after ones which are earlier. This is the characteristic proper to principles. These proofs articulate the particular fashions of their coming-into-being [il nascimento], what is called “nature” [natura], which is the most proper mark of science. Finally, these proofs are confirmed by the eternal properties which preserve things that could not have come to be [nate] except by such and not other comings-into-being [nascimenti], at such times and places and in such fashions—that is, by such natures, as was proposed in the two Axioms above.266

347

So as to come to find such natures for human things, this science proceeds by a strict analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or advantages of social life, which are the two perennial sources of the natural law of the gentile peoples, as also noted in an Axiom above.267 Hence, for its second principal aspect, this science is a history of human ideas, upon which, it seems, must proceed the metaphysics of the human mind. This metaphysics, queen of the sciences, on account of the Axiom268 stating that the sciences must take their starting points from the place where the subject matter starts, takes its starting point, then, from the place where these earliest men started to think in a human way, not yet from the place when philosophers started to reflect on human ideas, as was recently brought to light in an erudite and learned little   On the “divine pleasure,” see Longinus, On the Sublime 36.1; Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.28; Dante, Paradiso 33.33. 266   Axioms 14 and 15. 267   Axiom 11. 268   Axiom 106. 265

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book entitled Historia de ideis,269 which proceeds all the way up to the recent controversies between Leibniz and Newton, the two foremost geniuses of our age. And so as to make determinate the times and places of a history of this sort, namely, when and where those human thoughts came into being, and so to give certainty to them by means of a chronology and a geography which are, so to speak, metaphysical, this science uses an art of criticism which is also metaphysical, applied to the authors of these same nations, nations which must have had to run a course of more than a thousand years so as to be able to bring forth the writers with whom philological criticism has up until now been occupied.

348

And the criterion which serves this art of criticism, as was proposed in the Axiom above,270 is what is taught by divine providence in common to all nations—that is, the common sense of humankind itself, made determinate by their necessary agreement about these same human things, an agreement which makes for all the beauty in this civil world. Consequently, the following kind of proof rules in this science: the things of the nations that are reasoned about by this science are such that they HAD TO BE, HAVE TO BE, AND WILL HAVE TO BE, posited as such orders by divine providence, even if from one time to the next, infinite worlds came to be from eternity (in actuality, this is certainly false).271 Hence, this science, at the same time, comes to describe an ideal eternal history upon which the histories of all the nations run their temporal course in their emergence, progress, maturity, decadence, and end. Indeed, we would hasten to affirm that the one who meditates upon this science tells himself this entire eternal history: since this world of nations has certainly been made by men—that indubitable first principle proposed above [§331]—and since, accordingly, the fashion in which this world comes into being must be discovered within the modifications of our own human mind, therefore, in the proof that it HAD TO BE, HAS TO BE, AND WILL HAVE TO BE, he makes this world himself; for when the one who makes the things is also the one who tells their history, there can be no history more certain. So, this science proceeds exactly in the way that geometry, in constructing a world upon its elements and contemplating it, makes that world of quantity; however, this science makes a world all the more real inasmuch as the orders concerning the deeds of men have more reality than do 269   That is, the 1723 book by Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), Historia philosophica doctrinae de ideis, qua tum veterum imprimis graecorum tum recentiorum philosophorum placita enarrantur. 270   Axiom 12. 271   An allusion to Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De l’infinito universo et mondi, published in Venice in 1584.

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The New Science points, lines, planes, and figures.272 And this itself is an argument that such proofs are of a divine kind and should, O reader, bring about a divine pleasure, since, in God, the knowing and the making are one and the same thing.

350

Furthermore, through the definitions of the true and the certain proposed above,273 there was a long period of time when men could not be capable of the true or of reason—that is, of the source of inner justice by which they satisfy the intellect. This inner justice was practiced by the Hebrews who, illuminated by the true God, were prohibited by divine laws from even having thoughts that were less than just, about which no mortal lawgiver ever troubled himself. For the Hebrews believed in a God who is all mind, searching the hearts of men, whereas the gentiles believed in gods composed of body and mind who could not do this. Later, this inner justice was reasoned upon by philosophers, but these philosophers did not arrive until two thousand years after their nations were founded. Therefore, throughout this long period of time, men were governed by what is certain in authority, namely, by that same criterion which the metaphysical art of criticism uses—that is, the common sense of humankind itself—the source of the definition proposed above in the Elements,274 upon which rests the consciences of all the nations. As a result, from another principal perspective, this science comes to be a philosophy of authority, which is the source of the “external justice” of which the moral theologians speak. It is about this authority that the three princes of the doctrine of natural law of the gentile peoples ought to have had some account, not about an authority drawn from the commonplaces of writers who could have no reckoning of it: such authority ruled among nations for more than a thousand years before writers arrived. Hence, Grotius (more learned and more erudite than the other two) fights with the Roman jurists on almost every particular subject of his teaching on natural law,275 but all his blows fall short because the jurists establish their principles concerning the just upon what is certain from the authority of humankind, not upon the authority of the learned.

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272   Here Vico’s claim is that human beings can know the civil world, precisely because they make it. In this way, The New Science seems to endow history with the same intelligibility that his 1710 On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians attributes to geometry. One may compare Vico’s conception to Hobbes: “Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth” (Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics, in W. Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 7 [London, 1845], 184). 273   Axiom 10. 274   Axiom 12. 275   See Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena §53.

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These are the philosophical proofs that this science will use and, consequently, the ones absolutely necessary so as to pursue this science.

351

The philological proofs ought to have the last place. They can all be traced back to the following kinds. First, the things upon which we meditate agree with our account of various myths, an agreement which is not forced or contorted, but straightforward, easily obtained, and natural; these myths will be seen to be the civil histories of the earliest peoples, who are found everywhere to have naturally been poets.

352

Second, these things also agree with the heroic turns of phrase, which are explained by the full truth of their sentiments and the full propriety of their expression.

353

Third, these things also agree with the etymologies of native languages, which tell the histories of the things which terms signify, starting with the properties they had at their origins and following from there the natural progress of their movement according to the order of ideas, upon which the history of languages must proceed, as was premised in the Axioms.276

354

Fourth, a mental dictionary of the human things pertaining to our sociability is articulated, things sensed as the same in substance by all nations and articulated by as many different modifications as there are different languages, as discussed in the Axiom above.277

355

Fifth, the true is sifted from the false in everything that has been guarded over the period of many centuries by folk traditions; these folk traditions, insofar as they themselves have been guarded over a long age and by entire peoples, must have had some public foundation in the true, as the Axiom above278 proposes.

356

Sixth, the great fragments of antiquity—useless to science up until now because they lay squalid, broken, and out of place—draw out a great light when polished, put together, and put back in place.

357

Seventh and last, upon all these things, as upon their necessary causes, rest all of the effects which are told to us by certain history.

358

These philological proofs serve to make us able to see, in what is actual, the things meditated upon in idea concerning this world of nations; this is in accordance with the method of philosophizing of Lord Verulam— that is, the method of cogitare videre [“to think, to see”].279 Hence, it is through the philosophical proofs which were previously made that the philological proofs which come after are, at the same time, confirmed by the authority of reason and confirm reason by an authority of their own.

359

  Axioms 17, 18, 64, and 65.   Axiom 22. 278   Axiom 16. 279   On Bacon’s Cogitata et visa, see the note at §163. 276 277

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The New Science Let us conclude, from all that has been discussed concerning the ­ STABLISHMENT OF THE PRINCIPLES of this science, that given E that its principles are divine providence, the moderation of the passions in connection with marriage, and the immortality of the human soul in connection with burial; and given that it uses the criterion of judgment that what is sensed to be just by all, or the greater part, of men ought to be the rule of sociable life; and given that, on such principles and criterion, there is agreement between the commonplace wisdom of all the lawgivers and the recondite wisdom of the best-reputed philosophers, then these ought to be the boundaries of human reason: let anyone who should wish to pass beyond them see to it that he does not pass beyond all humanity.

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On Poetic Wisdom

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Through that which was stated above in the Axioms1—namely, that all the histories of the gentile nations have had mythical beginnings, and that among the Greeks, from whom we have all that we have concerning gentile antiquity, the earliest wise men were theological poets,2 and the nature of things that have ever come to be or been made points towards the rudeness of their origins3—it is in such terms and not otherwise that we must deem the origins of poetic wisdom.

361

And what is deemed high and sovereign in this wisdom has reached us, this has come to be because of the two kinds of vanity discussed in the Axioms above:4 first, the vanity of the nations and, second, the vanity of the learned; and more so from vanity of the learned than from the vanity of the nations. Through the vanity of the learned, just as Manetho,5 the Egyptian high priest, translated all of Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology, as we state in the Axioms,6 so too the Greek philosophers translated their history into philosophy. And they did so not only through what as we also saw above in the Axioms7—namely, that both those histories had become befouled—but also through the following five causes. The first cause was reverence for religion, for it was by myths that the gentile nations everywhere were founded upon religion. The second cause was the grand effect following thereupon, namely, this civil world, so wisely ordered that it could not have been effected except by a superhuman wisdom. The third cause was occasions, as we will see herein [§515], which these myths offer to the philosophers (assisted by the veneration of religion and by belief in such wisdom) for conducting inquiry into and for meditating upon the highest things in philosophy. The fourth cause was conveniences, which we make known herein, allowing them to explain the sublime matters of the things upon which they meditated in philosophy by means of the expressions that the poets happened to leave for them. The fifth and last cause, worth all of them together, was the proof those philosophers found for the things upon which they meditated in connection with the authority of religion and the wisdom of the poets. Of these five causes, the first two contain the praises of divine wisdom offered by the philosophers, and the last contains the testimony which, in their very errors, they offer to the divine wisdom which ordered this world of nations. The third and fourth causes are the deceptions permitted by divine providence from which would arrive philosophers to   Axiom 46.   Axiom 44. 3   Axioms 65–68. 4   Axioms 3–4. 5   On Manetho, see the note at §46. 6   Axiom 55. 7   Axiom 54. 1 2

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The New Science understand and to recognize providence as it truly is, as an attribute of the true God.

363

And throughout Book Two, it will be shown that as much as the poets first had sensed concerning commonplace wisdom, the philosophers later understood concerning recondite wisdom. As a result, the former can be said to be the sense, and the latter the intellect, of humankind. Because of this, it is generally true for humankind what Aristotle8 said particularly about each man: nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu [“there is nothing in the intellect except what was previously in the senses”]—that is, the human mind does not understand a thing for which there is not some impetus from the senses, what metaphysicians today call the “occasion.”9 And so, the mind uses the intellect when, from a thing that it senses, it gathers some other thing that is not contained under the senses. This is the proper meaning in Latin of intelligere [“to understand”].10

On Wisdom in General 364

Now, prior to reasoning about POETIC WISDOM, it is necessary for us to see in general what kind of thing this wisdom is. Wisdom is the faculty that commands all the disciplines; by these, all the sciences and arts that complete our humanity are apprehended. Plato11 defines wisdom as that which is the perfecter of man. Man, in the being proper to him as a man, is nothing other than mind and spirit, or, I mean to say, intellect and will. Wisdom must complete the human in both of these two parts, and the completion of the second follows from the completion of the first, such that, because of a mind illuminated by knowledge of the things that are highest, the spirit is led to the choice of the things which are best. The highest things in this universe are those that come from attending to and reasoning about God. The best things are those that look to the good of the whole of humankind. The former are called the “divine things,” and the latter, the “human things.” Therefore, true wisdom must teach knowledge of the divine things so as to conduct the human things towards the highest good.   See Aristotle, De anima 3.8, 432a.   The reference is to Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) and his followers. 10   Vico makes a similar claim about the interchangeability of intelligere with perfecte legere (“to gather fully”) at De antiquissima 1.1; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 16[14]. 11   See Plato, Alcibiades I, 124b–130e. Vico also refers to this passage in his 1732 oration De mente heroica (Battistini, p. 378). 8 9

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We believe that Marcus Terentius Varro (who deserved the title “most learned of the Romans”12) erected, on this basis, his great work, Rerum divinarum et humanarum, for which the injustice of time has made us feel a great loss. In this book, we will treat these things to the extent allowed by the weakness of our learning and the sparseness of our erudition. Wisdom among the gentiles starts with the Muse, who is defined by Homer13 in a golden passage in his Odyssey as “science of good and evil,” which was later called “divination”; it is upon the natural prohibition of this (because it is a thing naturally denied to men) that God founded the true religion of the Hebrews, from which comes our Christian religion, as was proposed in the Axioms above.14 Thus, this Muse must have originally been, in its proper sense, the science of divining the auspices, which—as was said in an Axiom15 above and will be stated below [§381]—was the commonplace wisdom of all nations for contemplating God by the attribute of his providence, through which divinari God is named in his essence “divinity” [divinità]. And because of such wisdom, we will see below that wise men were the theological poets who certainly founded the humanity of Greece—hence, in Latin, judicial astrologers are called “professors of wisdom.”16 Subsequently, “wisdom” was later used of men noted for the advantageous counsels they gave to humankind, such as those who were called the seven wise men of Greece. Later, “wisdom” came to be used of men who, for the good of peoples and nations, wisely ordered republics and governed them. After this, the term “wisdom” came in addition to signify the science of natural divine things—that is, metaphysics—which, accordingly, was called divine knowledge: this science comes to know the mind of man in God, and because of the fact that it knows God to be the source of whatever is true, it knows him as the ruler of whatever is good. As a result, metaphysics must essentially work towards the good of humankind, whose preservation rests upon the universal sense that divine providence exists; hence, perhaps Plato deserved the title, “divine,” because he demonstrated this and, accordingly, science which denies such a God and such an attribute should be called “folly” rather than “wisdom.” Finally, wisdom among the Hebrews, and subsequently among us Christians, was called the science of eternal things revealed by God. The  Drawn from Augustine, City of God 6.4.2.  Homer, Odyssey 8.63. 14   Axiom 24. 15   Here Vico misremembers his own text. The reference is actually to the section on Method, §342. 16   The title “professor of wisdom” was attributed by Celso (in De medicina) to Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus. 12 13

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The New Science ­ riginal term for this knowledge among the Etruscans, perhaps on aco count of its aspect as the science of what is truly good and truly evil, was “science in divinity.”

366

Consequently, we must make out three kinds of theology, with more truth than those kinds that Varro made out.17 First, there is poetic theology, that of the theological poets—which was the civil theology of all the gentile nations. Second, there is natural theology—which is that of the metaphysician. And, in place of the third kind proposed by Varro— which is the poetic theology that among the gentiles was the same as civil theology, but which Varro distinguished from both civil and natural theology because, led astray by the common folk error that within the myths are contained the high mysteries of sublime philosophy, he believed it to be a mixture of civil and natural theology—we instead propose, as the third kind, our Christian theology, a mixture of civil, natural, and the highest revealed theology, all three of which are conjoined in the contemplation of divine providence. This divine providence has conducted the human things in such a way that starting from a poetic theology (this regulated the human things by certain sensible signs believed to be divine indications sent to men from the gods) and passing through the medium of a natural theology (this demonstrates providence through eternal reasons which do not fall under the senses), the nations were disposed to receive a revealed theology on the strength of a supernatural faith, superior not only to the senses, but also to human reason itself.

An Exposition and Partitioning of Poetic Wisdom 367

However, because metaphysics is a sublime science which partitions, into their certain subjects, all the sciences which are called “subaltern,” and because the wisdom of the ancients was that of theological poets—who unarguably were the first wise men of gentile antiquity, as was established in the Axioms18—and because the origins of all things must by nature be rude, we must, on account of all this, allow that POETIC WISDOM started from a rude metaphysics; that from this metaphysics, as from a trunk, spread, through one branch, a logic, a morals, an economics, and a politics—all of which were poetic—and, through a second branch, likewise poetic, spread a physics, which was the mother of a cosmography and, consequently, an astronomy, rendered more certain by its two children, chronology and geography. And we will make it possible to see, in each of these clear and distinct fashions, how the founders of gentile humanity by their natural ­theology—that is, their metaphysics—imagined the gods; how by their

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17 18

  Compare Augustine, City of God 6.5–7.   Axiom 44.

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Book Two logic they discovered languages; how by their morality they generated the heroes; how by their economics they founded families, by their politics, cities. We will show how by their physics, they established principles for all the divine things; how by a physics particular to man, they, in a certain mode, generated their very selves; how by their cosmography, they devised an entire universe of gods; how by their astronomy they brought the planets and the constellations from Earth to the heavens; how by their chronology they offered a beginning to historical times; and by with their geography, the Greeks, for the sake of example, described the world within Greece itself. In such a manner, this science comes to be, in one breath, a history of the ideas, customs, and deeds of humankind; and from all three histories will come the principles of the history of human nature, these being the principles of a universal history, which seems to have been lacking its own principles.

368

On the Universal Flood and the Giants The authors of gentile humanity must have been men from the races of Ham, Japheth, and Shem, who one after another—almost immediately in the case of Ham, somewhat later for Japheth, and last of all for Shem—gradually renounced the true religion of their common father, Noah, which alone in the familial state was able to hold them in human society by the society of marriage and, therefore, in those same families. And, accordingly, they must have dissolved those marriages and dispersed those families because of uncertain couplings; and, by a feral error, wandered throughout the great forest of the Earth (the race of Ham wandering throughout southern Asia, Egypt, and the rest of Africa; the race of Japheth throughout northern Asia—that is, Scythia—and Europe; the race of Shem throughout middle Asia up to the Near East) and through their flight from wild beasts, which the ancient forest must have had in abundance, and through their pursuit of women who in that state must have been wild, shy, and reluctant; and, scattered thus through their search for food and water, mothers abandoned their children, who must have gradually grown up without hearing a human voice, much less apprehending human customs. Hence, they came to a state completely bestial and feral. In this state, mothers, like beasts, only nursed their babies and otherwise left them to wallow in their own filth and, as soon as they were weaned, abandoned them forever; these children must have wallowed in a filth which wondrously enriched the fields in nitrous salts and made efforts to penetrate into the great forest which, from the recent flood, must have been very dense; through these efforts, their muscles must have, first, contracted, then extended, whence those nitrous salts were absorbed in greater amounts into their bodies; and, without the

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The New Science fear of God, parents, or teachers which cools that surliness of childhood, they must have become disproportionately great in flesh and bone and grown so vigorous and robust that they became giants.19 This is a feral education, at a level more savage than that which—as was noted in the Axiom20 above—Caesar and Tacitus found to be the cause of the gigantic stature of the ancient Germans, and from which comes the stature of the Goths of which Procopius21 spoke and the stature of the Patagonians today who are believed to exist near the Strait of Magellan, concerning which philosophers in physics have said so much foolishness, collected by Chassanion, who wrote De gigantibus.22 The huge skulls and oversized bones belonging to these giants have been found and are all the time being found, for the most part in the mountains—a particular detail quite relevant to things which we have to say below [§377]—and their size was further exaggerated by folk traditions, on account of something that we will discuss in its proper place [§387].

370

Giants of this sort were spread over the Earth after the flood. Given this, just as we have seen them [§193] in the mythical history of the Greeks, so too the Latin philologists, without seeing it, have told us about them in the ancient history of Italy when they say that the most ancient peoples of Italy—called the aborigini—claimed that they were αυτόχθονες [autochthones], which is to say that they were “sons of the Earth,” which meant, in Greek and in Latin, “nobles.” And with complete propriety, these sons of the Earth were called “giants” by the Greeks, whence myths tell us that Earth was the mother of the giants. And αυτόχθονες in Greek must be rendered indigenae in Latin, who, in the proper sense, are those born of some land, just as gods born of some people or nation are claimed to be dii indigetes,23 a contracted form of inde geniti which we would write even more concisely as ingeniti24 (this is insofar as the syllable, de, is one of the redundancies of the earliest languages of peoples about which we will reason herein [§462]; so, for example, in early Latin, they wrote induperator25 for imperator, and in the Laws of the Twelve Tables, there is ENDOIACTIO for iniictio; hence, perhaps they spoke of induciae, “armistices,” as if they were iniiciae, for they would have called them this in the sense of icere foedus, “peace pacts made”); so, for the present case about which we are reasoning, that of indigeni, from it was derived ingenui, which in its primary and proper sense signifies nobili, whence are derived the artes ingenuae, “the noble arts,” which eventually came to signify liberi, but even the artes liberales derived their significance from the artes nobili, for the earliest cities, as we will demonstrate below [§586], were   Compare Tacitus, Germania 20.1 and Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.925–932.   Axiom 26. 21   Procopius of Caesarea (c. 500–554), noted Byzantine historian. 22   Jean Chassanion (1531–1598), author of De gigantibus eorum reliquiis (1580). 23   See Virgil, Georgics 1.498; Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.2.6. 24   See G. J. Voss, Etymologicon, p. 308. 25   See Cicero, De divinatione 1.48; Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.967 and 5.1227. 19 20

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composed only of nobles, of whom the plebeians were slaves or the precursors of slaves. These same Latin philologists26 observe that all ancient peoples were called aborigini, and sacred history tells us of whole peoples who were called the Enim and the Zamzummim; and those who are learned in the sacred language explain that they were giants, one of whom was Nimrod. And this same sacred history defines the giants as the strong, famous, powerful men of their age,27 for the Hebrews, by their education in cleanliness and by their fear of God and their Fathers, remained the correct stature in which God had created Adam and in which Noah had procreated his three sons. Hence, it is perhaps because they considered the giants an abomination that the Hebrews had so many ceremonial laws which pertained to the cleanliness of their bodies. And the Romans preserved a great vestige of this in the public sacrifice by which they believed the city was purged of all the sins of citizens, a sacrifice which they made with water and fire, the same two things with which they also celebrated solemn nuptials; and, moreover, citizenship rested upon being part of the community sharing these two things, and accordingly to be deprived of citizenship was said to be interdictum aqua et igni28 [“prohibited from taking part in water and fire”]. And this sacrifice was called the lustrum,29 which signified a period of five years (just as the Olympiad signified a period of four years for the Greeks) because it was within this amount of time that they made the sacrifice again. And lustrum among the Romans signified a “den of wild beasts,” whence the verb lustrari signifies both “to frequent” such dens and “to purge” such dens; it must have originally signified the frequenting of dens of this sort for the purpose of purging them of the wild beasts there within. And aqua lustrates continued to name the water needed for the sacrifices. And the Romans were perhaps more discerning than the Greeks, who counted the start of years from the fire by which Hercules burned down the Nemean forest so as to plant grain. Hence, Hercules—as was indicated in the “Idea of the Work” [§3] and will be seen more fully later [§733]—founded the Olympiads upon this, and we say the Romans, in counting the start of historical times from the water of their sacred cleansings for the lustrum, were more discerning insofar as they held the start of humanity to be with water, the necessity of which was understood before fire, just as in the expressions for nuptials and for the prohibition from citizenship they say, first, “water” and, then “fire.” And this is the origin of those sacred cleansings that must precede sacrifices, which were a custom of, and are common to, all the nations.   See Pliny, Natural History 3.56.   On the description of prelapsarian men as giants, see Augustine, City of God 16.4. 28   See Cicero, De domo sua 30.78. 29   See Virgil, Aeneid 3.279. 26 27

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The New Science By such cleanliness of the body and by fear of the gods and of the ­fathers—which will be found, in both cases, to have been in the earliest times because of the greatest terror—it came to pass that the giants decreased to our correct stature; it is perhaps because of this that from πολιτεία [politeia], by which the Greeks mean “civil governance,” the Latins came to use the term politus, meaning “polished” and “neat.”30

372

Their decrease in stature must have continued to happen down to the human times of nations, as is demonstrated by the excessively large arms of the old heroes, which, as Suetonius31 relates, Augustus preserved along with the bones and skulls of ancient giants in his museum. Consequently, as was discussed in the Axioms,32 the whole of the earliest world must have been made up of two kinds of men: first, the men of the correct stature who, in that early world, were only the Hebrews; and, second, the giants, who were the authors of the gentile nations. And the giants were made up of two kinds. First, there were the sons of the earth—that is, the nobles—who gave their name to the age of giants, in the full and proper sense of this term, as was stated [§370]; and sacred history has defined them for us as “the strong, famous, powerful men of their age.” Second, there were those who were less properly called giants, those giants ruled by the sons of the earth who were their lords.

373

The time marking the arrival of authors of this sort, authors of the gentile nations, is determined to be one hundred years after the flood for the race of Shem, and two hundred years for the races of Japheth and Ham, as was held in a postulate above;33 and, shortly hereafter [§387], we will draw out the physical history which, although Greek myths tell of it, has not been noticed up until now, and we will give, for this same time period, an alternative physical history of the Universal Flood [§380].

On Poetic Metaphysics,

in which are given the origins of poetry, idolatry, divination, and sacrifices 374

It is from earliest men of this sort—stupid, insensate, horrific beasts— that all the philosophers and philologists should have started in reasoning about the wisdom of gentile antiquity. That is, they should have   For the derivation of politus from politeia, see Voss, Etymologicon, p. 461.   See Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Augustus 72. 32   Axiom 27. 33   Axiom 42, and see §62. 30 31

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started from giants taken, as they just were, in proper significance of the term (concerning this, Father Boulduc,34 in his De ecclesia ante legem, says that the term “giant” in the sacred books signifies “pious, venerable, brilliant men,” but one can only understand the noble giants to be as such, those who, by divination, founded religions for the gentiles and gave their name to the age of giants). And those philosophers and philologists should have started from a metaphysics such as this, one which takes its proof not from without, but from within the modifications of the mind of the one who meditates upon it; and because, as we said above [§331], this world of nations has certainly been made by men, it is within these modifications that one must look to find the beginnings of that world. And human nature, to the extent that it is a nature shared in common with beasts, takes on the following property: the senses are the only way in which that nature knows things. Therefore, the poetic wisdom which was the earliest wisdom of gentile antiquity should start from a metaphysics not reasoned out and abstracted like that of the learned today, but sensed and imagined, as it must have been for those earliest men, like those who have no share in ratiocination and are all robust senses and the most vigorous imaginations, as was established in the Axioms.35 This metaphysics was the poetry proper to them, the poetry which, in them, was a faculty connatural to them, for they were naturally furnished with senses and imaginations of this sort, and it was a poetry that came to be from the ignorance of causes, which is the mother of wonder at all things—that is, those who are ignorant of all things have a strong sense of wonder at them, as was indicated in the Axioms.36 Such poetry takes its start in them as a divine poetry, for, at that time, they imagined that the causes of the things which they sensed and at which they wondered were gods—as we saw with Lactantius in the Axioms37; and as we confirm now with the Americans who call gods all the things which surpass their small capacity, to whom we connect the ancient Germans living near the Arctic Sea, of whom Tacitus38 tells us that they said that they heard the sun at night as it passed from west to east under the sea. And in affirming that they saw gods, the nations, most rude and simple, allow us to understand better those authors of gentile antiquity upon whom we now reason herein: at that same time, we would say, those authors gave the things at which they wondered the being of substances drawn from their own ideas, which is exactly the nature of   Jacques Boulduc (1575–c. 1646), French theologian and Capuchin monk, author of De ecclesia ante Legem (1626). 35   Axiom 36. 36   Axioms 35 and 39. 37   Axiom 38. 38  Tacitus, Germania 45.1. 34

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The New Science children—who, as was proposed in an Axiom,39 take inanimate things in their hands, play with them, and pretend to talk with them as if they were living persons. In this fashion, the earliest men of gentile nations, like the children of an emerging humankind—as was also discussed in the Axioms40—created, from their own ideas, the very things themselves. However, this was still infinitely different from the creating God does insofar as God, in his purest understanding, knows things and, in knowing them, creates them; those men, on account of their robust ignorance, made things on the strength of a most corporeal imagination, and, because it was so corporeal, they made them with a sublimity so wondrous and so great in its wonder that it disturbed the very men who, in devising things, thus created them; hence, they were called poets, which, in Greek, means the same as “creators.” There are three kinds of labor that must make for great poetry: to discover sublime myths made for a popular understanding; to excite an ecstatic pursuit of the end which the poetry has proposed; and to teach the common run to do virtuous works, just as they themselves have taught themselves, as will presently be shown [§379]. And in that nature of human things abides an eternal property articulated by the noble expression of Tacitus:41 men who are terrified emptily fingunt simul creduntque [“believe in something the moment they devise it”]. With such natures should one discover the earliest authors of gentile humanity at a time two hundred years after the flood for the rest of the world and one hundred in Mesopotamia (this was stated in a postulate,42 for such was the amount of time needed to reduce the earth to a state in which it had dried enough from the dampness of the Universal Flood to emit dry exhalations—that is, the materials igniting in the air to generate lightning43), the heavens finally flashed lightning, and thundered with lightning and thunder all the more terrifying since it must have come to pass that it introduced into the air for the first time so violent an impression. At that time, since a few giants (who must have been the more robust of those spread throughout the wooded places up high on the mountains where, like wild beasts, they had their dens) were terrified and surrounded by a great effect whose cause they did not know, they raised their eyes and looked to the heavens.44 And because, in such a case, the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect, as was   Axiom 37.   Axiom 37. 41  Tacitus, Annals 5.10.2. Compare Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum 1 (Works I, pp. 455–456). 42   Axiom 42, and see §62. 43   Compare Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.1220. 44   Compare Plato, Cratylus 398c and Republic 9, 568a, as well as Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.85–86. 39 40

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stated in the Axioms,45 and because their nature in this state was that of men who, being all robust bodily strength, express their quite violent passions through shouts and grunts, they devised a heaven which is one great animated body and which, in this aspect, they called JOVE—the first god of the so-called gentes maiores—who, in the sizzle of his lightning and the crash of his thunder, intended to say something to them. And so, they started to give currency to the natural curiosity which, as it is defined in the Elements above,46 is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of science, which it begets whenever wonder makes our minds open. This nature, in every way, stubbornly persists in the common run. Whenever they see something like either a comet or a parhelion or some other extraordinary thing in nature, particularly nature in its heavenly aspect, they are given, at once, to curiosity and, in anxious inquiry, ask what such a thing means or signifies, as was posited in an Axiom.47 And whenever the common run wonder at the remarkable effects of a magnet on iron, even in this age of minds made more discerning and erudite by the philosophies, they still come up with the following: the magnet has “a hidden sympathy” for the iron, and thus they make all of nature into a vast animate body which feels passion and affect, in conformity to what was discussed above in the Axioms.48 However, even nowadays (because the nature of our human minds, even for the common run, is so withdrawn from the senses by the many abstractions which fill our languages with their many abstract terms, and has been rendered so subtle by the art of writing and, as it were, so spiritualized by the use of numbers that even the common run know how to count and to reckon), it is naturally denied to us to be able to form an image of that vast goddess we call “sympathetic nature”: we say the words with our mouths, but it holds nothing for us in our minds (insofar as what we hold in our minds is false and so is nothing), and there is no succor any longer from the imagination in being able to form some vast, false image. So, in our time, it is naturally denied to us to enter into the vast imaginary of those earliest men, whose minds had nothing abstract, subtle, or spiritualized about them, for they were completely immersed in the senses, completely buffeted by the passions, completely buried in the body. Hence, as we said above [§338], in our time, it is nearly impossible to understand and completely impossible to imagine how they would have thought, these earliest men who founded gentile humanity.

378

In this fashion, the earliest theological poets devised the first divine myth greater than any other devised after, the myth of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in the act of casting lightning bolts, a myth

379

  Axiom 32.   Axiom 39. 47   Axiom 39. 48   Axiom 32. 45 46

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The New Science so popular, so disturbing, so instructive49 that even those who devised it believed it; and in keeping with terrifying religions, as will be shown later [§517], they feared, revered, and gave observance to this Jove. And, through that property of the human mind which, in the Axioms, we learned was noticed by Tacitus,50 such men believe all that they imagine, that they see, and, even, that they themselves do, to be Jove. And to the universe as a whole (to the extent they could be capable of seeing it as a whole) and to all the parts of the universe, they accorded a being of animate substance. This is the civil history of the phrase, Jovis omnia plena51 [“all is filled with Jove”].

Later, Plato52 took this to be the ether which penetrates and fills everything; however, for the theological poets, as we will see shortly [§712], Jove was no higher than the peaks of the mountains. At that time, the earliest men, who spoke in signs, by their nature believed that lightning and thunder were signs of Jove; hence, later, from the verb nuo [“to give a sign”] came numen,53 the term for the divine will, in connection with an idea quite sublime and worthy of expressing divine majesty, namely, that Jove decreed by signs—and such signs were real words54—and that nature was the language of Jove, the science of which language the gentiles universally believed was divination—which, for the Greeks, was called theologia, meaning “the science of the speech of the gods.”55 Thus came to Jove the fearful kingdom of lightning, for which he was called the king of men and gods, and so came two titles: first, “best,” by which was signified “strongest” (just as, in a reversal, for early Latin fortis [“strong”] signified what for the later Latins was signified by bonus [“good”]56) and, second, “greatest,” because of his body, which was as vast as the heavens. From this first great benefit done for humankind came the title soter, or “savior,” because he did not strike them with lightning, which is the first of the three principles we have taken for this   This triad rehearses the threefold description of what makes for great poetry, given near the end of §376. 50  Tacitus, Annals 1.28.2; Axiom 34. 51   See Virgil, Eclogues 3.60. 52  Plato, Cratylus 412d. 53   On the derivation of numen from nuo, compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 404. 54   On “real words,” compare Bacon, De augmentis scientarum 6.1 (Works I, p. 651). 55   For appearances of the term theologia in Greek, see Plato, Republic 2, 379a and Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.1, 1026a19. 56   For a comparable proposal about the primal identity of goodness and strength, see the identification of bonus with “warrior” in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 1.5. 49

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science [§333]; and the title, stator, or “stayer,” came to him because he stayed those few giants from their feral wandering, from which came to pass the beginning of the gentiles. The Latin philologists57 overly restrict this title to the fact that Jove, invoked by Romulus, had stayed the Romans who were in the midst of flight in their battle with the Sabines. Consequently, those many Joves at whom the philologists wonder that every gentile nation had one (from all of them, the Egyptians said, because of their vanity, that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient, as was stated above in the Axioms58), these Joves are so many physical histories preserved for us by the myths, which demonstrate that there was a Universal Flood, as we premised in the Axioms.59

380

Thus, through what has been stated in the Axioms60 concerning the principles pertaining to poetic characters, Jove came into being in poetry naturally as a divine character—that is, an imaginative universal—­under which were subsumed all the things pertaining to the divine auspices by the ancient gentile nations, all of which, accordingly, were poetic by nature. They started poetic wisdom from a poetic metaphysics of contemplating God through the attribute of his providence; and, for this, they were called theological poets—that is, men wise in understanding the speech of the gods conceived by the auspices of Jove—and were properly called divine—in the sense of being diviners, from divinari, meaning “to divine” or “to predict.” This science was called the Muse, defined by us above [§365], following Homer, as the science of good and evil61—namely, the divination upon prohibition of which God ordered for Adam his true religion, as was also stated in the Axioms.62 The theological poets were the mystics of this science (called “mystics” from the Greek word mystae, which the learned Horace63 translated as “interpreters of the gods”) because they explained the divine mysteries of the auspices and the oracles; in this science, every gentile nation had its own Sybil, of which twelve are mentioned, and these Sybils and oracles are the most ancient things of gentile antiquity.

381

Thus do all the things reasoned upon here accord with that passage of Eusebius cited in the Axioms64 where he reasons upon the beginnings of idolatry: the earliest gentiles, simple and rude, devised their gods ob terrorem praesentis potentiae [“on account of their terror at the power present before them”].

382

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.12.6; Cicero, In Catalinem 1.33; Seneca, De beneficiis 4.7.2. 58   Axiom 3. 59   Axiom 42. 60   Axioms 47–49. 61   Compare Homer, Odyssey 8.63 with Genesis 2:9 and 2:17. 62   Axiom 24. 63  Horace, Ars poetica 391. 64   Axiom 38. The actual source is Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 1.15. 57

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The New Science Thus it was fear that devised gods in the world, but, as was noted in the Axioms,65 men were not made fearful by other men, but were themselves made fearful by themselves. Along with this beginning for idolatry is demonstrated, in addition, the beginning of divination, which came into being in the world in one birth. The beginning of sacrifices came to follow from these two beginnings, sacrifices which were made so as procurare—that is, so as to understand the auspices.

383

That such is the generation of poetry is ultimately confirmed for us by the following eternal property that belongs to it: the proper material of poetry is what is impossible and yet believed,66 impossible to the extent that bodies are not minds, and yet believed to the extent that the thundering heavens were Jove. Hence, nothing exercises poets more than singing about the wonders made by sorceresses through their works of incantation. This has its foundation in a hidden sense that all nations have of the omnipotence of God; from this comes to be that other sense by which all peoples are naturally led to give infinite honors to divinity. And in this fashion, the poets founded the religions of the gentiles.

384

And all the things reasoned herein upon up until now overturn all that has been stated about the origins of poetry, first by Plato, then by Aristotle up until our own Patrizzi, Scaliger, and Castelvetro:67 it has been discovered that poetry came into being through a deficiency in human reasoning, poetry so sublime that nothing its equal (much less better than it) has been produced by the philosophies which came later, through the arts of both poetry and criticism. Hence comes the privilege by which Homer is the prince of all the sublime poets—that is, the heroic poets—first in rank as well as time. This discovery of the beginnings of poetry dispels the opinion about the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients, the discovery of which was so desired from Plato up until Baron of Verulam in his De sapientia veterum.68 This is the common wisdom of the lawgivers who founded humankind, not the recondite wisdom of lofty and rare philosophers. Hence, as we have started to do in the case of Jove, that entire mystical sense of a most lofty philosophy, which the learned have given to Greek myths and Egyptian hieroglyphs, will be found to be as out of season as   Axiom 40, holding that false religions are rooted not in another’s imposture but in one’s own credulity. 66   Compare Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a. 67   Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597), author of Retorica (1562) and Poetica (1582). Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), author of Poetices libri septem (1561). Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571), compiler of Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570). 68   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. Bacon’s De sapientia veterum was published in 1609. 65

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the historical sense, which they must have naturally contained, will come naturally to us.69

Corollaries concerning the principal aspects of this science I. From what has been stated herein, one gathers that divine providence (such as it is apprehended through the only human sense it can be sensed by men, crude, wild, and savage, who despair of any succor from nature and who also desire a thing superior to nature which will save them, which is the first principle upon which we established above the method of this science [§339]) permits such men to enter into the deception of fearing the false divinity of Jove because he could strike them with lightning: it is thus that within the clouds of those first storms and in the flash of that light they saw a great truth, that of a divine providence sovereign over the salvation of all of humankind.

385

As a result, this science has its start from here in being, in its principal aspect, a rational civil theology of divine providence; it starts from the commonplace wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the nations by contemplating God in the attribute of his providence, and it is completed by the recondite wisdom of philosophers who demonstrated it by reasoning upon it in their natural theology. II. Here also having its start is a philosophy of authority—that is, the second principal aspect this science has—taking the term “authority” in its primary significance as “property,” the sense in which the term is always used in the Law of the Twelve Tables. Hence, the term “author” in the Roman civil code retains the sense of someone who has claim over some domain inasmuch as it certainly comes from αὐτός [autos]—that is, proprius [“proper to one”] or suus ipsius [“that which is one’s own”]. Because of this, the erudite often write autor and autoritas without the aspirant of auctor and auctoritas.

386

And authority first had its start with a divine authority; by it, the divinity appropriated unto itself those few giants of whom we have spoken by properly casting them into the depths and into the recesses of groves

387

  Vico’s commitment to the claim that myths naturally contain an “historical sense” should not be confused with euhemerism. Named after Euhemerus, a Greek mythographer of the fourth century BCE, euhemerism is the view that myths are simply fabulized accounts of historical persons or events known as such. According to Vico, however, early humanity does not first think prosaically and decide later to speak mythically. On the contrary, its very perception is mythical, occurring in poetic characters and imaginative universals. These are something other and more than allegorical representations of particular individuals. 69

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The New Science over the face of mountains. These groves are the iron ring that held the giants fast, chained them to the earth in their terror at the heavens and at Jove, and held them fast wherever they were, scattered over the face of mountains, at the point when the heavens first flashed with lightning. Those giants were Tityus and Prometheus, who were chained to a rock on high, whose hearts were devoured by an eagle—that is, the religion of the auspices of Jove. Similarly, the sense of these giants being rendered immobile by terror was retained in the heroic expression in Latin, terrore defixi70 [“fixed by fear”], which is exactly how they are shown by painters, who depict them chained hand and foot upon the face of mountains. This iron ring forms the great chain for which Dionysius Longinus wondered at the sublimity of all the Homeric myths:71 this is the chain by which Jove proposed (so as to prove that he was the king of men and gods) that if all the gods and men were to attend to one side and he alone to the other side, he would drag all in his train; and if this is the chain by which the Stoics intend to signify the eternal series of causes with which that Fate of theirs holds the world encircled and bound, they should see to it that they do not wind up restrained themselves, for to drag men and gods along by a chain of this sort depends upon the choice of Jove himself, but they mean for Jove to be subject to Fate.

388

From a divine authority of this sort tends to follow human authority, which, in its full philosophical elegance, means that property of human nature which cannot be taken away from men, even by God, without destroying that nature; it is with this signification that Terence72 says voluptas proprias deorum [“joy proper to the gods”]—in the sense that the felicity of the gods does not depend on others—and that Horace says propriam virtutis laurum73 [“the laurel proper to virtue”]—in the sense that triumph of virtue cannot be taken away by envy—and that Caesar74 says propriam victoriam [“proper victory”]—about which Denis Pétau75 is in error when he notes this should not be said in Latin, for it signifies, in a quite elegant Latin, a victory which the enemy cannot take from one’s hands. Such authority is the free use of the will, whereas the intellect is a passive power subject to the truth. For at this earliest point in human things, men started by paying homage to the freedom of human choice to hold in restraint the motions of the body, either through completely calming them or through giving them better direction, which is the conatus proper to free agents, as we have stated above in the Method [§340]. Hence, those   Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.39.1 and Tacitus, Annals 13.5.2.   For the myth (which does not actually appear in the text of Longinus), see Homer, Iliad 8.18–27. 72  Terence, Andria 960. 73  Horace, Carmina 2.2.22. 74  Caesar, De bello gallico 3.70.2. 75   Here Vico has confused Denis Pétau (on whom see the note at §77) with Denis Voss (1606–1633), son of G. J. Voss. 70 71

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giants restrained the bestial wantonness to go about wandering through the great forest of the Earth and inured themselves to a completely opposite custom of staying hidden and settling for ages within their groves. An authority of human nature of this sort is followed by the authority of natural law: by occupying and staying settled for a long time in the land where fortune found them at the time of the first lightning strikes, they became lords of that land by the possession that comes from long occupation, which is the source of all the different domains in the world. Hence, these men are those

389

Pauci quos aequus amavit Jupiter76 [“few whom fair Jupiter has loved”].

Later, philosophers translated these few as those whose lot it was from God to be well disposed toward the sciences and the virtues. However, the historical sense of this phrase is that, within those recesses [nascondigli], in those depths [fondi], they became the princes of the so-called maiores gentes, who counted Jove as the first god—as was discussed in the Axioms.77 They, as will be shown later [§433], were the ancient noble households, branching out into many families, of which the first regimes and the first cities were composed. This historical sense of those recesses [nascondigli] and those depths [fondi] is retained in Latin in the beautiful heroic phrases condere gentes, condere regna, condere urbes; fundere gentes, fundere regna, fundere urbes.78 This philosophy of authority follows the rational civil theology of providence, for through the theological proofs of the latter, the former with its philosophical proofs renders clear and distinct the philological proofs (these three kinds of proofs are all enumerated in the Method79), and concerning the things pertaining to the most obscure antiquity of the nations, this philosophy of authority reduces human choice to certainty, which is by its very nature most uncertain, as was discussed in the Axioms.80 This is as much as to say that it reduces philology to the form of a science.

390

III. In its third principal aspect, this science is a history of human ideas, which, as has been seen [§377], took its start from divine ideas in the contemplation of the heavens done with the eyes of the body (so the

391

 Virgil, Aeneid 6.129–130.   Axiom 108. 78   Both phrases can be translated “to found peoples, to found kingdoms, to found cities.” And, from Vico’s perspective, founding, as condere and fundere, has its roots, etymologically and otherwise, in the “recesses” and “depths” of these first lords of the lands. 79   For the “theological proofs,” see §§342–345. For the “philosophical proofs,” see §§346–351. For the “philological proofs,” see §§352–359. 80   Axiom 11. 76 77

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The New Science Romans spoke of the science of augurs as the activity of contemplari, of observing the regions of the heavens from which the auspices came or observing the auspices). The regions marked out by the augurs with the lituus were called templa coeli81 [“the precincts of heaven”], whence must have come for the Greeks the earliest θεωρήματα [theo¯re¯ mata] and μαθήματα [mathe¯ mata], things which are divine or sublime in their contemplation, which ended in the abstract things of metaphysics and mathematics. This is the civil history of the saying, A Jove principium Musae82 [“The Muse begins with Jove”],

for we have seen [§§365, 381] that the earliest Muse takes its start from the lightning bolts of Jove, the Muse whom Homer defines as the “science of good and evil”; later, it became all too easy for philosophers to insert the tenet that “the beginning of wisdom is piety.”83 As a result, the earliest Muse must have been Urania, the one who contemplates the heavens to take the auguries, who later came to signify astronomy, as will be seen below [§508]. And, just as poetic metaphysics was above [§367] partitioned into all the subaltern sciences, having the same nature as their poetic mother, so too this history of ideas will give the rude origins of both the practical sciences, which were customary for the nations, and the speculative sciences, whose cultivation today is so celebrated by the learned. 392

IV. In its fourth aspect, this science is a philosophical art of criticism, which comes to be from the aforesaid history of ideas. And this art judges what is true for the authors of nations, nations which must have had to run a course of more than a thousand years so as to be able to produce the writers who are the subject of the philological art of criticism. This philosophical art of criticism, starting from Jove, will give a natural theogony—or generation of the gods—made naturally in the minds of the authors of gentile antiquity, who were by nature theological poets; the twelve gods of the so-called gentes maiores, the ideas of whom were imagined at different times because of certain human necessities or advantages, are established throughout twelve smaller epochs, under which are subsumed the times in which myths come to be. Hence, this natural theogony will give a rational chronology of a poetic history almost nine hundred years prior to the earliest starting point of history as commonly regarded [la storia volgare], which was after heroic times.   On the templa coeli, see Cicero, De divinatione 1.20.40; Terence, Eunuchus 590; Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.1014. 82  Virgil, Eclogue 3.60. 83   Compare Psalm 110:10; Job: 1.7 and 9:10; Ecclesiastes: 1.16. 81

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V. In its fifth aspect, this science is an ideal eternal history, upon which the histories of all the nations run their temporal course. Whenever men, starting from times that are primitive, ferocious, and savage, domesticate themselves with religion, they start, proceed, and end along the continuum of stages upon which we meditate in Book Two; reencountered in Book Four, where we treat the course that the nations make; and with the recurrence of human things in Book Five.

393

VI. In its sixth aspect, this science is a system of the natural law of the gentile peoples. As was posited in the Axioms above,84 those three princes of natural-law teaching—Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Samuel Pufendorf 85—should have started their doctrine from the start of the gentiles, from whom the subject matter starts. In this respect, they all err in unison, taking their start in the middle—that is, from the more recent times of genteel nations—and, consequently, from men enlightened by a fully articulated natural reason; it is from these that the philosophers came, who rose to meditate upon a perfected idea of justice.

394

In the first place, Grotius, on account of the same great effect which tends towards the truth, prescinds from divine providence and professes that his system will stand, even leaving to one side any knowledge of God. Hence, none of his reproofs against the Roman jurists on a great number of matters find their mark: for in positing divine providence as the beginning of their reasoning on the natural law, those jurists understood that reasoning to pertain to the natural law of the gentile peoples, not the natural law of the philosophers or of the moral theologians.

395

Next, Selden86 grants divine providence, but without taking notice of the lack of hospitality among the earliest peoples; without taking notice of the distinction made by the people of God among all the nations at that time in the world, between the Hebrews and gentiles; without taking notice, first, of the fact that because the Hebrews had lost sight of their natural law during their servitude in Egypt, God himself had to reinstitute those orders with the law that he gave to Moses on Sinai; without taking notice, second, of the fact that God in his law forbids even thoughts that are less than just, which never troubled any mortal lawgiver; without taking notice, furthermore, of the bestial origins of all nations upon which herein we reason [§§369–371]. And although Selden puts forward that the Hebrews later taught that law to the gentiles, it turns out to be impossible for him to prove it, not only because of the magnanimous confession of Josephus, assisted by the grave reflection of Lactantius drawn upon above [§94], but also with a view to the enmity, also observed above [§95], which the Hebrews had

396

  Axiom 106.   Compare the earlier criticism of these three thinkers at §§310, 318, and 329. 86   The reference is to Selden’s De iure naturali et gentium iuxta Hebraeorum. 84 85

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The New Science for the gentiles and which even today they preserve for all nations in their diaspora.

397

Finally, there is Pufendorf,87 who takes his start from an Epicurean hypothesis, which posits that men are cast in this world without any aid or concern from God; he was reproved for this, and while he justifies himself in a different treatise, without divine providence as a first principle, he is still completely unable to open his mouth to reason about law, as we heard [§335] Cicero88 say to Atticus, who was an Epicurean, when they were reasoning about laws.

398

On account of all of this, we take our start from that earliest most ancient point of all in reasoning about law (in Latin, law is called ius, a contraction of the ancient word of Jove, Ious89)—that is, from the moment when the idea of Jove came to be in the minds of the princes of the gentiles. In this, there is a convergence between Latin and Greek worthy of wonder: at first, the Greeks (as Plato90 observes to our good fortune in his Cratylus) called law, διαΐον [diaion], which, in the sound of the word as much as in its significance, means discurrens [“running through”] or permanans [“penetrating”]; at least this is the philosophical origin imposed upon the word by Plato, who, in his erudite mythology, takes Jove to be the ether penetrating and running through everything; but, in the historical origin, διαΐον comes from the Greek word for Jove, Διός [dios] (from which comes sub Dio, which in Latin, like sub Iove, means “under the open heavens”91) and later, for the ease of speech, it came to be pronounced δίκαιον [dikaion]. It is from here that we take our start in reasoning about law, which first came into being as a divine law because of the property expressed in the word “divination”—that is, the science of the auspices of Jove, which were the divine things by which the gentiles would regulate all the human things—and these two together comprise for jurisprudence the subject matter adequate to it. And thus do we start our reasoning upon the natural law with the idea of divine providence, by which the idea of law came into being and was begotten. Law naturally started to be observed, in the fashion upon which we meditated previously [§§316–317], by those properly called the princes of the gentiles, by princes of the most ancient kind who were called the gentes maiores, for whom Jove was the first god.

399

VII. In the seventh, and final, principal aspect which it has, this is a science of the principles pertaining to universal history; this history takes its start from that first moment of all in the human things of gentile   See Samuel Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2.2.   Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21. 89   For this etymology, see Voss, Etymologicon, p. 318. 90  Plato, Cratylus 412d–e. 91   See Horace, Carmina 1.1.25. 87 88

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Book Two antiquity, with the earliest age of the world which the Egyptians said the world ran through previous to themselves—that is, that age of gods when heaven ruled on Earth and made for great benefits for men, as was held in the Axioms.92 This was the start of the golden age of the Greeks when gods consorted on Earth with men, as we have seen herein [§§377, 379, 381, 384, 389, 392, 398] Jove starting to do. Thus, the Greek poets of this first age of the world are trustworthy in their myths in telling us of the physical existence of a Universal Flood and of giants; and in doing this, they have told us with truthfulness the beginnings of a universal profane history. However, for many reasons, this universal profane history has lacked these true beginnings. Those who came later were not able to enter into the imaginations of these earliest men who founded gentile antiquity, through whose imaginations they seemed to see gods. And those who came later did not properly understand the term atterrare, which means “to be sent under the earth.” And the giants who lived hidden in groves at the foot of mountains were excessively altered by the later traditions of extremely credulous peoples, who took these giants to have piled Olympus, Pelion, and Ossa one on top of the other so as to expel the gods from heaven (these earliest giants not only did not fight with the gods, but also did not even apprehend them until Jove had cast his lightning bolts); and while this heaven was later raised by the more developed minds of Greeks to boundless heights, it was for these first giants only as high as the peaks of mountains, as we will demonstrate below [§712]. The myth of giants fighting the gods must have been devised after Homer and fastened on to him in his Odyssey by others; in Homer’s time, shaking Olympus alone would have been enough to bring down the gods, who Homer always tells us in his Iliad were located on the peak of Mount Olympus.93 For all these reasons, this universal profane history has up until now lacked these true beginnings, and because there has been, up until now, a lack of a rational chronology of poetic history, this universal history has also lacked continuity.

On Poetic Logic Now, that which is a metaphysics (inasmuch as it contemplates things with a view to all the kinds of being) is, at the same time, a logic (inasmuch as it considers things with a view to all the kinds of signification); therefore, just as the poetry we have considered above [§375] is a poetic metaphysics (insofar as the theological poets imagined bodies in their 92  In fact, in the Idea of the Work (§4) and the Annotations to the Chronological Table (§64). 93   See Homer, Odyssey 11.315–316; Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484; 5.360 and 367.

400

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The New Science being largely as divine substances) so that same poetry is now considered as a poetic logic (insofar as it signifies those bodies).

401

Logic comes from the term λόγος [logos], which, in its first and proper sense, signifies “myth” [favola] which is translated in Italian as “speech” [favela], and myth in Greek is also called a μῦθος [muthos],94 from which comes the term in Latin, mutus [“mute”]; in mute times, what came into being was a mental λόγος, which Strabo95 says in a golden passage had existed before a spoken—that is, an articulated one. Hence, λόγος signifies both “idea” and “word.” And it was appropriate that divine providence instituted orders in those religious times with a view to that eternal property, that meditating upon religion is more important than talking about it. Hence, that earliest language in those earliest mute times of nations—as was stated in the Axioms—must have started with signs, gestures, or objects which have a natural correspondence to their ideas; on account of this, λόγος or verbum [“word”], also signifies “deed” in Hebrew and in Greek also signifies “thing” (as Thomas Gataker observes in his De instumenti stylo96). Indeed, to this we can add the definition of μῦθος as a vera narratio, or true speech. This was the natural speech that, first, Plato and, later, Iamblichus said was spoken at one time in the world; because these two, as we saw in the Axioms,97 were speaking like diviners, it turned out that Plato’s toil to find it in the Cratylus was empty, and he was attacked for it by Aristotle and Galen.98 For the first speech belonging to the theological poets was not a speech according to the nature of the things themselves (this must have been the sacred speech discovered by Adam, to whom God granted divine onomathesia—that is, the proposing of names for things according to the nature of each99). Rather, it was an imaginative speech through animate substances, for the most part imagined to be divine.

402

Thus, for the sake of example, they understood (and, at first, by mute pointing, explained) Jove, Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune as the substance of the heavens, the earth, and the sea, which they imagined were animate divinities and, consequently, with the truth of the senses, believed them to be gods. With these three divinities—through what we have stated above100 about poetic characters—they explained all the   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 235.  Strabo, Geography 1.2.6. 96   Thomas Gataker (1574–1654), English cleric and theologian, educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Author of Of the Nature and Use of Lots (1619) and Dissertatio de stylo Novi Testamenti (1648), among other works. As Battistini notes, Gataker attributes the claim that logos means “thing” to Sebastian Pfochen, a professor of Greek, and opposes him on the point. 97   Axiom 57. 98   See Plato, Cratylus 423c–e; Aristotle, De interpretatione 16a; Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis libri novem. 99   See Genesis 2:19–20. 100   See Axioms 47–49. 94 95

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things pertaining to the heavens, the earth, and the sea, and so with other deities, they signified other kinds of things by the divinity pertaining to them (so all flowers by Flora, all fruits by Pomona). We ourselves do the complete opposite of this for things of the spirit—such as the faculties of the human mind, the passions, virtues, vices, the sciences, the arts— we make ideas of them, largely in feminine form, and under these ideas, we subsume all the causes, all the properties, and, finally, all the effects pertaining to each. For when we wish to treat of spiritual things outside of the intellect, we must receive succor from the imagination so as to be able to articulate them and, like painters, must devise human images of them. However, the theological poets, because they were not able to make use of the intellect, labored in a more sublime, and completely opposite, way: they gave sense and passion, as we have seen, to bodies, even bodies as vast as the heavens, the earth, the sea; later, as these vast imaginings diminished and the ability to abstract grew more vigorous, these bodies were taken for the diminished signs of them. And metonymy put on a show of learned ignorance about the origins of human things which, up until now, have been buried: Jove has become so small and so light that he is carried in flight by an eagle; Neptune rides over the sea on a refined chariot; and Cybele is seated upon a lion. Consequently, mythology must be the speech proper to myths: the term suggests as much. As a result, since myths are, as was demonstrated above [§209], imaginative genera, mythology must be the allegory appropriate to it; the term which comes to define allegory, as was observed in the Axioms,101 is diversiloquium. Inasmuch as with an identity not of proportion, but (as the Scholastics would say) of predicability, the allegories signify different species or different individuals as comprehended under their genus, they must have a univocal significance, comprehending one reason common to all the species, or individuals: for example, with Achilles, an idea of valor common to all those who have strength; with Ulysses, an idea of prudence common to all those who are wise. As a result, allegories of this sort must be the etymologies of poetic speech in which must be given their univocal origins, just as those of vernacular tongues are more often analogical. And, indeed, one can add to this the definition of the very term “etymology,” which means the same as veriloquium102 [“true speech”] in the same way that we defined myth as a vera narratio.

403

Corollaries concerning poetic tropes, monstrosities, and transformations I. For this Poetic Logic, the corollaries are all the earliest poetic tropes, of which the most luminous (and because the most luminous, also the

101 102

  Axiom 49.   Compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 231.

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The New Science most necessary and the most frequent) is metaphor.103 And it is a great deal more praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things through the metaphysics reasoned upon herein. The earliest poets gave to bodies the being of animate substances with such capacities as the poets themselves were capable, namely, sense and passion, and thus made myths; as a result, every metaphor of this sort comes into being as a myth in miniature. Consequently, this allows for that art of criticism which is concerned with the time when metaphor came to be in the languages; all metaphors tending, by likenesses taken from bodies, to signify the labors of abstract minds must come from the times in which the philosophies had begun to be roughed out. This is demonstrated by the fact that, in every language, the terms needed for the cultivating arts and the recondite sciences are rustic in their origins.

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It is worth observing that, in all languages, the majority of expressions concerning inanimate things have been made by transferring to them features from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and from human passions. So “head” is used for what is on top or at the beginning; “face” and “back” are used for what is in front and behind; “eyes” is used for budding tendrils and for anything which speaks to light entering the household; “mouth” is used for any opening; “lip” is used for the rim of a vase or something similar; “teeth” are used for plows, rakes, saws, combs; “beard” is used for the roots of plants; “tongue” is used for the sea; “throat” is used for a river or mountain gorge; “neck” for a strip of land; “arm” for the branch of a river; “hand” is used for a small number; “lap” for a gulf in the sea; “flank” for the sides of things; “rib” for the coast of sea; “heart” (in Latin, they use umbilicus [“navel”])—for the middle of something; “leg” and “foot” are used for countries, “foot” for the boundary and “footing” for basis or foundation; “flesh” and “bone” are used for the parts of fruit; “vein” is used for water, rock, minerals; “blood,” which gives life, is used for wine; “bowels” is used for the earth; the heavens and the sea “smile” upon us; the wind “whistles”; the waves “murmur”; a body, under great weight, “groans”; farmers in ancient Latium used to say sitire agros [“thirsty fields”], laborare fructus [“the fruits of labor”], luxuriari segetes [“reveling crops”]; farmers today say that plants “fall in love,” that vines “go crazy,” and that trees “weep with sap.” And countless other such expressions can be gathered from every language. All of this follows from that Axiom, “man in his ignorance makes himself the measure of all things”104; indeed, as the examples adduced show, he makes himself the measure of the entire world. For, just as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, so this imaginative metaphysics demonstrates that man becomes 103   Battistini observes that Vico’s image derives from the canonical definition of metaphor, citing Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 5.14.34 and 8.6.4. 104   Axiom 1.

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all things by not understanding them; and perhaps this latter statement has more truth than the former, for man, by understanding, articulates his own mind and comprehends those things, but, by not understanding, he makes those things from himself and, by transforming himself, becomes those things. II. Through this same logic, sprung from such a metaphysics, the earliest poets must have given names to things from ideas which are particular and sensible. Sensible ideas are the source of metonymy, particular ideas the source of synecdoche.

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The metonymy which substitutes authors for their works came into being because authors were more often named than their works. The metonymy which substitutes subject matter for its form and accidents came into being because—as we stated in the Axioms105 above—they did not know how to abstract forms and quality from subjects. And certainly in the metonymy which substitutes causes for their effects, those causes are so many myths in miniature: by these causes, they imagine feminine figures clothed in their effects—that is, ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, pale Death. III. Synecdoche turned figurative later when particulars were raised to universals or when, later, parts were composed with other parts to make wholes. Thus “mortal,” at first, was properly used only of men, which must have been the case because only they sense their mortality. “Head” was used for the man, or for the person (this was frequently the case in common Latin) because, in the woods, they saw from a distance only the head of a man; the word “man” itself is an abstract term, comprehending the body and the parts of the body, the mind and the faculties of the mind, the spirit and the habits of the spirit. So must it have come to pass that tignum and culmen used to signify, in their proper sense in Latin, only a small rafter and thatching during times when there was thatching; later, in the more lustrous times of cities, they signified any materials or furnishings for buildings. So was tectum [“roof ”] later used for an entire “house” because in the earliest times any covering was enough for a house. So was puppis [“deck”] later used for “ship” (the deck being the highest part of the ship and the first to be seen from land) just as, in the return to barbarian times, “sail” was used for “ship.” So was mucro [“tip”] was used for “sword” because, whereas sword is an abstract term which, like a genus, comprehends the pummel, hilt, edge and point, it was their sensing of the point which called forth their terror. So was a material used for that of which is formed (as when “iron” is used for “sword”) because they did not know how to abstract the form from the material. 105

  Axiom 49.

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The New Science That ribbon of synecdoche and metonymy, Tertia messis erat106 [“It was three harvests later”],

came to be, without doubt, from a necessity of nature, for more than a thousand years must have had to run their course for the astronomical term “year” to have come into being among nations; indeed, everywhere in the Florentine countryside, they say that they have “reaped so many times” in order to express “so many years.” And that knot of two synecdoches and a metonymy, Post aliquot mea regna videns mirabor aristas107 [“After a few ears of corn, I shall wonder to see my rule”],

exposes how infelicitous expression was in the earliest rustic times, when a number of ears of corn (even more particular than a number of harvests) is used to express “so many years.” And where was such infelicitous expression, the grammarians supposed that there was an excess of art. 408

IV. Irony, certainly, could not have started before times in which there is reflection, for it is formed, on the strength of reflection, from a falsehood that takes on the mask of truth. And here emerges a great principle of human things, which confirms the origin of poetry herein discovered: the earliest men of gentile antiquity were as entirely simple as children, who are by nature truthful; the earliest myths could not have devised anything false. Because of this, those myths must necessarily have been, as we have defined them above [§401], true narrations.

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V. Through all this, it is demonstrated that although all the tropes (which are all traced back to these four) have up until now been believed to be the ingenious discoveries of writers, they were the necessary modes in which the earliest poetic nations articulated themselves, and they have, in their origins, all the properties native to them. However, when with the greater articulation of the human mind, terms were discovered that signified abstract forms, or genera, comprehending species within them or composing out of parts a whole, such ways of speaking for the earliest nations became figurative. And consequently, this starts the overturning of two common errors by grammarians: first, that prose is a more proper way of speaking than poetry; and, second, that prose, first, came as a way of speaking and, later, verse.   See Ovid, Heroides 6.57.  Virgil, Eclogues 1.69.

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VI. Poetic monstrosities and transformations arose from the necessity in that earliest human nature, as we have demonstrated in the Axioms,108 of not being able to abstract the forms or properties from subjects. Hence, in keeping with their logic, they must have composed subjects so as to compose those forms and must have destroyed a subject so as to separate its primary form from a contrary form imposed upon it.

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Such composition of ideas made for poetic monstrosities, just as, in the Roman legal code (as was observed by Antoine Favre109 in his Jurisprudence of Papinianus), they called a child born of a prostitute a “monstrosity” because such a child has a human nature and, at the same time, that bestial property belonging to those born of transient—that is, u ­ ncertain— couplings; such a monstrosity, we will find [§566], was someone born to an honorable woman, but outside of the solemnity of nuptials, whom the Law of the Twelve Tables commanded to be cast into the Tiber. VII. The distinction of ideas makes for metamorphoses, an example of which, among many others the Romans preserved from ancient jurisprudence, remains in their heroic phrase, FUNDUM FIERI [“to be the ground”], as a way of saying autorem fieri110 [“to be the author”] of something: for just as the ground sustains the farm or soil and whatever is sowed, planted, or built there, so too someone who advocates some action sustains it in that, without his advocacy, it would be overturned. For the advocate—leaving behind the form of a thing which is in ­motion— takes on the contrary form of a thing which is stable.

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Corollaries concerning the earliest nations speaking through poetic characters Poetic speech, on the strength of that poetic logic upon which we have meditated, ran its course long into historical times, just as great, swift rivers spread far into the seas and continue to carry fresh waters along their violent course; it is with a view to this that, as Iamblichus claimed in the Axiom111 above, that the Egyptians referred to everything discovered advantageous for human life to Hermes Trismegistus; this statement was confirmed in another Axiom, that “it is with the ideas and names of men, women, and things which children have first seen that they later apprehend and call all the men, women, and things which have some similarity or relationship to those first ones.”112 And this was the great   Axiom 49.   Antoine Favre (1557–1624), Savoisian nobleman and jurist. 110   See Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19. 111   Axiom 49. 112   Axiom 48. 108 109

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The New Science natural source of the poetic characters by which the earliest peoples naturally thought and spoke. If Iamblichus had reflected upon the nature of human things and had combined it with his reference to the Egyptian custom, as we stated in the Axioms,113 it is certain that he would not have imposed by force the sublime mysteries of his Platonic wisdom upon the mysteries of the commonplace wisdom of the Egyptians.

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Now, with a view to this nature of children and with a view to that custom of the earliest Egyptians, we state that poetic speech, on the strength of the poetic characters through which it speaks, can offer many and important discoveries concerning antiquity.

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I. It seems that Solon must have been some man wise in commonplace wisdom, who was the head of the plebs in the earliest times when Athens was an aristocratic republic; this is, indeed, preserved where it tells us that, at first, Athens was held by the optimates. This, as we will demonstrate in this book, was universally the case for all heroic republics: in such republics, the heroes—or nobles—said, on account of a certain nature which they believed to have been of divine origin, that they properly belonged to the gods and, consequently, that the auspices properly belonged to them; on the strength of this claim, they kept enclosed within their orders all the public and private laws of the heroic city, and to the plebeians, whom they believed to be of bestial origin and, consequently, to be men without gods and without the auspices, the nobles conceded only the uses of natural liberty; this is one of the great principles of the things which are reasoned upon for almost this entire work. It was Solon who had admonished the plebeians to reflect upon themselves and to recognize that they have a human nature equal to the nobles and that, as a consequence, they must have a claim equal to the nobles in civil law. This is how it seems, unless, that is, this Solon was the Athenian plebeians themselves, considered in this aspect.

415

For the ancient Romans must have also had such a Solon among them: among the Romans, the plebeians in heroic contests with the nobles (as ancient Roman history plainly tells us) said of the Fathers from whom Romulus composed the Senate and from whom the patricians came that they NON ESSE CAELO DEMISSOS114 [“had not been sent down from the heavens”]—that is, they had no such vaunted divine origins. And the plebeians said that Jove was fair to all: such is the civil history of the phrase, Jupiter omnibus aequus115 [“Jupiter is fair to all”],

upon which the learned, later, imposed that tenet that all minds are equal and that they took their differences from differences in the organization   Axiom 49.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10. 115   Here Vico is drawing upon Virgil, Aeneid 10.112. 113

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of the body and from different civil educations. It is with this reflection that the Roman plebeians started to move towards a civil liberty equal with the patricians and, in the end, changed Rome from an aristocratic to a popular republic (we noted this as a hypothesis in the Annotations on the Chronological Table [§§104–114] when we reasoned upon the Publilian law as an idea; and we will make it possible to see [§§599–618] by what is actual that this is what came to pass not only in Rome but also in all the other ancient republics; and we will demonstrate [§620] with both reasons and authority that, beginning from that reflection of Solon, the plebs of peoples universally changed republics from aristocratic to popular). Consequently, Solon was made the author of that celebrated saying, NOSCE TE IPSUM [“know thyself ”], which, on account of the great civil advantage Athenians drew from it, was inscribed on all the public places of the city; the learned, later, wished to state it as a great maxim concerning metaphysical and moral things (which it actually is), and they considered Solon a man wise in recondite wisdom and made him the prince of the seven sages of Greece.

416

In this fashion, because all the orders and laws in Athens which formed a democratic republic took their start from this reflection, the Athenians declared, in that manner of the earliest peoples thinking through poetic characters, that those orders and laws had come from Solon, just as the Egyptians declared everything discovered advantageous for human life to come from Hermes Trismegistus. II. Thus to Romulus must be attributed all the laws concerning the orders.

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III. And to Numa must be attributed those laws concerning sacred things and divine ceremonies, which Roman religion later displayed in times of greater pomp.

418

IV. And to Tullus Hostilius must be attributed all the laws and orders pertaining to military discipline.

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V. To Servius Tullius must be attributed the census, the foundation of the democratic republics, and a great number of other laws concerning popular liberty: as a result of this, he was praised by Tacitus116 as praecipuus sanctor legum [“principal enactor of sacrosanct laws”]. For, as we will demonstrate [§§619–623], the census of Servius Tullius was the basis of the aristocratic republic by which the nobles conveyed to the plebeians bonitary domain over the fields, and it was for this reason that the tribunes of the plebs were created, to defend the plebeians in this share of natural liberty and who, later, gradually made for their pursuit of all

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 Tacitus, Annals 3.26.4.

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The New Science of civil liberty. And so, the census of Servius Tullius, because these occasions and initiatives started from it, became the census that was the basis of the popular Roman republic, as was reasoned upon above in the annotation of the Publilian law [§107] by way of hypothesis and as will be demonstrated herein [§619] to be true by what is actual.

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VI. To Tarquinius Priscus must be attributed insignia and devices, by which, later, during the most luminous times in Rome the majesty of the Roman empire was resplendent.

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VII. Thus was it that many laws must have been affixed to the Twelve Tables which, as we will demonstrate herein [§§638, 957, 960, 1001], were decreed in later times. And, as was fully demonstrated in my Principles of Universal Law,117 because the law by which the nobles shared quiritary domain in common with the plebs was the first law to be inscribed on public tables and because it was solely for this law that the decemvirs were created, all the laws which equalized liberty and which were later inscribed on public tables, with a view to this aspect of popular liberty, were brought back to the decemvirs. Indeed, take the laws concerning Greek luxury at funerals as a demonstration of this: the decemvirs must not have taught the Romans such luxury in their prohibiting it, but the prohibition came after the Romans had accepted this practice, which itself could not have come to pass until after the wars with the Tarentines and with Pyrrhus—that is, after they started to become familiar with the Greeks. And, consequently, it is the case that, as Cicero118 observed, this law translates into Latin the very words in which it had been conceived in Athens.

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VIII. Thus was it with Draco (author of the laws inscribed in blood at a time which Greek history tells us, as was stated above [§414]) that Athens was held by the optimates; this was, as we will see below [§592], at a time of heroic republics when, as Greek history also recounts, Heraclids were spread throughout all of Greece, even in Attica—as we proposed above in the Chronological Table [§77]. These Heraclids eventually settled in the Peloponnesus and established their rule in Sparta, which we have found to have certainly been an aristocratic republic. And this Draco must have been one of the serpents of the Gorgon nailed to the shield of Perseus: you will find [§§542, 616] that this shield signifies the power of the laws because this shield, with its terrifying penalties, turned to stone those who looked upon it, just as, in sacred history, such laws, because they were exemplary in their punishments, were called leges sanguinis119 [“blood laws”]; it was with this shield that Minerva armed herself—who   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).  Cicero, De legibus 2.25.64. 119   The locution “blood laws” does not appear in Scripture, but (as Battistini notes) Vico may have in mind Hebrews 9:19–22 or Exodus 24:8. 117 118

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was, as will be explained more fully below [§§542, 616], called ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athe¯ na]). And for the Chinese, who to this day write in hieroglyphics a dragon (it must make one wonder that this poetic manner of thinking and expressing themselves is the same for two nations, so distant from one another in time and place) as the insignia for civil power. This must have been the case for Draco, for we have only these things told of him in all of Greek history. IX. This same discovery of poetic characters confirms for us that Aesop be placed well before the Seven Sages of Greece—as we promised in the Notes on the Chronological Table [§91] that we would be make it possible to see in this place.

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For such philological truth has been confirmed for us by the history of human ideas: the Seven Sages were admired for their starting to give precepts of moral and civil teachings through maxims, for example, the celebrated maxim of Solon, the prince of the Seven Sages, nosce te ­ipsum—we have seen above [§416] that this was, first, a civil teaching and, later, was translated into a metaphysical and moral teaching. However, prior to this translation, Aesop had offered his prescriptions through likenesses which, even prior to this, the poets had used for expressing themselves. And the order of human ideas is to observe the similarities in things, first, for expression and, later, for proof; and such proof proceeds, first, by means of example (for which a single example suffices) and, eventually, by means of induction (which has need of many examples). Hence, Socrates, father of all the sects of the philosophers, introduced dialectics with induction, which, later, Aristotle made complete with the syllogism, which cannot stand without a universal. However, for more restricted minds, it is enough to draw upon a single similarity for them to be persuaded, as the good Menenius Agrippa does with fable [favola] of the sort for which Aesop is founder: with this fable, he reduced the unrestrained Roman plebs to obedience.120 That Aesop was a poetic character representing the socii—that is, the familial servants of the heroes—the well-raised Phaedrus discovers for us, with divine inspiration, in the prologue to his Fables: Nunc fabularum cur sit inventum genus Brevi docebo. Servitus obnoxia Quia quae volebat, non audebat dicere Affectus proprios in fabellas transtulit. Aesopi illuius semitam feci viam.121 [“Now as to why the writing of fables was invented, here, in brief, is what I have to show. A fearful servant, because he did not dare to say what he intended   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.32.  Phaedrus, Fabulae 3.9–12 and 3.14.

120 121

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The New Science conveyed the feelings proper to him in fables. From the trail that famous Aesop blazed I make a path”]

This is clearly confirmed for us in the fable concerning the Society of the Lion.122 For the plebeians were called the socii of the heroic city, as was noted in the Axioms,123 and they came to have a share in the toil and danger of wars, but not in the reward and conquest. Accordingly, Aesop was called a servant because the plebeians, as will be demonstrated below [§§553–569], were the familial servants of the heroes. And we are told that he was a brute, because civil beauty was deemed to be born from solemn marriages, and only the heroes contracted marriage, as will also be shown below [§565]. In exactly the same way, Thersites was said to be a brute, who must have been a character representing the plebeians who served the heroes during the Trojan War: he was beaten by Ulysses with the scepter of Agamemnon,124 just as the ancient Roman plebs were beaten with whipping rods on their bare shoulders by the nobles regium in morem [“in royal fashion”], as Sallust tells us in St. Augustine’s City of God,125 until the Porcian law eventually freed Roman shoulders from whipping rods.126 426

Such prescriptions, therefore, advantageous for living in civil freedom, must have been the sense nurtured by the plebs of the heroic cities, as dictated by natural reason. It was to represent the plebeians in the aspect that Aesop was made a poetic character; later, he was connected with fables concerning moral philosophy, and in this respect Aesop was made the first moral philosopher, in the same fashion in which Solon was made a wise man who ordered the free Athenian republic with the laws. And because Aesop offered his prescriptions in fables, he was made to come before Solon, who offered his prescriptions by maxims. Such fables must have first been conceived in heroic verse. So was there a later tradition that they had been conceived in the iambic verse in which, as we will find herein below [§§463–464], the Greek gentiles spoke somewhere between the heroic verse and the prose in which the written fables came to us.

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X. In this fashion, the earliest authors of commonplace wisdom were connected with the later discoveries of recondite wisdom. And Zoroaster in the Near East, Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt, Orpheus in Greece, and Pythagoras in Italy, although, at first, they were lawgivers, they were eventually believed, later, to be philosophers, just as today Confucius is  Phaedrus, Fabulae 1.5.   Axiom 79. 124  Homer, Iliad 2.265–269. 125  Augustine, City of God 2.18. 126   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.9.6. 122 123

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in China. For certainly those Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia, as will be shown herein [§1087], were given this name to signify that they were nobles who, because they had tried to reduce the popular republics to which they belonged to aristocratic republics, were all killed. And the Golden Hymns of Pythagoras were demonstrated above [§128] to be an imposture, as were the oracles of Zoroaster, the Poimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the Orphics—that is, the poems of Orpheus. No book of philosophy written by Pythagoras came down to those of antiquity, and Philolaus was the first Pythagorean who wrote one, as was observed by Scheffer127 in his De philosophia Italica.

Corollaries concerning the origins of languages and letters, and therein the origins of hieroglyphics, of laws, of names, of insignia of noble houses, of medallions, and of money; and, so, the origins of the earliest language and literature of the natural law of the gentile peoples Now, from the theology of poets—that is, from the poetic metaphysics—and through the poetic logic, which was born from theology, we proceed to discover the origins of languages and letters, concerning which there are as many opinions as there are learned men who have written about them. Thus Gerald Jan Voss,128 in his Grammatica, says: de literarum inventio multi multa congerunt et fuse et confuse ut ab iis incertus magis abeas quam veneras dudum [“concerning the discovery of letters, so many have put together so many things with such profusion and confusion that you go away from them more uncertain than when you came”]; and Herman Hugo,129 in his De origine scribendi, observes: nulla alia res est in qua plures magisque pugnantes sententiae reperiantur atque haec tractatio de literarum et scriptionis origine. Quantae sententiarum pugnae? Quid credas? Quid non credas? [“There is no other thing for which one finds more and more conflicting thoughts than for that discussion of the origin of letters and writing. Why so many conflicting thoughts? Whom should one believe? Not believe?”]. Hence, Bernard

  Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), Swedish humanist born in Strasbourg, professor of eloquence and government at Uppsala University. 128   The reference is to Voss’s Aristarchus, sive de Arte Grammatica libri septem 1.9. 129   Herman Hugo (1588–1629), Belgian Jesuit and author of De prima scribendi origine et universae rei literariae antiquitate (1617). 127

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The New Science von Mallinckrodt,130 in his De arte typographica, followed by Ingewald Eling131 in his Historia linguae Graecae, claimed, on account of the incomprehensibility of the fashion in which they came to be, that they were a divine discovery.

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However, the learned themselves entirely make for this difficulty over the fashion in which they came to be insofar as they deem the origin of letters to be a thing separate from the origin of language, whereas they are by nature connected. Indeed, they ought to have noticed this in the terms “grammar” and “character.” In the case of the first term, although “grammar” is defined as the art of speaking, γράμματα [grammata] are letters; as a result, grammar should have been defined as the art of writing, as Aristotle132 defined it and as it actually came into being in the first place when, as will be demonstrated herein [§431], all nations first spoke through writing because they, at first, were mute. And in the case of the second term, “character” means “idea,” “form,” “model”; and certainly, there were poetic characters before there were those characters which express sounds—so does Josephus vigorously maintain against Apion the Greek grammarian that, in the times of Homer, they had not yet found those alphabetic letters called “common” [volgari]. In addition, if such letters had been the forms expressing sounds and not conventional signs, they would have to have been uniform for all nations, just as expressed sounds are uniform for all nations. Because of this desperate lack of knowledge about the fashion in which letters and language come to be, it was also unknown that the thinking of the nations was done through poetic characters, that speaking was done through myths, and that writing was done through hieroglyphs. These (having by their nature the most certainty) ought to have been the principles of philosophy, with a view to human ideas, and of philology, with a view to human terms.

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For reasoning of the sort in which must engage herein, let us offer a small taste of the many opinions held, as uncertain and flimsy and incongruent and vain and ridiculous as they are, opinions which are so many and of such a kind that one must leave off relating them all. Let this be a taste of them: insofar as, during the return to barbarism, Scandinavia was called (on account of the vanity of nations) the vagina gentium [“the womb of the gentiles”] and was believed to be the mother of all the other nations in the world, Johannes and Olaus Magnus (on ac-

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130   Bernard von Mallinckrodt (1591–1644), noted book collector, dean of Münster Cathedral, Catholic convert, and originator of the term “incunabula.” The work Vico cites was published in Cologne in 1640. 131   Lorenz Ingewald Eling, professor of logic and metaphysics at Uppsala. The text mentioned by Vico was published in Leipzig in 1691. 132  Aristotle, Topics 6.2, 141b31.

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count of the vanity of the learned) were of the opinion that their Goths had preserved letters, since the beginning of the world, divinely discovered by Adam, and for this dream they were ridiculed by all the learned. However, they were not ridiculed so much that Jon van Gorp resisted following them and proposing, further, that his own language, Dutch, which is not too different from Saxon, had come down from the earthly paradise and was the mother of all other languages. Joseph Justus Scaliger, Philipp Camerarius, Christian Becman, and Marten Schoock133 made of these opinions they were myths. And, indeed, this vanity became more swollen and burst forth in that work of Olaus Rudbeck134 entitled Atlantica, which wishes to say that Greek letters grew out of Norse runes; that these runes were inverted Phoenician letters to which Cadmus gave an order and sound similar to Hebrew; that eventually the Greeks straightened and rounded these letters with a ruler and compass; and that because the discoverer of these letters was called Merkurssman among the Nords, the Mercury who discovered the letters for the Egyptians was a Goth. So great a license in opining about the origins of letters should make the reader alert in receiving the things that we are going to say, not only with an indifference in seeing what they draw out by means of novelty, but also with attention in meditating upon them and taking them as what they must be, as principles pertaining to the whole of human and divine wisdom of gentile antiquity. Consider the following principles. The earliest men conceived ideas of things through characters of substances animated by their imaginations. As mutes, they expressed themselves with gestures and objects, which had a natural correspondence with the ideas (as, for example, when the act of swinging three times or three ears of corn signified three years). And they expressed themselves with a language whose significations were natural (this is the language that Plato and Iamblichus135 said was at one time spoken in the world, which must have been the most ancient language of Atlantis and which the erudite wish to say expressed ideas through the nature of things—that is, through the properties natural to them). It is from these principles, we would say, that all the philosophers and all the philologists ought to have started in treating the origins of languages and letters. Instead, they treated these two things (connected, as we stated, by nature) separately. Hence, they encountered such difficulties in their research into the origins of letters, even though 133   Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), tenth child and third son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, and nemesis of Jesuits. Philipp Camerarius (1537–1624), German jurist and historian. Christian Becman (1580–1648), Reformed theologian. Marten Schoock (1614–1659), Dutch author of Diluvium Noachi universale. 134   Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), professor of medicine at Uppsala and author of the four-volume Atland eller Manheim (Latin edition Atlantica sive Manheim). 135  Plato, Cratylus 423c–e; Iamblichus, On the Egyptian Mysteries 7.4.

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The New Science the ­difficulties involved are equal to those concerning the origins of languages, for which they had little or no concern.

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Therefore, at the start of our reasoning on this, we posit for our first principle that philological Axiom:136 the Egyptians tell us that, throughout the entire course of the world prior to them, there were three languages spoken, corresponding in number and order to the course of three ages in the world also prior to them—the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. And they said that the first language was hieroglyphic—sacred, or divine; the second was symbolic—language by signs or heroic devices; and the third is epistolary—language for those distant from one another to communicate the needs immediate to their lives. Concerning these three languages, there are two golden passages from Homer in his Iliad, through which it is plain that the Greeks agreed with the Egyptians in this matter. The first137 is where he tells us that Nestor lived through three lifetimes of men speaking different languages; as a result, Nestor must have been a poetic character representing the chronology established by the three languages corresponding to the three ages of the Egyptians, whence the expression “to live as long as Nestor” must have meant to live as long as the world. The second passage138 is where he tells us that Aeneas recounted to Achilles that there were humans speaking a different language when Ilium started to be inhabited, after Troy was conveyed to the seashore and Pergamum became its fortress. To this first principle, we add the tradition (also from the Egyptians) that their Thoth, or Mercury, discovered both laws and letters.

433

With this truth, we group the following other truths. For the Greeks, the words “name” and “character” have the same significance. Because of this, the church fathers used the two interchangeably when reasoning de divinis characteribus [“concerning divine characters”] and de divinis nominibus [“concerning divine names”].139 And the terms nomen [“name”] and definitio [“definition”], signify the same thing when, in rhetoric, what is called a quaestio nominis [“inquiry about a name”] is an inquiry about the definition of what something actually is.140 And, in medicine, the nomenclatura [“nomenclature”] for diseases is the area that defines that nature of those diseases. For the Romans, “names” signify, first and properly, the households from which many families branched. And that the earliest Greeks also considered names to have a significance of this sort is demonstrated by their patronymics, which signify the names of the Fathers of which the poets so often make use, and above all Homer,   Axiom 28.  Homer, Iliad 1.250–252. 138  Homer, Iliad 20.216–218. 139   This is an oblique reference to the Divine Names of Pseudo–Dioynsius. 140   Vico makes the same claim at De antiquissima 1.1; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 24[25]. 136 137

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Book Two the first of all of them; this is exactly the way that the Roman patricians were defined by a tribune of the plebs in Livy,141 qui possunt nomine ciere patrem, “those who are able to use the household name of their fathers”; these patronymics, later, were lost in the popular liberty of the rest of Greece, but were preserved by the Heraclids in Sparta, an aristocratic republic. In the Roman legal code, nomen signifies “right.” In Greek, the similar term νόμος [nomos] signifies “law”; and from νόμος comes νόμισμα [nomisma], which, as Aristotle142 noted, means “money.” And, for the etymologists, νόμος comes to be called numus [“money”] in Latin. For the French, loi signifies “law” and aloi means “money.” And in the return to barbarism, the term “canon” was used both for an ecclesiastical law and what the tenant under lease paid to the patron of land who granted the lease;143 it was through this uniformity in thinking, perhaps, that in Latin the term ius named both law and the fat of the sacrificial victim which was owed to Jove, who was originally called Ious, from which later were derived the genitives, Iovis [“of Jove”] and iuris [“of the law”], as was noted above [§398]; so too for the Hebrews, of the three parts of the animal which they made as a peace offering, the fat was the one which was owed to God and which was burned on the altar.144 In Latin, praedium [“landed property”] (this must have been used for country properties prior to urban ones) were called such, as we will make it possible to see [§486], insofar as the first cultivated lands were the first praedae [“spoils”] in the world; hence, the first domesticating was of lands of this sort, lands which on account of this, in the ancient Roman legal code, were called manucapatae (the sense of this is retained in the term manceps, someone who has an obligation to the public treasury in real estate). And those lands called manucapatae must have originally been, and have been called, mancipia [“repossessions”], which is certainly the sense in which we must understand the section in the Law of the Twelve Tables saying QUI NEXUM FACIET MANCIPIUMQUE—that is, “whoever makes a consignment of his bond with this consigns his freehold [poderi].” Hence, Italians were of the same mind as those of ancient Latium in calling the Latin manucapatae freeholds [poderi], for they have been acquired by force; one is further persuaded by the fact that, in the return to barbarism, they called the fields and their boundaries presas terrarum [“captured lands”]. The Spanish call brave enterprises prendas. The Italians name family coats of arms imprese and use termini [“boundaries”] to signify “terms,” a sense retained in Scholastic dialectic; family coats of arms, in addition to imprese, are called insegne, whence comes the word insegnare [“to teach”]; so too, Homer, in whose time the alphabetic letters called “common”

 Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.5, 1133a30. 143   That is, a Roman law contract known as an emphyteusis. Vico will allude to emphyteusis again at §§489, 573, 575, 1067. 144   Exodus 29:13; Leviticus 3:3–5, 4:8–10, 8:16, 9:10. 141 142

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The New Science [volgari] had not yet been found, says that the l­ etter from Proetus to Eureia against Bellerophon was written in σήματα [se¯ mata], “in signs.”145

434

Of all these things, let us make a summary with these final three incontestable truths. First, since it has been demonstrated that the earliest gentile nations were all mute at their start, they must have expressed themselves with gestures and objects that have a natural correspondence to their ideas. Second, it was with signs that they must have secured the borders of their freeholds and had perpetual witnesses of their rights. Third, all of them had founded the practice of using money. All these truths will give us herein the origins of languages and letters; and, from them, the origins of hieroglyphics, of laws, of names, of the insignia of noble houses, of money, and of the language and writing in which the earliest natural law of the gentile peoples was spoken and written.146

435

And so as to establish from all this these beginnings more firmly, we must here overturn that false opinion that hieroglyphics were discovered by philosophers so as to hide within them the mysteries of a lofty recondite wisdom, as was believed by the Egyptians. For it was a natural necessity common to all the earliest nations to speak in hieroglyphics—as was proposed above in the Axioms.147 So, in Africa, to what we have already considered in the case of the Egyptians, let us add the case of the Ethiopians, following Heliodorus148 in his On the Things of Ethiopia: they used as hieroglyphics the tools of all the arts of building. In the Near East, these same hieroglyphics must have been the magical characters of the Chaldeans. In northern Asia, as we have seen above [§§48, 99], the king of the Scythians, Idanthyrsus (at a time quite late in the Scythians’ boundless antiquity, in which they defeated even the Egyptians, who themselves boasted that they were the most ancient of all nations) responded with five real words to Darius the Great, who had threatened Idanthyrsus with war—that is, with a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow of an archer. The frog signified that Idanthyrsus was born from the land of Scythia, just as frogs are born from the land during the rainy season, and that he was the son of that land. The mouse signified that he, like a mouse, had made a house where he was born, that is, had founded a people. The bird signified that, in that house, the auspices were his—that is, as we will see below [§490], he was subject to no one but to God. The ploughshare signified that he had reduced those lands to cultivation, and so had domesticated them and made them his own by strength. Finally, the bow of an archer signified that he had, as the supreme commander of armed forces in Scythia, the duty and ability to defend it. Compare this explanation, so natural and   See Homer, Iliad 6.168.   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. 147   Axiom 57. 148  Heliodorus, Aethiopica 4.8.1. 145 146

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necessary, with the ridiculous ones that, in St. Cyril,149 are given by the counselors of Darius, and it will prove to be general evidence of the fact that up until now no one has known the true and proper use made of the hieroglyphics, which the earliest peoples gave currency (this is especially the case when you combine the interpretations the counselors of Darius gave to the Scythian hieroglyphics with those far-fetched, overwrought, and contorted interpretations the learned have given to the Egyptian hieroglyphics). In Italy, Roman history has not left us wanting for some tradition about hieroglyphs in the mute, heroic response that Tarquinius Superbus sent to his son in Gabii by making it possible for the messenger to see that he was cutting of the heads of poppies with a stick which he held in his own hands: some have believed that he did this out of pride when what was needed was total discretion. In northern Europe, Tacitus150 observes, in writing about their customs, that the ancient Germans did not know of literarum secretum [“secret letters”]—that is, did not know how to write hieroglyphics of their own—and this must have remained the case up until the time of Frederick the Swabian, even up until the time of Rudolph of Austria, after which they started to write state documents in common German script. In northern France, there was the hieroglyphic way of speaking, the so-called rebus de Picardie [“the things from Picardy”], which must have been, as in Germany, speaking with things—that is, hieroglyphics like those of Idanthyrsus. Up in Ultima Thule, and in its most remote part, Scotland, Hector Boece tells us in his History of Scotland that this nation, in ancient times, wrote in hieroglyphics. In the West Indies, the Mexicans were discovered to write in hieroglyphics, and Jan de Laet151 in his Description of New India describes the hieroglyphics of the West Indians as the different heads of animals, plants, flowers, fruits, and says that through their stock they distinguish the different families, which is exactly the use that family coats of arms have in our world. In the East Indies, the Chinese to this day write in hieroglyphics. In this way, the vanity of the learned is deflated (this came later than that of the extremely vain Egyptians and was not nearly as inflated), the vanity that all the other wise men of the world had learned from the Egyptians how to hide their recondite wisdom within hieroglyphics.

436

Having posited the principles pertaining to the Poetic Logic and having dissipated the vanity of the learned, let us return to the three languages of the Egyptians; on the first of these, the language of gods, as was noted in the Axioms,152 the Greeks agreed with the Egyptians, for

437

 In fact, Clement, Stromata 5.8.  Tacitus, Germania 19.1–2. Vico’s interpretation of this passage is highly questionable. 151   Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), Dutch geographer, director of the Dutch West India Company, author of the History of the New World. Vico’s reference is to the 1633 edition of this text. 152   Axiom 29. 149 150

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The New Science Homer, in five passages from the whole of his two poems, mentions a language more ancient than his own (his own language, certainly, being heroic) and called the language of the gods. Three passages are in the Iliad:153 the first is where he tells us of someone called Briareus by the gods, Aegaeon by men; the second is where he recounts a bird called χαλκίδα [chalkida] by the gods, κύμινδιν [kumindin] by men. In the third, there is a river in Troy which the gods call Xanthus, men call Scamandrus. In the Odyssey,154 there are two passages: first, that the gods call πλαγκτάς πέτρας [plagktas petras], those whom men speak of as Scylla and Charybdis; second, where Mercury gives Ulysses a secret antidote to the witchcraft of Circe, the name of which is μῶλυ [mo¯ly] for the gods and knowledge of which is completely denied to men. Concerning these passages, Plato155 has many things to say, but emptily; as a result of Plato, Dio Chrysostom156 later accuses Homer of the imposture that he understood the language of the gods. However, we may harbor some doubts about the agreement of the Greeks with the Egyptians: the gods in these passages perhaps ought be understood as representing heroes who, as will be shown a little below [§449], took for themselves the names of gods and, from on high, called the plebeians of their cities “men,” just as in the return to barbarism, they called vassals homines [“human beings”] (as was observed with wonder by Hotman157) and great lords, then as well as during the return to barbarism, made it a part of their glory that they possessed wondrous medical secrets. And so, these passages might show nothing more than the differences between the noble and common tongues. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt in the case of Latin, for Varro set to work diligently to collect thirty thousand gods, as was noted in the Axioms,158 which must have been enough for a dictionary of divine names copious enough to express every human need had by the peoples of Latium, which, in those simple and spare times, must have been very few, because their needs were the necessities of life. The Greeks also counted thirty thousand gods, as was also stated in the Axioms,159 making deities out of every rock, every fountain or brook, every plant, every reef (numbered among these are the dryads, the hamadryads, the oreads, and naiads) just as those in the Americas make gods out of all the things which exceed their limited capacities. As a result, the myths about the  Homer, Iliad 1.403–402; 14.291; 20.74.  Homer, Odyssey 23.327–328; 10.305. 155   See Plato, Cratylus 391d–392e. 156  Dio Chrysostom (40–115 CE), Greek orator. The reference is to Oration 11.23. 157   François Hotman (1524–1590), French Protestant jurist whose writings are important for Vico’s interpretation of medieval law. The reference is to De verbis feudalibus, p. 764. 158   Axiom 30. 159   Axiom 30. 153 154

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gods in Latium and Greece must be the earliest true hieroglyphics, comparable to the sacred characters of the Egyptians. The second way of speaking, corresponding to the age of heroes, the Egyptians claimed was speaking through symbols, which are reducible to heroic emblems; these must have been the mute similes which Homer calls σήματα [se¯ mata]—the signs in which heroes wrote—and, consequently, must have been the metaphors, images, similes, or comparisons which later, in articulated language, made for all the resourcefulness of poetic speech.

438

For certainly Homer (following the resolute denial by Josephus the Jew160 that any more ancient writer than Homer has come down to us) comes to be for us the first author of the Greek language and since we have from the Greeks everything that has reached us from gentile antiquity, he was the first author of all of gentile antiquity. Among the peoples of Latium, the earliest memories of their language are preserved in fragments of the Salian hymns. And the first writer of whom we are told is the poet, Livius Andronicus.161 And in the recurrence of barbarism in Europe, with the birth of other languages, the earliest language of the Spanish, and consequently of heroic poetry, was that which is called the language “of romance”; for the writers of romances were the heroic poets of the returned barbarous times. In France, the first writer in common French was Arnaut Daniel Pacca,162 the first of all the Provençal poets who flourished in the eleventh century. And, finally, the first writers in Italy were the Florentine and Sicilian rhymers. The epistolary way of speaking for the Egyptians—agreeable to the expression of the immediate needs of common life among those distant from one another—must have come to be among the common run of a principal people in Egypt, which must have been the people of Thebes, whose king, Ramses, as was stated above [§44], extended his power over the entirety of that great nation; this is because, for the Egyptians, this language corresponds to the age of men, those who were called the plebs of heroic peoples, as distinct from the heroes, as was stated above [§437]; and this language must be conceived as having come forth from free agreement among those plebs through this eternal property, namely, that commonplace speech and writing is a right of peoples. Hence, when Emperor Claudius discovered three additional letters needed in the Latin language, the Roman people would not accept them, just as the Italians   Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12.   Livius Andronicus (c. 284–205 BCE), earliest known Roman poet and the first translator of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin. 162   Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1200), Occitan troubadour whom Dante praises as a “better craftsman” (miglio fabbro) at Purgatorio 26.117. 160 161

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The New Science have not accepted those discovered by Giorgio Trissino,163 although their loss is felt in Italian speech.

440

This epistolary, or common, way of speaking for the Egyptians must have been written in letters equally common, which are found to resemble the common alphabetic letters of the Phoenicians. Hence, it is necessarily the case that one of them must have received the letters from the other.164 For, from this, those of the opinion that the Egyptians were the first discoverers of all the things necessary or advantageous for human society must conclude that the Egyptians taught them to the Phoenicians. However, Clement of Alexandria, who must have been better informed than any other author on things pertaining to Egypt, tells us that Sanchuniathon, or Sancuniates the Phoenician—who is placed in the Chronological Table in the age of heroes in Greece—had written Phoenician history in common alphabetic letters, and so he proposes Sanchuniathon as the first author of gentile antiquity to have written in common alphabetic characters. On account of this passage, it has been said that the Phoenicians, who certainly were the first merchant people in the world, entered into Egypt for reasons of trade and brought with them their common alphabetic letters. However, without any argument or conjecture, a folk tradition certifies for us that these Phoenicians brought letters to Greece. Reflecting on this tradition, Cornelius Tacitus165 says that they brought with them, as if discovered by themselves, the discoveries of others, by which he understands Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, because this folk tradition must have some foundation in the true—as we have proved must be universally true of all folk traditions [§144])—let us say that the Phoenicians brought with them hieroglyphs received from others and that these could not have been anything other than the mathematical characters which they had received from the Chaldeans, who indisputably were the first mathematicians and, especially, the first astronomers of the nations. Hence, Zoroaster the Chaldean (called this name because it means “observer of stars,” according to Bochart166) was the first wise man of gentile antiquity. And the Phoenicians used these mathematical characters as numbers in their trade, for which reason, long before Homer, they frequented the shores of Greece, evidence for which is offered in both poems of Homer, but   Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550), Renaissance humanist born in Vincenza.   Vico thus qualifies his opposition to “diffusion” theories (see the note at §125), allowing for the possibility of cultural borrowing in the third “hu­man” age. 165  Tacitus, Annals 11.14.1. 166   Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), Protestant theologian, teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet, and author of Geographia sacra seu Phaleg et Chanaan, printed in 1646. 163 164

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especially in the Odyssey; for in the time of Homer (as Josephus vigorously maintains, contrary to Apion the grammarian) common alphabetic letters had not yet been found in Greece. The Greeks, who take the prize for ingenuity, in which they surpassed all the nations, later translated these geometrical forms into the forms of different articulated sounds and, with the highest beauty, formed the common characters of alphabetic letters; these letters, afterwards, were taken up by the peoples of Latium, which that same Tacitus167 observed were similar to ancient Greek letters. A most weighty proof of this is that the Greeks, for a long time, and the people of Latium, down to their final days, used capital letters so as to write numbers, and it must have been the case that Demetrius the Corinthian and Carmenta, the wife of Evander the Arcadian, taught these letters to the people of Latium when, as we will explain below [§§762, 772], the Greeks committed to coastal and inland colonies in Latium. And there is no worth to the contention from many men of erudition that the common alphabetic letters of the Hebrews must have been brought to the Greeks inasmuch as the names for those letters are observed to be almost the same for one as they are for the other. It would be more reasonable that the Hebrews had imitated the Greek names for letters than that the Greeks imitated the Hebrews. For everyone agrees that from the time at which Alexander the Great conquered the empire of the Near East (which, after his death, was divided up by his generals), Greek speech spread throughout the entire Near East and Egypt, and everyone also agrees that grammar was introduced quite late among the Hebrews. The necessary thing would be for Hebrew men of letters to have named Hebraic letters after the names given to them by the Greeks.

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In addition, since elements are most simple by nature, it must have originally been the case that the Greeks minted letters in their simplest sounds, and on account of this aspect, they must have called them “elements,” just as the peoples of Latium, following the Greeks, minted letters with the same weightiness and preserved forms of letters similar to ancient Greek letters. Hence, one must say that the practice of naming letters with complex sounds was introduced late among the Greeks and, much later, was brought by the Greeks in the Near East to the Hebrews. Reasoning upon things in this way dispels the opinion of those who want Cecrops the Egyptian to have brought common alphabetic letters to Greece. In addition, as for the opinion of those who deem that Cadmus the Phoenician had brought these letters to Greece from Egypt inasmuch as there was founded in Greece a city with the name Thebes (the capital of a major dynasty in Egypt), this will be resolved below in the Poetic Geography [§§742–753], in which it will be found that the Greeks who  Tacitus, Annals 11.14.4.

167

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The New Science went to Egypt called the capital of Egypt “Thebes” on account of its similarity to a city native to them of the same name. Finally, one can understand why the perceptive critics (cited by the anonymous English author of On the Uncertainty of the Sciences168) judge that, because the date assigned to Sancuniates was too ancient, he never existed in the world. Hence, so as not to remove him completely from the world, we deem that he must be put at a much later time, certainly after Homer. And, so as to preserve the fact that the Phoenician invention of alphabetic letters called “common” [volgari] was more ancient than that of the Greeks and, at the same time, giving correct weight to the fact that ingenuity of the Greeks was much greater than that of the Phoenicians, one must say that Sancuniates existed somewhat before Herodotus, who is called the father of Greek history, a history that he wrote in commonplace speech. It is on account of this that Sancuniates was called the historian of truth—that is, someone writing on historical times, as Varro calls them in his division of time. Following the Egyptian threefold division of language corresponding to the threefold division of ages through which the world had previously run its course, it was in historical times that they spoke in an epistolary language written in common alphabetic characters.

443

Now, just as heroic, or poetic, language was founded by heroes, so too the vernacular languages were introduced by the common run, whom we will find herein [§§597–598] to have been the plebs of heroic peoples. Such languages were properly called by the peoples of Latium vernaculae [“indigenous”], but they could not have been introduced by those vernae whom the grammarians define as servants born in a household of those who were made slaves in war, for they naturally take up the languages of the peoples where their parents were born. However, as will be found herein [§§556, 994, 1017], those who were first, and properly, called vernae were the familial servants of the heroes in the state of the families, from whom were composed, later, the common run who were the first plebs of the heroic cities, and they were the precursors of those who were eventually made slaves by cities in wars. And all of this is confirmed by the two languages of which Homer speaks, the language of the gods and the language of men, which were— as we explained herein above [§437] and as we explain shortly a great deal more [§§446–454])—“heroic language” and “vernacular language.”

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However, concerning the vernacular languages, it has been accepted with too much good faith by all the philologists that their significations were conventional. For they must have had, on account of their natural 168   Thomas Baker (1656–1740), English antiquarian born in Durham, educated at St. John’s College at Cambridge, author of Reflections upon Learning (1738). As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Vico significantly misquotes the title of Baker’s book.

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origins, natural significations. This is easy to observe in the Latin vernacular language, which is more heroic than the Greek vernacular language and, accordingly, is as much hardened as Greek is more refined; almost all the words in vernacular Latin are formed by some natural correspondence, either by natural properties or by sensible effects. More generally speaking, metaphor makes for the majority of words the languages of all the nations. However, the grammarians encountered a great number of terms which give confused and indistinct ideas of things, and since they did not know the origins which must have originally formed luminous and distinct ideas, they established as a universal maxim—to make peace with their ignorance—that human words expressed significations which are conventional; and they drew in Aristotle, along with Galen and other philosophers, and armed themselves against Plato and Iamblichus, as we have stated [§227]. However, there still remains a very great difficulty: how is it that there are as many vernacular languages as there are peoples? In order to unravel this difficulty, we herein establish the following great truth: just as it is certain that peoples, on account of difference in climate, came to have a range of different natures, whence came so great a range of different customs, so too out of their different natures and customs grew just as many different languages. As a result, on account of this very diversity in their natures, they regarded the same advantages and necessities of human life from different perspectives, whence came the many customs so different from and contrary to one another. It was in this way, and not otherwise, that it came about that there are as many languages as there are nations. This is confirmed by the evidence of proverbs—that is, the maxims of human life—whose substance is the same, but which are expressed from as many different perspectives as there are nations which have and do exist, as was noted in the Axioms.169 Consequently, these same heroic origins, preserved with concision within vernacular tongues, have made biblical critics disposed to wonder at the fact that the names of the same kings are expressed in one way when reading sacred history and in another when reading profane history. For the former, with a view to what has come to pass, regards men in terms of appearance, of power; the latter regards this in terms of customs, enterprises, or other such things which have been. Thus do we observe all the time that the cities of Hungary are named in one way by the Hungarians, in another by the Greeks, in still another by the Germans, and in still another by the Turks. And the German language, which is a living heroic language, transforms almost all the words of foreign languages into native words proper to itself. This allows us to conjecture that the peoples of Latium and Greece did the same in reasoning upon so many barbarous things in elegant Greek and Latin. This must be the cause of 169

  Axiom 22.

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The New Science the obscurity encountered in ancient geography and in the natural history of fossils, plants, and animals. Accordingly, in the first edition of this work, we meditated upon an idea of a mental dictionary for giving the significations for all the differently expressed languages, reducing them all to certain unities of ideas in substance, which, in connection with various modifications as considered by the peoples, have come to be assigned different and various terms by those peoples. We will make use of this dictionary everywhere in the reasoning of this science, and we offered the fullest test of it in Chapter Four of the first edition,170 where we made it possible to see that the paterfamilias, observed from fifteen different perspectives in the familial state and the earliest republic (the time when languages must have been formed) had as many as fifteen different names in fifteen different languages, ancient and modern—the weightiest arguments about this time were those concerning the things which take their native significance from words, as was proposed in the Axioms.171 This is one of the three places for which we do not regret that that book was printed. This dictionary reasons in an alternative way upon the argument which Thomas Hayne172 discusses in his treatise, De linguarum cognatione, and, in addition, in De linguis in genere et variorum linguarum harmonia. It is from all this that one gathers the following corollary: the richer a language is in this concise, heroic speech, the more beautiful it is; and they are more beautiful because they are more evident; and because they are more evident, they are truer and more trustworthy. Contrariwise, the more crowded they are with words of hidden origins, the less delightful they are because they are obscure and confused and, accordingly, subject to deception and error. This must be the case for languages formed from a mixture of many barbarous languages, the history of whose origins and transmission has not come down to us.

446

Now (so as to enter upon the greatest difficulty concerning the fashion in which all three of these kinds of languages and letters were formed) one must establish the following principle: just as gods, heroes, and men started at the same time (for it was men who imagined the gods and believed that their heroic nature was a mixture of that of the gods and of men), so too these three languages started at the same time, with the understanding that each proceeded with letters equivalent to it. Nevertheless, at their start, they had these three great differences among them. The language of the gods was almost completely mute, barely articulate. The language of heroes was an equal mixture of articulate and mute language and, consequently, a mixture of the vernacular tongues and the  In fact, Scienza nuova prima 3.41 (§§387–389).   Axiom 65. 172   Thomas Hayne (1582–1645), English linguist, schoolmaster, and theologian, educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. Vico’s reference is to Hayne’s Linguarum cognatio (1639). 170 171

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heroic characters with which the heroes wrote (these are called σήματα by Homer173). The language of men was almost completely articulate and barely mute, insofar as there is no vernacular language so copious that there are not more things than it has words for. Consequently, it was necessarily the case that heroic language at its beginning was extremely discomposed, which is the great source of the obscurity of myths, of which the myth of Cadmus would be a signal example. He kills the great serpent; he sows its teeth; from the furrows are born armed men; he throws a great rock among them; they fight to the death; and, finally, Cadmus himself is changed into a serpent.174 Such was the great ingenuity of this Cadmus, who brought the letters to Greece by which the myth was transmitted, a myth which, as we will explain below [§679], contains several centuries of poetic history! To follow upon what has already been stated, at the same time that the divine character, Jove, was being formed (this was the first of all human thoughts in gentile antiquity), at equal pace was formed articulate language by onomatopoeia; it is by this that we everywhere observe children successfully expressing themselves. And this Jove for the peoples of Latium was because of the crash of thunder originally called Ious; because of the crackle of lightning, he was, for the peoples of Greece, called Ζεύς [Zeus]; for the peoples of the Near East, because of the sound of burning fire, he was called Ur, from which came Urim, the power of fire. From these same origins must have come the Greek word οὐρανός [ouranos], the “heavens,” and the Latin verb uro, “to burn.” Also in Latin, from that same crackle of lightning must have come cel, one of the monosyllables of Ausonius, but with the pronunciation of the Spanish “ç” in order to make sense of alliteration in his line on Venus:

447

Nata solo, suscepta solo, patre edita coelo.175 [“Born in the salt, raised on the soil, by her father borne to the heavens.”]

Within these origins, it must be noted that, along with that same sublimity of invention—which we observed above [§379] in the myth of Jove—is the equally important start of sublime poetic locution in onomatopoeia, which Dionysius Longinus176 puts among the sources of the sublime and which he notes in Homer in the sound emitted by Polyphemus’s eye when Ulysses pierces it with a flaming stake, the sound σίζ [sis]. These were followed by forming human words with interjections—that is, articulate words under the impetus of violent passions, which in all languages are monosyllables.  Homer, Iliad 6.168.   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.1–140; 4.563–603. 175  Ausonius, Epigrams on Various Matters, epigram 52. 176   The illustration does not appear in Longinus. Battistini suggests Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoria 1.5.72, as a possible source. 173 174

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The New Science Hence, it is not beyond verisimilitude that, when the start of the first lightning bolts awakened wonder in men, the first interjection came into being from the interjection of Jove, taking form in the word “pa!” which was later retained in the duplication “papa!” an interjection expressing wonder; hence came into being Jove’s title, “father of men and gods,” and later, all the gods were called “fathers,” all the goddesses “mothers.” This is retained in the Latin words, Jupiter, Diespiter, Marspiter, Juno genitrix (even though myths certainly tell us that Juno was sterile). And we observed above [§80] how many gods and goddesses in heaven did not contract marriages (for example, Venus was called the concubine, not the wife, of Mars) and, nevertheless, they were all named parents, on which there are some verses by Lucilius referred to in the notes in our On Universal Law.177 And they were called “fathers” [padre] in the sense that patrare [“to bring to completion”] must have originally signified the making that is proper to God, since this accords with the sacred text which, in telling us of the creation of the world, says that on the seventh day God rested ab opera quod patrarat [“from the work He brought to completion”].178 Consequently, the word impetrare [“to obtain a request”] must have been used as if it were impatrare, which, in the science of auguries, they say as impetrire—that is, “to seek a good augury”—about whose origin, the Latin grammarians have said such nonsense. This proves that the first “interpretation” was an interpretation of the divine laws ordered by the auspices, as if the word were written interpatratio.179

449

Now, it was a divine title of this sort, out of the natural ambition of human pride, that men with power in the familial state arrogated to themselves, the men who were named Fathers (this perhaps gave the impetus to the folk tradition that the earliest men with power on the Earth made themselves adored as if they were gods). However, through the piety owed to the numinous ones, only the latter were called “gods”; later, when the powerful men of the earliest cities took for themselves the name of gods, through that same piety, they called the numinous ones dei immortali [“immortal gods”] in order to distinguish them from dei mortali [“mortal gods”]—that is, men such as themselves. However, in this can be noted the gullishness of those giants of whom travelers in Patagonia tell us, a fair vestige of which remains in Latin in the ancient words pipulum and pipare, which mean “complaint” and “to complain”: this must have come from interjections of lament, “pi! pi!” It is in this sense that pipulum is used later in Plautus180 as synonymous with  In fact, Vico treats Lucilius not in his Notae, but at De constantia iurisprudentis 2.20 (Cristofolini 515[1]). 178   Compare Genesis 2:2 in the Vulgate. 179   See Vico, Notae in Librum Alterum 49 (Cristofolini 779). 180   See Plautus, Aulularia 446. 177

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the obvagulatio [“wailing”] of the Twelve Tables, a term which comes from vagire, which is the “crying” proper to children. As a result, it is necessarily the case that out of these interjections of fear was born the Greek word παιάν [paian], which started with παί [pai, “child”]. About this word, there is a golden ancient tradition among the Greeks that, when they were terrified by the great serpent, Python, they invoked the succor of Apollo with the words ἰὼ παιάν [io¯ paian]; at first, they beat out the words in rhythm three times slowly while paralyzed by terror; then, jubilantly (because Apollo had killed Python) they beat out the words again three times, but quickly and separating out the “ω!” into “ο! ο!” and the diphthong “αι” into two syllables. Hence, first, spondaic heroic verse naturally came into being and, later, dactylic verse; and this verse has retained that eternal property of giving priority to the dactyl in all feet other than the final one. And song in the metrics of heroic verse naturally came into being under the impetus of the most violent passions and, above all, under the impetus of extreme affliction and joy, as was stated above in the Axioms.181 And what has been said here will be put to good use a little below [§463], when we reason upon the origins of song and verse. They went on, after interjections, to form pronouns, insofar as interjections give vent to passions proper to oneself, which can be done even when one is alone, but pronouns serve to communicate our ideas with others about things that either we do not know how to call by their proper names, or whose proper names another may not understand; and, indeed, the majority of pronouns in almost all languages are monosyllables, and the first of these (or, at least, among the first) must have been that which in this golden passage from Ennius, Aspic HOC sublime cadens, quem omnes invocant Iovem182 [“Behold that which descends sublimely from on high, that which everyone calls Jove”];

here, the HOC [“that”] is said in place of “the heavens,” and the demonstrative function of the pronoun remains in common Latin in expressions like Luciscit hoc iam183 [“That there now grows light”]

in place of albescit coelom [“the heavens grow light”]. And the definite article from its birth has that eternal property of going before the word to which it is connected.   Axiom 59.   This verse of Ennius is attested at Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2.4. 183  Plautus, Amphytrion 543.

181 182

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451

Afterwards, particles were formed, of which the majority are the prepositions, which are also, in almost all languages, monosyllables and which preserve as words the eternal property of going before the nouns which depend upon them and the verbs with which they are composed.

452

Gradually, nouns came to be formed. Concerning these nouns, in the Origins of the Latin Language in the first edition of this work,184 we counted a great number which grew in Latium out of the primitive life of those peoples and continued through their rustic period up until the time of the earliest civil life; all these nouns took the form of monosyllables, and none of them were of foreign origin, not even Greek, with the exception of four: βοῦς [bous], σῦς [sus], μῦς [mus], and σήψ [se¯ ps], the last of which means “hedge” in Latin, “serpent” in Greek. This is the second of three places that we deem complete in that first edition. For it can offer a model for those with learning in other languages to search for the origins in these languages most fruitfully for the Republic of Letters; for example, it is certainly the case that, insofar as no foreign nation ever entered to have command over Germany, the German language (which is a mother language) has monosyllables for all of its root words. And that nouns came into existence before verbs is proved by this eternal property, that no sentence holds up unless it starts with a noun, either expressed or tacit, which supports it.

453

Finally, the authors of languages formed verbs, just as we observe children expressing nouns and particles, but omitting the verbs. For nouns awaken ideas that leave definite traces, and particles, which signify these modifications, do the same. However, verbs signify motions, which imply a “before” and an “after,” which are measured by the indivisible present, something difficult to understand even by philosophers. And here is an observation from physiology, which more than proves what we are saying: there is alive among us an honorable man who, struck down by a serious stroke, still remembers nouns but has completely forgotten verbs. And, indeed, there are verbs which are genera for all the other verbs: sum [“to be”] for the genus “being,” under which are subsumed all essences—that is to say, all the metaphysical things—and so there is sto [“to stay”] for the genus “rest,” and eo [“to go”] for the genus “motion,” under which are subsumed all the things pertaining to physics; do and dico and facio [“to give” and “to say” and “to do”], under which are subsumed all the things pertaining to agency, whether moral or domestic or, eventually, civil. These verbs must have started with imperatives, for in the familial state, impoverished to the highest degree in terms of language, the Fathers alone must have used speech and given orders to children and familial servants. These children and familial servants, subject to a terrifying familial power, as we will see below [§518], must have silently followed these commands with a blind obsequiousness, impera-

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  Scienza nuova prima §§369–370.

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Book Two tives which were all monosyllables, retained in the words es, sta, i, da, dic, and da [“be,” “stay,” “go,” “give,” “speak,” “do”]. This account of the generation of languages thus conforms with the principles of universal nature, by which the elements of all things are indivisible; from these elements, these things are composed and into them they are resolved. Similarly, they conform to the principles particular to human nature; through the Axiom185 that children born into this abundance of articulate speech, even though the tissues of the organ necessary for articulate language is quite supple in children, still start with monosyllables, we must deem all the more, then, that this was the case for the earliest men of the gentiles, whose organs were extremely inflexible and who had never heard a human voice.

454

Moreover, this account offers an order in which the parts of speech came into being and, consequently, the natural causes of syntax. All these things seem more reasonable than what Julius Caesar Scaliger and Francisco Sanchez186 have stated with respect to the Latin language. As if the peoples who discovered the languages had first gone to school with Aristotle, with whose principles both Scaliger and Sanchez have discussed the matter!

455

Corollaries concerning the origins of poetic locution, digression, inversion, rhythm, song, and verse187 In this fashion, the poetic language was formed by the nations, a language composed of divine and heroic characters; it was, later, expressed in the vernacular tongues; and, finally, it was written in common alphabetic characters.

456

And this came into being entirely from the poverty of language and the necessity to express oneself. This fact is demonstrated by the first adornments of poetic locution: hypotyposes, images, similes, comparisons, metaphors, periphrases, phrases expressing things through their natural properties, descriptions gathered from the most special and sensible effects, and, finally, emphatic and redundant epithets. Poetic digression came into being from the excessiveness of the heroic mind, which does not know how to separate out what is proper to the   Axiom 60.   Here Vico probably has in mind Scaliger’s De causis linguae latinae (1540) and Sanchez’s Minerva seu de causis linguae latinae (1587). 187   The corresponding section of the 1730 edition bears the title “Demonstration of the Truth of the Christian Religion.” 185 186

457

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The New Science things which they propose to do, which we see is naturally the usage of idiots and, above all, women.

458

Poetic inversion came into being from the difficulty of giving the verb of a sentence, which, as we have seen [§453], is the last part of speech to be discovered. Hence the Greeks, who were a most ingenious people, invert speech less than people of Latium, and the people of Latium less than the Germans.

459

Prose rhythm was understood late by writers, by Gorgias of Leontini in Greek and by Cicero in Latin. This was insofar as previously (as Cicero188 himself relates), they had given rhythm to their speeches by using certain poetic meters. This will serve us well subsequently [§§461–462] when, shortly, we reason upon the origins of song and verse.

460

From all this, it would seem to be demonstrated that poetic locution, because of a necessity of human nature, came into being prior to prose locution, just as, by a necessity in human nature, myths—that is, imaginative universals—came into being prior to rational, or philosophical, universals, which came into being by means of prose locution. Insofar as poets previously went on to form poetic speech by the composition of particular ideas, as has been fully demonstrated herein [§209], later there came peoples after them who formed prose speech by contracting in a single word, as if under a genus, the parts which had been composed in poetic speech; so, for example, from the poetic phrase “the blood in my heart boils” (this expresses an eternal and universal property belonging to the nature of humankind), the people contracted the parts—blood, boiling, and heart—in a single word, as if under a genus, which is, in Greek, στόμαχος [stomachos], in Latin, ira, and, in Italian, anger [collera]. At the same pace, hieroglyphics and heroic letters were contracted to a few common alphabetic letters, as genera to which countless different articulated words could conform; for this, the peak of ingenuity was necessary. With these commonplace genera, both of words and of letters, the minds of peoples became quicker at thinking and at forming abstractions, at which later the philosophers were able to arrive, the philosophers who formed the intelligible genera. This is but a piece of our reasoning in the history of ideas. Thus, to the extent that one seeks to find the origins of letters, one must, in the same breath, treat the origins of languages!

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Concerning song and verse, we have proposed the Axioms189 that demonstrate the origins by which men, who originally were mute, must have issued forth vowels while singing, just as those who are mute do; and by which, later, they must have issued forth articulate consonants, also while singing, just as those who stutter do. A great proof for this is 188 189

 Cicero, De oratore 3.44.173.   Axioms 58–59.

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that the earliest song by peoples is in the diphthongs, which persists in our languages; these diphthongs must have originally been much more numerous, as they are in Greek and in French, which passed before their time from the poetic age to the common [volgare], retaining a great many of them—as was observed in the Axioms.190 The cause of these diphthongs is that vowels are easy to form, but consonants are difficult; and that, as was demonstrated, those first, stupid men, so as to be moved to issue words, must have felt the most violent passions, which are naturally expressed in a very loud voice. And nature tends, when a man raises his voice, towards diphthongs and song, as was noted in the Axioms,191 whence it was demonstrated a little above [§449] that the earliest Greek men, in their age of gods, had formed the earliest spondees of heroic verse with the diphthong παί [pai], with twice as many vowels as consonants. Again, this first song of peoples came into being naturally from difficulties in enunciation in those earliest times, which we will demonstrate by both its causes and its effects. The cause is that these men had an organ for speaking which was formed of tissues not flexible enough for articulating words, and there were very few words to articulate. Even children (who, by contrast, have the most supple tissue and are born into the greatest abundance of words) are observed to have the greatest difficulty in enunciating consonants, as was also stated in the Axioms,192 and the Chinese (who have no more than three hundred articulated sounds which, by various modifications of pitch and stress, correspond to a vernacular language of one hundred and twenty thousand hieroglyphics) speak by singing. As for the effects, it is demonstrated, first, by the contraction of words (of this there are countless cases in Italian poetry, and in the Origins of the Latin Language in the first edition of this work,193 we demonstrated, in a great number of cases, that words must have come into existence in a contracted form and, over time, were lengthened) and, second, by redundant sounds insofar as stutterers compensate with syllables that they are better disposed to utter by singing for those which are difficult to enunciate, as was also proposed in the Axioms.194 Hence, with us, during my lifetime, there was an excellent tenor with a speech defect who, when he was unable to utter some word, would offer it in the pleasing song and, in doing so, enunciate it. So, certainly the Arabs start almost all their words with “al,” and it has been affirmed that the Huns were called this because they started all their words with “un.” Finally, it is demonstrated that languages started in song by the fact that, as we have stated above [§459], prior to Gorgias and Cicero, the Greek   Axiom 21.   Axioms 21 and 59. 192   Axiom 60. 193   Scienza nuova prima §§369–372. 194   Axiom 58. 190 191

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The New Science and Latin prose writers used certain meters that were quasi-poetic, just as, in the return to barbarism, the Latin church fathers did (the Greek church fathers will be found to do the same) and, as a result, their prose resembles canticles.

463

The first verse—we have demonstrated just above [§449] its actual coming to be—must have come to be in a way agreeable to the language and age of heroes—that is, as heroic verse, the greatest of all the verses and the one proper to heroic poetry—and it came to be out of the most violent passions of terror and joy, since heroic poetry treats of nothing but the most disturbing passions. And yet, it did not come into being as spondaic out of a great fear of Python, as folk tradition recounts, for such disturbances quicken ideas and words rather than slow them down (hence, in Latin, solicitus [“restless”] and festinans [“hastening”] also signify “fearful”). Rather, it was on account of the slowness of mind and the difficulty of speaking for the earliest authors of the nations that heroic verse first came into being, as we have demonstrated, as spondaic; because of this, it holds on to the last foot, allowing only a spondee. Later, when thought and speech became quicker, the dactyl was admitted. Later, as both became even quicker, iambics came into being, which Horace195 calls “the swift foot,” as two Axioms196 proposed with respect to these origins. Finally, with both at their quickest, came prose, which, as we saw above, speaks in almost intellectual genera, and iambic verse is so close to prose that prose writers will often inadvertently fall into it. Thus, song went along at the same pace as speech and ideas, hastening as both became quicker among the nations, as was also noted in the Axioms.197

464

Such philosophy is confirmed for us by history, which tells us, as was proposed in the Axioms,198 that there are no things more ancient than oracles and the different versions of Sybil: hence, so as to indicate that a thing is very ancient, it was said that it was “older than Sybil”; and there were different versions of Sybil spread throughout all the earliest nations, of which twelve come down to us; and there is a folk tradition that the Sybil sang in heroic verses, and the oracles of all the nations also gave their responses in heroic verse, whence such verse was called, by the Greeks, Pythian from the famous oracle of the Pythian Apollo, who must have been named this from killing the serpent called Python, from whom, as we have stated above [§449], the earliest spondaic verse came into being; by the peoples of Latium, such verse was called Saturnian, as Festus199 ascertains, which must have come into being in Italy during  Horace, Ars poetica 252.   Axioms 61–62. 197   Axiom 65. 198   Axiom 40. 199   Sextus Pompeius Festus, second-century-CE grammarian and author of De verborum significatu. 195 196

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the age of Saturn, corresponding to the golden age in Greece, in which Apollo, along with the other gods, consorted on Earth with men; and Ennius, according to that same Festus, says that, in such verse, the fauns in Italy rendered their fati—that is, their oracles, which, it is certain, in Greece they rendered in hexameters, as was stated. However, later, Saturnian verses remained in iambics called senarii, perhaps because by then it was as natural to speak Saturnians in iambic verse as previously it was natural to speak Saturnians in heroic verse. Although those in our times who are learned about the sacred texts are divided into their different opinions concerning Hebrew poetry over whether it is composed with meters or, more truly, with rhythms, nevertheless, Josephus, Philo, Origen, and Eusebius stand in favor of meter. And, what is most important for our purposes, St. Jerome insists that the Book of Job, which is more ancient than the Books of Moses, was put together in heroic verse from the beginning of third chapter up until the beginning of the forty-second chapter.200

465

The Arabs, when they were ignorant of letters (as was related by the anonymous author201 of On the Uncertainty of the Sciences) preserved their language by keeping its memory in their poetry until they inundated the Near Eastern provinces of the Greek empire.

466

The Egyptians inscribed memory of the departed in verse on s­ iringi— or columns—so-called from sir, which means “song,”202 whence came the name “Siren,” a deity without doubt renowned for song; Ovid says the nymph, Syrinx, was as equally renowned for her song as for her beauty, and the origin of the names, Syrians and Assyrians (who must have originally spoken in verse) was also sir.

467

Certainly, the founders of Greek humanity were the theological poets, and they were called heroes and sang in heroic verse.

468

We have seen [§438] that the earliest authors of the Latin language were the Salians, sacred poets from whom we have fragments of Salian verse, which have the air of heroic verse and are the most ancient memorials of Latin speech.

469

The ancient triumphant Romans left memorials of their triumphs also with the air of heroic verse; thus, there is that of the triumph of Lucius Aemilius Regillus,203

 In his Preface to Job (c. 392 CE), Jerome claims that Job 3:3–42:6 is written in hexameter verse, composed of dactyls and spondees (PL 28:1081). He proceeds to cite the same four authors mentioned by Vico in support of the claim that Hebrew meters bear a resemblance to Greek authors such as Pindar, Alcaeus, and Sappho (1082). 201   See the note at §442 on Thomas Baker. 202   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 550. 203   Lucius Aemilius Regillus (fl. 190 BCE), Roman admiral and praetor. 200

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The New Science Duello magno dirimendo, regibus subiugandis [“He brought the great fight to its conclusion and subjugated kings”];

and also that of Acilius Glabrio, Fudit, fugat, prosternit maximas legiones [“He routs, he sets in flight, he destroys mighty legions”];

and other such verses on other triumphs. The fragments of the Law of the Twelve Tables (if one reflects well upon them) in the majority of its sections end in adonic verse, the pattern for the final feet of heroic verse. This is what Cicero must have imitated in his own Laws, which begin thus: Deos caste adeunto Pietatem adhibento204 [“Let them approach the gods chastely; let them conduct themselves with piety].

Hence must have come that Roman custom to which Cicero refers, whereby children, so as to recite the Law of the Twelve Tables word for word, sang them tamquam necessarium carmen205 [“as if they were hymns about the necessities of life”], just as Cretan children did, as Aelian tells us. For certainly Cicero (as famous for inventing prose rhythms in Latin as Gorgias of Leontini was in Greek, to which we referred above [§459]) would have otherwise avoided in prose, especially prose on so weighty a subject as the laws, not just the adonic meter in these lines, but even iambic meter, a meter quite similar to prose, but which he guards against even in his letters to friends.206 Hence, in Cicero’s need for this kind of verse lies the truth of the following folk traditions. The first is in Plato,207 which says that the laws of the Egyptians were the poems of the goddess, Isis. The second is in Plutarch,208 which tells us that Lycurgus offered laws to the Spartans in verse, out of which one particular law forbade knowledge of letters. The third is in Maximus of Tyre, which recounts that Jove gave laws to the Minos in verse. The fourth, and last, is referred to by Suidas,209 that Draco gave laws to the Athenians in verse; of Draco, we are commonly told that he wrote those laws in blood. 470

Now, if we return from laws to history, Tacitus210 relates, concerning the customs of the ancient Germans, that they preserved the beginnings of  Cicero, De legibus 2.8.19.  Cicero, De legibus 2.23.59. 206   See Cicero, De oratore 3.47.182. 207  Plato, Laws 2.3, 657a. 208  Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 4. 209  Suidas, Lexicon, “drakon” entry. 210  Tacitus, Germania 2.3. 204 205

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their history by conceiving them in verse; Lipsius,211 in his notes on this passage, relates that the natives of America did the same. The authority of these two nations (the first of these was unknown to other people except to the Romans, and even to them quite late, and the second was discovered only two centuries ago by those of us in Europe) gives a strong argument for conjecturing that the same was the case for all other barbarian nations, ancient and modern. And there is no need to conjecture about the Persians, among the ancient nations, or the Chinese, among the nations newly discovered, for there are those who say with authority that both wrote their early histories in verse. And let us make the following important reflection upon this: if peoples are founded by the laws, and if the laws for all peoples are stated in verse and if the earliest things of these peoples are also preserved in verse, then among those things which are necessary is that all the earliest peoples were poets. Now, taking up again the argument at hand concerning the origins of verse, Festus relates that the Carthaginian Wars were written by Naevius prior to Ennius in heroic verse. And Livius Andronicus,212 the first Latin writer, wrote the Romanidae, a heroic poem that preserves the annals of the ancient Romans. In the return to barbarian times, the historians in Latin were heroic poets: Gunther,213 William of Apulia,214 and others. We have seen that the earliest writers in the new languages of Europe were versifiers, and that those in Silesia—a province whose people are almost all rustics—are born poets. And, more generally, insofar as the German language preserves quite intact its heroic origins, this is why (whose cause Adam Rechenberg215 affirms, although he is ignorant of it) it is possible to render compound words in Greek so successfully in German, especially in poetry; Matthias Bernegger216 wrote a catalogue of these words, which Georg Christoph Peisker217 later sought to expand in his index, De Graecae et Germaniae   Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), Flemish humanist philosopher and philologist.   See the note at §438 on Andronicus. 213   Gunther of Pairis (c. 1150–1220), German Cistercian monk and poet to whom is attributed the poem Ligurinus, sive de gestis divi Frederici I libri X, printed in 1507. The poem is an epic about Frederick Barbarossa. 214   William of Apulia, chronicler of the Normans (fl. 1090), about whose life very little is known. An edition of his Historicum poema de rebus Normanorum in Sicilia, Appulia et Calabria gestis was published in 1724. 215   Adam Rechenberg (1642–1721), German philologist and author of the preface to Eling’s Historia linguae Graecae (mentioned at §428). 216   Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), German philologist, historian, and mathematician, translator of Galileo’s works into Latin, and author of a commentary on Tacitus’s Germania and Agricola. 217   Georg Christoph Peisker, author of not only the 1677 work that Vico mentions, but also De negatione (from the same year). 211 212

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The New Science linguae analogiae. The ancient Latin language also left a good share of compound words, which the poets, as is their right, continued to use. For this must have been a property common to all the earliest languages. These languages, as was demonstrated [§§452–453], were provided, first, with nouns and, later, with verbs, and it was on account of the lack of verbs that nouns were joined together. These must be the principles pertaining to what Morhof218 has written in his Disquisitionibus de Germanica lingua et poesi. And let this be proof of the observation that we noted in the Axioms,219 that if those who are learned in the German language give their attention to finding its origins by these principles, they will make the most wondrous discoveries.

472

Through all the things upon which we have reasoned here, it would seem to be evident that we have refuted that common error of the grammarians who say that prose speech was born first and poetic speech later. And within the origins of poetry that have herein been discovered are found the origins of languages and the origins of letters.

The additional corollaries that were proposed above 473

I. Along with the earliest coming into existence of characters and languages, law also came into being, which, in Latin, was called ius and, in ancient Greek, was called διαΐον [diaion], which, as we explained above [§398], meant “heavenly,” derived from Διός [dios]; hence in Latin, the expressions sub dio [“under god”]) and sub Jove [“under Jove”] both came to mean “under the open heavens”; and, as Plato220 states in his Cratylus, διαΐον was later, for the ease of speech, said as δίκαιον [dikaion]. For all gentile nations universally observed the heavens in their aspect as Jove so as to accept as laws the divine warnings and decrees which they believed the auspices were. This demonstrates that all nations were born of their persuasion that divine providence exists.

474

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Let us start by enumerating these versions of Jove. For the Chaldeans, Jove was the heavens insofar as he was believed to warn of what was to come in the aspects and motions of the stars, whose sciences were called astronomy and astrology, the former being the science on the laws of the stars, the latter on the language of the stars, but in the sense of “judicial astrology”; thus, the word “Chaldeans,” remains, in Roman law, a term for judicial astrologers. 218  Daniel Georg Morhof (1639–1691), German writer and scholar, professor of eloquence and poetry at Kiel, and author of the 1682 work mentioned by Vico. 219   Axiom 18. 220  Plato, Cratylus 412d–e.

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Also for the Persians, Jove was the heavens insofar as the heavens were believed to contain things hidden from men; those wise in the science of such things were called mages, and their science was named magic, both in the sense of the licit science of natural things, which are the wondrous occult forces of nature, and in the sense of the forbidden science of supernatural things; in this latter sense, a mage means “wizard”; and mages did their work with wands (the lituus of the augurs among the Romans) and described the circuits of astronomy, and these same wands and circuits were later used by mages in their sorcery; and for the Persians, the heavens were the temple of Jove, and it was in keeping with this religion that Cyrus overturned the temples built by the Greeks.

475

Also for the Egyptians, Jove was the heavens insofar as it was believed that the heavens influenced terrestrial things and warned of what was to come. Hence, they believed that they could fasten on to these celestial influences through foundry, casting images of the gods at certain times, and even today they preserve a commonplace art of divination.

476

Also for the Greeks, Jove was the heavens insofar as they believed, as we have stated in other places [§391], that the theorists and mathematicians who considered the heavens to be contemplating and observing divine and sublime things, contemplating with the eyes of the body and observing in the sense of “following” the laws of Jove; such mathematicians in Roman law were called mathematici, a term used for judicial astrologers.

477

Concerning the Romans, there is the famous verse from Ennius, to which we referred above [§450],

478

Aspic HOC sublime cadens, quem omnes invocant Iovem221 [“Behold that which descends sublimely from on high, that which everyone calls Jove”];

there, the demonstrative pronoun HOC signifies, as was stated [§391], the heavens; the same Romans spoke of templa coeli [“the precincts of heaven”], the regions designated by the augurs for their taking of the auspices, a sense retained in the Latin use of templum to signify any place which is free on all sides and whose prospect is unimpeded; hence, the term extemplo signifies subito [“immediately”], and it is in this ancient sense that Virgil calls the sea neptunia templa222 [“Neptune’s precincts”]. Concerning the ancient Germans, Tacitus223 tells us that they worshipped their gods in sacred places which he calls lucos et nemora [“groves and woods”], which must have been places cleared of trees within a wooded   This verse of Ennius is attested at Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2.4.  Virgil’s Aeneid contains many references to the descendants of Neptune, but none to his “temples.” Vico may be thinking of the description of the sea at Plautus, Miles gloriosus 412–413. 223  Tacitus, Germania 9.3. 221 222

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The New Science enclosure; and from this primitive custom, the Church toiled hard to separate them (as one can gather from the Councils of Nantes and Braga collected by Burchard224) and traces of it persist even today in Lapland and Livonia.

480

Concerning the Peruvians,225 it is found that they spoke of God in absolute terms as “the sublime,” whose temples, open to the heavens, were mounds where one ascends from either side by high staircases and in whose heights reposes the entirety of their magnificence. Hence, even today, the magnificence of the temples reposes in their boundless height; the tops of these temples, according to Pausanias,226 were called in Greek (this is very much to our point) ἀετός [aetos], which means “eagle,” for they cleared the forests of trees so as to have a prospect for contemplating the auspices of eagles, which fly much higher than all other birds; and it is perhaps a consequence of this that the tops of temples were called in Latin pinnae templorum [“the wings of temples”] and that, later, parapets were called pinnae murorum [“the wings of walls”], for upon the borders of those earliest temples were raised the walls of the earliest cities, as we will see below [§550]; and, finally, in architecture, the parapet of a building, which was called an “eagle,” is today called a merlo [“blackbird,” “merlon”].227

481

However, the Hebrews worshipped the one who is truly Most High, who is above the heavens in the enclosure of the Tabernacle; and Moses,228 wherever the people of God extended their conquests, ordered the sacred groves to be burned, within which were enclosed the luci of which Tacitus speaks.

482

Hence, one can gather that the earliest laws everywhere were the divine laws of Jove. It is from such antiquity that it has come to pass in the languages of many Christian nations that they take the heavens to be God. So, for example, we say in Italian voglia il Cielo [“may heaven will it”] and spero al Cielo [“I hope to heaven”], in both of which expressions we understand “God.” The Spanish use the same expressions. And the French say bleu, “blue” for God because the term “blue” is a thing that can be sensed and can be understood to represent the blue of the heavens; and, consequently, just as the gentile nations understood “the heavens” as representing Jove, so the French by the heavens understand God in that impious expression of theirs, moure bleu,   Burchard of Worms (c. 950–1025), bishop and author of the Decretum Burchardi, a work of canon law. 225   Vico’s source for the Peruvians, according to Battistini, is José de Acosta (c. 1539–1600), Spanish Jesuit and author of The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590). 226  Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.9.13. 227   On the “eagles” that supported the wooden roof of the Capitol, see Tacitus, Histories 3.71. 228   See Deuteronomy 12:3 and Exodus 34:13. 224

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meaning “God’s death,” and they frequently say par bleu!, meaning “by God!”229 One can take this as a test of the mental dictionary proposed in the Axioms,230 upon which we reasoned above. II. Establishing certainty of domain made, in great part, for the necessity behind discovering characters and names in their native significance as the households branching off into multiple families, households which were called, with supreme propriety, gentes. Thus, Hermes Trismegistus (a poetic character for the first founders of the Egyptians, as we have demonstrated [§§66–68]) discovered laws and letters. It is from this Hermes, who was, in addition, believed to be the god of trade [mercatanzie], that Italians (and this uniformity in thought and expression, preserved even up until our times, ought to call forth wonder from us) use the verb mercare, in the sense of marking, by letters or other insignia, beasts or other merchandise [roba da mercantare] so as to distinguish and render those who own them.

483

III. These are the earliest origins of the insignia of noble households and, consequently, of medallions. From these insignia, discovered, first, for the sake of private necessity and, later, for sake of public necessity, came the insignia of the erudite for the sake of pleasure, insignia which the erudite called, by some divination, “heroic”; the insignia of the erudite need to be brought to life by their mottos, for they have an analogical significance, whereas natural heroic insignia were insignia because of their lack of such mottos, and thus they spoke in their muteness. Hence, they were, in their own right, the best insignia, for they contained the significance proper to them, as when three ears of grain or three swings of the scythe naturally signified three years. From this, it came about that “character” and “name” could be exchanged for one another, and “name” and “nature” had the same significance, as was stated above [§433].

484

Now, we can make another attempt at the insignia of noble households because, in the return to barbarian times, the nations returned to being mutes in terms of commonplace speech. Hence, we are completely lacking any early record of the languages of Italy, France, Spain, or any other nation from these times. And the Latin and Greek languages were known only by priests; as a result, in French, they said clerc [“priest”] to signify someone with letters, and in Italian (as we encounter in a fine passage in Dante231), they said laico [“layman”] to signify a man who did not know letters. Even within the regime of priests, there was such ignorance that one can read documents with signatures written by bishops with

485

  Vico himself uses this oath at §783.   Axiom 22. 231   The passage appears not in Dante, but in a passage about Dante in a work by the fifteenth-century Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani (Cronica 9.136). 229 230

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The New Science the sign of the cross because they did not know how to write their own names, and even learned prelates knew very little about writing (thus the diligence of Father Mabillon232 in his work, De re diplomatica, allows one to see, in engraved facsimiles, the signatures of bishops and archbishops on the acts of councils in those barbarous times; one observes signatures written in letters so misshapen and brutish that they might have been written by the unlearned idiots of today); indeed, these prelates were, by and large, the chancellors of the kingdoms of Europe, which is retained today in the chancellor archbishops of the empire, one for each of the three languages, German, French, and Italian; and it must have been from them (on account of their manner of writing with such irregularities) that there is the expression “chancellor’s script.” It is from a scarcity of this sort that there was ordered, as a law in England,233 that a criminal under sentence of death, if he was knowledgeable about letters because he excelled in this art, did not have to die. It is from scarcity, perhaps, that the term “lettered” later came to have the same significance as “erudite.”

486

It is on account of this same short supply of writers that, in ancient households, we do not observe walls that have not been stamped with some device [impresa]. Elsewhere, in barbarous Latin, the expression terrae presa [“a holding of land”] is used for a farm and its boundaries, and in Italian, the word for farm, podere [“power”], expresses the same idea as does the word in Latin, praedium [“seized property”], for the lands reduced to cultivation were the earliest seizures in the world; and grounds were called municipia [“holdings”] in the Law of the Twelve Tables, and those under real-estate bond, especially to the public treasury, were called praedes or manucipes, and what we call “real servitude” was called iura praediorum. Elsewhere, prenda [“undertakings”] is used for brave enterprises, for the earliest enterprises in the world were the taming of the lands and bringing them under cultivation, which will be found [§540] to be the greatest of all the labors of Hercules. What is called a device [impresa] in more recent Italian used to be called an insegna, an insignia which, conceptually, is “a thing which signifies,” whence the verb in Italian, insegnare [“to teach”]; it was also called a devisa, for devices are discovered to have been the signs marking out the earliest divisions of the land, which previously had been used by all of humankind in common; hence, the termini, which early on were the real terminations of these fields, were carried, later, over into the termini of the Scholastics, verbal terminology—that is, words which, in their signification, define the limits of propositions— and this is exactly how hieroglyphics in the Americas are used, as we saw   Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), French Benedictine scholar and philologist, editor of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of paleography and diplomatics. The work to which Vico refers, De re diplomatica, was published in 1681. 233   Vico may be associating the “English law” with those laws promulgated by Edward the Confessor (1004–1066). 232

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above [§434], as real terminations for distinguishing among the different familial clans. From all of this, one can conclude that, in the times of mute nations, the great necessity behind insignia giving significance must have been to make certain the borders of domains. These passed, later, over into public insignia during peace, whence they became the medallions which, when even later still they were introduced, are found to have been well prepared to use as military insignia: military insignia are, as their primary use, hieroglyphics during wars that are made, for the most part, between nations whose spoken words are different and who, consequently, are mutes relative to one another. The wonder we feel in reasoning upon all the things here is confirmed by the truth of the fact that, on account of a uniformity of ideas, the hieroglyph of an eagle on the top of a scepter is uniform among the Egyptians, the ancient Etruscans, the Romans, and the English, who use it as a mark of honor on their royal coat of arms; among all these nations—separate from each other by immense distances over land and sea—the hieroglyph must have signified, equally for all of them, that their kingdoms took their start in the earliest divine regimes of the different versions of Jove on the strength of his auspices. Finally, when commerce which uses coinage was introduced, these medallions are found to be well prepared for use as money, which, in their use as money, were in Latin called monetae, derived from monendo [“to warn”], just as in Italian insegna [“insignia”] is derived from insegnare [“to teach”]. Thus, from νόμος [nomos] came νόμισμα [nomisma] (as was discussed by Aristotle234), and from it also came, perhaps, the Latin word numus [“money”], which has only one “m” in the best writers; the French call law, loi, and money, aloi; these ways of speaking can have come from nowhere else except from the laws and rights signified by hieroglyphs, which is exactly the use that medallions have. Our wonder at all this is confirmed by the words for money: ducato, which is derived from ducendo [“to lead”], which is proper to captains; soldo, from which is derived soldato [“soldier”]; and scuto, a shield, which was previously the background for the coats of arms of noble families (this background was originally the ground itself, the lands cultivated by each Father in the time of the families, as will be demonstrated below [§§529, 562–563]). Consequently, this must shed light on those medallions where one sees an altar; or a lituus—that is, the rod used by the augurs for taking the auspices, as was stated above [§475]; or a tripod, where oracles were given, 234

 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, 1133a30.

487

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488

489

490

The New Science from which comes the expression dictum ex tripode [“spoken from the tripod”], which means “a statement from an oracle.” To medallions of this sort must belong the wings which the Greeks in their myths connected with all the objects signifying heroic rights founded upon the auspices: so Idanthyrsus, among the real hieroglyphs with which he responded to Darius, sent a bird; and the Roman patricians in all the heroic contests they had with the plebs (as one plainly reads in Roman history) so as to preserve for themselves their heroic rights, opposed the plebs with the claim, AUSPICIA ESSE SUA235 [“the auspices were theirs”]; in exactly the same way, in the return to barbarism, one observes that noble devices were topped by helmets with crests adorned with feathers; and, in the West Indies, no one is adorned with feathers except the nobles. IV. Thus, the word Ious, Jove, and its contracted form Ius, prior to anything else must have signified the fat of the victims owed to Jove, in conformity with what was stated above [§433]; and, in the same way in the return to barbarism, the word “canon” was used of ecclesiastical laws and that which was paid by someone under fealty236 directly to his patron, perhaps because the first fealties were introduced by ecclesiastics who, not able themselves to cultivate grounds owned by the Church, gave them to others to cultivate. The two things stated here agree with two stated above, first, that among the Greeks, νόμος [nomos] signified law and νόμισμα [nomisma] signified money [§433], second, that the French call law, loi, and money, aloi [§487]. It is from these very actualities, and from nothing else, that Ious Optimus was used for Jove as the strongest of the gods, who, through strength in the lightning bolt, afforded a beginning to divine authority in its primary signification: it was the domain he had because, as was stated above [§379], all things came from Jove. For that truth from metaphysical reasoning about the ubiquity of God (taken, later, in a false sense) was a truth of poetic metaphysics, that Jovis omnia plena237 [“all is filled with Jove”];

this truth produced the human authority of the giants, who occupied the first vacant lands of the world as their domain in the same sense as above, which is retained in the Roman legal code in the expression ius optimum [“supreme law”], even though its native significance then was different from the significance it had in later times. This is because ius optimum came into being with the significance that Cicero238 gives it   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6.   L’enfiteuticario—that is, someone under the Roman law contract known as “emphyteusis.” 237   See Virgil, Eclogues 3.60. 238  Cicero, De haruspicum responso 7.14; De lege agraria 3.2.7. 235 236

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in a golden passage from his speeches, where he defines it as “domain over real estate subject to no encumbrance either private or public,” and it was a law deemed “supreme” in terms of strength (this is found to conform with the earliest times of the world) in the sense that it was strongest because it was not weakened by any encumbrance foreign to it. This must have been the domain held by the Fathers in the familial state and, consequently, the natural domain that must have come into being prior to the civil domain. And when cities were later composed from these families in Greece upon this supreme domain, which was called the δίκαιον ἄριστον [dikaion ariston], they came into being with an aristocratic form, as will be found below [§586]. It was because of these same origins that they were called, by the peoples of Latium, “republics of the optimates,” and thus were also called “republics of the few,” for they were composed of those Pauci quos aequus amavit Jupiter239 [“few whom fair Jupiter has loved”].

In their heroic contests with the plebs, they maintained their claim over the divine auspices; in mute times, these auspices were signified by the bird of Idanthyrsus and by the wings in Greek myths; eventually, the Roman patricians used articulate language to state AUSPICIA ESSE SUA [“the auspices were theirs”]. This is because with his lightning bolts, from which come the greater auspices, Jove drove those earliest giants into the earth and sent them under the earth into caves in the mountains, and by driving them to the earth, he granted them the good fortune of becoming lords of the lands where they hid as settlers; and from there they became lords of the earliest republics. It is on account of this domain that each of them spoke of himself as FUNDUS FIERI240 [“being the ground”] rather than fieri auctor [“being the author”]. And it was the union of their private familial authority, as we will see below [§584], that made for the civil—or public—authority of their regnant heroic senates. This is expressed in the medallion, observed so frequently among those in Goltz,241 displaying three human legs united at the center, with the base of their feet resting on the edge, which signifies domain over the ground within the orbit, or territory, or district of any republic (this is now called “eminent domain” and is signified by an apple which today rests upon the crowns of civil power, as will be explained below [§548]) and which signifies the strongest domain with the number three. The Greeks were wont to use that number for superlatives; so too the French say très today; it is from this sort of way of speaking that the lightning bolt of Jove was called “thrice-furrowing” in that it furrowed most strongly through the air, whence, perhaps, the idea of furrowing applied, first, to air, later,  Virgil, Aeneid 6.129–130.   Compare Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19. 241   Hubert Goltz (1526–1583), Dutch painter, engraver, and printer. 239 240

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The New Science to land, and, finally, to water; the trident of Neptune was so called because, as we will see [§634], it was the strongest hook for grabbing or grappling ships; and Cerebus was called “thrice-gulleted” because of his enormous throat.242

492

The things stated here concerning the devices of noble households are those which were reasoned out from their principles in the first edition of this work (this is the third place in that book for which we are not vexed at its having come to light).

493

V. As a consequence of all this, it is from here—from those letters and laws found by Hermes Trismegistus for the Egyptians, from those characters and names of the Greeks, from those names which signify both peoples and laws for the Romans—that the three princes of the doctrine of natural law of the gentile peoples—Grotius, Selden, and P ­ ufendorf— ought to have taken their start in speaking about this law; and thus ought to have explicated it with intelligence by the hieroglyphs and myths which were the medallions of those times when the gentile nations were founded; and thus they ought to have made certain the customs of those nations with a metaphysical art of criticism concerning those authors of nations, from which that philological art of criticism ought to take its first lights, concerning writers who did not arrive until more than a thousand years after the nations were founded.

Final corollaries concerning the logic of the learned 494

I. By the things upon which we have reasoned up until now concerning the origins of languages on the strength of this Poetic Logic, we have done justice to the earliest of the authors who were taken in all later times to be wise men, insofar as they gave names to things naturally and with propriety (hence, as we saw above [§433] for the peoples of Greece and Latium, nomen and natura signified the same thing).

495

II. The earliest authors of humanity gave their attention to an art of topics for the senses,243 by which they united properties or qualities or relations which were, so to speak, concrete and which belonged to the individuals, or species, from which were formed the poetic genera to which they belonged.

496

III. As a result, that first age of the world can truly be said to be occupied with the first operations of the human mind.   See Virgil, Aeneid 6.417.   Vico discusses the ars topica at some length in the third chapter of his inaugural oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an expanded version of which was published in 1709. 242 243

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IV. And, first of all, it started by roughing out a crude art of topics—that is, the art of regulating well the first operation of our minds—teaching the commonplaces that must all be run through so as to know all there is in something that one wishes to know well—that is, fully.

497

V. Providence gave good counsel to the human things by moving the human mind towards the art of topics prior to the art of criticism, just as to know things comes first, and to judge them comes later. For the art of topics is the faculty of making minds ingenious, just as criticism is the faculty of making them exact; and in those earliest times, they had to discover all the things necessary for human life, and discovery is the property of ingenuity.244

498

And anyone who reflects will notice that, in effect, not only the necessary, but also the advantageous, the convenient, the pleasurable, and even the luxurious superfluous to human life, had already been discovered in Greece prior to the arrival of the philosophers, as we will make it possible to see [§§793–801] when we reason upon the age of Homer. Concerning this, we proposed an Axiom above “that children avail themselves of imitation in quite powerful ways, that poetry is nothing other than imitation,” and that “the arts are nothing other than imitations of nature and consequently, in a certain way, are real poems.”245 Thus, first, the earliest peoples—who were the children of humankind—founded the world of the arts; later, the philosophers—who came a long time afterwards and who, consequently, are the old age of the ­nations—founded the world of the sciences, by which humanity was made complete.246 VI. This history of human ideas, much to our wonder, is confirmed by the history of philosophy itself. The first manner in which men practiced a rude form of philosophizing was αὐτοψία [autopsia]—or “the testimony of the senses”—which, later, was used by Epicurus, the philosopher of the senses, who was content with suppositions about things relying on the testimony of the senses; the senses, as we have seen in the origins of poetry [§424], were most vivid for the earliest poetic nations. Later came Aesop—that is, one of the moral philosophers called “common” [volgari], who, as we stated above [§424], took their start prior to the seven sages of Greece—who reasoned from examples; and since it 244   For Vico’s most complete theory of ingenium, see De antiquissma 7.3, which defines it as “the faculty of joining together into one things which are scattered, diverse” (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 111). 245   Axiom 52, inexactly quoted. 246   Here and elsewhere (§§4, 209, 241–243, 819) Vico suggests a strong parallel between the stages of a human being’s life and the stages of humankind as a whole, so that the latter reproduces the former. This parallel may be compared to the (highly disputed) claim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a dictum of German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).

499

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The New Science was still a poetic age, the examples he took were ones devised and based upon comparisons. With one such example, the good Menenius Agrippa reduced the Roman plebs to obedience.247 And even today, one example of this sort, especially one which is true, is better for persuading the common run than any irrefutable reasoning through maxims. After, came Socrates, who introduced the dialectic of reasoning by induction from more certain things which have a relation to doubtful things which are in question. Medicine, through reasoning by induction from observations prior to Socrates, gave us Hippocrates, the prince of doctors both on his merits and as first of them, who deserves the immortal eulogy, nec fallit quenquam nec falsus ab ullo est248 [“he deceived no one and was deceived by none”]. Mathematics, through reasoning by the unitive, so-called “synthetic” method, had made, in the time of Plato, its greatest progress in the Italian school of Pythagoras, as one can see in the Timaeus.249 Thus, through reasoning by this unitive method in the time of Socrates and Plato, Athens was resplendent in all the arts for which human ingenuity can be admired, the arts of poetry, eloquence, and history as well as those of music, foundry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Later came both Aristotle, who taught the syllogism (a method which explains universals in their particulars rather than uniting particulars to gather what is universal), and Zeno, who taught by the sorites (this method corresponds to that of modern philosophizers and makes ingenuity subtle, not acute). And they did not bear any other fruits that were more noteworthy on behalf of humankind. Hence, it is with good reason that Lord Verulam, equally great in philosophy and politics, proposes and illustrates reasoning by induction in his Organon250 and is followed today in England very fruitfully by the experimental philosophers.

500

VII. By this history of human ideas, we convict of an error common to all those who, because they were preoccupied with the false, common opinion about the lofty wisdom which the ancients had, believed that Minos, first lawgiver for the gentile peoples, Theseus for the Athenians, Lycurgus for the Spartans, Romulus and the other Roman kings had all ordered universal laws. For the most ancient laws are observed to be conceived as commands and prohibitions for a single case, which, later,   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.32.   The source is Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 1.6.64. 249  It is not clear which passage from the Timaeus Vico has in mind. 250   See Bacon, Novum Organum 1.14, 1.40, 1.105–106. 247 248

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Book Two were run through for all: this is how little capable the earliest peoples were of universals. And, indeed, these laws were not conceived until after the deeds that called for them had come to pass. And the law of Tullus Hostilius against the accused, Horatius, it is nothing but the penalty which the duumvirs (who were created by the king for this purpose) pronounced against that illustrious defendant, and it is proclaimed to be a lex horrendi carminis [“a law of dreadful form”] by Livy.251 As a result, it is one with those laws which Draco wrote in blood and the leges sanguinis252 [“blood laws”]) of sacred history. For Livy, his reflection on this law—namely, that the king did not wish to publish the law on his own so as not to be the author of a judgment so harsh and unpopular—is ridiculous since the king prescribed the formula to the duumvirs so that they could not acquit Horatius, even if he were discovered to be innocent. Here, Livy makes this completely unintelligible, because he himself did not understand, first, that in the heroic senate (which is discovered to have been aristocratic) the kings had no power other than that of creating the duumvirs as commissioners, who stand in judgment of those publically accused; second, that the peoples of heroic cities, to whom the condemned could appeal, consisted only of nobles. Now, to return to our purpose, this law of Tullus is, in actuality, one of what are called exempla, in the sense of “exemplary punishments,” and these must have been the earliest examples used by human reason. This agrees with what we learned from Aristotle above in the Axioms253 that “heroic republics did not have laws concerning damages and private offences.” In this fashion, there were, first, real examples and, later, the reasoned examples which are used in logic and rhetoric. However, after intelligible universals were understood, this essential property of laws—namely, that to be laws, they must be universal—was recognized and this maxim of jurisprudence—namely, that legibus non exemplis est iudicandum [“judgment must be based on laws, not examples”]—was recognized.

501

On Poetic Morals,

And therein on the origins of the commonplace virtues taught by religion along with marriage Just as the metaphysics of the philosophers, by means of the idea of God, performs its first labor, that of clarifying the human mind, and  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.6.   See note on §423. 253   Axiom 81. See Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b. 251 252

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The New Science needs logic in order, by the clarity and distinction of ideas, to inform its own reasoning, and by use of this, the mind descends to purge the human heart with morals; so too, the metaphysics of the poetic giants, who had made war on the heavens with their atheism, were defeated by terror of a Jove, feared for his lightning bolt, who drove them into the earth, not only physically but also mentally, with their devising so terrifying an idea of Jove; and if that idea was not formed by reasoning (of which they were not yet capable) but by the senses, and if it was as materially false as it was formally true, this still was a logic conforming to the sort of nature they had, and from it sprouted poetic morals by making them pious. From this nature of human things comes that eternal property of the human mind, that for it to make good use of the knowledge of God, it needs to bow itself down to the earth, just as, by contrast, pride in the human mind tends towards atheism, and it is by such pride that atheists become giants of the spirit who, with Horace, must say: Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia254 [“We seek after heaven itself in our foolishness”].

503

It was certainly pious giants of this sort that Plato255 recognized in the Polyphemus of Homer, and we are emboldened by what Homer256 tells us of this same giant, where he makes Polyphemus say that an augur, who had been among them at one time, had predicted the disgrace that he would later suffer at the hands of Ulysses, for augurs certainly do not live among atheists. At that time, poetic morals took its start from piety, for piety was ordered by providence for the founding of the nations, among all of which piety is commonly understood as the mother of all the virtues pertaining to moral, economic, and civil life. And religion alone makes the work of virtue effectual, for philosophy is better at reasoning about virtue. And piety takes its start from religion, piety which, in its proper sense, is fear of the divine; the heroic origin of the word “religion” is preserved in Latin by those who derive it from religando [“to bind”]—that is, who derive it from the fetters with which Tityrus and Prometheus were fettered to rocks on high so that eagles, the terrifying religion of the auspices of Jove, might devour their heart and entrails. In this is retained a property eternal for all nations, that piety is instilled in children by a fear of some divinity.

504

Moral virtue takes its start, as it must, from conatus257; it is by conatus that the giants, by the terrifying religion of lightning bolts, fettered themselves at the foot of mountains and held in check their bestial vice  Horace, Carmina 1.3.38.   See Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e. 256  Homer, Odyssey 9.507–512. 257  On conatus, see the note at §340. 254 255

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of wandering wild through the great forest of the Earth and took on the completely contrary custom of staying hidden and settled on those grounds (hence, they later became the authors of nations and lords in the earliest republics, as we have noted above [§§387–389] and will explicate at greater length below [§§553–559]); this is one of the great benefits, preserved by folk tradition, that heaven did for humankind when heaven reigned on Earth with the religion of the auspices (hence, Jove was given the title Stator—that is, the “One Who Settles,”—as was stated above [§379]). In addition to moral virtue, virtue of the spirit also started to break forth among them from conatus, containing their bestial lust from being exercised in the sight of a heaven for which they held the greatest terror. And each of them was given to dragging off into their caves for himself one woman and keeping her there within in continuous companionship for his life. And they gained experience with each other in that Venus of human life, a love covered and hidden—that is to say, done with a sense of shame. And thus was the start of the sense of shame that Socrates says is the color of virtue,258 which, after religion, is the second bond which preserves the unity of nations, just as audacity and impiety are what destroy that unity. In this fashion, marriages were introduced—that is, chaste carnal unions made in fear of some divinity—which were posited as the second principle [§336] of this science and which came from the principle that we posited as first, that of divine providence; and marriage came with three solemnities.

505

The first of these solemnities of marriage were the auspices of Jove taken from the lightning bolts, when the giants were induced to celebrate the auspices. The lot [sorte] taken in the auspices is retained in Latin in the definition of marriage as omnis vitae consortium [“sharing in the lot of an entire lifetime”], and from this, husband and wife were called consortes [“those sharing in lot”]; and even today among ourselves, they commonly say that young women are “taking up their lot” [prender sorte] for “getting married.”

506

In this determinate fashion and from this earliest time of the world, this law of the gentile peoples is retained: namely, that the wife adopts the public religion of her husband inasmuch as husbands started to share with their wives their earliest human ideas, drawn from the idea about some divinity of theirs which forced them to drag their wives into their caves. And so, even this commonplace metaphysics starts to know the human mind in God. And it must have been from this first point of all the human things that gentile men started to praise the gods in the sense in which ancient Roman law speaks of praise, as “citing” or “calling by name”; this sense 258

  Compare Plato, Euthyphro 12c.

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The New Science of divine praise is retained in the expression laudare auctores [“to name authors”],259 for they cited the gods as the authors of all that men had themselves done (these must have been the praises that were appropriate for men to give to the gods).

507

From this most ancient origin of marriage was born the custom of women entering into the family and household of the men to whom they were married. This natural custom of the gentile peoples was preserved by the Romans, among whom wives had the place of daughters relative to their husbands and sisters relative to their children. And, consequently, even from its start, marriage must have been, on the one hand, with one woman only (a custom preserved by the Romans and admired by Tacitus in the ancient Germans,260 who, like the Romans, preserved it intact from the earliest origins of their nation, a passage which allows one to conjecture that it was the same for all other nations at their beginnings), and, on the other hand, a continuous companionship for their whole lives, as it remains in the customs of many, many peoples. Hence, the Romans defined nuptials, with a view to this property, as individua vitae consuetudo261 [“the inseparable intimacy of a lifetime”], and these same Romans introduced divorce quite late.

508

Proceeding from the auspices of this sort taken in the lightning bolts seen as Jove, Greek mythical history tells us that Hercules—the character pertaining to the founders of the nations—as we saw above [§82] and will observe more below [§514]—was born of Alcmena in the thunder of Jove; another great hero of Greece, Bacchus, was born of lighting-struck Semele. For such was the first impetus for the heroes to call themselves the sons of Jove: they said this in keeping with a truth of the senses and based on an opinion in whose persuasion they lived, that the gods had made all things, as was reasoned upon above [§449]. And one reads of this in Roman history: that, in the heroic contests, the patricians said AUSPICIA ESSE SUA262 [“the auspices were theirs”], to which the plebs responded that the Fathers (of whom Romulus composed the Senate and from whom those patricians traced their origin) NON ESSE CAELO DEMISSOS263 [“had not been sent down from the heavens”]; if this does not mean that the Fathers were not heroes, one cannot understand how this response could be suitable. Consequently, so as to signify that connubium—that is, the right to contract solemn nuptials, whose major solemnity was the auspices of Jove— was the property of the heroes, they made noble Love out to be winged  In Latin, the laudare of the expression laudare auctores means “to praise.”  Tacitus, Germania 18.1. 261   Institutes of Justinian 1.9.1. 262  Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6. 263  Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10. 259 260

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and with a blindfold (so as to signify his modesty) and called him ῎Ερως [Ero¯s], a name similar to those heroes;264 and they made out Hymen to be winged, who was the son of Urania, so called from οὐρανός [ouranos], or coelum [“the heavens”], and so “she who contemplates the heavens in order to take the auspices”265 (she must have come into being as first of the Muses, defined by Homer, as we observed above [§§365, 381, 391], as the “science of good and evil,” and she was also, like the other Muses, described as winged, because she belonged to the heroes, as was explained above [§488]). Also, in relation to this, we have explained above [§391] the historical sense of the phrase, A Jove principium Musae266 [“The Muse begins with Jove”];

hence was she, as with all the others, believed to be the daughter of Jove, because the arts of humanity came into being from religion, and the numinous source of these Muses is Apollo, who is principally believed to be the god of divination, and when they sing, they do so in the sense of the Latin verbs canere or cantare, which mean “to foretell.” The second solemnity of marriage was that women were veiled as a sign of their modesty, which made for the first marriages in the world. This custom has been preserved by all nations, and in Latin it is preserved in the very name they gave to nuptials, called nuptiae from nubendo, which means “to cover,”267 and in the return to barbarian times they described young women who were unmarried as in capillo [“with hair uncovered”] to distinguish them from matrons who were veiled.

509

The third solemnity of marriage (preserved by the Romans) was the taking of one’s spouse with a certain feigned force, derived from the true force with which the giants dragged the earliest women into their caves; and in keeping with the first lands occupied by the giants who encumbered them with their bodies, wives solemnized by marriage were called manucaptae [“those taken in hand”].

510

The theological poets made from solemn marriages the second divine character after that of Jove, JUNO, the second divinity of the socalled gentes maiores. She is the sister and wife of Jove,268 for the earliest ­lawful—that is, solemnized—marriages (called lawful because of the solemnity of the auspices of Jove) must have started between brothers and sisters. She was queen of gods and men because later regimes came

511

  This doubtful etymology also appears at Plato, Cratylus 398c–d.   See Plato, Cratylus 396b–c. 266  Virgil, Eclogues 3.60. 267   This etymology was proposed by Festus, and is reported by Voss (Etymologicon, p. 405). 268   See Augustine, City of God 4.10. 264 265

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The New Science into being from legitimate marriages. She is completely clothed (as one can observe in statuary and medallions) in order to signify her modesty.

512

Hence, the heroic Venus, to the extent that she is also a numinous source for solemn marriages, was called pronuba269 [“bridesmaid”], and is covered in her shame by the marriage girdle, which later effeminate poets embroidered with all their incentives to lust. However, by then, the strict history of the auspices had been corrupted, and just as Jove was believed to lie with women, so too was Venus believed to lie with men: with Anchises, she made Aeneas, who was produced under the auspices of this Venus. And it was this Venus to whom they attributed the swan, common to both her and Apollo, which sang in the sense of the Latin verbs canere or cantare, which signify divinari or “to foretell”; it is in the form of a swan that Jove lies with Leda—that is to say, Leda, under the auspices of Jove, conceived Castor, Pollux, and Helen from eggs.

513

This is the Juno called “yoke-bearing,” from the yoke whence solemn marriage was called coniugium, and husband and wife were called coniuges. Juno is also called Lucina, she who brings offspring into the light, although not light in its natural aspect (this is also shared in common with the offspring of slaves) but in its civil aspect, whence nobles were called illustri [“illustrious”]. Her jealousy is a political jealousy, because of which the Romans, up until Year 309 of Rome, considered connubium closed off to the plebs. However, she was called by the Greeks ῞Ηρα [Hera], from which must have been derived the name of the heroes themselves, for they came to be from the solemn nuptials whose numinous source was Juno and, accordingly, were produced by a noble love, which is what ῎Ερως [Ero¯s], who is the same as Hymen, means. And the heroes must have been named after Hera in the sense of their being “lords of the families,” in contrast to their familial servants who, as we will see below [§556], were like slaves. The Latin word heri [“heir”] had this same sense; hence, the use of the word hereditas, “inheritance,” for which, the native Latin term was familia.270 As a result of this origin, hereditas must have signified the condition of a despotic master. So in that Law of the Twelve Tables, a sovereign power of testamentary disposition was reserved for the paterfamilias— UTI PATERFAMILIAS SUPER PECUNIAE TUTELAEVE REI SUAE LEGASSIT ITA IUS ESTO [“as the paterfamilias disposes his possessions and the guardianship of his estate, let this be the law”]—for “to dispose” is generally the verb legare, which is proper to a sovereign, whence an heir came to be a legate, who, in the inheritance, represents the person of the dead paterfamilias, and children no less than slaves were comprehended in the expressions REI SUAE [“his estate”] and PECUNIAE [“his possessions”]; this is all too weighty a proof of the monarchical power which the Fathers had in the state of nature over their

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269 270

  See Virgil, Aeneid 4.166.   See Ulpian, Digest 50.16.195.1.

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families, which they ought to have reserved for themselves and which, as we will see below [§§521–522], they actually did reserve in the state of the heroic cities, which must have come into being as aristocracies—that is, republics of lords—for they retained this power even within popular republics—all of these things will be completely reasoned through by us below [§§584–586]). The goddess, Juno, commanded the great labors of the so-called Theban Hercules—that is, the Greek Heracules, for every ancient gentile nation had a Hercules who founded it, as was stated above in the Axioms271— for the piety connected with marriage is the school where they learned the first rudiments of all the great virtues; and Hercules, with the favor of Jove under whose auspices he was produced, overcomes all these labors and so is called ῾Ηρακλῆς [Herakle¯ s]—that is, ῾Ηρακλείς [Herakleis], “the glory of Juno”—and if we were to esteem this glory by the correct idea of it (which Cicero272 defines as “popular fame for worthy deeds done for humankind”), then how great must be the glory of these versions of Hercules, who with their labors founded the nations.

514

However, since these strict significations were obscured by time and by the customs becoming effeminate, first, the sterility of Juno taken to be natural and, second, her jealousy was taken to be at the adulterous Jove, and Hercules was taken to be the bastard son of Jove; and, with a name completely at odds with things—he was actually the “disgrace of Juno”—Hercules overcame all these labors with the favor of Jove and in spite of Juno, and Juno was considered the mortal enemy of virtue. And that hieroglyph, or myth, of a Juno hanging in the air, with a rope around her neck, and with her hands bound with another rope and with two heavy stones attached to her feet, this signified the sanctity of marriage: the air represents the auspices needed for solemn nuptials, whence Iris, the rainbow, was given to Juno as her assistant, and the peacock with its rainbow tail was her sign; the rope around her neck is to signify the force used by the giants on the first matrons; the rope binding the hands (this was later represented among the nations of gentile humanity by a ring) is to demonstrate the subjection of wives to their husbands; and the heavy stones on her feet are to denote the stability of nuptials, whence Virgil called solemn marriage “coniugium stabile.”273 Ever since this myth was taken (because of the sense given to it by later times corrupted by their customs) to represent the cruel punishment of an adulterous Jove (a sense of a sort unworthy of it), the myth has troubled the mythologists up until now. Precisely on account of these causes did Plato,274 with the Greek myths, do what Manetho had done with the Egyptian hieroglyphs:   Axiom 43.  Cicero, Pro Marcello 8.26 273   See Virgil, Aeneid 1.73; 4.26. (The expression in the text is conubium stabile.) 274   See Plato, Cratylus 412d. 271 272

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The New Science ­ bserving, on the one hand, the incongruity of gods with customs of o this sort and, on the other hand, the congruity between them and his own ideas, he imposed upon the myth of Jove his idea of the ether which runs through and penetrates all—because of which, Jovis omnia plena [“all is filled with Jove”],

as was stated above [§379]—but the Jove of the theological poets was no higher than the mountains and the regions of air that produced lightning bolts. And on the myth of Juno, he imposed this idea of breathable air, but Juno was not produced by Jove, even though ether, along with air, produces everything. This is how much the theological poets in their phrase understood the truth of physics that teaches that the universe is filled with ether, or the truth of metaphysics that demonstrates the ubiquity with which natural theology speaks of God! Upon poetic heroism, Plato raised up his own philosophical heroism, for the hero stands above man, not just beasts. According to that heroism, a beast is slave to the passions; man is placed in the middle, fighting the passions; and a hero commands the passions at his pleasure, and so the heroic is in the middle between divine and human nature.275 And he found congruent that the noble love of the poets (called ῎Ερως [Ero¯s] at its origins, from which a hero was called ἥρως [hero¯s]) was winged and blindfolded and that the plebeian love was without a blindfold and without wings, both congruous for explaining the two loves, divine and bestial: the one blind to things of the senses, the other intent upon things of the senses; the one rising on wings to the contemplation of intelligible things, the other, without wings, falling back into sensible things.276 And as for Ganymede taken away on an eagle to the heavens by Jove, the strict poets meant by this that he was one who contemplates the auspices of Jove; in later corrupt times, he was made into the profane delight of Jove; and Plato, in keeping with a beautiful congruity, made him into that metaphysical contemplative who, in his contemplation of the supreme being by means of what is called the unitive method, is united with Jove. 516

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In this fashion, piety and religion made the earliest men naturally men of prudence, who sought the counsel of the auspices of Jove; it made them men of justice, who were just, in those earliest times, both toward Jove (who, as we have seen [§§398, 433], gave his name to justice) and toward men, not meddling in the things of others, the sort of justice, as Polyphemus tells Ulysses, belonging to the giants separated from each other throughout the caves of Sicily, although, by comparison, this justice was quite primitive; it made them men of temperance, content with one woman for their entire lifetime. And, as we will see below [§§708, 1099], it made them men of fortitude, industry, and magnanimity, which are the virtues   See Plato, Symposium 202c–203a and Laws 7, 792c–d.   See Plato, Symposium 180d–181c; Phaedrus 255b–c.

275 276

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of the golden age. This age was not as the later effeminate poets devised it, in which pleasure is license, for, in the age of theological poets, where men were immune (just as we observe that even to this day rustics are similarly ­immune) to any taste for nauseating reflection, there was no pleasure ­unless it was licit, and there was no pleasure unless it was helpful; the heroic origin of this is preserved in the Latin expression iuvat [“it helps”], which is used to say “it is beautiful.” Nor was this age as later philosophers devised it, as one where men read, off the heart of Jove, the eternal laws of justice, for originally they read, off the aspect of the heavens, the laws dictated to them by lightning bolts. And, in conclusion, the virtues of this earliest age were like those which—as we learned above [§100] in the Annotations on the Chronological Table—were praised by the Scythians, who used to stick a knife in the earth and worship it as a god because, by this, they could justify the murders which they were about to perform—that is to say, they were virtues of the senses mixing together religion and brutality, and whose customs comport tolerably well with those of the witchcraft we observe even today, as was noted in the Axioms.277 Out of these early morals of a superstitious and savage gentile humanity came the custom of consecrating human victims to the gods, a custom held by the most ancient Phoenicians, among whom, when some great calamity, like war or famine or plague, had sovereign claim over them, the kings would consecrate their own children so as to placate heavenly anger (as Philo of Byblus278 tells us), and they made such sacrifice of children even under ordinary circumstance to Saturn (as Quintus Curtius279 relates), and this custom (as Justin recounts) was preserved by the Carthaginians, a people who, undoubtedly, came from the Phoenicians, as was herein observed [§660], and this custom was practiced by the Carthaginians up until their latest times (as was preserved by Ennius in that verse, Et Poinei solitei sos sacruficare puellos280 [“And the Phoenicians are accustomed to sacrifice their own children”]).

The Carthaginians, after the rout they received from Agathocles,281 sacrificed two hundred children of the nobility to their god so as to placate him. And along with the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, we see that this custom of impious piety was a convention for the Greeks in the offering and sacrifice which Agamemnon made of his daughter Iphigenia.   Axiom 40.   Philo of Byblos (c. 64–141 CE), grammarian and historian, known primarily for his Phoenician History. 279   Quintus Curtius Rufus, Roman historian of uncertain date, author of Historiae Alexandri Magni. 280   Ennius, fr. 125. 281   Agathocles (360–289 BCE), Greek tyrant of Syracuse, mentioned by Machiavelli at Prince 8. 277 278

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The New Science This ought not evoke wonder in anyone who reflects upon the cyclopean paternal power of the earliest Fathers of gentile humanity, which was practiced by the most learned of nations, the Greeks, and the wisest, the Romans: both of them, even until the time of their most cultivated humanity, had the choice to kill their infant children who had just been born. Such reflection ought certainly to lessen the horror which, in our meekness, we are made to feel at Brutus decapitating his two sons because they had conspired to restore the tyrant, Tarquinius, to rule in Rome and our horror at the Manlius called “the Imperious,” because he severed the head of his generous son, who had fought and won a battle contrary to his father’s orders.282 That such sacrifices of human victims had currency among the Gauls is confirmed by Caesar;283 and Tacitus,284 in his Annals, relates of the English that the Druids with their divine science (here, the vanity of the learned hopes to find the riches of recondite wisdom) divined, in the entrails of human victims, what was to come. This was the savage and brutal religion prohibited by Augustus to the Romans who lived in France and forbidden by Claudius to the Gauls themselves (as Suetonius285 relates in his biography of Emperor Claudius). Consequently, those who are learned in Near Eastern languages infer that it was the Phoenicians who spread throughout other parts of the world their sacrifices to Moloch (whom Mornay,286 van der Driesche,287 and Selden say was Saturn), sacrifices in which they burned a man alive. Such was the humanity of the Phoenicians who brought letters to Greece, coming as teachers for those earliest nations in a most barbarous gentile humanity! They say that Hercules purged Latium of a similar custom, exceptionally brutal, that of casting into the Tiber living men as sacrifices, and that he introduced the custom of instead throwing in men made of straw. However, Tacitus tells us that the sacrifice of human victims was a solemnity among the ancient Germans, who were certainly, for all the time for which there is memory, closed off from foreign nations (as a result of this, even the Romans, with all the strength in the world, could not penetrate Germany), and the Spanish found these sacrifices in the Americas (hidden up until two centuries ago from the rest of the world), where

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282   For the Brutus episode, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.5; for Manlius, Ab urbe condita 7.4–5. 283  Caesar, De bello gallico 6.16. 284  Tacitus, Annals 14.30. 285  Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (Claudius 25.5). 286   Philippe de Mornay, (1549–1623), also known as Duplessis-Mornay: Calvinist, counselor to Henry IV, founder of first Protestant academy in 1604. 287   Johannes van den Driesche (1550–1616), Flemish Protestant divine and Dutch Hebraist.

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Book Two barbarians feed upon human flesh, which (as observed by Lescarbot288 in his De Francia nova) must have been the flesh of men thus consecrated and killed (sacrifices of which Oviedo289 tells us in his De historia Indica). As a result, at the same time that the Germans saw gods on Earth, those in the Americas did as well. As we stated of both above [§375], the ancient Scythians were rich in the many golden virtues we have heard praised by writers at the very time when this most inhumane humanity had currency among them! And these were the victims which Plautus290 called Saturni hostiae [“sacrifices to Saturn”], made at a time which authors wish to call the golden age of Latium, and what an age it was, so tame, so benign, so restrained, so tolerant, so dutiful! From all this one has to conclude the emptiness of the vanity of the learned up until now concerning the innocence of the golden age observed in the earliest gentile nations. By what was, in actuality, a fanaticism of superstition, the earliest men of gentile humanity—wild, arrogant, most savage—held to some kind of duty by the terrifying strength of a divinity which they themselves imagined; reflecting on this superstition, Plutarch proposes in his Problema the question: which is the lesser evil, to venerate gods impiously or not to believe in any gods at all?291 However, he does not justly weigh the evil of this savage superstition relative to the evil of atheism. For it was by this superstition that the most luminous nations arose, but atheism has never founded any nation in the world, which conforms with what was demonstrated above in the Principles [§334].

518

And this is what should be said about the divine morals of the earliest peoples of this now lost humankind. What should be said about heroic morals will be reasoned upon in its place below.292

519

On Poetic Economics,

and therein on the earliest families comprised of children The heroes sensed through human senses those two truths which comprise the whole of economic doctrine,293 truths which the people of   Marc Lescarbot (1570–1641), French author, poet, and lawyer. The text to which Vico refers, an early history of Canada, was published in 1609. 289   Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), Spanish historian whose book made Europeans aware of the hammock, the pineapple, and tobacco. 290   See the note to Plautus at §191. 291  Plutarch, De superstitione 10. 292   That is, in the final chapter of the Poetic Politics (§§666–678). 293   “Economic doctrine,” la dottrina iconomica. Though the term iconomica will be translated as “economic” throughout, the reader should remember that the 288

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The New Science Latium preserved in their verbs, educere [“to bring forth”] and educare [“to bring up”]: with masterful elegance, the first verb pertains to the educating of the soul; the second to the educating of the body. The first verb was, by a learned metaphor, applied by the physicists to bring forth forms from matter inasmuch as this heroic education, first, took its start from bringing forth, in a certain mode, the form of the human soul, which had been completely buried in the matter of the vast bodies of giants, and, second, took its start from bringing forth the form of the human body from their gigantic bodies lacking in all measure.

521

And, with a view to what is regarded as the first part of economic discipline, the heroic Fathers must have been, as was noted in the Axioms,294 while in that state which is called the “state of nature,” men wise in the art of divining from auspices—that is, in commonplace wisdom—and, as a consequence of this wisdom, they were priests through procuring— that is, through understanding well—the auspices by means of sacrifices; and, finally, they were kings who must have brought the laws of God to their families in the proper sense of the term “lawgiver”—that is, those who are “bringers of law,” just as, later, they were the first kings of the heroic cities, who brought the laws of the regnant senates to peoples (we observed this later form of lawgiving above in the Annotations on the Chronological Table [§67] with the two kinds of heroic assemblies in Homer, one called the βουλή [boule¯ ] and the other called the ἀγορά [agora]; in the former, the heroes ordered laws orally and, in the latter, they made these laws public orally inasmuch as common alphabetic letters had not yet been found; hence, the heroic kings brought laws for the regnant senates to the people in the persons of duumvirs, whom they created in order to declare these laws, just as Tullus Hostilius did in the trial of Horatius295 with the result that those duumvirs came into being as living and speaking laws, which Livy does not understand and, because of this, does not offer a narrative of the judgment of Horatius which is intelligible, as we observed above [§500].

522

This folk tradition, along with the false opinion of the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,296 tempted Plato with the empty desire for times in which philosophers ruled or rulers philosophized. And certainly these Fathers, as was noted in the Axioms,297 must have been monarchical rulers in their families, superior to everyone in their families and subject only to God, fortified by a power armed with terrifying religions and consecrated by the most brutal punishments, which

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terms “economy” and “economics” have come to acquire connotations that do not necessarily fit Vico’s usage, which is frequently closer to the older sense of “household management.” 294   Axiom 72. 295   On the trial of Horatius, see the note at §268. 296   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. 297   Axioms 73 and 75.

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must have been the power belonging to the sons of Polyphemus in whom Plato298 recognized the earliest paterfamilias in the world. The poor reception of this tradition gave occasion to an error common to all the political theorists, that of believing that the first form of civil governance in the world was that of monarchy and, hence, that civil governance allowed for the unjust principles of wicked politics, that civil rule came into being from either open force or fraud that later bursts out in force.299 However, in times of such complete arrogance and savagery fresh from their origins in bestial liberty—as we have also posited above in an ­Axiom300—in lives of such extreme simplicity and coarseness, where they were content with the fruits immediately offered by nature, with water from fountains, with sleeping in caves, in the natural equality of the familial state, in which all the Fathers were sovereign, it is completely impossible to understand there being in this state either the force or the fraud by which one Father would be able to subject all others to a civil monarch, proof of which will be more fully explicated below [§§1009–1019]. Only here, then, is it permitted for us to reflect on how long it took for men in a gentile humanity still wild in its native liberty to become, through many stages of cyclopean family discipline, domesticated enough for the obedience natural to the laws of the civil state, which came later. This process remains in the eternal property that happier than those in the ideal republic of Plato are those in the republic where fathers teach nothing other than religion and are admired by their children as their wise men, revered as their priests, and where the children fear them as rulers. So great a quantity and kind of divine force needed to reduce these ­giants—as gullish as they were savage—to what they ought to be as men! Since they were not able to speak of this force abstractly, they named it concretely with a physical object, a cord called in Greek χορδά [chorda] and, in early Latin, fides [“lyre string”], whose earliest and proper sense was still understood in the phrase fides deorum, the “force of the gods.” From this cord (for the lyre must have started with a single cord) was made the lyre of Orpheus, and by singing to them of the force of the gods in the auspices, Orpheus reduced the wild beasts of Greece to humanity. And Amphion with self-moving stones raised the walls of Thebes: these were the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who stood before the temple of Themis—that is, in fear of divine justice—with veiled heads— that is, in the modesty of marriage—and found, placed before their feet, stones—that is, men who, previously, were stupid (which is retained in Latin when lapis [“stone”] is used for someone who is stupid301)—and they threw the stones over their shoulders—introducing the family order  Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e.   Compare Machiavelli, Prince 7 and Discourses on Livy 2.13, as well as the locus classicus in Cicero, De officiis 1.13. 300   Axiom 94. 301  Terence, The Self-Tormentor 831 and 917. 298 299

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The New Science by means of economic discipline—and, thus, made men come into being, as this myth was explained above in the Chronological Table [§79].

524

And, with a view to what pertains to the second part of economic discipline, the education of the body, these Fathers, with terrifying religions and with their cyclopean power and with sacred ablutions, started to bring up their children—that is, bring forth from the gigantic stature of their children their correct human stature, in conformity with what we have stated above [§371]. Here, providence is to be admired, above all, in disposing that, until the economic discipline which came later, these lost men would become giants so that, in their wild wandering, they could sustain by their hardened complexion the inclemency of the weather and the seasons and could penetrate by their boundless strength the great forest of the Earth, which because of the recent flood must have been most thick; and on account of providence, until such time as the Earth was found fully populated, these human beings fled wild beasts and pursued shy women and, consequently, becoming lost in their search for food and water, they were scattered over the Earth. However, after this, they started to stay settled with their women, first, in caves and, later, in huts next to springs with year-round water and then, as we are about to state [§526], by the fields which they reduced to cultivation and which gave them the sustenance to live. These were the causes, now reasoned upon herein, by which men decreased to the correct stature which they have now.

525

There, at the very coming-to-be [nascere] of economics, they perfected economics in its ideal form, which is that the Fathers, by travail and by industry, left to their children a patrimony, whereby there was easy and convenient and secure subsistence, even if commerce with foreigners was lacking, even if the fruits of civil life were lacking, even if cities themselves were lacking, so that, even in such extreme circumstances, families would be preserved, from which there would be hope that the nations might rise again. They ought to have left their children a patrimony in a place with a good climate, with its own water flowing year-round; in a situation of natural strength where they can retreat if they despair of the protection of cities; with fields having large grounds which can support impoverished rustics fleeing from the destruction of cities who, in turn, by their labors can support the lords of these fields. These are the orders providence posited in the familial state (in keeping with the statement of Dio Cassius to which we referred in the Axioms302), not the legal orders of a tyrant, but the customary orders of a queen, the queen of the human things who is providence. For these men of fortitude were found based in lands high in the mountains, where there is a windy and thus healthy climate; they were also situated in places of natural strength, the first arces [“citadels”] in the world, which, following its own

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  Axiom 104.

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rules, military architecture later fortified (so, in Italian, steep and rugged mountains were called rocce, whence later fortresses were called rocche). Finally, these men of fortitude were found based next to springs flowing with water year-round, which, for the most part, are located at the tops of mountains. Next to these fountains, birds of prey make their nests; hence, next to such fountains, hunters set their nets. It is because of this, perhaps, that all birds in ancient Latin were called aquilae [“eagles”], as if to say they were aquilegae [“those gathering at water”] (certainly, aquilex retains the sense of “someone who finds or gathers water”), but there is no doubt that the birds by which Romulus observed the auspices so as to take the site of the new city (although we are told in history that they were vultures) later became eagles and were the numinous source for all Roman armies. Thus, men who were simple and rude pursued eagles, which they believed to be the birds of Jove (for they flew high in the heavens) and discovered perennial fountains, whence they venerated Jove for this second great benefit that the heavens made for them when the heavens ruled on Earth; the auspices observed from the flight of eagles were second only to those of lightning bolts, and were called by Messala and Corvinus303 the “major, or public, auspices”; these are the auspices that the Roman patricians understood when they replied to the plebs that AUSPICIA ESSE SUA [“the auspices were theirs”]. All of this, which providence ordered so as to give a beginning to gentile humankind, Plato304 deemed to have been the result of a discerning human providence on the part of the earliest founders of cities. However, in the recourse to barbarism which destroyed cities everywhere, the families were preserved in this fashion, families out of which came the new nations of Europe; and this is retained in Italian in the word castella [“castles”] for all the lordships which newly arose. For, generally speaking, one observes that the more ancient cities, and most of the capitals of peoples, were placed high on mountains and, by contrast, villages were spread throughout the plains. From this must have come those Latin phrases summo loco nati [“those born in a lofty place”] and illustri loco nati [“those born in an illustrious place”] used to signify the nobles, and the phrases imo loco nati [“those born in a lowly place”] and obscuro loco nati [“those born in an obscure place”] used to speak of plebeians, for, as we will see below [§608], the heroes inhabited the cities while the familial servants inhabited the countryside. But it was, above all else, with a view to perennial fountains that the political theorists stated that the community constituted by the sharing of water was the occasion which united the families closely together;   “Messala” is Marcus Valerius Messala (64 BCE–8 CE), Roman general and author of De auspiciis. “Corvinus” is Marcus Valerius Massimus, commander in the early Roman Republic. 304  Plato, Laws 5.9, 738b–c. 303

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The New Science consequently, the earliest communities were called, in Greek, φρατρίαι [phratriai], just as the earliest lands came to be called in Latin pagi, and so too, in Doric Greek, fonts were called πηγή [pe¯ ge¯ ]. And water is the first of two principal solemnities pertaining to nuptials, which the Romans celebrated aqua et igni [“with water and fire”]. For the earliest marriages were naturally contracted between men and women who had water and fire in common, and so belonged to the same family; hence, as was stated above [§511], husbands and wives must have started as brothers and sisters. It was from this fire that there was a tutelary god for each household, which originally was called the focus laris, the hearth where the paterfamilias sacrificed to the gods of the household; these gods (according to Jacob Raewaerd’s305 reading of the chapter in the Law of the Twelve Tables on parricide) were called DEIVEI PARENTUM [“the gods of the fathers”], and in sacred history one frequently reads a similar expression, Deus parentum nostrorum [“God of our fathers”], which, in its more articulated form, is the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob”;306 Cicero conceived a law concerning these gods in his Laws307 in the following terms, SACRA FAMILIARIA PERPETUA MANENTO [“let the sacred things of the family be perpetually maintained”], whence the same phrase in Roman law, in sacris paternis [“within the sacred things of the father”], is used for the son in a family, and paternal power itself is called sacra patria [“the sacred things of the father”], for rights in the earliest times, as is demonstrated in this work were all believed to be sacred. This custom, it has to be said, is observed in the barbarism that came after antiquity, for in the Florence of the times of Giovanni Boccaccio (as is attested in his Genealogy of the Gods308), the paterfamilias, at the beginning of each year, sat at the hearth and put incense and sprinkled wine on the top of a log which he had set on fire. And among the lowly plebs of our Naples, one observes, on the night of Christmas Eve, that the paterfamilias must solemnly set on fire a log of this sort in the hearth, and because of this, they say that families in the kingdom of Naples are counted by the number of these fires. Consequently, after the founding of cities, it became a universal custom that marriages were covenanted only among citizens, and this eventually remained even when they were contracted with strangers, in the fact that they had, at least, to share between them religion in common.

527

To return now from fire to water, the Styx by which the gods swore was the spring of the fountains; in this case, the gods must have been the   Jacob Raewaerd (1534–1568), Belgian jurist and author of On the Law of the Twelve Tables (1563). 306   See (for example) Exodus 3:15. 307  Cicero, De legibus 2.9.22. Cicero’s text actually reads: Sacra privata perpetua manento. See also De legibus 2.11.27: ritus familiae patrumque servare (“to preserve the rites of family and the fathers”). 308  Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium 12.65. 305

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nobles of the heroic cities, as was stated above [§449], for the community of water made for the rule of these gods over mere men. Hence, in Year 309 of Rome, the patricians withheld from the plebs any common share in connubium, as was stated somewhat above [§110] and will be stated more fully below [§§589, 986]). On account of all this, in sacred history, we often read of either the “well of the oath” or the “oath of the well.”309 Hence, the city of Pozzuoli retains, in its very name, an indication of its great antiquity, for it was called “Puteoli” because of the many small wells it united. And it is a reasonable conjecture (founded upon the mental dictionary of which we have spoken [§162]) that the many cities spread throughout the ancient nations which have names with plural endings come from a thing that is, in substance, one, although they are differently named by means of articulate speech. From there was imagined a third major deity—that is, DIANA—who was the earliest human necessity made sensible to giants after they settled in certain lands and joined in marriage with certain women. The theological poets have left us descriptions of the history of these things in two myths about Diana. The first of these signifies the modesty of marriage in the modesty of a Diana who, in complete silence in the darkness of nighttime, lies with the sleeping Endymion, the result of Diana chaste in that chastity with which one law in Cicero’s Laws decrees DEOS CASTE ADEUNTO310 [“let the one going to the gods be chaste”]—that is, the one going to make a sacrifice must first make sacred ablutions. The second myth tells of the terrifying religion of fountains retained in their perpetual epithet “sacred”; this is the myth of Actaeon,311 who, since he saw Diana—the living spring—naked and was sprinkled by the goddess with water—which is to say that the goddess struck him with a great terror of her—he became a stag, the most timid of the animals, and was devoured by his own dogs, by the remorse of his own conscience for violating religion. As a result, in Latin, lymphati is properly used for “those who have been sprinkled with water,” which is to say that lympha must have originally been understood to be someone like Actaeon, driven mad by terrifying superstition. This poetic history is preserved in the Latin term latices [“streams”], which must have come from latendo [“to hide”]: these streams have the perpetual epithet puri [“pure”], and signify the water rising from fountains; they must have, in Latin, been the nymphs who are the companions of Diana in Greek, for nymphae, in Greek, signifies what lymphae does in Latin. And such nymphs must have been so named at times when they perceived all things as animate substances and, for the most part, in   Genesis 21:32.  Cicero, De legibus 2.8.19. 311   For the myth of Actaeon, see Ignius, Fabula 181; Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.2.3; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.183–252. 309 310

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The New Science terms of human substance, as we reasoned above in the Poetic Metaphysics [§379].

529

Later, the pious giants who were located in the mountains must have become sensible of the stench which came from the cadavers of those belonging to them who passed away and were rotting upon the land near to them; hence, they must have buried their dead, whose immense skulls and bones have been found and are still found even today high upon the mountains (a great argument that, from the impious giants spread throughout the plains and valleys everywhere and from the cadavers rotting unburied, there came the skulls and bones that were either carried by storms to the sea or eventually rotted in the rains). And these pious giants imbued these graves with so much religion—that is, divine ­terror—that religiosa loca [“religious place”] remained primarily, in Latin, an expression for places where there were graves. And from here was the start of the universal belief which we showed above in the Principles [§337] was the third principle taken by this science, namely, belief in the immortality of the soul. These souls were, in Latin, called DII MANES and, in the chapter in the Law of the Twelve Tables on parricide, were called DEIVEI PARENTUM [“the gods of the fathers”]. In addition, there must have been some marker for the grave, either on or beside each mound, which could only have been called such because the ground was slightly raised; thus, there is a custom of the ancient Germans (to which Tacitus refers in a passage312) which allows us to conjecture that it was the same custom for all the other earliest nations, a custom whereby the Germans deemed that the dead should not be weighed down by too much earth, whence came that prayer for the dead, sit tibi terra levis [“may the earth be light upon you”]; the marker for the grave (what we call in Italian a ceppo) must have in Greek been called φύλαξ [phulax], which means “guardian,” because in their simplicity they believed that this post guarded the grave; and, in Latin, cippus [“boundary stone”] continued to signify a grave, and for Italians, ceppo signifies the base of a genealogical tree. Hence, in Greek, φύλαξ must have come from φυλή [phule¯ ], which means “tribe,” and the Romans described their genealogies by placing, in the halls of their households, statues of their ancestors in lines [fili] which they called stemmata, whose origin must have been temen—that is to say “thread” [filo]—and from which came subtemen, the “crossthread” which extends under the other threads when cloth is woven; these genealogical threads were, later, called by jurists, linnae [“lines”] and, subsequently, down to our times, stemmata have retained their significance as insignia of noble households. As a result, one can strongly conjecture that the earliest lands containing these graves were the earliest family shields, whence one must understand that expression of the Spartan mother who assigned a shield to her son going

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 Tacitus, Germania 27.2.

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to war, saying to return aut cum hoc aut in hoc [“either with it or on it”], means that he should return with the shield or on a funeral bier (so too even to this day in Naples, a funeral bier is called a shield). And since these graves were on the ground of the first fields to be planted, a shield in the science of heraldry is defined as the background of the fields, which later was called the background of the coats of arms. From origins of this sort came the word filius [“son”], and when a son was distinguished by the name or household of his father, the word signified someone who was a noble, exactly as we learn that a Roman patrician was defined as someone qui potest nomine ciere patrem313 [“who can cite his father by name”]; these Roman names, as we saw above [§433], are equivalent to the patronyms which are so often used by the early Greeks (hence, Homer calls heroes filii Achivorum314 [“sons of the Acheans”]), and similarly in sacred history filii Israel signifies the nobles among the Hebrew people.315

530

As a result, it is necessarily the case that if the tribes originally were constituted by nobles, then cities originally were composed only of nobles, as we will demonstrate below [§597]. Thus, with the graves of their buried, the giants demonstrated lordship over their lands, which is retained in the Roman legal code in the burying of the dead in their proper place so as to make the burial a religious one. And the giants would truthfully speak the heroic phrases, “we are sons of this earth, we were born from these oaks”;316 just as the heads of families, in Latin, were called stirpes [“stems”] and stipites [“root stock”], and the descendant of one of them was called a propago [“offshoot”], and such families, in Italian, are called legnaggi [“lineages”]; the most noble households of Europe and almost all sovereigns take their surnames from the lands over which they have lordship, whence, in Greek as much as in Latin, “sons of the Earth,” means that the same as “noble” and, in Latin, the nobles were signified with the word ingenui, as if it were derived from indegeniti [“indigenous”] and a shortened form of ingeniti [“native”]; certainly, in Latin, indigenae [“the indigenous”] retains its significance as “those born from a land,” and dii indigetes were, by definition, the gods native to a land, who must have been the nobles of the heroic cities, who called themselves “gods,” as was stated above [§370], and whose great mother was the earth. Hence, from the beginning, ingenuus and patricius signified nobility because the earliest cities belonged only to the nobles. And these ingenui must have been aboriginals, used  Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.  Homer, Iliad 1.162, 237, 240, 276, 368, 392. 315  In fact, the term is applied to the people in general. Compare Genesis 32:32 and Exodus 2:23, 4:29, 5.14; 12:21. 316   “We are sons of this earth”—an allusion to the myth of Cadmus; compare Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.118. “We are born from these oaks”—compare Virgil, Aeneid 8.315. 313 314

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The New Science as if to indicate that the nobles were “without origins”—that is, were born of themselves, which is the exact equivalent of what the Greeks call αὐτόχθονες [autochthones]—and these aboriginals were giants, and “giants” in the proper sense means “sons of the earth,” and so myths are trustworthy when they tell us that the earth is the mother of the giants and of the gods.

532

We have reasoned upon all these things above, and we repeat them here, in their proper place, so as to demonstrate that Livy317 poorly connected the heroic phrase “sons of the earth,” with Romulus and with the Fathers who were his companions, when he had them say to those who had recourse to the asylum opened in the lucus that they were sons of that earth, and so made it become, in their mouths, a shameless lie what had been for the founders of the earliest peoples a heroic truth; for, on the one hand, Romulus was recognized as ruler of Alba and, on the other hand, this mother of theirs, in producing only men, had been so unjust that they needed to seize the Sabine women so as to have wives. Hence, one must say that, through the manner of earliest people thinking through poetic characters, they connected with Romulus (regarded in his aspect as city-founder) the properties of the founders of the earliest cities of Latium, in the midst of a great number of which Romulus founded Rome. Together with this error is the definition that Livy318 gives of asylum, vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”]: for the earliest city-founders in their simplicity, it was not yet counsel, but a nature that served providence.

533

From there was imagined a fourth divinity of the so-called gentes maiores—that is, APOLLO—taken as the god of the light pertaining to civil life (hence, in Greek, the heroes were called in κλειτοί [kleitoi], “brilliant,” from κλέος [kleos], “glory,” and, in Latin, they were called incluti [“renowned”] from cluere, “to be brilliant at arms” and, consequently, from that light into which Juno Lucina brought noble offspring). As a result, after Urania (who, as we saw above [§§365, 391], was the Muse whom Homer defines as the “science of good and evil”—that is, of the divination through which, as was stated above [§§365, 391], Apollo is the god of poetic wisdom, or of divinity), there was imagined a second Muse, who must have been the Clio who tells heroic history; and the first history of this sort must have started with the genealogies of those heroes, just as sacred history starts with the descendants of the patriarchs. This sort of history of Apollo begins with his pursuit of Daphne,319 the wandering maiden who was errant throughout the forests, living a pro Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5. 319   For the myth of Apollo and Daphne, see Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.9; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.452–600. 317 318

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fane life. This maiden (with the aid which she implored from the gods whose auspices are needed for solemn nuptials) settled in her wandering and became a laurel tree, a plant which is always green in its certain and recognized offspring; it is with this same significance that, in Latin, the heads of families are called stipites [“rootstock”], and the recourse to barbarism brought with it the same heroic phrases, whereby they call descendants of the same family “trees,” and the founders of families are called the “stock” or “roots,” and the descendants are called “branches,” and the families themselves are called “lineages.” Thus, the pursuit of Apollo was proper to a god, the flight of Daphne was proper to a wild beast; however, later, when the speech of strict history was unknown, this pursuit of Apollo became that of a shameless man, the flight of Daphne that of a Diana. Moreover, Apollo was the brother of Diana, for along with the perennial fountains came the age of founding the earliest gentile peoples upon mountains, whence Apollo had his seat upon Mount Parnassus, which the Muses, who are the arts of humanity, inhabit and near the spring, Hippocrene, from whose waters swans drink (birds who sing in the sense of canere or cantare, which, in Latin, means “to foretell”); under the auspices of one of these swans, as was stated above [§512], Leda conceives two eggs, and from one is born Helen and from the other Castor and Pollux in one birth.

534

And Apollo and Diana are the children of Latona, called this from latere, “to hide,” whence the expressions condere gentes, condere regna, condere urbes and, more particularly, whence came, in Italy, Latium. And Latona took her offspring near the waters of perennial fountains, as we have stated [§526]. At their birth, men became frogs,320 which, during the summer rains, are born from the earth, who is called the “mother of giants,” giants who are properly called sons of the earth. One of these frogs was that which Darius sent to Idanthyrsus, and it must be three frogs and not toads on the royal arms of France, which, later, changed into lilies of gold, depicted with the superlative of three (which French retains with très) to signify one great frog—that is, one great son of the earth, and so Lord of the Earth. Both Apollo and Diana are hunters, who hunt with unrooted trees, one of which is the club of Hercules; they kill wild beasts, so as first to defend themselves and their families (since they were no longer permitted, like wanderers living a lawless life, to escape by flight) and so as, later, to feed themselves along with their families (just as Virgil321 makes his heroes feast on meat and, as Tacitus322 relates, to such an end, the ancient Germans went hunting wild beasts along with their wives).

535

  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.316–381.  Virgil, Aeneid 1.184–193. 322  Tacitus, Germania 46. 320 321

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The New Science And Apollo is the god who is the founder of humanity and its arts, which, as we have said [§534], are called the Muses; these arts, in Latin, are called liberales [“free”], meaning the arts of “nobles,” one of which is the art of cavalry, whence Pegasus flies above Mount Parnassus armed with wings, for being so armed is within the rights of the nobility; and in the return to barbarism, because they alone were able to be armed on horseback, the nobles of Spain were called “cavaliers.” This humanity had its start in humare, “burying,” and it was for this that we took burial as the third principle of this science. Hence, the Athenians, the most humane of all the nations, were (as Cicero323 relates) the first to bury their dead.

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538

Finally, Apollo is always a young man, just as Daphne, changed into a laurel tree, lives evergreen, for Apollo is the eternity men enjoy in their families because of the names given to progeny. He wears long hair as a sign of his nobility; this, in many nations, is retained in the custom of nobles wearing long hair, and one reads that one of the punishments for nobles, among both the Persians and those in the Americas, is to tear out one or more of these hairs. And, consequently, perhaps the region of Gallia Comata [“long-haired Gaul”] was called this because of the nobles who founded that nation, just as, among all nations, slaves certainly have their heads shaved.

539

However, as some point, these heroes settled within circumscribed lands, and their families grew in number so that the immediate fruits of nature were no longer enough for them. And yet, they feared going beyond their borders so as to have enough resources because those borders had been circumscribed by the same chains of religion by which the giants were chained below the earth, and this same religion insinuated to them that they should set fire to the forest so as to have a prospect of the heavens from which the auspices came. Thus, they gave themselves over to the large, long, hard toil of reducing the lands to cultivation and sowing them with the grain which, roasted along with the briar and thorns, they observed was advantageous for human sustenance. And here, with quite beautiful, natural, necessary comparison, they called the ears of grain, “golden apples,” transferring the idea of apples, which are the fruits of nature gathered in the summer, to the ears of grain which are gathered by industry.

540

Because of this toil, which was the greatest and most glorious of all, the character of Hercules sprang up, the Hercules who made such glory for Juno in her command to sustain the families. And with another metaphor that was as beautiful as it was necessary, they imagined the land under the aspect of a great dragon, armed with scales and spines, which were the briar and thorns of that land. They imagined it with wings because these lands rightfully belonged to the heroes. They imagined it as  Cicero, De legibus 2.25.63.

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always awake—that is, always thickly overgrown—and guarding over the golden apples of the gardens of the Hesperides. Because of the dampness from the waters of the flood, it was, later, believed that the dragon was born in water. Under another aspect, they imagined the land as a hydra (coming from the word ὕδωρ [hudo¯r], “water”), which, whenever one of its heads was cut off, grew another and which changed into three colors—black, the color of the burnt land; green, the color of plants; and gold, the color of ripe grain—the three colors of the skin of a serpent which, as it grows old, takes on a new skin. Finally, for the land in the aspect of its ferocity to being tamed, they devised an animal of the greatest strength—that is, the Nemean lion— whence, later, the strongest of animals was given the name “lion,” which philologists suggest had the form of a serpent. And all these animals spewed fire, which was the fire Hercules set to the forests. These three different histories from three different parts of Greece mean the same thing in substance. So too, in another part of Greece, there was another history, also about Hercules, that in his infancy, he killed serpents while still in the cradle—that is, in the infancy of heroic times. In another, Bellerophon kills the monster called the Chimera, a monster that has the tail of a serpent and the chest of a goat (so as to signify the lands still in a primitive state) and the head of a lion spewing flames. In Thebes, it was Cadmus who also kills a great serpent and sows teeth (in a beautiful metaphor, they called the hard pieces of curved wood which, prior to finding the use of iron, they must have used to plow the lands “serpent’s teeth”). And Cadmus himself became a serpent:324 the ancient Romans would have said that Cadmus FUNDUS FACTUS EST [“was made into the ground”]—as was explicated above [§446] and as will be more fully explicated below, where we will see that the serpents on the head of Medusa [§616] and on the staff of Mercury [§604] signified “dominion over those lands,” which is retained in ὠφέλεια [o¯pheleia], derived from ὄφις [ophis], “serpent,” the word in Greek for “land rent,” which is also called the “tithe of Hercules.” It is in this sense that one reads in Homer325 of the diviner, Calchas, who interprets a serpent devouring eight sparrows and their mother to mean that, at the end of nine years, the land of Troy would come under the dominion of the Greeks; and the Greeks, while they were fighting the Trojans, took a serpent killed in the air by an eagle, which fell in the middle of the battle, to be an augury conforming with what Calchas divined with his science. Accordingly, Proserpina—who is the same as Ceres—is seen in sculpture carried off in a chariot drawn by serpents, and serpents are frequently observed on the medallions of Greek republics. 324 325

  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.563–603.  Homer, Iliad 2.308–330; 12.200–230.

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The New Science Consequently, in accord with our mental dictionary (and it is a thing worthy of reflection), kings in the Americas are found (as was sung by Fracastoro326 in his Syphilis) to have carried the shed skin of a serpent instead of a scepter. And the Chinese royal coat of arms bears a dragon, and they take the dragon as an insignia of civil power (this must have been the same dragon, Draco, who wrote laws for the Athenians in blood). And we stated above [§423] that this dragon was one of the serpents of the Gorgon whom Perseus nailed to his shield, which, later, was the shield of Minerva, goddess of the Athenians (this aspect of her petrifying people who look upon the shield will be found [§616] to have been a hieroglyph for the civil power of Athens). And sacred scripture in the book of Ezekiel327 gives the king of Egypt the title the “great dragon” which lies in the midst of his own rivers, in exactly the same way that what we called dragons above [§540] were born in water and that the Hydra took its name from water. The emperor of Japan has made an order of cavaliers, who carry as their device a dragon. And, in the return to barbarous times, histories tell us that household of the Visconti was called to the duchy of Milan on account of its great nobility and bore, on its coat of arms, a shield with a dragon devouring a child—that is, the python which, in exactly the same way, devoured the men of Greece and was killed by Apollo, whom we have discovered to be the god of nobility. This device of the Visconti must make one wonder at the uniformity between the heroic thought of men in that second age of barbarism and that of the ancients of the earlier age of barbarism. So too must have been the two-winged dragons who keep possession of the golden fleece and who hold up a necklace of flint stones, igniting the fire they spew forth. (Chifflet,328 who writes the history of the order of the golden fleece, is not able to understand this insignia, and therefore Pietrasanta329 argues that his history is obscure).

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Just as, in some parts of Greece, it was Hercules who killed the serpents, the lion, the Hydra, the dragon and, in other parts, it was Bellerophon who murdered the Chimera, so too, in another part, it was Bacchus who domesticated the tigers, who must have been lands clothed in as many colors as the coat of tigers (later the name “tiger” passed over to the strongest kinds of animals). But that Bacchus who domesticated tigers with wine, this is a physical history that in no way pertains to what was known by the rustic heroes who founded the nations. Similarly, that Bacchus whom we are told went to Africa or to Hyrcania to tame tigers, 326   Girolamo Fracastoro (1483–1553), Italian humanist physician and poet, and author of Naugerius sive de poetica (1553) and Syphilis sive de morbo gallico (1530). Vico wrote the preface to Pietro Belli’s Italian translation of Syphilis. 327   Ezekiel 29:3. 328   Jean-Jacques Chifflet (1588–1660), French archaeologist and physician. 329   Silvester Petra Sancta (1590–1647), Roman Jesuit and heraldist, and author of De symbolis heroicis (1634).

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he could not have been known to the Greeks of heroic times, as we will demonstrate in the Poetic Geography [§747], for those Greeks did not know of any Hyrcania in the world, much less Africa, to say nothing of tigers in the forests of Hyrcania or in the deserts of Africa. Moreover, the ears of grain called golden apples must have been the first gold in the world, for at this time, the metal, gold, encased in earth, and the art of extracting it from ore was still unknown, to say nothing of the art of shining or shaping it; nor when they were still drinking water from fountains could gold have any use that was prized. It was only later, from the similarity it had to the color of the food most highly prized at that time, that it took the name of gold (hence, Plautus must say thesaurum auri330 [“a treasury of gold”] so as to distinguish this kind of gold from the gold in a granary). For certainly Job331 counts, as part of the greatness from which he has fallen, the fact that he used to eat bread made from grain, just as in our more remote provinces, the sick eat bread made from grain, instead of the potions in our cities made from gems, and to say of someone who is sick that he is “eating bread made of grain” means that he is at the end of his life.

544

Later, by further explicating this idea of such preciousness and dearness, “golden” must have been said of fine wool. Hence, in Homer,332 Atreus laments that Thyestes had stolen his golden sheep, and the Argonauts stole the golden fleece from Pontus.

545

Accordingly, Homer also continuously names his kings and heroes with the epithet πολύμηλος [polume¯ los], which they interpret as “rich in flocks,”333 just as, in Latin, because of the uniformity of ideas, a patrimony was called pecunia, which Latin grammarians suggest is derived from pecus [“sheep”]; so too among the ancient Germans, as Tacitus334 tells us, flocks and herds solae et gratissimae opes sunt [“are the most favored and the only wealth”]. This custom must have been the same among the ancient Romans, for whom a patrimony was called pecunia, as is attested in the Law of the Twelve Tables in the chapter on testaments, and μῆλον [melon] meant both “apple” and “sheep” to the Greeks, who perhaps under the aspect of precious fruit called honey, μέλι [meli] and Italians call apples meli. As a result, these ears of grain must have been the golden apples, which Hercules before all others brought back—that is, gathered at harvest, from Hesperia. And the Gallic Hercules with chains of this gold coming out of his mouth chained men by their ears, which, below, will be found [§560] to have been the history concerning the cultivation of fields.

 Plautus, Aulularia prologue, 7.   Job 31:40. 332  Homer, Iliad 2.105–106. 333  Homer, Iliad 2.605 and 705; 14.490. 334  Tacitus, Germania 5. 330 331

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The New Science Consequently, Hercules remains the divinity propitious for the discovery of treasure, of which Dis is god; Dis is the same as the Pluto who abducts Proserpina down into the underworld, who herself will be found [§§716, 720, 721] to be the same as Ceres—that is, grain—and, according to the poets who tell us of her being carried off, the underworld was, first of all, where the Styx was; second, where graves were; and third, the bottom of furrows—as will be demonstrated in its place [§715]. From this god, Dis, the rich were called dites, and the rich were the nobles; accordingly, among the Spanish, nobles are called riccosombres [“rich men”] and, among the Italians of ancient times, they were called benestanti [“those faring well”], and in Latin, they used ditio [“wealth”] to name what we would call, in the affairs of a state, “lordship,” for the fields were the true riches of states, whence, also in Latin, an ager [“field”] is the precinct of some lordship, and ager in its proper sense is land aratro agitur [“worked with the plough”]. Thus, it must be true that the Nile was called χρυσοῥῤόας [chrusorrhoas], “flowing with gold,” because it overflows into the wide fields of Egypt, and its flooding brings great abundance when the harvest is gathered. Thus, they called the Pactolus, the Ganges, the Hydaspes, and the Tagus “rivers of gold” because they made the fields of grain fertile. It is from these golden apples, certainly, that Virgil, so learned about heroic antiquity, extended further the previous comparison and made that golden bough which Aeneas carries down into the underworld335—this myth will herein be explicated more fully in its proper place [§721]. As for what remains, gold which is a metal, it was not considered in heroic times any more precious than iron. So, Etearchus, king of Ethiopia, responded to the ambassadors of Cambyses, who had presented on behalf of their king numerous golden vases, that he did not recognize in them anything useful, much less necessary, and so made his refusal of them out of a natural magnanimity exactly like that of the ancient Germans, of whom Tacitus tells us that (and the Germans at that time were found by Tacitus336 to be as ancient as the heroes about whom we are now reasoning) est videre apud illos argentea vasa legatis et principibus eorum muneri data non alia vilitae quam quae hum fingetur [“one sees that among them silver vases offered as gifts to their envoys or princes are not valued any differently from those devised from clay”]. Accordingly, in Homer,337 heroes keep in their armories arms made of gold and of iron without any distinction. For the earliest world must have had metals of this sort in abundance just as they had with the discovery of America, and it was only later that they were exhausted by human avarice.

 Virgil, Aeneid 6.137.  Tacitus, Germania 5. 337  Homer, Iliad 6.234–236. 335 336

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From all this comes the following great corollary, that dividing the world into four ages—namely, the ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron—was discovered by poets from baser times. For it was this poetic gold that, for the earliest Greeks gave its name to the golden age, whose innocence was only the extreme primitiveness of sons of Polyphemus, in whom Plato338 recognizes, as was stated otherwise above [§§296, 338, 503], the earliest paterfamilias, who remained separated and alone throughout these caves with their wife and children, never meddling with others’ things, as Polyphemus recounts to Ulysses in Homer.339

547

As confirmation of all that has been stated herein up until now about poetic gold, it would help to draw upon two customs which still have currency and whose causes cannot be explained except by the principles above.

548

The first custom is that of placing a golden ball, or apple, in the hand of the king as part of the solemnities of his coronation (this must also be the same apple in the insignia resting on the top of their royal crowns). This custom can have no other origin than in the golden apple, which, as we have stated here, was grain and which has been found herein [§602] to have been a hieroglyph representing the dominion which the heroes had over the lands (a dominion which, perhaps, Egyptian priests signified with an apple, if it is not an egg, in the mouth of their Kneph, about which we will reason below [§605]). This was the hieroglyph brought by the barbarians who invaded all the nations that were subjects of the Roman Empire. The second custom is that of kings giving gold coins as part of the solemnities of their nuptials to the wives, the queens. This custom must have come from the poetic gold, which, as we stated here, was grain. So too did gold coins have the exact same significance in heroic nuptials, which the ancient Romans celebrated coëmptione et farre [“with bride-purchase and spelt cake”] and is in conformity with the heroes, as Homer340 recounts, who bought their wives with gifts; Jove must have changed into a shower of this kind of gold in order to be with Danae enclosed in a tower—which must have been a granary—so as to signify the abundance which is a part of this solemnity, and this should make one wonder when it is connected with the Hebrew expression et abundantia in turribus tuis341 [“and abundance in thy towers”]. This conjecture is confirmed by the ancient Britons, among whom grooms regaled their brides, through the solemnity of nuptials, with cakes. For the coming-to-be [nascere] of these human things, three other deities of the gentes maiores were awakened in the Greek imagination, ideas  Plato, Laws 3.3, 680b.  Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115. 340  Homer, Iliad 9.144–148. 341   Psalm 121:7. 338 339

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The New Science whose order corresponds to the order of things: first, VULCAN; second, SATURN (so called from satis, “sown ground,”342 whence the age of Saturn of the peoples of Latium corresponds to the golden age of the peoples of Greece); and, in third place, CYBELE, or ­BERECYNTHIA— that is, the cultivated land—and, accordingly, she is depicted as seated on a lion, which is the primitive earth which the heroes reduced to cultivation, as was explained above [§§3, 540]. She is called the “great mother of the gods” and also the “mother of the giants,” and she was properly called the latter in the sense that the giants were “sons of the earth,” upon which we have reasoned above [§370]. So, also, she is mother of the gods—that is, the mother of giants who in the time of the earliest cities arrogated to themselves the name of “gods,” as was also stated above [§449]. And the pine is consecrated to her, a sign of the stability by which the authors of peoples, after they had settled on the first lands, founded cities whose goddess is Cybele. Cybele was called VESTA, goddess of divine ceremonies, by the Romans. For the lands ploughed at that time were the first altars of the world, as we will see in the Poetic Geography [§776], and it was there that the goddess, Vesta, armed with a savage religion, guarded over the fire and the spelt, which was the grain of the ancient Romans. Hence, the same nuptials which were celebrated aqua et igni [“with water and fire”] were also celebrated with spelt and were called nuptiae confarreatae, a solemnity which later was retained only by Roman priests, for the earliest families were comprised entirely of priests (as has been discovered to be the case for the regimes of Buddhist monks in the East Indies). Water and fire and spelt were the elements of divine ceremonies in Rome. Upon these first lands, Vesta sacrificed to Jove those impious men who engaged in that profane sharing in common, a sharing that violated the first altars which, we have stated above, were the first fields producing grain, as we will explain below [§776]). They were the first sacrificial hosts, the first victims of gentile religion, and were called the Saturni hostiae [“the victims of Saturn”] by Plautus, as we observed above [§§191, 517], and were called victimae from victus [“defeated”], on account of being weak because they were alone, a sense of weakness which is retained in the Latin word victus. And they were called hostes [“enemies”] in keeping with the correct idea that those who are impious in this way were considered enemies of all of humankind. The Romans retained this idea in their spreading a paste of spelt on the brow and horns of victims and sacrificial hosts. It was from the goddess Vesta that these Romans also named the vestal virgins, those who guarded the eternal fire which, if it were by unhappy chance extinguished, must be relit by the sun, for it was from the sun, as we will see below [§713], that Prometheus stole the first fire and brought it to Earth among the Greeks, who set fire to the forests with it and

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342

  On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3.

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started to cultivate the land. And, accordingly, Vesta is the goddess of the divine ceremonies for the Romans, because the first colere [“cultivation,” “religious observance”] that came to be in the world for gentile humanity was the cultivation of the earth, and the first culto [“husbandry,” “worship”] was the raising of altars of this sort, lighting these first fires, and making sacrifice upon those stated above to be impious men. Such is the fashion in which the boundaries of fields came to be located and guarded. We have been told about this division of the fields in a way too general by Hermogenianus the jurist, who imagined that it was made through the deliberate consensus of men, that it emerged because of much justice and was observed by no less good faith, even though there was not yet, in those times, any arms for public enforcement and, consequently, no laws connected with civil power; such division of the fields cannot be fully understood except as one which was made by men who were extremely savage and observed a terrifying religion, which settled those men and circumscribed them within certain lands; it was by these blood ceremonies that the first walls were consecrated, walls which even the philologists say were traced out by city-founders with a plough whose moldboard, as was discovered above through the origins of languages, must have originally been the word urbs [“city”], from which comes the archaic word urbum, meaning “curved” (and from this same origin, perhaps, comes orbis [“globe”]). So, originally, orbis terrarum [“globe of the world”] must have been used of every enclosure of this sort, so low that Remus passed over it with one leap and was killed by Romulus; and the Latin historians tell us that he consecrated with his blood the first walls of Rome.343 As a result, such an enclosure must have been a fence [siepe]; and among the Greeks, σήψ [se¯ ps] signified a “serpent” in its heroic significance, as cultivated land. It was from these origins that the expression munire viam [“to make a way”], must have come: this “making” was done by fortifying fences in the fields, whence the word for “walls” [mura] was moenia or, nearly the same, munia; similarly, munire [“to build”] certainly retains the sense of “to fortify.” These fences must have been planted with the plants which, in Latin, are called sagmina—that is, “bloodwort,” “elder,” which to this day retain both this use and this name, and it is preserved in the use of sagmina to signify the plants used in worship at altars. These words must have been derived from the blood of those murdered, who, like Remus, transgressed what was forbidden. From this came the sanctity of walls, as was stated, and, in addition, from this came the sanctity of heralds who, as we will see below, crowned themselves in plants of this sort (just as the ancient ambassadors of Rome certainly did with plants plucked from the fortress on the Capitoline), and, finally, from this came the sanctity of the laws which those heralds conveyed, both in war and peace, whence that part of the law which imposes a penalty on someone who transgress is called the “sanction.” 343

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.7.2.

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The New Science And, consequently, here starts what we are proving in this work, that the natural law of the gentile peoples344 came from a divine providence which instituted orders privately among peoples, who in coming to know one another would come to know what they had in shared in common. Because the Roman heralds who were consecrated with plants of this sort were inviolate among the other peoples of Latium, it is necessarily the case that the latter, without any knowledge of the former, celebrated the same custom.

551

Thus, the paterfamilias arranged for the subsistence of his heroic family by religion, which he was obliged to preserve by religion. From this came the continuous custom of nobles being religious (as was observed by Julius Scaliger in his Poetica345), as a result of which, it must be a great sign of a nation coming to its end when the nobles despise their native religion.

552

It is an opinion common to both the philologists and the philosophers that families in what is called the state of nature were comprised of nothing but children, whereas these families were also comprised of familial servants [famoli], from whom is principally derived the word “family.” Hence, upon this defective economics, they establish a false politics, as was noted above [§§257, 516] and will be shown more fully below [§§555–559, 582–584]). Therefore, by starting from that part of families comprised of familial servants—which, properly speaking, belongs to economics—we here start our reasoning about politics.

On the families comprised of familial servants prior to cities, without which it was completely impossible for cities to come into being 553

For finally, there came an end to the long age of impious giants, who remained in that profane sharing of things and women in common in the quarrels produced (as the jurists say) by that sharing, then the simpletons of Grotius346 and the abandoned men of Pufendorf347 had recourse to the altars of men of fortitude so as to save themselves from the violent men of Hobbes, just as wild beasts, driven by intense cold, will go to places which are inhabited in order to save themselves. And there these ferocious men, because they were already united in familial society,   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.   J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem 1.28. 346  Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis 2.2.1–2. 347   See Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2.2. 344 345

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killed the violent who had violated their lands and received under their protection the unfortunate who had fled from them. And, moreover, the natural heroism born of Jove—that is, conceived under the auspices of Jove—shined forth principally in the virtuous heroism in which the Romans excelled above all other peoples on the Earth, exercised in exactly the following two practices: parcere subiectis et debellare superbos348 [“sparing the subjected and conquering the proud”].

And here is offered a thing worthy of reflection so as to understand how men who, in this wild state, were so ferocious and untamable in their bestial liberty came to human society: so as to come to the first form of human society—which was the society of marriage—these first men needed, so as to make themselves enter into it, the sharp sting of a bestial lust, and they needed, so as to keep themselves within it, the strong restraint of a terrifying religion, as was demonstrated above [§529]. From this, marriage became the earliest form of friendship that came to be in the world. Hence, Homer,349 to signify Jove and Juno lying together, says with heroic gravity that they “celebrated their friendship [amicizia],” the Greek word for which, φιλία [philia], is derived from φιλέω [phileo¯], “to love”; it is from here that the Latin word filius [“child”], is derived, and in Ionic Greek, the word φίλιος [philios] is “friend,” and, consequently, with the morphing of one letter similar in sound, there is the word φυλή [phule¯ ], “tribe”; hence, we saw above [§529] that the stemmata that were called the “genealogical lines” were called by the jurists lineae.

554

From this nature of human things remains this eternal property: that the true natural friendship is marriage, in which naturally all three final goods are shared in common, namely, the honorable, the advantageous, and the pleasurable, whence husband and wife share, by nature, all the prosperity and adversity of their lot in life (exactly as, by choice, amicorum omnia sunt communia [“friends share all things in common”]).350 On account of this, Modestinus defines marriage as omnis vitae consortium [“sharing in the lot of an entire lifetime”].351 Those who were the second to come to the second form of society (which, on account of a certain excellence, bears the name of “society,” as we will make known shortly hereafter [§558]) did not come to it except for the extreme necessity of life itself. This too is worthy of reflection: because the first men who came to human society were driven by religion and by the natural instinct to  Virgil, Aeneid 6.853.  Homer, Iliad 14.314. 350   A Greek proverb, attested (for example) at Plato, Phaedrus 279c and Laws 739c; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.9, 1159b31, and 9.8, 1168b8. 351   Modestinus, student of Ulpian and among the last representatives of classical jurisprudence. 348 349

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The New Science ­ ropagate the human race—the first cause being pious, the second, propp erly speaking, being genteel—they gave a beginning to friendship which is noble and lordly; and because those second men came to it on account of the necessity of saving their lives, they gave a beginning to society in the proper sense of the term, society which is principally to share in common the advantageous and which, in consequence, is base and servile. Accordingly, those seeking refuge were received by the heroes in keeping with the just law of protection, whence they would have sustenance for their lives with the obligation of serving the heroes as day laborers. Here, because of the fama [“repute”] of the heroes (which they acquired principally by the practice in the two areas in which we said [§553] that virtuous heroism is exercised) and because of worldly renown352 (which, in Greek, is κλέος [kleos] or gloria [“glory”] and came to be called in Latin fama, which, in Greek was called φήμη [phe¯ me]), those seeking refuge were named familial servants, from whom is principally derived the word “family.” Certainly it is because of this fama that sacred history, in telling us of the giants prior to the Flood, defines them as viros famosos353 [“famous men”] in exactly the same terms that Virgil354 describes the goddess, Fama: she is seated above in a high tower—representing the lands of the heroes located up high; she puts her head up in the heavens, whose height started no higher than the peaks of mountains; she is winged because this was the right of heroes, whence Fama in the fields of Troy flies in the midst of the ranks of Greek heroes, not in the midst of the throng of their plebeians355; she has a trumpet, which must be the trumpet of Clio, who is heroic history, and celebrates the names of the great inasmuch as they were the founders of nations.

556

Now, in families of this sort prior to cities, the familial servants lived in the condition of slaves, who were the precursors to those later made slaves in the wars that came to be after the cities. These latter slaves were, in Latin, called vernae, from which came the languages which also in Latin were called vernaculae [“vernacular”], as was reasoned upon above [§443]. The sons of heroes, so as to distinguish them from the sons of the familial servants, were called liberi [“free”], although, in actuality, this did not distinguish them: just as, concerning the ancient Germans (who permit us to understand that the same custom belonged to all the earliest barbarous peoples), Tacitus356 tells us that dominum ac servum nullis educationis deliciis dignoscas [“you cannot distinguish master from servant by any refinement of education”], so too certainly among the ancient Romans the paterfamilias had the sovereign power of life and death over his children and despotic dominion over their acquisitions   Mondano romore—a phrase from Dante, Purgatorio 11.100.   Genesis 6:4. 354  Virgil, Aeneid 4.173–188. 355  Homer, Iliad 2.93–94. 356  Tacitus, Germania 20. 352 353

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(hence, down to the time of the Roman emperors, sons were no different from slaves in terms of peculium [“property held by someone without legal ownership”]). However, the term liberi also originally meant, in Latin, “noble,” whence the artes liberales were the arts of nobles and liberalis retains the significance of genteel, liberalitas the significance of gentility, from this same ancient origin. Hence, gentes was the term used for noble households in Latin, for, as we will see below [§597], these earliest gentes were composed only of nobles and only nobles were free [liberi] in the earliest cities. In addition, the familial servants were called clientes [“associates”] and originally cluentes from the ancient verb cluere, “to shine bright in the light of arms,” which brilliance was called cluer, for the servants shone in the brilliance of the arms used by the heroes, who from this same origin were originally called incluti and, later, inclyti [“famed”]; without being seen in this light, it was as if they did not even exist among men, as will be explained below [§559]. And here would be the beginning of clientele [“clientships”] and the earliest roughed-out forms of fealties, about which we will reason more below [§§599–618, 1058–1059], and we read of these clientele [“clientships”] and clienti [“clients”] scattered throughout all the ancient nations, as was proposed in the Axioms.357

557

However, Thucydides tells us that, in the Egypt even of his time, the dynasties of Tanis were all divided, one to each paterfamilias, the shepherd-princes of families of this sort; and Homer358 calls all the heroes of whom he sings “kings,” and defines them as shepherds of peoples, who must have existed before the shepherds of flocks, as we will demonstrate below [§§607, 1058–1059]. Even today in Arabia, there is as great a number of them there as there was in Egypt. And in the West Indies, the greater part were found in such a state of nature, governed by families of this sort and thronged by so many slaves that Emperor Charles V, the king of Spain, thought about bringing some moderation and measure to it. And it must have been with one of these families that Abraham359 made war with gentile kings; the name of the servant with whom he made this war is translated in a way very much to our purpose by those learned in the sacred language as vernaculos, explained by us a little above [§556] in connection with vernae. It was with the coming-into-being of these things that, in truth, started the famous knot of Hercules: because of it, the clientes [“clients”] were called nexi, “tied by knot” to the lands which they must cultivate for the inclyti; this passed over, as we will see [§§1030–1031], into the legal   Axiom 82.   See, for example, the description of Diomedes at Iliad 11.370 and Achilles at Iliad 16.2. 359   See Genesis 14:1–17. 357 358

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The New Science fiction of a knot in the Law of the Twelve Tables, which gave form to the civil mancipation which solemnized every Roman legal act. Now, because one cannot understand a kind of society which is either more restrictive on the part of those who had an abundance of goods or more necessary for those who needed them, it is here that the earliest socii in the world must have had their start; these were the socii who, as we noted in the Axioms,360 received life from the heroes and, thus, put their lives at the discretion of those heroes. Hence, because of just one word from Antinous, the head of the socii of Ulysses361 (a word which, although it was spoken to good purpose, was not to his liking), Ulysses intends to cut off his head; and, hence, the pious Aeneas362 kills his socius, Misenus, who was needed in order to make a sacrifice. This episode was also preserved in a folk tradition. However, the wise poet, Virgil, devises (because, in the tameness of the Roman people, it was too crude to hear this of Aeneas, whom he celebrates for his piety) that Misenus was killed by Triton because he had dared to contend with Triton at the trumpet. However, at the same time, he offers quite plain indications for understanding this (by telling us, concerning the death of Misenus, that among the solemnities prescribed by the Sybil to Aeneas so as to be able descend into the underworld, one was that he needed to bury Misenus beforehand), and he plainly says that the Sybil had foretold his death.

559

As a result, to these socii belonged only the toil, but not the acquisitions and much less the glory in which only the heroes shone—for this, they were called in Greek κλειτοί [kleitoi], “illustrious” and, in Latin, inclyti. And Aesop laments this in the fable of the Society of the Lion, as we stated above [§425]. For certainly concerning the ancient Germans (from whom we are permitted to make a necessary conjecture about all the other barbarous peoples), Tacitus363 tells us that what belonged to these familial servants, or clients, or vassals was suum principem defendere et tueri sua quoque fortia facta gloriae eius adsignare praecipuum iuramentum est [“principally that they must swear to defend their prince and also to designate all his own brave deeds to the glory of his prince”]; this is one of the properties most sensible in our own fealties. And it is a consequence of this, and not otherwise, that it must have come to pass that it was under the persona—or “head,” which, as we will see below [§1033], signified the same thing as “mask”—of the Roman paterfamilias and under his “name” (what we would now call his “insignia”) that all his children and all his slaves were legally held (and this   Axiom 79.  Homer, Odyssey 10.438–441. 362  Virgil, Aeneid 6.160–189. 363  Tacitus, Germania 14.2. 360 361

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is retained in what the Romans called clypea [“shields”], the semi-busts representing images of their ancestors placed in the concave hollows of their courtyard walls, and it is quite congruent with these things that we stated herein [§487] concerning the origins of medals that in modern architecture these “shields” are called “medallions”). As a result, it must have been stated with truth when Homer364 recounts, about such heroic times of the peoples of Greece, that Ajax, tower of the Greeks, alone fought against entire battalions of Trojans, just as, in the heroic times of the people of Latium, Horatius alone held back an army of Etruscans on a bridge365—that is, Ajax and Horatius were with their vassals. In exactly the same way, in the history of the return to barbarism, forty Norman heroes who returned from the Holy Land scattered an army of Saracens who held Salerno under siege. Hence, one needs to say that it was from these earliest, most ancient protectorates, in which the heroes took in those seeking refuge in their lands, that fealties must have had their start in the world. At first, these were personal rustic fealties, and through them, such vassals must have been the earliest vades, bondsmen who gave surety with their persons and were obliged to follow in person their heroes wherever they were brought to cultivate the fields of those heroes (this is retained in the use of vades for defendants obliged to follow their attorneys into the courtroom). Hence, just as in Latin vas and in Greek βάς [bas] signified “vassal,” so too was and wassus continued to signify this for the barbaric feudalists. Later, real rustic fealties must have come, and through them, vassals must have been the earliest praedes, or mancipes, bondsmen who were obliged to give surety with real property; in its proper sense, mancipes was used of those who were obliged to the public treasury, about which we will reason more below [§1064]). As a consequence, this must have been, in addition, the start of the heroic colonies which we call “inland” colonies in order to distinguish the others which came later, which were “coastal” colonies (we will see [§§634–636] that the latter colonies were bands of those seeking refuge in the sea in order to find safety in other lands, as the Axioms366 have noted). For the term “colony” is used in its proper sense only for a group of day laborers who cultivate the fields, as they do even today, for their daily bread. For the histories of these two kinds of colonies, there are the following two myths. For inland colonies, there is the myth of the famous Gallic Hercules who, with chains of poetic gold—that is, grain—which are coming out of his mouth, enchains by their ears groups of men and leads them behind him wherever he wishes—up until now, this has been taken  Homer, Iliad 3.229; 6.5; 7.211 and 219, 11.485; 17.128.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.10. 366   Axiom 100. 364 365

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The New Science as a symbol of eloquence, but the myth came into being in the times in which heroes did not even know how to use articulate speech, as I demonstrated more fully above [§§446, 546]. For the coastal colonies, there is the myth of the nets with which the heroic Vulcan drags the plebeian Venus and Mars from the sea367—the distinction between heroic and plebeian gods will be explained herein more generally [§§579–581]—and the Sun spied them in their ­nakedness—that is, not clothed in the civil light with which the heroes shone, as was stated [§553]—and the gods—that is, the nobles of heroic cities, as was explained above [§449]—made mockery of them (as the patricians made mockery of the impoverished plebs in ancient Rome).

561

And, finally, as a consequence, the asylums had their earliest origins. Hence Cadmus with the asylum founded Thebes, the most ancient city in Greece. Theseus founded Athens upon the Altar of the Unfortunates, so called in keeping with the correct idea that they are unfortunate, those who, as impious wanderers, are deprived of all the divine and human goods which human society has produced. Romulus founded Rome with the asylum opened up in the lucus, or rather, as a new city-founder, he founded it along with his companions on the basis of the asylum from which arose the ancient cities of Latium, which Livy368 for this purpose defines generally as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”] and which is not well connected, as we saw above [§532], with the statement that Romulus and his companions were sons of the earth there. However, for all that, this statement of Livy is to our purpose in that it demonstrates for us that asylums were the origins of cities, whose eternal property is that men live in them secure from violence. In this fashion, from the groups of impious wanderers who everywhere repaired to the lands of men of piety and strength and became safe there, Jove came to have the gracious title of the Hospitable,369 insofar as asylums of this sort were actually the earliest hospices of the world, and those received in this sort of way, as we will see below [§611], were the earliest guests, or foreigners, in these earliest cities. It is preserved in Greek history that among the many labors of Hercules are the following two, that, first, he went throughout the world slaying monsters (whose aspect was that of men, but whose customs were those of beasts), and that, second, he purged the Augean stables of their extreme filth.

562

It is here that the poetic gentes maiores imagined two other greater divinities, first, MARS, and, second, VENUS. The former was a character representing the heroes who first and properly fought pro aris et

 Homer, Odyssey 8.267–302 and 8.325–327.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5. 369   See Cicero, De finibus 3.20.66. 367

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focis370 [“‘on behalf of altar and hearth”], which sort of fighting is always heroic, as one is fighting for the religion proper to humankind, to which it has recourse when it despairs of succor from nature (hence religious wars are the bloodiest, and so libertine men who grow old, as they sense that nature fails to succor them, become religious371) and because of this above [§§333–335], we took religion as the first principle of this science. It is here that Mars fought on true, real fields and behind true, real shields (which, as derived from the Latin verb, cluere [“to be brilliant at arms”], were, at first, called clupei and, later, clypei by the Romans, just as, in the return to barbarian times, enclosed pastures and forests were called “defenses”). These shields bore true arms which, at first, since there were not yet arms made of iron, were spears of poles whose tip was burned, and then tapered and sharpened so as to inflict wounds (such simple spears, and not arms made of iron, were given as military prizes to Roman soldiers who had conducted themselves heroically in war). Hence among the peoples of Greece, it was Minerva, Bellona, and Pallas who were armed with spears, and, among the peoples of Latium, from the word quiris, “spear,” Juno was named Quirina, Mars was named Quirinus, and Romulus, because he was to be trusted with a spear during life, was named Quirinus after his death. And when the Roman people met in assembly armed with javelins (just as the Spartan people, the heroic people of Greece, met armed with spears), they were called Quirites. However, concerning barbarous nations, Roman history tells us that they made war with these early spears of which we were just speaking and describes them as praeustas sudes, “spears burnt at the tip,” just like those with which the American peoples have been discovered to be armed; and in our times, nobles are armed with spears at tournaments, just as earlier they were part of the business of war. This sort of arms was discovered because of the correct idea of strength, because they are an extension of the arm and of its ability to keep injuries far from the body, just as arms which are held closer to the body are more bestial. Above we discovered [§529] that the first grounds of the fields—that is, the graves—were the first shields in the world, whence it is retained, in the science of blazonry, that the shield is the background for coats of arms. The colors of the field were true colors. Black came from the burnt lands to which the heroes set fire. Green came from the blades of grain in leaf. It was by an error that the metal was taken for the gold of grain,372 which in the yellowing of its dry blades was the third color of the earth—as was stated elsewhere above [§540]; so the Romans counted shields loaded with grain among their military prizes for the heroism of soldiers who   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.12.3; 10.44.8.   See the note at §339 on Cephalus and Socrates. 372  Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.101–110. 370 371

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The New Science distinguished themselves in battle, and they called military glory adorea from ador, the “burnt grain” that they ate early on and which the ancient people of Latium called adur from uro, “to burn”; as a result of this, the earliest worship in religious times was the burning of grain. Blue was the color of the heavens, which covered those in the lucus (which is why the French say bleu, “blue” for the heavens and for God, as was stated above [§482]). Red was the blood of the impious thieves whom the heroes killed when found in their fields. The devices of nobles which have come down to us from the return to barbarism are observed bearing lions who are black, green, gold, blue, and, finally, red, which (through what we saw above [§§18, 434, 486] stand for the fields of plantings, which later passed over to the fields of coats of arms) must have been the cultivated lands regarded under the aspect, as we reasoned above [§540], of the lion defeated by Hercules and of their colors enumerated above. Many such devices bear furs, which must have been the furrows whence, from the sown teeth of the great serpent killed by Cadmus, came armed men. Many such devices bear iron bars, which must have been the spears with which the earliest heroes were armed. And, finally, many such devices bear harrows, which are certainly instruments of the countryside. Through all this, one has to conclude that agriculture, both in the earlier times of barbarism, as we ascertained with the Romans, and in the later times of barbarism, makes for the first nobility of nations.

564

Shields of later ancients were covered in leather, as attested by the poets who dress the old heroes in leather—that is, in the pelts of wild beasts which they hunted and killed. Of this, there is a fine passage in Pausanias373 where he relates that Pelasgus (the most ancient hero of Greece, who gave his name to the nation of Pelasgians, whom, as a result, Apollodorus in his De origine deorum374 calls αὐτόχθονα [autochthona], “son of the earth,” which is, in a word, a “giant”) discovered leather clothing. And it is a wonder how well the earlier times of barbarism correspond with the later such times: Dante,375 speaking of great ancient personages, says that they were dressed in leather and bones, and Boccaccio376 tells us that they went about burdened with leather clothing. It is because of this that it must have come about that the devices of noble families were covered with leather and that the scrolling of the top and bottom of these pelts was a congruent finishing touch. Shields were round, for the deforested and cultivated lands were the earliest orbis terrarium, as was stated above [§550], and this property was retained in the Latin words for “shield”: a clypeus was a round shield, distinct from a scutum, which had sides. This land was called a lucus in  Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.1.5.   See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.8.1. 375  See Paradiso 15.113. 376  Boccaccio, Decameron 4.1.22. 373 374

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the sense of an “eye” (so too, even today, we call the openings by which light enters into a house “eyes”). That heroic phrase, “every giant has his own lucus,” is true, although, later, unknown as a consequence of being altered and eventually corrupted, and it was already false when it came to Homer; it was taken to mean that every giant has an eye in the middle of his brow, and with these one-eyed giants came that Vulcan who in the first forges—that is, the forest to which Vulcan set fire—must have fabricated the first arms—that is, as we have stated [§562], spears with burned tips—and by extending this idea, he fabricated the lightning bolt of Jove, for Vulcan must have set fire to the forest so as to observe in the open heavens where the lightning bolts were sent by Jove. The second divinity that came into being in the midst of these most ancient human things was the divinity of VENUS, who was a character representing civil beauty, whence, in Latin, honestas continues to signify “nobility” and “beauty” and “virtue.”377 For it was in the following order that these three ideas must have come into being. The first beauty to be understood was the civil beauty which pertained to the heroes. Later came the natural beauty, which falls under the human senses and yet senses belonging to men with discerning and comprehending minds, who know how to discern the parts and combine them agreeably in the body as a whole, in which beauty essentially consists378 (hence, rustics and men of plebeian taint understand little or nothing of beauty). This would demonstrate of the error of philologists who say that, in the simpleminded and bewildered times about which we are reasoning, kings were elected with a view to their beautiful and well-proportioned bodies; for such a tradition is to understood in terms of civil beauty—that is, the nobility of the heroes, as we are about to state [§566]. Finally, the beauty of virtue was understood, whose name is honestas and which is understood only by philosophers.

565

Hence, it must have been in civil beauty that they were beautiful, Apollo, Bacchus, Ganymede, Bellerophon, and Theseus, along with other heroes, and it was because of them, perhaps, that Venus was imagined as masculine. The idea of civil beauty must have come into being in the minds of the theological poets when they saw the impious seeking refuge in their lands—men in aspect, but beasts in custom. It was this beauty, and no other, that was valued by the Spartans, the heroes of Greece who cast from Mount Taygetus offspring that were brutish and deformed—that is, were conceived by noble women outside the solemnity of nuptials—and these must have been the monstrosities which the Law of the Twelve Tables commanded be cast into the Tiber. For there is no verisimilitude in the point that the decemvirs would have 377 378

  See Cicero, De oratore 3.31.125.   Compare Plato, Phaedrus 264c.

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The New Science given any thought (in that parsimony for laws which was proper to the earliest republics) to natural monstrosities so rare—things which are rare in nature are called monstrosities—while, in the present abundance of laws under which we toil, lawgivers leave to the discretion of judges cases which rarely come up. As a result, those originally and properly called MONSTROSITIES must have been civil monstrosities; it was with this understanding that Pamphilus said of one of these, when he falsely suspected that the maiden, Philumena, was pregnant, that Aliquid monstri alunt379 [“Some monstrosity is being nursed”],

and so they continued to be called this in Roman law, which was spoken with complete propriety (as Antoine Favre observes in his Jurisprudence of Papinianus, which was observed above in another place for another purpose [§410]). 567

Hence, it must be this that Livy is saying when he writes (with as much good faith in as he is otherwise ignorant about Roman antiquity) that if the nobles gave a common share in connubium to the plebeians, the offspring born would have been SECUM IPSA DISCORS380 [“in discord with itself ”], which is as much as saying that it would have been a “monstrosity mixed of two natures,” one heroic from the nobles, the other wild from those plebeians, who AGITABANT CONNUBIA MORE FERARUM381 [“practiced marriage in the manner of wild animals”]; this expression Livy took from some ancient writer of annals and used it without knowledge [senza scienza]. He shows his lack of knowledge insofar as he reports it as though it meant “if the nobles intermarry with the plebeians.”382 This is wrong because the plebeians, in their unfortunate state of near-slavery, could not put this forward to the nobles, but rather demanded the right to contract the solemn nuptials—for this is what connubium means—a right that belonged to the nobles alone; as for “in the manner of wild beasts,” no one species has intercourse with any other species. As a result, one is forced to say that it was an expression with which the nobles, in that heroic contest, intended to mock the plebeians, none of whom (because they had no share in the public auspices which by their solemnity make nuptials legitimate) had a father who was certain (so, in the Roman legal code, there remains the definition that nuptiae demonstrant patrem383 [“marriages demonstrate the father”]), and as a result of uncertainty of this sort, the plebeians could  Terence, Andria 250.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. Livy’s text actually reads ne secum quidem ipse concors. 381  Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1.6. 382  Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1.2. 383  See Digest 2.1.5. 379 380

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be said to have intercourse with their mothers, with their daughters, as wild beasts do. On the one hand, to the plebeian Venus were attributed doves, not yet to signify visceral love, but rather because they are, as Horace defines them, degeneres, birds which are “base” in comparison with eagles, which the same Horace defines as feroces; this is to signify that the plebeians held private, or minor auspices, different from the auspices of eagles and lightning bolts which were noble and which Varro and Messala called “the major, or public auspices,” upon which depended all the heroic rights of the nobles, as Roman history plainly confirms.

568

On the other hand, to the heroic Venus, Venus pronuba, were attributed swans (birds proper also to Apollo, who, we saw above [§533], was the god of nobility), and under the auspices of one of these swans, Leda conceived from Jove an egg—as was explained above [§512]. The plebeian Venus was described as naked, whereas Venus pronuba was covered with a nuptial girdle, as was stated above [§512], and this nakedness (one sees here how greatly distorted ideas are about this poetic antiquity!) was believed to have been devised as an incentive to lust, when it is discovered truly to signify the natural modesty—that is, the punctiliousness of good faith—with which the plebeians observed their natural obligations insofar as they had no share, as we will see shortly in the Poetic Politics [§§597–598], in the citizenship of heroic cities and so did not contract in their obligations any that were bound to some constraint of civil law that made it necessary to fulfill them. Consequently, to Venus were attributed the Graces, also naked [nude], and, in Latin, causa [“the grounds for an action”] and gratia [“grace,” “the goodwill behind an action”] signify the same thing. As a result, the Graces must have signified for the poets those pacts which are bare [nudi] because they are the product only of natural obligation; and, as a consequence, the Roman jurists called some pacts “stipulated” (these were, later, called “vested” by medieval interpreters of Roman law). For since they meant that bare pacts were pacts which were not stipulated, stipulatio must not have come from the word stipes [“stump”] (for the word derived from such an origin would be stipatio, and the justification for such a derivation would be forced insofar as it would be the stump which “sustains” the pacts). Instead, stipulatio must have come from stipula [“stalk”], as the rustics of Latium used the word, insofar as it is the stalk which “clothes” the grain384 (by comparison, pacts which were called “vested” by the earliest feudalists came from the same origin, whence the term “investiture” for fealties, from which certainly comes exfestucare, “depriving of rank”). On account of this reasoning, gratia and causa were understood to be the same thing by the poetic peoples of Latium with respect to the c­ ontracts 384

  Compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 570.

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The New Science to which the plebeians of heroic cities paid homage, just as later with respect to the contracts which were introduced by the natural law of people (Ulpian adds HUMANARUM [“of the humane peoples”]), causa [“legal case”], and negotium [“transaction”] signified the same thing385 insofar as in this kind of contract the transaction itself almost always is the causa—here, cavissae, or “indemnity”—because these transactions indemnify the pact.

Corollaries concerning contracts completed by consent alone

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570

Because, through the most ancient law, the heroic gentile peoples cared about nothing but the things necessary for life, and because they gathered no fruits other than the fruits of nature, as yet understood nothing about the advantage of money, and were, so to speak, all body (they certainly could have recognized the contracts which are today completed by consent alone). And they were also extremely rude, because of which it is proper to be suspicious, for rudeness is born of ignorance,386 and it is a property of human nature that it always doubts what it does not know. On account of all this, those peoples did not recognize good faith, and they made all their obligations secure with a handing over—either a true handing over or one which was a legal fiction—and made them still more certain during the process of the transaction with solemn stipulations. From here comes that celebrated heading in the Law of the Twelve Tables: SI QUIS NEXUM FACIET MANCIPIUMQUE UTI LINGUA NUNCUPASIT IUS ESTO [“if anyone shall make bond or conveyance, as he has declared with tongue, so shall it be law”]. From this nature of human civil things come the following truths.

571

I. As they say, the most ancient form of sale and purchase was exchange, and when this involved real estate, this must have been what was called, in the return to barbarism, livellus, the advantage of which exchange was understood to lie in one party having an abundance of fruits which were scarce for another party, and vice versa.

572

II. The leasing of houses could not have had currency when cities were small and habitations were confined; as a result, proprietors must have offered their grounds for others to build on, and so there could have been no other kind of rent. 385   Vico makes the same claim about causa and negotium at De antiquissima 3; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 50[49]. 386   The term Vico uses here is ignorazione, a term whose connotation is less pejorative (as Battistini and Fubini observe) than ignoranza.

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III. The leasing of lands must have been the emphyteusis,387 which, in Latin, is called clientele [“clientship”], whence grammarians have divined that they used the word clientes [“clients”] as if it were colentes388 [“cultivators”].

573

IV. As a result, this must be the reason that, in the midst of the return to barbarism, one reads of no other contracts in the old archives than those for the rent of houses or farms, either in perpetuity or for a set time.

574

V. This is perhaps the reason that emphyteusis is a contract de iure civili [“pertaining to civil law”]: that, through the principles found herein, this is the same as de iure heroico Romanorum [“pertaining to the heroic law of the Romans”], to which Ulpian opposes the ius naturale gentium humanorum [“the natural law of the humane gentile peoples”], a law which he called “humane” in comparison with the law of the barbarian peoples who came earlier, not that of the barbarian peoples, who, in his time, were outside of the Roman empire, for these were of no importance to Roman jurists.

575

VI. Society was unknown during the cyclopean custom whereby each paterfamilias cared only for his own things and did not meddle in those of others (as above [§547] Homer allows us to learn in recounting what Polyphemus did to Ulysses389).

576

VII. And, for the same reason, mandates were unknown, whence remains that rule of ancient civil law, per extraneam personam acquire nemini [“no one can make an acquisition by means of an external party”].

577

VIII. However, when the law of the heroic peoples was succeeded by what Ulpian defines as the law of humane peoples, it made such a revolution in things which are sold and purchased that, whereas in olden times, no return was guaranteed unless a “double” return was stipulated in the process of making the contract, today, this is the rule for all contracts said to be “of good faith” and is naturally the obligation, even if it is not stipulated.

578

Mythological canon Returning now to the three characters of Vulcan, Mars, and Venus, it is noted here (and such notice must be considered an important canon of this mythology) that there were three divine characters who signified the   See the note on emphyteusis at §489.   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 165. 389  Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115. 387 388

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The New Science heroes, as distinct from another three characters who signified the plebeians. So, there is the Vulcan who rends the head of Jove with a blow from an ax, whence Minerva390 is born, and who, when he tries to intervene in a contest between Jove and Juno, falls with a kick from Jove from the heavens and remains lame. There is the Mars whom Jove strongly reproaches where Homer makes him say that Mars is the basest of all the gods, and Minerva in a contest among the gods, also in Homer, wounds Mars with a blow from a rock—these must have represented the plebeians who served the heroes in battle—and Venus—who must have represented the natural wives of plebeians of this sort—is caught, along with that plebeian Mars, in the nets of the heroic Vulcan and, when both are discovered to be naked by the Sun, they are mocked by the other gods. Consequently, Venus was later erroneously believed to be the wife of Vulcan. However, we saw above [§§80, 511] that in the heavens there was no marriage except that between Jove and Juno, and, indeed, this was sterile; and Mars was not said to have committed adultery with Venus, but to have lain with a concubine, for the plebeians would only contract in the natural marriages which, as will be shown below [§§598, 610], were, in Latin, called concubinati.

580

Just as we have explained these three characters here, so too we will explain in their places others below. Among these, we will find a plebeian Tantalus [§583], who can neither take hold of apples rising too high nor touch water sinking too low; a plebeian Midas [§649], who, because all that he touches becomes gold, dies of hunger; a plebeian Linus [§647], who contends with Apollo in song and, defeated by him, is killed.

581

The double myths or characters must have been necessary in the heroic state, where the plebeians did not have names and took the names of the heroes to whom they belonged, as was stated above [§559], and this in the midst, moreover, of the extreme poverty of language which they must have had in those times (even in the present abundance of language, the same term often signifies two different, and, in some cases, contrary, things).

On Poetic Politics,

by Which the Earliest Republics in the World Came to Be in the Strictest Aristocratic Form 582

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In this fashion were founded the families comprised of familial servants of this sort, received within trust, or strength, or protection of the heroes; these were the first socii of the world, as we saw above [§§558–559], whose lives were within the bailiwick of their lords and, as a conse  See Hesiod, Theogony 886–900.

390

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quence of their lives, also their possessions, whereas those heroes, by their paternal, cyclopean power, had the right of life and death over their own children and, as a consequence of this right over their persons, also had despotic right over all their possessions; this is what Aristotle391 understands in defining children in families as the living instruments of the fathers, and the Law of the Twelve Tables, even down to the most unrestricted popular liberty, preserved for the Roman paterfamilias both parts of this monarchical right: power over their persons and domain over their possessions. On the one hand, up until the arrival of the emperors, sons, just like slaves, had only one kind of wealth, that which is possessed because the father allowed it; on the other hand, fathers in the earliest times must have truly had the power to sell their sons up to three times, and later when the tameness of human times grew, they made, as legal fictions, three sales when they wished to free their sons from paternal power. However, the Gauls and Celts preserved equal power over their children and their slaves; and the custom of fathers truly selling their children has been discovered in the West Indies; and in Europe, it is the practice to sell them up to four times among the Muscovites and the Tartars. This is how much truth there is to the claim that other barbarian nations did not have paternal power talem qualem habent cives Romani [“of the sort which Roman citizens had”].392 This is plainly false and came from a common folk error, from which the learned have accepted the expression. Rather, it was the case that when the jurists said it, it was in connection with nations defeated by the Roman people, to whom—as we will demonstrate more fully in its place below [§§557, 608, 1023]—nothing remained, after their entire civil law was taken away by right of the victor, except natural paternal power and, as a consequence of this, the ties of blood called kinship ties and the natural part of dominion which is bonitary; on account of all this, they retained the natural obligations which are called de iure naturali gentium [“concerned the natural law of the gentile peoples”], which Ulpian specified above with the addition HUMANARUM [“of the humane gentile peoples”]. All the peoples outside the Roman Empire would have had civil rights, and ones exactly like those which the Romans had. However, turning back to our reasoning, once freed by the death of their fathers from this private monarchical power, the sons of the families each instead assumed it themselves, whence every Roman citizen free from paternal power in the Roman legal code is called a paterfamilias, but the familial servants always must live in that servile state. At the end of a long age, they must have naturally tired of this, through the Axiom

  See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.11, 1161b3–4.   Institutes of Justinian 1.9.2. Modern Italian editions include an exclamation point after this sentence, but neither the autograph nor the edition printed in 1744 contains one. 391 392

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The New Science we proposed above,393 that “a man who is a subject naturally longs to deliver himself from servitude.” As a result, they must have been the Tantalus whom we called plebeian above [§580], who cannot get his teeth into the apple; this must have been the golden apples of the grain, explained above [§539], which rise from the lands of the heroes to whom they belonged, and (explaining his burning thirst in the same way) he cannot take the smallest sip from the water which rises up to his lips and then retreats. They must have been the Ixion who forever turns a wheel, and the Sisyphus who pushes upward the rock which Cadmus threw, the hard earth which returns once it reaches the top—this is retained in the Latin expressions, vertere terram [“turning earth”], for cultivating the land, and saxum volvere [“turn the stone”], for arduously performing a long and difficult task. It was on account of all this that the familial servants must have rebelled against the heroes. And this is the necessity upon which we conjectured in general terms in the Axioms,394 the necessity which the familial servants made for the heroic fathers in the familial state, from which the republics came into being.

584

For at that time, a great urgency must have naturally brought the heroes to unite in orders so as to resist the multitude of familial servants rising up, and they must have made as their head some Father more ferocious than the rest and more spirited in presence. And such men were called kings, from the verb, regere, which, in its proper sense, means “to sustain” and “to direct.” In this fashion (to use the phrase of the jurist, Pomponius, who understood this quite well), REBUS IPSIS DICTANTIBUS REGNA CONDITA395 [“regimes are founded by the dictates of the things themselves”], a statement agreeing well with the doctrine of the Roman legal code, which establishes that ius admirat gentium DIVINA PROVIDENTIA constitutum [“the natural law of the gentile peoples is founded by divine providence”]. And behold the generation of the heroic regimes: for the Fathers were sovereign kings in their families, and since, because in the equality in this sort of state and through the ferocious nature of these sons of Polyphemus, none of them ought to have ceded to any of the others, there emerged from them regnant senates—that is, senates comprised of such who were kings in their own families—these kings are found, without any human discernment or counsel, to have united their private interests   Axiom 95.   Axiom 81. 395   An inexact rendering of a passage found at Digest 1.2.2.11. 393 394

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in an interest common to each, which (with the word res understood) was called patria [“fatherland”], meaning “the interests of the Fathers,” and the nobles were called patricians, whence it must be the case that only the nobles were citizens in the earliest fatherlands. It is thus that there can be truth in the tradition which has come down to us that, in the earliest times, kings were elected by nature. Concerning this, there are two golden passages by Tacitus in his On the Customs of the Germans, which allow room to conjecture that this was the same custom for all of the other earliest peoples. The first of these is non casus non fortuita dmirationn turman aut cuneum facit, sed familiae et propinquitates [“their cavalry and infantry formations are not the result of chance or fortuitous congregations, but are comprised of members of households and of relatives”].396 The second is duces exemplo potius quam imperio, si prompti, si conspicui, si ante aciem agant admiratione praesunt [“their leaders lead by example rather than power: quick to respond, conspicuous, and acting at the front lines, they stand out in admiration”].397 That such were the earliest kings on Earth is demonstrated by the fact that such heroic poets imagined Jove in heaven to be king of gods and men (as in that golden passage of Homer398 where Jove explains to Thetis that he cannot do anything contrary to what the gods at one time determined in heavenly council, speaking like a true aristocratic king; this is the same passage where, later, the Stoics fixed their dogma of Jove being subject to Fate). However, Jove and the other gods held council concerning such things pertaining to men and so determined them with free volition. The passage related here explains two other passages, also in Homer, upon which the political theorists have erroneously founded their contention that Homer had an understanding of monarchy: the first399 passage is Agamemnon reproving the contempt of Achilles; the second400 is Ulysses persuading the Greeks, who are rebelling to return home, to continue the siege they have started at Troy. Both passages state that “one is king,” and both passages state this in reference to war, where there is only one general captain, which accords with the maxim noted by Tacitus,401 when he says eam esse imperandi conditionem, ut non aliter ratio constet quam si uni reddatur [“it must be a condition of power that there is no stable accountability unless it is rendered to one”]. Again, Homer also, as often as he mentions the heroes in his two poems, continuously gives them the epithet “king.” In connection with these,  Tacitus, Germania 7.3.  Tacitus, Germania 7.1–2. 398  Homer, Iliad 1.526–527. 399  Homer, Iliad 1.287–289. 400  Homer, Iliad 2.204–205. 401  Tacitus, Annals 1.6.3. 396 397

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The New Science one wonders at a golden passage from the book of Genesis,402 where as often as Moses tells of the descendants of Esau, he names them “kings,” which means “captains,” or, as the Vulgate reads, duces; and the ambassadors of Pyrrhus403 related to him that they had seen in Rome a senate comprised of such kings. For truly one cannot understand any cause in our civil nature by which the Fathers, in changing their state, should have altered anything which they already had in the state of nature except being subject, in their sovereign family power, to their own regnant orders. For it is the nature of the strong, as we posited above in the Axioms,404 to surrender, from what has been acquired by virtue, as little as they are able and only as much as is needed in order to preserve what they have acquired (hence, one reads often in Roman history of that heroic disdain of the strong, who do not suffer gladly virtute parta per flagitium amittere [“to surrender through disgrace what is the part of virtue”]).

586

Among all the possibilities in human life (once one has seen that the civil state came into being neither by fraud nor by the force of one, as we demonstrated above [§522] and will demonstrate more fully below [§§1009–1019]), one cannot imagine how it is that civil power can be formed from familial power and how it is that the eminent domain of the civil state is formed from a natural paternal domain, which, we noted above [§490], was ex iure optimo, in the sense of being free from any private or public encumbrance, in any other fashion than this.405 This fashion, as we have meditated upon it, is wondrously proven by the origins of words pertaining to it. For upon this dominion of those who are best, which the Fathers held (which the Greeks called δίκαιον ἄριστον [dikaion ariston]), were formed the republics which, as we stated in another place above [§490], were called, by the peoples of Greece, “aristocratic”; and these were called, by the peoples of Latium, “republics of the optimates,” from Ops, whom they called the goddess of power; hence, it is perhaps the case that Ops, who must have been so called from optimus—that is, ἄριστος [aristos] in Greek, and so optimus in Latin—was called the wife of Jove—that is, the wife of the regnant orders of those heroes—who, as was stated above [§449], arrogated to themselves the name of “gods.” For Juno, by reason of the auspices, was the wife of a Jove taken as the heavens flashing with lightning. And, as mother of the gods, as was stated above [§549], she was Cybele, who was also called “mother” of the “giants”—the word used in its proper signification for “nobles”—and it   See Genesis 36:15–21 and 29–30.   See Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 19. 404   Axiom 91. 405   Here Vico rejects, at least implicitly, contractarian accounts of how humans leave the state of nature for civil society. Civil society, Vico implies, cannot possibly arise from rational calculation, because humans in the prepolitical state have not yet become rational calculators. 402 403

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was she who, as we will see below in the Poetic Cosmography [§722], was later taken as the queen of cities. From Ops, therefore, came the term “optimates,” for such republics were only ordered to preserve the power of the nobles and, by preserving it, to retain as their eternal properties those two principal guardianships: the first being guardianship over the orders; and the second, guardianship over boundaries. And from the guardianship over the orders came, first, guardianship over kinship, by which, up until Year 309 of Rome kept connubium closed to the plebs;406 and, later, came guardianship over the magistracies, whence the patricians so contested the claims of the plebs to the consulate; and, later still, came the guardianship over the priesthood and, by this, guardianship of the laws, which all the earliest nations regarded, in this aspect, as sacred things. Hence, up until the Law of the Twelve Tables, the nobles governed Rome with custom—as was made certain in the Axioms407 by Dionysius of Halicarnassus—and, for a hundred years after the Law, they kept their interpretation closed off inside the college of the ­pontiffs—as Pomponius the jurist tells us.408 For up until that time, only the nobles were admitted to this college. The other principal guardianship is that over boundaries (hence the Romans, up until their bringing Corinth to an end, were incomparable in their observance of justice in wartime, so as not to make soldiers of the plebeians, and were extreme in their observance of clemency in victory, so as not to enrich them) as was proposed above in two Axioms.409 This great and important section of poetic history is contained in the myth that Saturn410 intended to devour the infant Jove, and the priests of Cybele hid him and, by the clamor of their arms, made his cries unheard. Here, Saturn must be a character representing the familial servants who, in their day-laboring, cultivated the fields of their lords, the Fathers, and, with the burning covetousness of desire, wished for fields from the Fathers so as to sustain themselves. And so, this Saturn is the father of Jove, for it was from this Saturn, as occasion, that the civil rule of the Fathers came into being (this rule, as was previously stated [§586], was explicated by the character of Jove, whose wife is Ops); for Jove, taken as the god of the auspices (the most solemn of which are the lightning bolt and the eagle) is the Jove whose wife is Juno and is the father of the gods—that is, of the heroes who believed themselves to be the sons of Jove, just as they believed that they had been generated by the auspices   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1 and 4.4.   Axiom 92. 408  See Digest 1.2.2.6. 409   Axioms 87 and 88. 410   On the fable of Saturn, see Hesiod, Theogony 485, and Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.633–639. 406 407

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The New Science of Jove because of the solemn nuptials whose numinous presence was Juno, and who took for themselves the names of gods, whose mother is Earth, that is, Ops, wife of this Jove, all of which was stated above [§586]. And this same Jove is called the king of men—that is, of the familial servants in the state of the families and of the plebs in the state of heroic cities. There was confusion, because of ignorance of this poetic history, between these two titles, as if Jove was also father of men: these men, even into the times of the ancient Roman republic, non poterant nomine ciere patrem [“could not cite their fathers by name”] (as Livy tells us), for they were born from natural marriages, not solemn nuptials, whence remained, in jurisprudence, the rule that nuptiae demonstrant patrem [“marriages demonstrate the father”].411

588

The myth continues that the priests of Cybele—that is, Ops—for everywhere, the earliest regimes were regimes of priests—as was stated somewhat above [§§254, 267–268] and will be shown more fully below [§§593–594]—hid Jove (it is from this hiding, say the Latin philologists by some divination, that Latium has its name, and the Latin language preserves this history in the phrase condere regna, as was stated in another place [§535]), for the Fathers closed themselves off within their orders against the rebelling familial servants; from this secrecy was the start of the coming of what the political theorists call arcana imperii.412 By the clamor of their arms, they made the cries of Jove unheard (a Jove just born in the union of these orders) and in this fashion they saved him; this tells us distinctly what Plato413 relates to us confusedly, that republics are born on the basis of arms, to which one must join what Aristotle said above in the Axioms,414 that in heroic republics the nobles swore to be the eternal enemies of the plebs (an eternal property retained in what we say now, that servants are the paid enemies of their patrons). The Greeks preserved this history in the etymology by which “war” is called πόλεμος [polemos] from the word for “city,” πόλις [polis].

589

At that time, the Greek nations imagined a tenth divinity of the socalled gentes maiores—that is, MINERVA—and she is devised as being born by an imagination as savage as it is gullish: Vulcan rends the head of Jove with an ax, whence Minerva was born, meaning that the multitude of familial servants who practiced servile arts (this, as was stated [§579], came under the poetic genus of the plebeian Vulcan) broke (in the sense of “enfeebling” or “diminishing”) the rule of Jove (this is retained in the Latin expression minuere caput for “to batter the head”). For not knowing how to speak an abstract word, “rule,” they said instead a concrete one, “head” (in the familial state, rule was monarchical and changed to aristocratic rule in the civil state). As a result, it is no empty  See Digest 2.1.5.   See Tacitus, Histories 1.4.2: “the secret of empire was now made public, that a princeps could arise elsewhere than from Rome.” 413  Plato, Laws 1.2, 626a. 414   Axiom 86. 411 412

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conjecture that from that verb minuere [“to diminish”] comes the name Minerva in Latin. Nor is it an empty conjecture that retained from this distant poetic antiquity is the expression in the Roman legal code, capitis deminutio, to signify “a change in state,” just as, with Minerva, there was an alteration from the familial state to the civil state. Onto this myth, the philosophers later attached the most sublime of their metaphysical meditations, that the eternal idea is generated by God in God, whereas created ideas are produced by God in us.415 However, the theological poets contemplated a Minerva with the idea of civil order (this was retained, in Latin, by ordo [“order”] as a term par excellence for the Senate), and this idea, perhaps, gave impetus to philosophers believing that it was the eternal idea of God, which is nothing other than eternal order (and in it was retained the eternal property that the order of the best is the wisdom of cities). However, the Minerva of Homer is always distinguished by the continuous epithets “Warlike” and “Despoiler,” and only twice do we recall her having the epithet “Counselor”; and the owl and the olive were consecrated to her, not because she meditates at night, not because she reads and writes by the light of a lamp, but rather, first, to signify the night of what is hidden (by this, as we stated above [§387], humanity is founded) and, second, to signify (perhaps more properly) that the heroic senates which composed the cities conceive laws in secret (certainly, the Areopagites continued to give their votes under the darkness of the Senate of Athens—that is, the city of the Minerva who was called ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athe¯ na]). From this heroic custom comes, in Latin, the expression condere leges [“to found laws,” “to hide laws”]. As a result, legum conditores [“founders of laws”] were properly the Senators who decreed laws, just as legum latores [“bearers of laws”] were those who brought the laws from the Senate to the plebs of people, as was stated above [§§500, 521] concerning the trial of Horatius. This is how much the theological poets consider Minerva to be the goddess of wisdom, that in statues and medallions, she is observed to be armed, and this Minerva of the Curia, the Pallas of the plebeian assemblies (in Homer,416 it is Pallas who leads Telemachus into an assembly of plebs, who are called “another people,” as he intends to go to find Ulysses, his father) is ultimately the same as the Bellona of war.

590

As a result, what has been stated—that it was an error that the theological poets understood Minerva as representing wisdom—goes together with another error, that the word “curia” is derived from curanda republica417 [“caring for the republic”], in times when the nations were stunned and stupid. The most ancient Greeks must have used the word κυρία [kuria] as derived from χείρ [cheir], “hand”; and that, in Latin, the

591

  Compare to De antiquissima 7, where Vico holds that “God, by understanding, generates divine truth and makes human truth” (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 103). 416  Homer, Odyssey 2.12. As Battistini notes, the exegesis is somewhat forced. 417   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 193. 415

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The New Science word curia similarly accords with one of those two great fragments of antiquity which—as was stated in the Chronological Table and in the Annotations [§77] written upon it—to our good fortune, Denis Pétau418 found lying in the midst of Greek history prior to the age of heroes in Greece and, consequently, during the age of which we are here in pursuit, the age of gods. The first fragment is that the Heraclids—that is, the descendants of Hercules—were spread throughout the whole of Greece, even in Attica where Athens was, and that, later, they retreated to the Peloponnesus where Sparta was; Sparta was an aristocratic regime, or republic, of two kings from the race of Hercules, called Heraclids, or nobles, who administered the laws under the guardianship of the ephors, who were guardians of the liberty not of the people, but of the lords; these ephors had the king, Agis, strangled419 because he had attempted to bring to the people, first, a law reckoning debts anew (which Livy420 defines as facem ad accendendum adversus optimates plebem [“a firebrand for inciting the plebs against the optimates”]) and, second, a law concerning testaments, which would have popularized inheritances outside of the orders of the nobles, inheritances which had previously been preserved among the nobles by means of legitimate succession. For only the nobles must have had familial relations in the forms of direct paternal or tribal kinship, and there must have been attempts of this sort in Rome prior to the Law of the Twelve Tables, as will below be demonstrated [§598]. Hence, just as those like Cassius, Capitolinus, Gracchus, and other principal citizens intended with laws of this sort to raise up the poor and oppressed Roman plebs a little and so were declared traitors and killed, so too Agis was strangled by the ephors. This is how much the ephors of Sparta (as Polybius would have it) were guardians of the peoples of Lacedaemonia! Hence, Athens (named for Minerva, who, in Greek, is called ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athe¯ na]) must have had, in its earliest times, an aristocratic constitution, and Greek history tells us most faithfully about this, as noted above [§423], where it says that Draco ruled in Athens at a time when it was occupied by the optimates; and this is confirmed by Thucydides, who tells us that as long as Athens was governed by the most severe Areopagites (which Juvenal translates as “judges of Mars,” in the sense of armed judges, although because the word is derived from ῎Αρης [Are¯ s]— Mars—and πηγή [pe¯ ge¯ ]—from which, in Latin, comes pagus [“country district”]—it would be better translated as “peoples of Mars”—which is what the Romans were called—for at their coming-into-being [nascimento], peoples were composed only of nobles, who alone had the right to bear arms), Athens was brilliant with the most beautiful heroic virtues and engaged in the most outstanding enterprises (precisely as Rome   On Pétau, see the note at §77.   See Plutarch, Life of Agis 19–20. 420  Livy, Ab urbe condita 32.38.9. 418 419

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was when, as we will see below [§625], it was an aristocratic republic). It was this constitution that Pericles and Aristides (precisely as Sextius and Canuleius, tribunes of the plebs, started to do in Rome) overturned in favor of popular liberty. The other great fragment was that Greeks who left Greece observed that the Curetes—that is, the priests of Cybele—were spread out in Saturni— that is, ancient Italy—and in Crete and in Asia; and as a result, they must have paid homage everywhere among the earliest barbarous nations to regimes of Curetes, corresponding to the regime of Heraclids spread throughout most ancient Greece. These Curetes were those armed priests who, with the clamor of their arms, drowned out the cries of the infant Jove, whom Saturn intended to devour, the myth which was explained above [§§500, 521].

593

Through all that upon which we have reasoned, it was at this most ancient point in time and in this fashion that the earliest Comitia Curiata came into being. These are the most ancient assemblies, of which we read in Roman history; they must have been held under arms and remained in later times for treating sacred things, for it was under this aspect that, in the earliest times, they regarded all profane things. Concerning these assemblies, Livy421 wonders that at the time when Hannibal passed through Gaul, if they were held there. However, Tacitus422 in his On the Customs of the Germans tells us that they were also held by priests—that is, those who decreed penalties while surrounded by arms, as if they were in the presence of their gods. And this is the correct sense in which heroic assemblies were armed for decreeing penalties, for the supreme power of the laws comes in with the supreme power of arms in its train.423 And, in general terms, Tacitus tells us424 that only when armed did they treat of their public affairs and with priests presiding over them, as was just stated [§593]. Hence, among the ancient Germans (who afford us a place to understand that the same customs existed for all the earliest barbarous peoples), we encounter the Egyptian regime of priests; we encounter the regime of Curetes—that is, armed priests—whom, as we have seen, the Greeks observed in Saturnia—that is, ancient Italy—and in Crete and in Asia; and we encounter the Quirites of ancient Latium.

594

Through these things upon which we have reasoned, the law of the Quirites must have been the natural law of the heroic gentile peoples of Italy, which, so as to distinguish it from the law of other peoples, was called IUS QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM [“the law of the Roman

595

 Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.20.1.  Tacitus, Germania 7.2–3. 423   A likely allusion to Machiavelli, Prince 12: “And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws, I shall leave out the reasoning on laws and speak of arms.” 424  Tacitus, Germania 13.1. 421 422

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The New Science Quirites”]; it was not on account of a pact agreed upon between the Sabines and Romans that they were called Quirites—that is, from Cures, the capital city of the Sabines—for in that case they would had to have been called the Curetes, but this is the name of those whom the Greeks observed in Saturnia. Moreover, if this city of the Sabines was called Ceres (as the Latin grammarians suggest), then the Quirites would have had to be called (see how ideas are distorted!) “Cerites,” but this is the name of the Roman citizens condemned by the censors to bear the penalty of having no share in civil honors, exactly the burden borne by the plebs who were later composed of familial servants when heroic cities came to be, as we will see presently [§597], and it was into the plebs that those Sabines were incorporated in barbarous times when a defeated city was destroyed (this is a destruction the Romans did not spare Alba itself, their mother) and those captured were scattered over the plains, obliged to cultivate the fields for the conquering people. It was these defeated who were the first provinces, called this as if to say prope victae [“those defeated nearby”] (hence the Corioli, from whose defeat Marcius was called Coriolanus), in contrast to what were called faraway provinces because they were procul victae [“defeated far away”]. And it was into this countryside that they led the first inland colonies, which are, with complete propriety, called coloniae deductae—that is, bands of those rusticated for day labor who were “led down from above”—whereas, later, the expression “faraway colonies” meant the complete opposite, that from the lowly and burdensome places in Rome which they inhabited, the impoverished plebeians were led up to the lofty and strong places of the provinces so as to hold them as lords must and to change the lords of those fields into impoverished day laborers. In this fashion (referred to by Livy,425 who saw only its effects), Rome grew upon the ruin of Alba, and the Sabines brought to their sons-inlaw in Rome, as dowries for their abducted daughters, the riches of Ceres, upon which Florus426 offers empty reflections. These are the colonies prior to those which came after the Agrarian Laws of the Gracchi, colonies which (as the same Livy relates) the Roman plebs, in the heroic disputes in which they engaged with the nobility, disdained, or rather considered a provocation, because they were not like the colonies far away and because they did nothing to raise up the Roman plebs (and when Livy finds that the disputes continued even with these colonies, he offers his empty reflections upon them).

596

Finally, that Minerva signified the armed aristocratic orders is proved by Homer427 where he tells us that in their dispute, Minerva wounds Mars (who, as we saw above [§597], is a character representing the plebeians who served the heroes in war) with a blow from a rock, and where he relates that Minerva intended to conspire against Jove, which is the con Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.30.1.  Florus, Epitoma 1.1.14. 427   See Homer, Iliad 21.444–445. 425

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vention in aristocracies when the lords by secret counsels suppress their princes when they affect tyranny (it is only in aristocratic times that one reads of statues raised for tyrannicides; if we were to suppose that the rulers killed were monarchs, then their killers would have been traitors). Thus, the earliest cities were composed only of nobles who were in command; however, since they also still needed others who would serve them, the heroes were constrained by a common sense of advantage to make content the multitude of clients rising up and to send to them the earliest embassies (which, by the law of the gentile peoples, sovereigns send), and to send with those embassies the earliest agrarian law which came to be in the world, by which the strong concede to their clients only as much as they can bear to concede—that is, bonitary domain over the fields—which concessions are the mark of heroes. And thus is it true that Ceres discovered both grain and laws.428

597

Such a law was dictated by this natural law of the gentile peoples: since domain comes with power in its train, and since these familial servants had a precarious life owing to the heroes, who had saved them with their asylum, it was lawful and legitimate that they would have a similarly precarious domain over the fields, which they enjoyed as their own only to the extent that it pleased the heroes to maintain them in possession of the fields to which they had been assigned. Thus, the familial servants came together to compose the earliest plebs of the heroic cities, having none of the privileges of citizens. This is exactly the way that Achilles says he was treated by Agamemnon, when Agamemnon wrongfully took Briseis from him: there, Achilles says that Agamemnon had committed an outrage which would not have been committed against a day laborer who had none of the rights of a citizen.429 Such were the Roman plebeians up until the dispute over connubium. For by the second agrarian law granted to them by the nobles with the Law of the Twelve Tables, the plebeians had taken quiritary dominion over the fields (as was demonstrated many years ago in our Principles of Universal Law,430 one of two places for which we are not sorry that that work came into the light), and yet, by the law of the gentile peoples whereby foreigners have no ability to acquire civil dominion, the plebeians were still not citizens so that, when they died, they were not able to leave the fields intestate to their relatives because they did not have familial relations in the forms of direct paternal or tribal kinship, which depend completely on solemnized nuptials, and they were not able to dispose of the fields by testament because they were not citizens; as a result, the fields assigned to them returned to the nobles, from whom came the legitimacy of the domain of the plebeians; they noticed this   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.342–343.   See Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59. 430   See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 727[23]). 428 429

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The New Science quickly, after three years, and made claim to connubium, in which they did not make claim (in that state of miserable slaves which Roman history plainly tells us they were in) to join in marriage with the nobles (for which claim, in Latin, they would have said connubia cum patribus [“nuptials with the patricians”]) but, instead, demanded that they be able to contract in the solemnized nuptials which the Fathers contracted and so demanded CONNUBIA PATRUM (“the marriages of the patricians”), the major solemnity of which is the public auspices which Varro and Messala called the public auspices, to which the Fathers said AUSPICIA ESSE SUA431 [“the auspices were theirs”].432 As a result, the plebeians, by this claim, demanded Roman citizenship, whose natural beginning was those nuptials which are defined by the jurist Modestinus, as omnis divini et humani iuris communicatio433 [“the sharing in common all rights, divine and human”], and no more proper definition can be assigned to citizenship itself.

All republics have come to be from certain eternal principles of fealties 599

In this fashion (first, because it is the nature of the strong to preserve their acquisitions and, second, because it is the nature of benefits which they can expect from civil life, upon which the twofold nature of human things are founded the eternal principles of fealties, as we said in the Axioms434), there came to be in the world republics with three kinds of domain for three kinds of fealty, which three kinds of person have over three kinds of thing.

600

The first was the bonitary domain of rustic, or human fealties, which the “men”—those who in the feudal laws of the return to barbarism were called “vassals,” a source of wonder for Hotman, that is, plebeians—had over the fruits of the farms belonging to their heroes.

601

The second was the quiritary domain of noble fealties—that is, the heroic and armed fealties which today are called military fealties—in which the heroes, by uniting in armed orders, preserved sovereignty over their farms: in the state of nature, this was the supreme domain of which, as was stated in another place [§490], Cicero,435 in his speech De aruspicum responsis, knew in some of the households which remained in Rome in his time; he defined it as “domain over real estate subject to no encumbrance either private or public.” About this, there is a golden passage  Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6.   See the note at §110 on Vico’s reinterpretation of the lex Canuleia. 433   Digest 23.2.1. 434   Axioms 80 and 81. 435  Cicero, De aruspicum responsis 7.14. 431 432

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in the Pentateuch436 where Moses tells us that, in the times of Joseph, the Egyptian priests did not pay the king tribute for their fields; and we have just demonstrated above [§594] that all heroic regimes were priestly and we will demonstrate below [§619] that, at first, the Roman patricians did not pay the public treasury any tribute for theirs. These sovereign, private fealties, in the forming of heroic republics, were naturally subject to the greater sovereignty of the ruling heroic orders; this was an interest common to each of them which, with the word res implicitly understood, was called patria [“fatherland”]—that is, “the interests of the Fathers,” which must be defended and maintained because it preserved their sovereign family power and the equality of all them relative to each other, and this alone made for the liberty of the lords. The third, with complete propriety, was called “civil domain,” which those heroic cities, composed in their beginning only of heroes, had over the grounds through certain divine fealties which the paterfamilias had previously received because of the divine providence by which, as we demonstrated above [§§586–587], they found themselves to be sovereigns in the familial state and composed themselves in ruling orders in the civil state; thus, they became sovereign civil regimes subject only to a supreme sovereign God, in whose providence is recognized all civil sovereign power. This is well professed, in a human sense, by the sovereign powers when they join to their titles of majesty the expressions THROUGH DIVINE PROVIDENCE and THROUGH THE GRACE OF GOD, expressions in which they must publicly profess that they have received their regimes by providence and grace; as a result, if the worship of providence were forbidden, those regimes would naturally go toward their downfall, for nations of fatalists or chance-ists437 or atheists never existed in the world. And we saw above [§334] that all the nations of the world, through four primary religions and no more,438 believe in a provident divinity. Accordingly, the plebeians swore by the heroes (there are remnants of this in the oaths “mehercules!” “mecastor!” “aedepol!” and “mediusfidius!” to the god Fidius who, as we will see [§§658, 761, 766, 1065], was the Roman Hercules), but the heroes swore by Jove;439 for the plebeians were, from the first, subject to the strength of the heroes (so Roman nobles up until Year 419 of Rome exercised the right of private incarceration over plebeians who were debtors), and the heroes, who formed regnant   Genesis 47:26.   Casisti, a term that utterly defies English translation, derived from Latin casus, “chance.” 438   That is, pagan worship of the gods, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; see §334. 439   Battistini suggests a comparison of this passage to Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.11: “the citizens feared to break an oath much more than the laws, like those who esteemed the power of God more than that of men” (trans. H. Mansfield and N. Tarcov, p. 34). 436 437

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The New Science orders for themselves, were subject to the strength of a Jove whose right was in the auspices; with these auspices, if they seemed to permit it, the heroes would appoint magistrates, decree laws, and exercise other rights of sovereignty, and if the auspices seemed to forbid it, the heroes would abstain. All this is in the fides deorum et hominum440 [“the faith of gods and men”], to which pertain the Latin expressions implorare fidem,441 “to implore succor and help,” and recipere in fidem,442 “to receive under one’s protection and power”; and to which pertains the exclamation proh deûm atque fidem imploro!443 by which the oppressed implore on their behalf “the strength of gods and of men,” which, in connection with its human sense, Italians turned into “the powers of the world!” For, on the one hand, this is the power by which the highest civil powers are called “potentates.” This is the strength, this is the fealty by which those observed above who swear the oaths bear witness to the deference of subjects. On the other hand, this is the protection that the powerful owe to the weak. And in these two things consist the complete essence of fealties: it is this strength which sustains and directs the civil world whose center was sensed, but not reasoned out, by the peoples of Greece in their medallions, as we noted above [§491], and by the peoples of Latium in their heroic phrases, as we observed, as being the ground of each civil sphere, just as today sovereigns have, on their crowns, a sphere upon which is set the ensign of the divinity of the cross. This is the sphere that, as we demonstrated above [§548], is a golden apple, which signifies the high domain that sovereigns have over the lands of which they are lords, and, accordingly, in the midst of the greater solemnities of their coronation, it is put in their left hand. Hence, this is to say that civil powers are lords over the substance of peoples which sustains, contains, and maintains all that is above it and rests upon it; and because it is one part of this substance—a part which is pro indiviso [“indivisible”]—the patrimony of each paterfamilias, in the distinctions of the Roman legal code, was called patris substantia [“the father’s substance”] or paterna substantia [“the paternal substance”]. This is the fundamental reason why sovereign civil powers can dispose of all that is conjoined to their subjects—as much their persons as their acquisitions, work, and labor—and can impose tributes and taxes whenever they must exercise their domain over this ground [fondi], which today from an opposite perspective (but one that in substance has the same meaning) is called by moral theologians and writers de iure publico [“on the public law”] “eminent domain,” just as the laws regarding this domain are also now called the fundamental [fondamentali] laws of the regime. This domain, because it is domain over the ground [fondi] itself, sovereigns naturally cannot exercise except to preserve the substance of  Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 5.16.48  Cicero, Academica 2.28.89. 442  Cicero, De officiis 1.11.35. 443  Cicero, De natura deorum 1.6.13. 440 441

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their state, on whose standing or falling the particular things of their peoples stand or fall. That the Romans sensed, even while they did not understand, this generation of republics on such eternal principles of fealties, this is demonstrated in the formula left to us for claiming property, conceived as follows: AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I say this ground is mine by law of the Quirites”]. This is the formula connected with a civil action for domain over the ground that belongs to the city itself and comes from the center, so to speak, of the strength of that city; by this center, every Roman citizen is the certain lord over his own farm with a dominion pro indiviso (as a scholastic would say, since it is a purely rational distinction), and, accordingly, they said that this domain was ex iure Quiritium (these Quirites, by a thousand proofs so far made or to be made [§§562, 1077], were, at first, the Romans armed with spears in public assembly, who made up the city). Such is the profound reason that the grounds [i fondi] and all the goods which come from these grounds, when they are vacated, fall back to the treasury, for every private patrimony pro indiviso is a public patrimony, whence, in absence of a private patron, it loses its designation as a part and retains its designation as a whole. This must be the cause of that elegant legal phrase, that inheritances, particularly those of legitimate heirs, are said TO RETURN to the heirs, even though, in truth, the inheritance only comes one time, for the founders of Roman law—those who were the founders of the Roman republic—established as orders all private patrimonies as fealties (which the feudalists say are ex pacto et providentia—that is, all of them come from the public patrimony), and these patrimonies, “by pact and providence” of the civil laws, rotate with certain solemnities from private person to private person and, in the absence of them, must return to the beginning whence they came. All that has been stated clearly becomes confirmed in the Lex Papia Poppaea concerning caducaries, which punishes those who were celibate with the just penalty that, for citizens who have forgone propagating their Roman name by marriage, if they should have made a testament, it is rendered void and, in addition, they were deemed to have no relatives who succeed them if they died intestate; and so, one way or the other, they would have no heirs who would preserve their name. And their patrimony fell back to the treasury, not as an inheritance but as wealth which—as Tacitus444 puts it—goes to the people TAMQUAM OMNIUM PARENTUM [“as the parent of all”]. Here, this fundamental writer calls forth the reason for caducary penalties from the most ancient times when the earliest Fathers of humankind occupied the earliest empty lands, an occupation which was the originary source of all domains in the world; these Fathers, later united in cities, made the civil power out of their paternal power, and made out of their private 444

 Tacitus, Annals 3.28.3.

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The New Science ­ atrimonies the public patrimony (which is called the “treasury”), and p these patrimonies went from private citizen to private citizen in the quality of inheritances, but when they fall back to the treasury, they take on their first, most ancient quality of wealth.

604

Here, during the generation of their heroic republics, the poet heroes imagined an eleventh major divinity—that is, MERCURY—who conveys to the rebelling familial servants the law as a divine rod, a real word for the auspices; this is the rod with which Mercury calls back souls from Orcus (as Virgil445 tells us), and it calls back, to the life of sociability, the clients who, when they left the protection of the heroes, returned to being scattered in a lawless state (which is the Orcus of the poets, who devours all men, as will be explained below [§§688, 717]). This rod comes to be depicted with one or two serpents wound around it, which must be the skins of serpents, signifying the bonitary domain left to them by the heroes and the quiritary domain which the heroes reserved for themselves; it is depicted with two wings at the top of the rod, to signify the eminent domain of the orders; and it is depicted with a cap (also winged) to affirm the profound legitimacy for their sovereign liberty (so too, the cap remains a hieroglyph for liberty). In addition to this, Mercury is depicted with wings on his ankles, to signify that domain over the ground belonged to the regnant senate. Except for this, he is conveyed the law completely naked, for he conveys to them a domain naked of civil solemnities and which consists completely of the shame of the heroes—this is exactly the nakedness which, we saw above [§569], was devised for Venus along with the Graces. As a result, from the bird of Idanthyrsus (by which he meant to say to Darius that he was sovereign lord over Scythia by the auspices which he held), the Greeks sprouted the wings to signify heroic legitimacy, and eventually the Romans, with articulate language, said in abstract terms that AUSPICIA ESSE SUA [“the auspices were theirs”], by which they meant to demonstrate to the plebs that all civil legitimacy and law was their property. Thus, this winged rod of Mercury of the Greeks, when its serpents are removed, is the eagled scepter of the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Romans, and, last of all, the English, as we stated above [§487], which was called by the Greeks κηρύκειον [ke¯ rukeion], for it conveyed that agrarian law to the familial servants of the heroes, who, in Homer, are named κήρuκες [ke¯ rukes]; it conveyed the agrarian law of Servius Tullius by which he instituted the order of the census so that rustics under its conditions were called, in Roman law, censiti [“those assessed”]; it conveyed, in those serpents, bonitary domain over the fields—in Greek, ὠφέλεια [o¯pheleia], derived from ὄφις [ophis], “serpent,” is the word for the land rent which, as we demonstrated above [§541], the plebeians

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 Virgil, Aeneid 4.242.

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paid to the heroes. Finally, it conveyed the famous knot of Hercules, by which men paid to the heroes the tithe of Hercules; and by which the Roman plebeians, in debt up until the Petelian law, were bound, or liege, vassals of the nobles—we reason much upon all of these things below [§§1065–1066]. Consequently, one must say that this Greek Mercury was the Thoth, or Mercury, who gave laws to the Egyptians, signified by the hieroglyph of Kneph: he is depicted as a serpent to denote the cultivated land; he is depicted with the head of a hawk or an eagle, just as, later, the hawks of Romulus became the eagles of the Romans, by which are understood the heroic auspices; he is depicted as girded with a belt, a sign of the knot of Hercules; he is depicted with a scepter in hand, which means the Egyptian regime of priests; he is also depicted with a winged cap, which points to the profound domain of the ground; and, finally, he is depicted with an egg in his mouth, which allows one to understand the Egyptian sphere, unless, perhaps, it is the golden apple which, as we demonstrated above [§548], signifies the profound domain which the priests held over the lands of Egypt. It is within this hieroglyph that Manetho stuck the generation of the entire world, and the vanity of the learned reached such a point of madness that Athanasius Kircher,446 in his Pamphili Obelisk, says that it signifies the Holy Trinity.

605

Here was the start of the earliest commerce in the world, whence Mercury has his name and, later, was considered the god of mercantile trade, just as from those earliest embassies, he was also believed to be the god of ambassadors; and in a way true to the senses, he was said to have been sent by the gods—whom we found above [§449] to be what the heroes of the earliest cities named themselves—to men (which Hotman notes with wonder was what, in the recourse to barbarism, they called vassals), and the wings, which herein we saw [§§488, 604] signify heroic origin, were later believed to be used by Mercury to fly from heaven to Earth and subsequently to fly back from Earth to heaven.

606

However, to return to commerce, it started with the commerce concerning real estate, and the earliest payment was, as it must have been, most simple and natural—that is, payments in the fruits gathered from the land. Such payment, either in toil or in goods, is even today the customary commerce of rustics. The Greeks preserved all of this history in the word νόμος [nomos], which signifies both “law” and “pasture,” for the earliest law was that agrarian law by which heroic kings were called shepherds of the people,   Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), author of Obelisus Pamphilius. A similarly disapproving reference to Kircher occurs at De antiquissima 7.4 (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 116 [114]), where Vico claims that the procedure common to him and Ramon Llull (1232–1315) is suitable for “someone who knows letters but cannot gather them together to read the great book of nature.”

446

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The New Science as has been noted herein [§557] and will be explained more fully below [§§1058–1059].

608

Thus the plebeians of the earliest barbarous nations (exactly as Tacitus447 tells us concerning the ancient Germans, where he erroneously believed that their plebs were slaves because, as has been demonstrated [§§258, 555, 558, 582], the socii of the heroes were like slaves) must have been scattered by the heroes throughout the countryside; and lived in their houses in the fields to which they were assigned; and contributed, with the fruits of these villas, as much as was needed to sustain their lords; along with these conditions, they swore the oath (which above [§559] we also heard from Tacitus448) that they must guard and defend and serve the glory of their lords. And if one thought to define this kind of rights with a legal term, one will clearly see [§§1057–1087] that another term could not agree better with them than the one by which we have called them: “fealties.”

609

In this manner, the earliest cities are discovered to have been founded upon the orders of nobles and bands of plebeians by two opposite eternal properties which come from the nature of the human civil things, upon which herein we have reasoned: the nature of the plebeians is to want always to change the state, as it is always they who do change it; and the nature of the nobles is always to preserve it. Hence, during upheaval in civil governance, the ones who are all called “optimates” are those who work to maintain the state, so named from their property of standing firm and on a stable footing.

610

At that time, two distinctions came into being. The first distinction is between the wise and the common run, insofar as the heroes founded their regimes on the wisdom of the auspices, as was stated in the Axioms449 and was reasoned upon more fully above [§§365, 488, 525]. As a result of this distinction, the common run has retained the perpetual epithet, “profane”; for the heroes, or the nobles, were the priests of heroic cities, just as they certainly were among the Romans up until one hundred years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, as was stated above [§250]. Hence, the earliest peoples, by a certain kind of excommunication, took away citizenship (among the Romans, this was the interdict of water and fire, as will be shown below [§957]). Accordingly, the earliest plebeians of the nations were considered foreigners, as we will see herein [§611], and this is retained in the eternal property of not granting citizenship to a man whose religion is different. And it was of such “common people” [volgo] that vulgo quaesiti [“those begotten of the common run”] remained as an expression for children conceived in whoring on account of the fact that, as we reasoned above [§567], insofar as the plebeians of the earliest cities had no common share in  Tacitus, Germania 25.3.  Tacitus, Germania 14.2. 449   Axiom 72. 447

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sacred or divine things, they did not contract solemnized marriages for many centuries. The second distinction was between civis [“citizen”] and hostis, signifying both “guest,” or foreigner, and “enemy.”450 For the earliest cities were composed of heroes and of those received in their asylums, and it is in this sense that one has to take all heroic hospitality, which, because of the return to barbarism, Italian retains in the word “oste” for innkeeper and soldier’s quarters, and in the word “ostello” for inn.

611

Thus, Paris was a guest of the royal household of Argos—that is, was an enemy who abducted noble Argive women. Thus Theseus was a guest of Ariadne, and Jason of Medea, whom they later abandoned and with whom they did not contract marriages: these were reputed to be heroic actions, while, to our present sensibilities, they seem to be (and, indeed, are) the actions of wicked men.451 Thus does one have to defend the piety of Aeneas (he abandoned Dido after he ravished her, besides the great benefits he had received from her and the magnanimous offer that she had made of the regime of Carthage as a dowry for their nuptials452): it was a piety obedient to the Fates who had destined Lavinia in Italy, although she was also a foreigner, to be his wife. This heroic custom is preserved by Homer453 in the person of Achilles, the greatest of the heroes of Greece, who refused any of the three daughters whom Agamemnon offered him in marriage along with the royal dowry of seven lands well populated with ploughmen and shepherds, replying that he intended to take in marriage the woman whom, in his fatherland, his own father, Peleus, gave to him. In sum, the plebeians were guests in the heroic cities, against whom (we have learned many times from Aristotle [§§271, 588]) the heroes swore to be eternal enemies. The same distinction is demonstrated for us with the opposite terms civis [“citizen”] and peregrinus [“alien”]), taking “alien” with the property native to it, of being a man who wanders through the countryside (called, in Latin, an ager, meaning a “territory” or “district,” from which the expressions in Latin ager neapolitanus, ager nolanus for “Naples,” “Nola”), and a peregrinus, as it were, wanders thus, whereas foreigners who travel through the world do not wander through the fields, but hold straight to the public roads. Reasoning out such origins for heroic guests sheds great light on Greek history when it tells of Samians, Sybarites, Troezenians, ­Amphipolitans,   See Cicero, De officiis 1.37.   Here Vico renders a starkly negative judgment against the norms of the heroic age—a judgment that must be kept in mind when in other places he seems to praise its merits over against those of the human age. 452  Virgil, Aeneid 4.102–104. 453  Homer, Iliad 9.378–394. 450 451

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The New Science Chalcedonians, Cnidians, and Chians, whose republics were changed by foreigners from aristocratic to popular. And it sheds conclusive illumination on a fact which we published many years ago in our Principles of Universal Law454 concerning the myth of the Laws of the Twelve Tables coming from Athens to Rome (one of the two places for which we deem that it was not useless to have composed that work). We proved that for the heading—FORTI SANATE NEXO SOLUTO [“The strong, once corrected, are freed from bondage”]—its entire subject was the dispute in which the expression “the strong, once corrected,” referred not, as the Latin philologists say, to foreigners reduced to obedience, but to the Roman plebs, who revolted because they could not take from the nobles certain domain over the fields, a domain which could not remain certain unless its law was fixed eternally on a public tablet; by this tablet, what was uncertain in the law was made determinate and what was hidden was made manifest, thus binding the nobles from taking it back again with a royal hand, which is the truth in what Pomponius recounts. Because of this dispute, the plebs made such a clamor that there was need to create the decemvirs, who gave a new form to the constitution and reduced the plebs in their uprising to obedience by declaring, in the heading above, that the plebs were released from the true bondage of bonitary domain (by which they were glebae addicti [“bound to the soil”], ascriptiti [“enrolled”], or censiti [“assessed”] under the census of Servius Tullius, as was demonstrated above [§§597, 604]) and, instead, were obligated by the fictive bondage of quiritary domain; however, a vestige of the old bond was preserved up until the Petelian law in the right of private imprisonment, which the nobles had over plebeians who were debtors; it was these “foreigners” who with the “enticements” of the tribunes (as Livy455 elegantly calls them, and enumerated by us in the note on the Publilian law in the Chronological Table [§104]) eventually changed the Roman constitution from aristocratic to popular.

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That Rome was not founded upon the earliest agrarian revolts demonstrates for us that it was a new city, as is sung in its history. It was founded, instead, upon the asylum where, while violence still prevailed everywhere, Romulus and his companions must have, first, made themselves strong and, later, received those seeking refuge and at that time founded clientships, as we have explained above [§§556–557, 597]. Hence, two hundred years must have passed for the clients to grow weary of this state, exactly the amount of time to run its course for the king, Servius Tullius, to bring the earliest agrarian law, but it must have taken five hundred years to run its course in cities which were old, for they were composed of men most simple, while Rome was composed of those most cunning. This is the cause of Rome manumitting Latium, then Italy, and, later, the world, for more than the other peoples of Latium, its heroism was young. This is also the most proper reason, as was stated in the 454 455

 Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 727[21–23]).  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.4.

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Axioms,456 that the Romans wrote their heroic history in vernacular language, while the Greeks wrote this history with myths. All of that upon which we have meditated concerning the principles of Poetic Politics and have seen in Roman history is wondrously confirmed in the following four heroic characters: first, the lyre of Orpheus, or Apollo; second, the head of Medusa; third, the Roman fasces; fourth and last, the struggle of Hercules with Antaeus.

614

And, in the first place, the lyre was discovered by the Mercury of the Greeks (just as law was discovered by the Mercury of the Egyptians), and this lyre was given to him by Apollo, the god of civil light, or the nobility, for in heroic republics, the nobles decreed the laws. And by this lyre, Orpheus, Amphion, and the other theological poets who professed science of the laws founded and established humanity in Greece, as we will explain more fully below [§§661, 734].

615

As a result, the lyre was the union of the cords, or the strengths of the Fathers, whence was composed the public strength called “civil power,” which finally made private strength and violence cease. Hence, with perfect propriety, law continued to be defined by the poets as the lyra regnorum [“the lyre of regimes”] in that it brought into accord the familial regimes of the Fathers which previously were discordant, for they were all alone and separated from one another in the familial state, as Polyphemus says to Ulysses; and the glorious history of the sign of the lyre, later, was described with a constellation in the heavens; and the regime in Ireland, in its coat of arms for the king of England, bears on its shield a harp. However, later, the philosophers made this lyre into the harmony of the spheres brought into accord by the sun. Yet, Apollo played the lyre on Earth, a lyre which Pythagoras not only could have, but must have heard and played himself, when he is taken as a theological poet and a founder of nations, not as a part of the imposture of which he has until now been accused. The serpents united on the head of Medusa, whose temples bear wings, are the profound family domains the Fathers have in the familial state, which come to compose the civil eminent domain. And this head was nailed onto the shield of Perseus, the same shield with which this Minerva is armed, she who, in the midst of these arms—that is, these armed assemblies of the first nations among which we found [§§593, 594, 562] the Roman assembly—declared terrifying punishments that turn to stone those who look at them. One of these serpents, we stated above [§423], was Draco, who was said to have written laws in blood, for Athens (which called Minerva ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athe¯ na]) was armed with these laws at the time when it was occupied by the optimates, as was stated above

456

  Axiom 21.

616

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The New Science [§§423, 542]. And the Dragon, among the Chinese—who still write with hieroglyphics, as was seen above [§542]—is the insignia for civil power.

617

The Roman fasces are the litui of the Fathers in the familial state, and Homer457 names one rod of this sort in the hands of those Fathers with the freighted word “scepter,” and he calls such Fathers “kings” when he describes the shield of Achilles, which contains the history of the world; in this passage, the epoch of the families is situated prior to the epoch of cities—as will be explained more fully below [§§683–684]. For when the Fathers had with these litui taken the auspices what they decree, they dictated punishments to their children—one such punishment for the impious son was passed on to the Law of the Twelve Tables, as we saw above [§526]. Hence, the union of these rods—or litui—signifies the genesis of the civil power upon which we reason herein.

618

Finally, Hercules, a character representing the Heraclids—or nobles of the heroic cities—struggles with Antaeus, a character representing the rebelling familial servants, and by raising Antaeus to the heavens—­ leading the familial servants back to the earliest cities located on high— Hercules defeats him and binds him to the Earth, which is retained in the Greek game called the knot—that is, the knot of Hercules—by which Hercules founded the heroic nations and through which the plebeians paid the tithe of Hercules to the heroes, which must have been the census which was the basis of aristocratic republics; hence, the Roman plebeians, through the census of Servius Tullius, were the nexi [“bondsmen”] of the nobles, and through swearing the oath which Tacitus tells us was given by the ancient Germans to their princes, they must have been at the service of those princes as vassals pressed into service during war at their own expense. About this, the Roman plebs complained during what was dreamed to have been popular liberty. These must have been the earliest assidui [“tribute payers”], who suis assibus militabant [“were soldiers at their own expense”], but these were soldiers not of fortune, but of hard necessity.

On the origins of the census and the treasury 619

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However, finally, the heavy usury and frequent usurpations which the nobles made upon the fields were so marked that, at the height of this age, Philippus, tribune of the plebs, cried out in a loud voice that two thousand nobles possessed all the fields which should have been portioned out among the well over three hundred thousand citizens counted in Rome at the time. For now forty years after the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus, because the nobility was secure in his death, they started again in their insolence towards the impoverished plebs, and the Senate  Homer, Iliad 18.556–557.

457

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at this time must have started to enact the ordinance that the plebeians pay the census to the treasury, which previously they were required to pay privately to the nobles, so that this treasury could thenceforth administer the expenses of later wars. At this time, the census displayed something new in Roman history: Livy458 relates that the nobles disdained to administer it as a thing disagreeable with their dignity, for Livy could not understand that the nobles did not want it because it was not the census instituted by Servius Tullius—that is, the one which was the basis for the liberty of lords and which was paid privately to those nobles—and so Livy, along with everyone else, was deceived into thinking that this census of Servius Tullius was the basis for popular liberty. For certainly there was no magistracy of greater dignity than that of the censorship, and from its first year it was administered by the consuls. Thus, the nobles themselves through these avaricious arts came to establish the census in the form which later was the basis of popular liberty; as a result, when all the fields came within their own farms during the time of Philippus the tribune, two thousand nobles were required to pay tribute for the three hundred thousand other citizens who had then been counted (exactly as in Sparta, where the entire Spartan countryside had come into the hands of a few). For in the treasury were written down the census taxes imposed privately by the nobles on fields which, uncultivated, the nobles had assigned ab antiquo [“from an ancient date”] to the plebeians for cultivation. On account of such inequality, there must have come great unrest and revolts from the Roman plebs; these Fabius set in good order with the wise ordinance which earned him the title Maximus,459 by ordering that all the Roman people be partitioned out into three classes, senators, knights, and plebeians, and that citizens be put into these classes according to their ability; this consoled the plebeians insofar as previously the senatorial order, which held the magistracies, was comprised from the first of all nobles, whereas thenceforth plebeians could advance to it by wealth and, consequently, this opened to the plebeians an ordinary avenue to all civil honors. Such is the fashion which makes true the tradition that the census of Servius Tullius was the basis of popular liberty, for it was from it that material was arranged and occasions came into being—as was reasoned upon hypothetically above in the Annotations to the Chronological Table in the passage on the Publilian law [§111]. And it was this ordinance, born within Rome itself, that truly instituted the orders of the democratic republic, not the Law of the Twelve Tables brought there from Athens. So much so that Bernardo Segni460 renders what Aristotle called a “democratic republic” in Tuscan as a “republic by  Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.8.7.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.46.14. 460   Bernardo Segni (1504–1588), Florentine historian and popularizer of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics. 458 459

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The New Science census,” to express a “republic of popular liberty.” This is demonstrated by Livy461 himself who, in spite of being ignorant about the Roman constitution in those times, still tells us that the nobles complained that they had lost more by that law within the city than they gained by arms outside the city, in a year when they, indeed, had brought back many, great victories. This is the cause of Publilius, who was the author of the law, being called the “people’s dictator.”

621

With popular liberty, in which the entire people is the city itself, it came to pass that the civil domain (the term “civil” was derived from the word for city) lost its proper significance as the public domain and was dispersed throughout all the private domains of the Roman citizens who all later made up the Roman city. The supreme domain came to be obscured in its native signification of the “strongest domain” which, as we stated above [§490], “is not weakened by any real encumbrance, even public ones” and retained its significance as “domain over property free from any private encumbrance.” The quiritary domain no longer signified domain over the ground, which, if the client or plebeian lost possession of his grounds, obliged the noble, because of this domain, to come to his defense; these were the earliest auctores iuris [“authors of law”] in the Roman legal system, who only for these clientships instituted by Romulus instructed the plebeians in only these laws. Indeed, in what other law would the nobles have instructed the plebeians when, up until Year 309 of Rome, the plebs did not have the privilege of citizenship, and when, up until one hundred years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, the nobles kept these laws secret from the plebs in the college of pontiffs? Thus, the nobles in those times were auctores iuris [“authors of law”] of the kind which still remains for those who possess lands that have been purchased: when such owners are summoned to a lawsuit by a claim on that land by others, they “cite the authors” and defend them. Such quiritary domain now came to signify private civil domain assisted by claims of ownership, as distinct from bonitary domain, which was maintained by possession alone.

622

In this same fashion, and not otherwise, these things based upon the eternal nature of fealties came back in the return to barbarous times. Let us take, for example, the regime in France: the several provinces of which it is now composed were sovereign lordships of princes subject to the king of this regime. There, these princes must have held their goods, not subject to any public encumbrance. Later, either by succession or by rebellion or by failure in succession, these goods were incorporated into the regime, and all the goods of these princes ex iure optimo were subject to public encumbrance. For even the household and grounds of

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 Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.12.17.

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that king, including the royal chambers proper (because they have been transferred to their vassals either by parental lineage or by concessions), are today found to be subject to taxes and tributes. In this way, hereditary regimes come to confound domain ex iure optimo with private domain subject to public encumbrance (so the Roman fisc, which was the patrimony of the princeps, came to be confounded with the treasury). This research into the census and the treasury has been the most rigorous of our meditations upon Roman things, as we remarked in the Idea of the Work [§25].

623

On the origins of the Roman assemblies Through the things upon which we have thus far meditated [§§67, 521], the βουλή [boule¯ ] and the ἀγορά [agora] (the two heroic assemblies of which Homer tells and which we observed above [§§67, 521]) must have been, among the Romans, the Curiate Assembly (which we read was the most ancient assembly under the kings) and the Tribal Assembly.

624

The former was called “curiate” from quir, “spear,” whose genitive, quiris, was later kept as the nominative (in conformity with our reasoning in the Origins of the Latin Language462), just as it was that from χείρ [cheir], “hand,” which among all nations signifies “power,” must have come the Greek word κυρία [kuria], used in the same sense as the Latin word curia; hence came the Curetes, the priests armed with spears, for all heroic peoples were composed of priests and only heroes had the right to bear arms, and the Greeks, as we saw above [§§593, 594], observed these Curetes in ancient Italy, in Crete, and in Asia. And κυρία, in this ancient sense, was understood to mean “lordship,” just as now we call aristocratic republics “lordships”; from these heroic senates came the word κῦρος [kuros], “authority,” but—as we have observed above [§§389, 603, 621] and will observe more below [§§944, 1073]—it was an “authority of domain,” whose origins are retained in the use of κύριος [kurios] and κυρία for “sir” and “madam,” and just as the Greek Curetes came from χείρ, so we saw above [§562] that the Roman Quirites came from quir, which was the title of Roman majesty given to the Roman people in public assembly, as we noted above [§594] when we observed from the Gauls and the ancient Germans, in combination with those called Curetes by the Greeks, that all the earliest barbarous peoples held public assemblies under arms. Consequently, such a title of majesty must have started at a time when the people were comprised only of nobles, who alone had the right to bear arms, and when, later, it passed on to a people composed also of plebeians, the Roman republic became popular.

462

  Scienza nuova prima §370.

625

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The New Science For it was from the plebs, who did not at first have such a right, that the Tribal Assemblies were named from tribus, “tribe,” and just as, among the Romans, families in the familial state were named from famuli, so too, later, in the civil state, the tribe was understood as derived from the plebs who assembled to receive the orders of the regnant senate, among which orders (because it was the principal and most frequent) the one requiring the plebeians to contribute to the treasury came to be named tributum [“tribute”], derived from the word “tribe.”

626

However, afterwards, Fabius Maximus introduced the census which separated the whole Roman people out into three classes, according to the patrimonies of the citizens, for previously only senators were knights because only the nobles in heroic times had the right to bear arms; accordingly, one reads of the ancient Roman republic based on this history divided between PATRES [“the Fathers”] and PLEBEM [“the plebs”]. As a result, previously the word “senator” meant the same as “patrician,” and, by contrast, “plebeian” meant the same as “lowborn” [ignobile]. Consequently, just as there were previously only two classes for the ancient Roman people, so too there were only two sorts of assembly: first, the Curiate Assembly comprised of Fathers, or nobles, or senators; second, the Tribal Assembly of plebeians—that is, those who were lowborn. However, afterwards, when Fabius portioned out the citizens according to their ability into the three classes of senators, knights, and plebs, those nobles no longer made up an order in the city, and they were placed, according to their ability, into these three sorts of classes. From that time on, they came to distinguish “patrician” from “senator” and “knight,” and “plebeian” from “lowborn”; and “plebeian” was no longer contrasted with “patrician,” but with “knight” and “senator.” No longer did “plebeian” mean “lowborn,” but rather “a citizen with a small patrimony,” who might well be a noble; and, by contrast, “senator” no longer meant “patrician,” but rather “a citizen with a quite ample patrimony” who might well be lowborn.

627

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On account of all this, thenceforth, the Comitia Centuriata [“Centuriate Assembly”] was the assembly in which the whole Roman people from all three classes convened so as to decree, among other public activity, consular laws, and they retained the Comitia Tributa as the assembly where only the plebs decreed tribunicial laws—that is, the plebiciti [“plebicites”]—previously called this in the sense in which Cicero463 called them plebi nota—that is, “laws made public to the plebs”—one of these laws is that of Junius Brutus, of which Pomponius464 tells us; by it, Brutus publicly announces to the plebs that kings have been forever expelled from Rome (just as, in a monarchy, royal laws with equal propriety would be   See Cicero, De legibus 3.3.10 and 3.15.33–34, and compare Vico, De uno 150.1.   Digest 1.2.2.3.

463

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called popolo nota [“laws made public to the people”]). Because of this, Baldus465 (with little erudition but great acuity) wonders at the fact that the term plebiscitum, as it comes down to us, has only one s, because if it had the sense of a law decreed by the plebs, it should have been written with two, plebisscitum,466 and would have been derived from sciscor [“to approve”], and not from scio [“to know”]. Lastly, for certainty in divine ceremonies, they retained the assembly called the Comitia Curiata, assemblies of only the heads of the Curias, which treated of sacred things; for in the times of kings, they regarded all profane things under the aspect of the sacred, and the heroes everywhere were the Curetes, or armed priests, as was stated above [§593]. Hence, even up until the final times of Rome, paternal power continued to be regarded under its aspect as a sacred thing, and the regulations in the laws for this power were often called the sacra patria [“sacred things of fathers”]. Such is the cause of celebrating adoptions in such assemblies with curiate laws.

628

Corollary It is divine providence which is the institutor of the orders of republics and, at the same time, of the natural law of the gentile peoples467 This genesis of republics is discovered above in the age of the gods in which governance was theocratic—that is, was divine governance—and later came the earliest human governance—that is, heroic governance which is called “human” so as to distinguish it from divine governance. Into such human governance, like the great current of a royal river retains long into the sea the impression of its current and the sweetness of its waters, coursed this age of gods. For there must have persisted that religious manner of thinking, that it is the gods who do all that men themselves do. Hence, from the ruling Fathers of the familial state, they made Jove; from those same Fathers, closed off in orders when the earliest cities came to be, they made Minerva; from the embassies sent to the clients rising up against them, they made Mercury; and, as we will see shortly below [§634], from the corsair heroes, they finally made Neptune. It is because of this, especially, that divine providence is to be admired, that although men intended to do something completely different, it brought them, from the first, to a fear of divinity, whose religion is the earliest fundamental base of republics. Thence, because of religion, they settled in the first empty lands, which they occupied first, before all   Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), medieval Italian jurist born in Perugia, student of Bartolus de Saxoferrato. 466   See Vico, De uno 150 (Cristofolini 195[3]); Voss, Etymologicon, p. 458. 467   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. “Institutor” translates l’ordinatrice (more literally, “ordinatrix”). 465

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The New Science others, and this occupation is the source of all domains. And when the even hardier giants occupied the heights of mountains, where sprang forth perennial fountains, providence disposed that they would discover places healthy, and strongly situated, and with an abundance of water, so that they could remain settled there and no longer wander; these are the three qualities that lands must have for cities to spring from them later. Then, by that same religion, providence disposed them to unite with certain women in continuous companionship for life: these are marriages, recognized as the source of all power. Later, they are discovered to have founded families with these women, which are the seedbeds of the republics. Finally, by opening asylums, they are discovered to have founded clientships, whence were arrayed the materials that later, through the earliest agrarian laws, gave birth to cities upon the two communities of men that compose them, first, that of the nobles who command and, second, that of the plebeians who obey (the latter, Telemachus in his speech in Homer468 calls the “other people”—that is, a subject people different from the ruling people, which was composed of heroes). Hence comes the matter of political science, which is nothing other than the science of commanding and obeying in cities. And in that same coming-into-being [nascimento], providence makes it that republics come into being in an aristocratic form, conforming to the primitive and retiring nature of those earliest men; this form consisted entirely (as indeed the political theorists have noticed) in guarding boundaries and orders, so that peoples freshly arrived to their humanity might even by their form of governance continue for a long time to remain enclosed within them and leave off from the primitiveness of that profane and infamous community of the state of beasts and wild animals. And, because these men had minds entirely beholden to particulars and, thereby, were unable to understand the common good, they were accustomed never to meddle with the particular things of others (just as Homer469 has Polyphemus say to Ulysses; in this giant, Plato470 recognizes the paterfamilias in what they call the “state of nature,” which is prior to that of the cities). With this same aristocratic form of governance, providence led them to unite themselves to their fatherlands, so as to preserve such great private interests as they had in their monarchical families, and preserving those interests is all that they intended. And so, beyond any of their purposes, they came together in a universal civil good, which is called a “republic.”

630

Now reflect here, through those divine proofs upon which we remarked in the Method [§343], by meditating upon the simplicity and naturalness  Homer, Odyssey 2.12.  Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115. 470  Plato, Laws 678c–681e. 468

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with which providence orders these human things, such that, although in a false sense, men say truly that the gods have done everything. Reflect by combining this with meditation upon the countless number of civil effects all evoked by the following four causes which are, as will be observed throughout this entire work, the four elements, as it were, of this civil universe: namely, religion, marriage, asylum, and the earliest agrarian law, upon which we reasoned above [§§265, 597, 604]. And then go on to inquire among all the human possibilities if so many things so varied and so different could have had in some other fashion a starting point that was simpler and more natural among those very men whom Epicurus says have come about by chance and Zeno says burst forth by necessity, men whom neither chance swerved nor fate dragged away from this natural order. It was at this point—the point at which these republics must have come into being—that, prior to their birth, the materials were already arrayed and ready to receive form, and there came from them the forming of republics composed of mind and body. The materials arrayed were their own religions, their own languages, their own lands, their own nuptials, their own names—that is, their own peoples and households—their own arms, and, consequently, their own power, their own magistracies, and, last of all, their own laws; and because these were their own, they were, accordingly, completely free, and because they were completely free, they were constitutive of true republics. And all this came to be because all the aforesaid rights previously belonged to the monarchical paterfamilias in the state of nature. These Fathers, at the point when they united in orders, came to generate civil sovereign power, just as in the state of nature these Fathers had held their family powers previously subject to no one but God. This sovereign civil person was formed of a mind and a body. The mind was an order of such wise men as could naturally exist in that state of extreme rudeness and simplicity; and with this order, republics retain the eternal property that, without an order of wise men, states seem, at first sight, to be republics, but are dead bodies without a soul. For its other part, the body of this person is formed of a head and other secondary members, whence republics retain this second eternal property, that some must exercise the mind in the employments of civil wisdom, and others the body in trades and arts required to serve in peace as well as war. With this comes a third eternal property, that the mind always commands and that the body must perpetually serve. However, it is this which must induce even greater wonder, that just as providence, in the midst of making families come into being, which all came into being with some knowledge of a divinity (although because of their ignorance and disorder, they did not know the true Divinity), families which each had their own religion, language, land, nuptials, name, arms, governance, and laws, had at the same time made for the coming-into-being of the natural law of the gentes maiores, with all the aforesaid propriety for the paterfamilias to use later over his clients; so

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The New Science too ­providence, in the midst of making for the coming-into-being of republics, by means of that aristocratic form with which they came into being, made it such that the natural law of the gentes maiores—that is, the law of the families which was previously observed in the state of nature—passed over to the natural law of the gentes minors—that is, the law of peoples observed in the civil state. For the paterfamilias, who held as their own all of the aforesaid rights over their clients, at the point at which they closed themselves off in a natural order against those clients, came to close off all the aforesaid properties within their civil orders against the plebs, which constituted the strict aristocratic form of heroic republics.

632

In this fashion, the natural law of the gentile peoples, which now comes to be celebrated among peoples and nations, was at the coming-intobeing of republics born as a property of the civil sovereign powers. As a result, a people or nation which has within it no civil sovereign power furnished with all the aforesaid properties is not, properly speaking, a people or nation, nor could it exercise abroad against another people or nation the natural law of the gentile peoples. Rather, both legitimacy and its exercise will be held by another people or a superior nation.

633

These things upon which we have reasoned, put together with what was noted above [§449]—that the heroes of the earliest cities called themselves “gods”—allow for an explanation of the significance of that saying, IURA A DIS POSITA [“laws posited by the gods”], used to express the dictates of the natural law of the gentile peoples. However, when later it was succeeded by the natural law of humane peoples (as Ulpian has called it many times above [§§569, 575, 578, 582]), upon which the philosophers and moral theologians ascended to understand the natural law of eternal reason fully explicated, then this saying congruously passed on to signify the natural law of the gentile peoples, ordained by the true God.

Heroic politics, continued 634

However, all historians allow that the HEROIC AGE begins with the corsairs of Minos471 and the naval expedition that Jason made to Pontus; that it continues on with the Trojan War; and that it ends with the wandering of the heroes, which comes to a close with the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. Hence, there must have come into being at this time the last of the major divinities—that is, NEPTUNE—as attested by the authority of histori-

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  See Strabo, Geography 10.4, 8, 15 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.456–474, 490–500, and 8.6–10. 471

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ans. We may corroborate this authority with philosophical reasoning, assisted by several golden passages in Homer. The philosophical reasoning is that the naval and nautical arts were the last discovered by the nations, for they needed the peak of ingenuity to discover them, such that Daedalus, who was their discoverer, continued to signify this ingenuity (and Lucretius uses daedala, in the expression daedala tellus [“daedal earth”] for “ingenious”). The passages from Homer472 are the ones in the Odyssey where Ulysses, either landing or carried by storm, mounts some hill so as to look inland for smoke, which signifies that the place is inhabited by men. These passages from Homer are strengthened by a golden passage in Plato (to which, we learned in the Axioms,473 Strabo refers) concerning the longstanding horror which the earliest nations had of the sea; the reason for this was noted by Thucydides,474 that it was on account of their fear of corsairs that the Greek nations were slow to come down to inhabit the coasts. Accordingly, we are told that Neptune was armed with a trident which made the earth shake; this must have been a great hook for grappling ships (spoken of with a beautiful metaphor, a tooth, with the superlative, three, as we stated above [§§491, 535]), and with this trident, he made the lands of men shake in terror of his corsairs. Neptune later, already in the times of Homer,475 was believed to make the lands of nature shake, and in this opinion Homer was later followed by Plato,476 with his abyss of waters which he placed in the bowels of the Earth—the extent to which he did so discerningly will be demonstrated below [§§714, 753]. These corsairs must have been the bull by which Jove abducted Europa477 and the Minotaur, or the bull of Minos, by which he abducted lads and maidens from the shores of Attica (this is retained in speaking of sails as “the horns of ships,” an expression later used by Virgil478); and those on the land explained with complete truthfulness that the lads and maidens were devoured by the Minotaur, whom they saw in horror and sadness were swallowed up by the ships. So, Orcus wants to devour Andromeda,479 chained to a rock, who becomes a stone on account of terror (this is retained in the Latin expression terrore defixus, “to become immobilized on account of terror”). The winged horse with which Perseus frees her must have been the ship of another corsair (thus, sails   See Homer, Odyssey 9.167, 10.97–99, 148–149.   See Axiom 98. 474  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.7–8. 475   See Homer, Iliad 8.445; 13.18–19, 34, 43, 231; 15.174, 201; 20.34, 57–66. 476  See Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b. 477   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.836–875. 478  See Aeneid 3.549. 479   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.671–734. 472 473

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The New Science continued to be called the “wings of ships,” and Virgil,480 with his knowledge of heroic antiquity, when he spoke of Daedalus, whom he says discovered a ship which mechanically could fly, called it alarum remigium [“an oarage of wings”]; and, indeed, we are told that Daedalus was the brother of Theseus). As a result, Theseus must have been a character representing the Athenian lads who, by the law of force practiced upon them by Minos, were devoured by his bull, or ships of corsairs. Ariadne, the seafaring art, teaches him how, by the thread of navigation, to leave the labyrinth of Daedalus—which, prior to the labyrinths which are the delight of royal villas, must have been the Aegean Sea, on account of the great number of islands which that sea washes over and surrounds—and when he learns the art from the Cretans, he abandons Ariadne and returns with Phaedra, her sister—that is, a similar art—and thus, he kills the Minotaur and frees Athens from cruel ransom imposed by Minos by allowing those Athenians to be corsairs. And just as Phaedra was the sister of Ariadne, so Theseus was the brother of Daedalus.

636

On the occasion of these things, Plutarch says in his Life of Theseus481 that the heroes took it as a great honor and considered it a part of their prestige in arms, to be called “thieves,” just as in the return to barbarous times, “corsair” was considered a title of lordship. At about this time comes Solon, who is said to have permitted in his laws societies for the purpose of pillage: this is how much Solon understood our own perfected humanity, in which corsairs enjoy no protections from the natural law of the gentile peoples! However, we may wonder even more that Plato and Aristotle482 posited thievery as a kind of hunting: so, these great philosophers of the most humane people agree with the barbarous ancient Germans, among whom Caesar483 relates that thievery was not only not infamous, but was even considered a part of the exercise of virtue, by which someone who was not committed to some art would escape idleness. This barbarous custom endured for so long among the most luminous nations that Polybius484 tells us that the peace between the Romans and the Carthaginians, among its other laws, decreed that the Romans could not pass by the Cape Pelorum in Sicily, because of pillage or trade. However, the point about the Carthaginians and Romans is minor: they put themselves forward as barbarians in those times (as one can observe in Plautus,485 in the passage where he says that he translated  Virgil, Aeneid 1.301 and 6.19.   See Plutarch, Life of Theseus 6 and 10. 482   See Plato, Sophist 222c and Aristotle, Politics 1.8 (1256a). 483  Caesar, De bello gallico 6.23. 484  Polybius, Histories 3.24.4. 485  Plautus, Asinaria, Prologue, 11, and Trinummus, Prologue, 19. 480 481

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Greek comedies into a barbarous tongue, by which he means Latin). It is a major point that the most humane Greeks in the times of their most cultivated humanity celebrated so barbarous a custom. Hence, it is treated in almost all the plots of their comedies, and it is, perhaps, because of the same custom (for it is still practiced today against Christians) that the coast of Africa opposite to us is called the Barbary Coast. The principle pertaining to this most ancient law of war was the lack of hospitality in heroic peoples, upon which we reasoned above [§611]: they regarded foreigners under the aspect of perpetual enemies and rested their reputation for power upon keeping foreigners as far from their border as possible (as Tacitus tells us concerning the Suevi, the nation of greatest repute in ancient Germany). And they regarded foreigners as thieves, upon whom, we have reasoned a little above: concerning this, there is a golden passage in Thucydides,486 that up until his own time, whenever they encountered one another traveling by land or making passage by sea, they would ask, interchangeably, if they were thieves or foreigners, which meant the same.

637

However, as Greece hastened on in its humanity, it presently shed this custom, and they called “barbarous” all nations which preserved it. This significance was retained in the name Βαρβαρία [barbaria] for the Troglodytes, who must have killed the sort of guests who entered within their borders, just as even today there are barbarous nations for whom this is customary. Certainly, even humane nations do not allow in foreigners without their having been given permission. Among those whom, because of this custom, the Greeks called “barbarous nations” was the Roman nation, on account of two golden passages in the Law of the Twelve Tables: the first is ADVERSUS HOSTEM AETERNA AUCTORITAS ESTO [“Against a stranger, let authority be eternal”]); the second, reported by Cicero,487 is SI STATUS DIES SIT CUM HOSTE VENITO [“If a day is established, let him come with the stranger”]. And here the term hostis is taken as suggestive of more general terminology, as a metaphor expressing an adversary in the courtroom. However, Cicero’s reflection on this passage is much to our purpose: he says that, for the ancients, hostis meant the same as what was later called peregrinus [“traveler”]. Putting these two passages together allows one to understand that, from the beginning, the Romans considered foreigners as eternal enemies at war. However, the two passages as stated must be understood in terms of those who were the earliest hostes in the world, those who, as was stated above [§611], were the foreigners received in the asylums, who later took on the condition of plebeians in the formation of heroic cities, as more fully demonstrated above [§§553, 555]. 486 487

 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.5.2.  Cicero, De officiis 1.12.37.

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The New Science As a result, the passage in Cicero means “on the established day, let the noble come with the plebeian to claim the farm,” as was also stated above [§§603, 621]. Accordingly, the “eternal authority” expressed in the same laws must have been authority against the plebeians (against whom Aristotle says in the Axioms488 that the heroes swore eternal enmity). On account of this heroic law, usucaption of any Roman ground was impossible for the plebeians, no matter how long the course of time, for such grounds were exchanged only among the nobles. This is, in good part, the reason why the Law of the Twelve Tables did not recognize bare possession. Hence, later, when heroic law started to fall into disuse and human law grew stronger, the praetors assisted those with bare possession on an extraordinary basis, for neither openly nor by any interpretation did they have in the Law of the Twelve Tables any basis for establishing ordinary judgments, either strict or equitable. And all this was because this same law considered even bare possession by the plebeians to be entirely at the disposal of the nobles. In addition, this law was untroubled by the furtive or violent acts of these same nobles on account of that other property of the earliest republics (which Aristotle also stated in the Axioms489) that they did not have laws concerning private damages and offences. They must have seen to these private matters by force of arms, as we will demonstrate more fully in Book Four, and this true force, later, remained in the fictive force in the solemnities around repossession of property, which Aulus Gellius490 calls “of straw.” All this is confirmed by the interdict Unde vi [“On force”] (which was granted by the praetors in extraordinary cases, because the Law of the Twelve Tables had no understanding of, much less language for, private violence) and by two acts, De vi bonorum raptorum [“Concerning the use of force with stolen goods”] and Quod metus caussa [“Action whose cause is duress”] (which came late and were also from the praetors).

639

Now, this heroic custom of considering foreigners as eternal enemies, which was observed in private affairs by each people in peace, when it was brought to bear abroad, was recognized as common to all heroic peoples in their exercise of eternal wars with each other by continuous raiding and piracy. Thus, it is from these cities, which Plato491 says were born on the basis of arms, as we have seen above [§588], and which at their start were governed in a warlike fashion, even before the arrival of wars waged between   See Aristotle, Politics 5.9 (1310a9) and Axiom 86.   Axiom 85. 490   Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 20.10.10. 491  Plato, Laws 1.2 (626a). 488 489

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cities, it is from this πόλις [polis], “city,” that the Greek word for “war,” πόλεμος [polemos] came. Now, as proof of what has been said, the following important observation must be made: the Romans extended the conquests and spread out the victories they brought back from the world by four laws which they used upon the plebeians within Rome. For with the more ferocious provinces, they used the clientships of Romulus, by sending Roman colonists which changed the patrons of fields into day laborers. With the tamer provinces, they used the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, by permitting those provinces bonitary domain over the fields. With the Italian provinces, they used the agrarian law of the Law of the Twelve Tables, by permitting quiritary domain, which they enjoyed as grounds called Italian soil. With the municipalities, or well-deserving cities, they used the laws pertaining to connubium and the consulship, which were shared with the plebs.

640

This eternal enmity among the earliest cities did not require that wars were declared, and so pillaging was considered just. And so, by contrast, when, later, nations left behind primitive and barbarous customs of this sort, they held undeclared wars to be pillaging, no longer recognized by the natural law of the gentile peoples which Ulpian492 calls “humane.”

641

This same eternal enmity of the earliest peoples must explain for us that the long period of time in which the Romans waged war with the Albans was the whole previous time in which both sides practiced one against the other, back and forth, the pillaging of which we are here speaking. Hence, it was more reasonable that Horatius would kill his sister,493 for she mourned that her Curiatius was someone who had abducted, not married, her, whereas Romulus himself was not able to have a wife from those same Albans, in no way aided either by the fact that he was one of the Alban royalty or by the great benefit of expelling the tyrant, Aemulius, and restoring the Romans’ legitimate king, Numitor. It is noteworthy that they contracted laws of victory upon the outcome of combat between those principally interested in the outcome: in the case of the war with Alba, these were the three Horatii and the three Curiatii: and in the case of the Trojan War, these were Paris and Menelaus, and when this outcome remained undecided, the Greeks and the Trojans later continued the war until its conclusion. So too, in the more recent barbarous times, princes by personal combat would similarly bring the controversies over their regimes to a conclusion, to whose outcome their peoples were subject. And behold, Alba was the Latin Troy, and the Roman Helen was Horatia, who had a history among the Greeks which was completely 492 493

 Ulpian, Digest 2.14.7.1.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5.

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The New Science the same (as was reported by Gerald Van Voss in his Rhetoric). And the ten years494 of the siege of Troy for the peoples of Greece must have been the ten years of the siege of the Veii for the peoples of Latium—that is, a finite number representing an infinite amount of previous time in which cities practice eternal hostility toward one another.495 For reckoning numbers, insofar as they are most abstract, was the last thing to be understood by the nations—as will be reasoned upon in this book to other purposes [§§713, 1026]. This, even after reason was more fully articulated, was retained in Latin by sexcenta [“six hundred”] (just as, in Italian, we said “one hundred” at first and “one thousand and a hundred” later) in order to express a number beyond counting, for the idea of an infinite number can only fall within the mind of philosophers. Consequently, it is, perhaps, in order to express a great number that the earliest peoples said “twelve.” So, twelve were the gods of the gentes maiores (of which Varro496 and the Greeks counted thirty thousand); twelve also were the labors of Hercules, which must have been countless. And the peoples of Latium said that twelve were the parts of a penny, which can be divided into infinite parts; of this sort must have been what was called the Law of the Twelve Tables, representing the infinite number of laws which were inscribed on tables over time. Therefore, at the time of the Trojan War, it was necessary that the Greeks were called “Achaeans” in that part of Greece where it was waged—they had been previously called “Pelasgians” after Pelasgus, one of the most ancient heroes of Greece, upon which we reasoned above [§564]. Later, the name “Achaean” came to expand over all of Greece, and this lasted up until the time of Lucius Mummius (as was observed by Pliny497) such that, from that point and for all of time thereafter, they were called “Hellenes.” And so, the propagation of the name “Achaeans” made those in the time of Homer find that all of Greece was allied in that war. This is exactly how (as Tacitus498 relates) the name “Germany” eventually spread over all that great part of Europe, derived from those who had crossed the Rhine and, from there, expelled the Gauls and started to call themselves “Germans.” And so, the glory of these peoples poured this name out over Germany, just as the fame of the Trojan War spread the name “Achaeans” over all of Greece. For this is how much peoples in their earliest barbarism understood of leagues, that none of the peoples of those kings who were offended cared to take up arms so as to vindicate them, as was observed at that beginning of the Trojan War.   The ten years are from 406 to 396 BCE. See Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.22.   See Plautus, Bacchides 128; Menaechmi 222; Miles gloriosus 355; Horace, Satires 1.3.13, and Epistles 1.18, 1.25. 496   On the claim that Varro counted thirty thousand gods, see the note at §175. 497  Pliny, Natural History 35.8.24. 498  Tacitus, Germania 2.5. 494 495

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Because the nature of human civil things is such, and not otherwise, one can resolve the following problem worthy of wonder. How is it that Spain, which was the mother of such nations which Cicero499 acclaimed as the strongest and most bellicose and which Caesar himself experienced (while in every other part of the world which he defeated, Caesar fought for empire, only in Spain did he fight to save himself), how is it, we say, that with the disaster of Saguntum500 (which for eight continuous months made Hannibal sweat with his entire force fresh from Africa, forces with which later, although they were tired and much reduced, he came just short after the rout at Cannae of a triumph over Rome on the Capitoline itself), how is it with the clamor from Numantia (which made Roman glory tremble although it already triumphed over Carthage and proved a match to the very virtue and wisdom of Scipio which had triumphed over Africa), how is it that Spain did not unite all its peoples into a league to establish a universal empire on the banks of the Tagus, but instead afforded Lucius Florus501 a place for the unhappy eulogy which he made, that Spain became aware of its strength only after it had been defeated in all its parts? Tacitus502 in his Life of Agricola noticed this same custom in the English at a time when they were found to be most ferocious and reflected on it with another expression of sound understanding: dum singuli pugnant, universi vincuntur [“while they fight separately, they are defeated as a whole”]. For while they remained untouched, like wild beasts within the dens of the borders, they continued to pay homage to the primitive and solitary life of the sons of Polyphemus demonstrated above [§§516, 547, 576, 615, 629].

644

Therefore, historians are completely taken up by the fame of heroic warfare at sea and so completely stunned by it that they have not noticed heroic warfare on land, much less the heroic politics by which the Greeks at this time must have governed themselves.

645

However, Thucydides,503 a writer of great acuity and wisdom, left us with a great indication of this where he tells that heroic cities were without walls, as remained the case with Sparta in Greece and with Numantia, which was the Sparta of Spain. And given their arrogant and violent nature, the heroes all were expelling one another from their seats, just as Amulius expelled Numitor, and Romulus expelled Amulius and restored Numitor. This is how much assurance504 the chronologists should take from the genealogies of the royal households of heroic Greece and from the succession of fourteen kings in Latium in their reckoning of time! For in  Cicero, Ad Quintum fratrem 1.1.27.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.6–15. 501  Florus, Epitome of Roman History 1.33.4. 502  Tacitus, Agricola 12.3. 503  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.5.1. 504   Antiphrasis: the meaning is closer to “how little assurance.” 499 500

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The New Science the recourse to barbarism, at the time when Europe was at its crudest, one reads of a thing no more inconstant and no more variable that the fortune of regimes, as was noted above in the Chronological Table [§76]. And truly Tacitus,505 with great awareness, remarks upon this in the opening words of his Annals—urbem Romam principio reges HABUERE [“the city of Rome at its beginning had kings”]—by using the verb which signifies the weakest of the three kinds of possessions made out by the jurists—that is, habere [“to have”], tenere [“to hold”], and possidere [“to possess”].

646

The civil things celebrated under regimes of the sort are told to us in the poetic history of these myths, which contain contests of song (taking the word song [canto] as derived from canere or cantare, which mean “to foretell”) and, consequently, contain heroic contests concerning the auspices.

647

Thus, Marsyas506—the satyr who is SECUM IPSE DISCORS [“in discord with himself ”] and the monstrosity of whom Livy speaks—after defeated by Apollo in a contest of song, he is flayed alive by the god. Behold the savagery of heroic punishments! Linus—who must be a character representing the plebeians, for the other Linus was a heroic poet counted among Amphion, Orpheus, Musaeus, and others—was killed in a similar contest of song by Apollo.507 And in both of these myths, the contests are with Apollo, the god of divinity, of the science of divination or of the auspices—and we found above [§§537, 538] that he was also the god of the nobility, for the science of the auspices, as has been demonstrated with many proofs, belonged to the nobles alone.

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There are the myths of Sirens who put to sleep wayfarers with song and then murder them, of the Sphinx who proposes riddles to travelers and, when they do not know how to solve them, kills them; of Circe, who with her incantations changes the companions of Ulysses to swine. As a result of this, later, cantare was taken to mean “making witchcraft,” as in the phrase . . . cantando rumpitur anguis508 [. . . “the serpent bursts from the singing”],

whence the magic (which in Persia must have, at first, been wisdom in divining the auspices) continues to signify the art of witches, and the word witchcraft itself continues to be used to express “incantations.” The wayfarers, travelers, and wanderers of this sort were the foreigners of  Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.   For the myth of Marsyas and Apollo, see (among other sources) Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.58–59; Pliny, Natural History 16.89; Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.382–400. 507   See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.67. 508  Virgil, Eclogue 8.71. 505 506

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heroic cities, who, we stated above [§§611, 638], were the plebeians who contend with the heroes so as to take a share of the auspices in common with the nobles and who, when they were defeated in these efforts, were cruelly punished. Because of the same deeds, Pan the satyr tries to seize Syrinx, a nymph, as we said above [§467], valiant in song, and finds himself embracing reeds,509 and, just as with Pan and Syrinx, in his turn Ixion, in love with Juno, goddess of solemnized nuptials, embraces a cloud. As a result, the reeds signify the lights and the cloud signifies the emptiness of natural marriages. Hence, it is said that born from this cloud are centaurs—that is to say, plebeians—who are monstrosities because of their discordant natures (as Livy says510), centaurs who abduct their spouses from the Lapiths in the midst of their celebrating their nuptials.

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So too Midas, whom here we have found above [§580] to be a plebeian, wears hidden the ears of an ass, and the reeds which Pan seizes—that is, natural marriages—uncovers those ears, exactly as the Roman patricians proved to their plebeians that each of them was a monstrosity, for they AGITABANT CONNUBIA MORE FERARUM511 [“practiced marriage in the manner of wild animals”]. Vulcan, who here also must be a plebeian, tries to interpose in a contest between Jove and Juno, and with a kick from Jove, he falls from the heavens and remains lame.512 This must be a contest that the plebeians had made so as to take a share of the auspices of Jove and the connubium of Juno in common with the heroes, and when they were defeated in this contest, they remained lame in the sense that they were humiliated.

650

Thus, Phaethon, from the family of Apollo and consequently a child of the Sun, tries to direct the golden chariot of this father—the chariot of the poetic gold of grain—and turns it away from the accustomed paths which lead to the granary of his paterfamilias, and, with pretensions of domain over the fields, he falls from the heavens.513

651

However, above all, there is also falling from the heavens the apple of discord—that is, the apple which, as we have demonstrated above [§548], signifies domain over lands. For the earliest discord came into being because of the fields that the plebeians wished to cultivate for themselves, and Venus, who must here be the plebeian Venus, contends with Juno over connubium and with Minerva over power. For concerning the judgment of Paris, Plutarch,514 to our good fortune, notices in his Life of

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 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689–712.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. 511   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. 512   See Homer, Iliad 1.590–91; 15.22–24. 513   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.150–213. 514   Actually, the pseudo-Plutarch, in On the Life and Poetry of Homer 1.5. 509 510

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The New Science Homer that the two verses at the end of the Iliad515 which speak of this judgment were not from Homer, but from the hand of someone who came later.

653

Atalanta,516 by casting away the golden apples, defeats her suitors on the racecourse, exactly as Hercules wrestling with Antaeus raises him to the heavens and defeats him, as was explained above [§618]. Atalanta leaves to the plebeians first bonitary domain and then quiritary domain over the fields, and reserves connubium for herself, exactly as the Roman patricians with the first agrarian law of Servius Tullius and with the second agrarian law of the Law of the Twelve Tables also preserved connubium within their own order in the chapter entitled CONNUBIA INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO [“nuptials are not to be shared in common with the plebs”], itself the consequence of another earlier chapter, AUSPICIA INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO [“the auspices are not to be shared in common with the plebs”].517 Hence, three years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, the plebs started to make a claim to the auspices and nuptials, and after a heroic contest of three years they took them.

654

The suitors of Penelope invade the royal household of Ulysses—that is to say, the regime of the heroes—and call themselves kings. If they devour the royal substance, this is because they consider domain over the fields to be their property. They seek to claim Penelope in marriage; they make claim to connubium. In some versions, Penelope remains chaste, and Ulysses hangs the suitors like thrushes in nets of the kind by which the heroic Vulcan caught the plebeian Venus and Mars518; he ties them up to cultivate the fields, like the day laborers of Achilles (just as Coriolanus tried to reduce the Roman plebeians who were not content with the agrarian law of Servius Tullius to the day laborers of Romulus, as was stated above [§108]). At this point, Ulysses519 also fights with the impoverished Irus, and murders him, which must have been an agrarian contest in which the plebeians were devouring the substance of Ulysses. In other versions,520 Penelope prostitutes herself to the suitors, allowing the plebs to share in connubium. From this she gives birth to Pan, a monstrosity with two discordant natures, human and bestial, which is precisely the SECUM IPSE DISCORS [“something in discord with itself ”] in Livy,521 which  Homer, Iliad 24.29–30.   See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.9.2 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.560–680. 517   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6 and 10.8.9. 518   See Homer, Odyssey 22.171–192 and 300–305. 519  Homer, Odyssey 18.66–104. 520   See Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.12; Cicero, On the Nature of the God 3.22.56; Maurus Servius Honoratus, Commentary on Aeneid 2.44; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 35.27.8. 521   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. Livy’s text actually reads ne secum quidem ipse concors. 515 516

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Book Two the Roman patricians said to the plebeians would be the nature of whosoever was born from those plebeians who had a share of connubium in common with the nobles, a monstrosity similar to the Pan who, a monster with two discordant natures, was the offspring of Penelope when she prostituted herself to the plebeians. From the Pasiphaë, who lies with a bull, was born the Minotaur, a monstrosity of two different natures.522 This must be the history of the heroic Cretans sharing connubium with foreigners, who must have come to Crete in the ship called “Bull”; it was by this ship, as we have explained above [§635], that Minos abducted lads and maidens from Attica and that Jove previously had abducted Europa.

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It is to this kind of civil history that the myth of Io must appeal. Jove falls in love with her; he is favorable to her in his auspices. Juno is jealous with a civil jealousy that, as we explained above [§513], preserves solemnized nuptials for the heroes. Jove gives her to be guarded by Argus of the hundred eyes; she is guarded by the Argive Fathers, each one with his own lucus, with his own cultivated land, as we interpreted the lucus above [§564]. Mercury, who here must be a character representing plebeian traders, by the sound of his pipe—or rather, by his song— puts Argus to sleep; he defeats the Argive Fathers in a contest over the auspices, by which they sang out each person’s lot in solemnized nuptials. And Io at this point changes into a cow and lies with the bull with which Pasiphaë laid. She goes wandering in Egypt—that is, among those Egyptian foreigners by whom Danaus had expelled the Inachids from rule in Argos.523

656

However, Hercules at the end of his time becomes effeminate and spins under the command of Iole and Omphale; the heroic right over the fields came to be subject to the plebeians, in comparison with whom the heroes called themselves viri [“men”], which means the same in Latin as “heroes” does in Greek. So, Virgil starts his Aeneid with a weight given to this word,

657

Arma VIRUMque cano524 [“I sing of arms and the man”];

and Horace translates the first verse of the Odyssey, Dic mihi, Musa, VIRUM525 [“Speak to me, Muse, of the man”].

And VIRI continued for the Romans to signify solemnized husbands, magistrates, priests, and judges, for in the poetic aristocracy, nuptials and   See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.60; Apollodorus, Epitome 3.1.2–4; Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.4.5. 523   See Hyginus, Fables 168; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.1.5; Strabo, Geography 8.6.9. 524  Virgil, Aeneid 1.1. 525  Horace, Ars poetica 141. 522

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The New Science civil powers and priesthoods and judgeships were all enclosed within the heroic orders. And thus, there was a sharing of the heroic right over the fields with the plebeians of Greece, just as there was by the Roman patricians a sharing of quiritary right with the plebeians (fought for through the second agrarian law and taken with the Law of the Twelve Tables, as was demonstrated above [§§109, 598]). Exactly in this way in the times of the return to barbarism, feudal goods were called GOODS OF THE LANCE, and borough goods were called GOODS OF THE DISTAFF, as it is held in the laws of the English; hence, the royal arms of France, in order to signify the Salic law which excludes women from succession of rule, are supported by two angels dressed in priestly robes and armed with spears and adorned with the words, LILIA NON NENT [“lilies do not spin”]. As a result, just as Baldus526 by our good luck called the Salic law IUS GENTIUM GALLORUM [“the law of the Gallic peoples”], so we can call the Law of the Twelve Tables (inasmuch as in its rigor it preserved in succession intestate to direct paternal or tribal kinship) IUS GENTIUM ROMANORUM [“the law of the Roman peoples”]. For it will be shown below [§991] how true527 it is that, in the earliest times of Rome, it was customary for daughters to succeed intestate their fathers, such that, later, this passed into the Law of the Twelve Tables.

658

Finally, Hercules goes into a fury by being stained by the blood of Nessus the centaur, the exact plebeian monstrosity of two discordant natures of which Livy speaks—that is, in the midst of civil furor he shares connubium with the plebs and is contaminated by plebeian blood—and it is in this fashion that, as Fidus, the Roman Hercules, dies, on account of the Petelian law called De nexu: by this law, VINCULUM FIDEI VICTUM EST [“the bond of faith was unbound”], and although Livy528 reports this on the occasion of a deed which came to pass ten years later, it was in substance the same as that which was the cause of the Petelian law, which must have required that they institute as an order what was contained in the words—these words must have been in some ancient writer of annals, which Livy with as much good faith as ignorance reported. For by freeing the plebeians from the private incarceration by the noble creditors, those in debt were still constrained by judicial laws to pay their debts; however, they were released from the law of fealties, the law of the Herculean knot, born inside the earliest asylums of the world. Accordingly, it is a strong conjecture that the author of these annals had written VINCULUM FIDI [“THE BOND OF FIDUS”], for the god  Baldus, Commentaria in primam Digesti veteris partem 1.9, and quoted at Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 6.5. 527   Antiphrasis: the intended meaning is closer to “how untrue.” 528   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.28.8. 526

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Fidus (whom Varro529 says was the Roman Hercules), and others who came later, not understanding the word, erroneously believed that it was written FIDEI: this heroic natural law has been found to be the same for peoples in the Americas, and even today it endures in our world among the Abyssinians in Africa and among the Muscovites and Tartars of Europe and Asia; however, it was practiced with greater tameness among the Hebrews, with whom debtors served for no more than seven years. And, to bring this to an end, eventually Orpheus, the founder of Greece with his lyre—or his cord, or his force, all of which signify the same thing as the knot of Hercules, the knot of the Petelian law—dies, killed by the Bacchantes of the plebs in their furor; the Bacchantes broke into pieces his lyre,530 which, in the many proofs made above, signifies the law. Hence, already in the time of Homer, the heroes brought foreign women as their wives, and bastards came into royal successions. This demonstrates that popular liberty had already started to have currency in Greece.

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On account of all this, one has to conclude that these heroic contests gave the AGE OF HEROES its name. And one has to conclude that in these contests, many leaders, defeated and suppressed, were given to taking to the sea in wandering so as to discover other lands; that some, like Menelaus and Odysseus, eventually returned to their fatherlands while others, like Cecrops, Cadmus, Danaus, and Pelops, settled in foreign lands insofar as these heroic contests had come to pass many centuries previously in Phoenicia, Egypt, and Phyrgia, since in these places humanity had its start much earlier than those who settled in Greece; Dido must have been one of those who, after fleeing Phoenicia from the faction of her brother-in-law, who was pursuing her,531 settled in Carthage, which was called Punica as if for Phoenicia; and of all the Trojans after the destruction of Troy, Capys settled in Capua, Aeneas landed in Latium, Antenor entered into Padua.

660

In this fashion, there came an end to the wisdom of the theological poets, the wise men or political theorists of the poetic age of Greece—that is, Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus, and others—and by singing to the Greek plebs of the strength of the gods of the auspices (these were the praises these poets must have sung to the gods—that is, praises to the divine providence it belonged to them to sing), they kept those plebs in deference to their heroic orders. This is exactly how Appius, the grandson of the decemvir, around Year 300 of Rome (as was stated in another place [§81]), maintained the obedience of the plebs to the nobles, when he sang to the Roman plebeians of the strength of the gods in the auspices, whose science was held by the nobles. In the same way Amphion,

661

 Varro, De lingua latina 5.66.  Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.1–43. 531  Virgil, Aeneid 1.341. Virgil, however, portrays Pygmalion as Dido’s brother, not her brother-in-law. 529 530

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The New Science when he sang on his lyre, raised from stones thus moved the walls of Thebes, which three hundred years previously Cadmus had founded— that is, confirmed—by singing the heroic state.

Corollaries concerning the ancient Roman things and, in particular, the dreamed-up monarchical regime in Rome and the dreamed-up popular liberty instituted by Junius Brutus 662

Such great convergences between the human civil things of the Romans and the Greeks (by this ancient Roman history is found, by so many proofs, to be a continuous historical mythology for the numerous, varied, and different Greek myths) put anyone who has understanding (which is not the same as memory or imagination) under the necessity of affirming resolutely that from the time of kings up until the sharing of connubium with the plebs, the Roman people, the people of Mars, was composed only of nobles; and that to this people, the king Tullus, starting with the trial of Horatius,532 permitted the one condemned of a crime by the duumvirs or by the quaestors to appeal to the entire order at a time when the only orders were the heroic peoples and the plebs were mere additions to such peoples (later, provinces continued to be such additions to conquering nations, as Grotius533 well noticed), and it is exactly these plebs who are the “other people,” which Telemachus534 called his plebeians in assembly, as we noted herein above [§§590, 629]. Hence, on the strength of an undefeatable metaphysical art of criticism applied to these authors of the nations, one must shake out the error that a band comprised of the basest of day laborers, who were kept as slaves up from the death of Romulus, held elections for their kings, who were later approved by the Fathers. This must be an anachronism, from times in which the plebs were already part of cities and concurred in electing consuls (this was after connubium was shared with the plebs by the Fathers), and imposed on a time three hundred years earlier during the interregnum of Romulus.

663

This term “people,” when applied to the earliest times of the world of cities with the signification it has in more recent times (because neither philosophers nor philologists are able to imagine this kind of strict aristocracy), tends to entail two errors concerning two other terms, “king” and “liberty.” Hence, all have believed that the Roman regime was a monarchy and that the liberty instituted by Junius Brutus was popular.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.6.  Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis 1.3.7.2. 534   See Homer, Odyssey 2.12. 532

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However, although Jean Bodin enters into that common folk error into which all previous political theorists entered, that first there were monarchies, later tyrannies, then popular republics, and finally aristocracies (here one sees what distortions can be made and actually are made when there is a lack of true principles!), when he observes, during the dreamed-up popular liberty of ancient Rome, that the effects were nevertheless those of an aristocratic republic and so shores up his system with the following distinction, that in ancient times Rome had a popular constitution, but aristocratic governance.535 Even with all this (because the effects came to contradict it) and even by shoring his system up in this way, his political structure eventually collapsed under the weight of the truth, and with brute inconsistency he confesses that in ancient times, the Roman republic had an aristocratic constitution, and not just aristocratic governance. All of this is confirmed by Titus Livy:536 in telling us that Junius Brutus instituted the order of two yearly consuls, Livy plainly says and claims that this did not change the constitution (and in doing so, the wise Brutus must have called that constitution back to its beginnings), and he says that with the two annual consuls NIHIL QUICQUAM DE REGIA POTESTATE DEMINUTUM [“in no way was royal power decreased”]. This is inasmuch as the consuls came to be two yearly aristocratic kings, whom Cicero537 in his Laws names REGES ANNUOS [“yearly kings”], just as there were two kings for life in Sparta, a republic which undoubtedly was aristocratic. These consuls, as everyone knows, were subject to recall during the time of their rule (just as the Spartan kings were subject to being corrected by the ephors and, at the end of their year of rule, were subject to prosecution, which conforms to the fact that Spartan kings were put to death by the ephors). For this, there is a passage in Livy which demonstrates in one stroke both that the Roman regime was aristocratic and that the liberty instituted by Brutus was not popular—that is, the liberty of the people from the lords—but was lordly—that is, the liberty of the lords from the Tarquin tyrants. It is certain that Brutus would not have been able to do this if he had not been offered the deed of the Roman Lucretia, which he wisely seized; this occasion was clothed in all the sublime circumstances so as to arouse the plebs against the tyrant Tarquinius, who had so badly governed the nobility that it was up to Brutus to refill the Senate depleted by the deaths of so many senators because of Tarquinius Superbus.538 In doing this he achieved, with wise counsel, two public advantages: both the restrengthening of the order of nobles that was in decline and the preserving of the favor of the plebs, for it was from the body of the plebs that he must have culled many men (and perhaps the most ferocious of   See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.1, 2.6, 2.7, and 4.1.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.7. 537  Cicero, De legibus 3.8. 538   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.10. 535 536

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The New Science them who would have opposed reinstituting lordship) and made it so that it was they who entered into the orders of the nobility and from whom the city was composed, a city which was at that time completely divided inter PATRES et PLEBEM539 [“between the Fathers and the plebs”].

665

Consider the initial course taken by the many varied and diverse causes up until the age of Saturn, upon which we meditated herein. Consider the subsequent course of their many varied and diverse effects in the ancient Roman republic, which Bodin540 observes, and consider the continuity and consistency by which those causes led to the effects that Livy considers: see whether these are not worthy enough to establish that the Roman regime was aristocratic and that the liberty instituted by Brutus was lordly and only so as to hold on to their authority. If they are not, then one needs to say that the Romans, a barbarous and rude people, had to have a privilege from God which the Greeks could not have had, a people of acuity and the greatest humanity who, as told by Thucydides,541 knew nothing about their own antiquity up until the Peloponnesian War, the most luminous time of Greece, as we observed above in the Chronological Table [§101], where we demonstrated the same for the Romans up until the time of the second Carthaginian War, after which Livy claims to write Roman history with more certainty, and yet plainly admits that he did not know about three circumstances most worthy of consideration for that history, which were also observed in the Chronological Table [§117]. However, were one in spite of all this to concede such a privilege to the Romans, what remains is still an obscure memory, a confused image, and as such one is not able to deny the reasoning we have done upon these ancient Roman things.

Corollaries concerning the heroism of the earliest peoples 666

But the heroic age of the earliest world which we are treating draws us along by hard necessity to reason about the heroism of the earliest peoples. This heroism—through Axioms proposed above542 and used here and through the principles established here concerning heroic politics [§§582–598]—was a heroism quite different from that which was a consequence of the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,543 which the philosophers imagined, and which deceived the philologists. In defining the three terms which we noted above [§663], “people,” “king,” and “liberty,” the philologists took heroic peoples also to include the  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.23.1; 2.39.6.   See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.1, 2.1, 5.4. 541  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2. 542   See Axioms 3, 54, 55. 543   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. 539 540

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plebeians, they took heroic kings to be monarchs, and they took heroic liberty to be popular. By contrast, the philosophers applied to this heroism three of their genteel and learned ideas: first, the justice reasoned from the maxims of Socratic morals;544 second, the glory which is fame for having done benefits for humankind;545 and, third, the desire for immortality. Hence, with these three errors and by these three ideas, they believed that kings and other great personages in ancient times consecrated themselves and their families, as well as their entire patrimony and substance, to making happy those who are unfortunate, who are always the majority in cities and in nations. Yet Achilles, who is the greatest of the Greek heroes, had three properties, as Homer tells us, which were completely at odds with those three ideas of the philosophers. And concerning justice, when Hector says that he intends to bury Achilles if he kills him in battle, Achilles ferociously responds, without reflecting upon their equality of status or upon their common lot (the two considerations which naturally induce men to recognize justice): “When have men ever made pacts with lions, and when have wolves and lambs ever agreed in their intentions?” Indeed, he responds: “If I kill you, I will drag you naked tied to my chariot for three days around the walls of Troy” (which he did), “and in the end give you to my hunting dogs to eat.”546 He also would have done this if the unfortunate father of Hector, Priam, had not come to him to ransom the corpse. Concerning glory, on account of a private grievance—Agamemnon had offended him by taking his Briseis—he called himself wronged by men and gods, made an appeal to Jove to restore his honor, withdrew his men from the allied army and his ships from the armada, and suffered Hector to bring affliction upon the Greeks, and contrary to the dictates of the devotion that one owes to one’s fatherland, Achilles makes a show of avenging his own private wrong with the destruction of his entire nation; indeed, he is not ashamed to rejoice to Patroclus at the slaughter which Hector brings upon his Greeks, and to this same Patroclus, Achilles— this man who carries in his heels the fate of Troy—says something much worse, praying that all the Greeks and Trojans might die in the war and that they alone survive.547 Concerning their third idea, asked by Ulysses in the underworld if he wishes to stay there, Achilles responds that he would rather be alive and the basest of slaves.548   See the references to Socrates at §§102, 191, 424, 499.   Compare to Cicero’s definition of gloria at Pro Marcello 8.26. 546   Here Vico is collating passages from Iliad 22.258–265, 335–355, and 395–404. 547   Here Vico is collating passages from Iliad 1.322–344, 353–354, 490–491, and Iliad 16.77–79, 97–100. 548  Homer, Odyssey 11.489–491. 544 545

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The New Science Behold the hero of whom Homer sings with the invariable epithet “blameless” to the Greek people as a model of heroism! If Homer profits us by teaching and delighting at the same time, as poets ought to do, then one cannot understand this epithet otherwise than in terms of a man who is so arrogant that he would not allow, as we would say today, a fly to pass before the tip of his nose; thus, Homer preaches the virtue of punctiliousness, in which during the return to barbarism those who engage in duels placed their entire morality. From this ethics came the proud laws, the lofty duties, and the vengeful satisfactions of the knights-errant of whom writers of romances sing.

668

In comparison with this, reflect upon the oath which Aristotle549 says that the heroes swore against the plebs, to be their eternal enemies; reflect, subsequently, upon Roman history in the time of Roman virtue (a time which Livy550 determines to be up until the Pyrrhic War and to which he gives acclaim with the words nulla aeta virtutum feracior [“no age was more fruitful in virtues”], a time which we, following Sallust551 in Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei, extend from the expulsion of the kings up until the second Carthaginian War); there is Brutus, who consecrated his household along with his two sons to liberty; there is Scaevola,552 who punishes his own right hand in fire for not knowing how to kill Porsena, the Etruscan king, and by doing so terrifies Porsena and puts him to flight; there is the Manilius, called The Imperious, who because of a happy fault553 of military discipline (which was still successful and inspired by the motives of valor and glory) cut off the head of his own victorious son; there is Curtius,554 who casts himself, armed and mounted, fatally into a trench; there are the Decii,555 father and son who consecrate themselves to the safety of their armies; there are Fabricius and Curius,556 who refuse Samnite gold beyond compare and a share in rule offered by Pyrrhus; there is Atilius Regulus,557 who went to Carthage and to a certain death of the most cruel kind so as to preserve the sanctity of a Roman oath; what did any of these men do for the miserable and unfortunate Roman plebs, what did they do other than oppress them more with taxes in wartime, plunge them more deeply into an ocean of usury, bury them at the bottom of private prisons where the nobles beat their bared shoulders in the fashion of the basest slaves? And if someone tried to lift up the plebs with some grain law or agrarian law, this order of  Aristotle, Politics 5.9 (1310a9).  Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.16.19. 551   See Augustine, City of God 2.18, and Sallust, Histories 1.10. 552  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.12. 553   The Italian is felice peccato, a deliberate echo (as Battistini notes) of felix culpa, a phrase that appears in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil (“O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer”). 554  Livy, Ab urbe condita 7.6. 555  Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.9–10 and 10.28–29. 556   On Fabricius and Curius, see Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 20 and 25. 557   See Cicero, De officiis 3.99–100. 549 550

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heroes in the time of this Roman virtue would condemn and kill him as a traitor; this is what came to pass (so as not to touch on all the others) for Manilius Capitolinus, who had preserved the Capitoline from the fire of the exceptionally brutal Senonic Gauls; this is what came to pass in Sparta—that city of the heroes of Greece, just as Rome was that of the heroes of the world—for the magnanimous king Agis because, when he attempted to lessen the poverty of the plebs of Lacedaemon oppressed by usury of the nobles, with one law erasing debts and with another law attempted to lift up the plebs concerning testaments, he was, as stated in another place [§592], strangled by the ephors; hence just as the valorous Agis was the Manlius Capitolinus of Sparta, so Manlius Capitolinus was the Agis of Rome and, on the mere suspicion of somewhat assisting the impoverished and oppressed Roman plebs, was thrown down from the Tarpeian Rock. As a result, it was on account of this—namely, that the nobles of the earliest peoples considered themselves heroes, that is, of a nature superior to that of the plebeians, as was fully demonstrated above [§§197, 449, 560, 586, 606])—that they acted so badly in their governance of the impoverished multitudes of the nations. For certainly Roman history will baffle any discerning reader who combines the reports above. Where is the Roman virtue in the midst of such great pride? Where is moderation in the midst of such great avarice? Where is the tameness in the midst of such great savagery? Where is the justice in the midst of such great inequality? Hence, the principles that are able to satisfy someone in such great wonder must necessarily be the following:

669

I. Subsequent to the wild education of the giants reasoned upon above [§§369–371, 523–524], the education of children would be severe, harsh, and cruel, as it was for the unlettered Lacedaemonians, who were the heroes of Greece558 and who would beat their sons in the Temple of Diana within an inch of their lives (as a result of this they often fell dead, writhing in pain under the blows of their fathers) in order to inure them to fear of pain and death; this cyclopean paternal power remained for both the Greeks and the Romans, permitting them to kill innocent infants newly born. For now we make our young children our delight, which today makes for all the refinement of our natures.

670

II. Wives were bought with heroic dowries, which remained later as a solemnity in the nuptials of Roman priests, which were contracted coëmptione et farre [“by mutual sale and spelt cakes”] and which was also, as Tacitus559 tells us, the custom of the ancient Germans, which allows us to deem the custom to be the same for all the early barbarous peoples. And

671

558 559

  See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 18.  Tacitus, Germania 18.

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The New Science wives were kept, as if by natural necessity, for the purpose of making children: in other respects, they were treated as slaves. This is a custom of nations to which many parts of our world conform, and to which almost the whole of the New World does.

672

III. Sons acquired for and wives saved for their husbands and their fathers, entirely the opposite of what is done today.

673

IV. Games and pleasures were tiring, for example, wrestling and racing (hence, Homer560 gives Achilles the continuous epithet “swift-footed”). They were also dangerous, for example, jousting and hunting wild beasts, whence they were accustomed to hardening their strength and spirit and to risking and scorning their lives.

674

V. They were completely lacking in understanding of luxury, daintiness, and ease.

675

VI. Wars, like heroic antiquity, were completely beholden to religion, which (for the reason that we have taken it as the first principle of this science [§§333–335]) makes them all extremely atrocious.

676

VII. Slavery also had currency in heroic times, which came about as a result of those wars, in which the defeated were considered men without God, and so lost their natural liberty along with their civil liberty. And here we have use for that Axiom posited above: “Natural liberty is fiercer inasmuch as its goods are more properly connected to our bodies, and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary for life.”561

677

Because of all this, republics were naturally aristocratic—that is, republics of those who were naturally strongest—which closed off but to a few noble Fathers all civil honors, and the public good was in the family monarchies preserved by the fatherland; for the true fatherland, as we have stated more fully elsewhere [§§584, 601], was the interests of a few Fathers, because of which the citizens were naturally patricians. And with such natures, such customs, such republics, such orders, and such laws, the heroism of the earliest peoples will have currency. This heroism, since the causes just enumerated are the complete opposites of those which later produced the other two kinds of civil constitution which, as we proved above [§292], are both human—namely the free popular republics and, still more human, the monarchies—is now impossible, because of our civil nature. For throughout the entire time of Roman popular liberty, only Cato of Utica had a reputation for heroism, and this reputation remained the 560

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  See Homer, Iliad 1.58, 84, 121, 148, 215, 364, 489.   Axiom 94, quoted inexactly.

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Book Two guiding spirit of the aristocratic republic: after the fall of Pompey and with Cato left as the head of the nobility, because he was not able to suffer seeing his party humiliated by Caesar, Cato committed suicide. During monarchies, the heroes are those who consecrate themselves to the glory and greatness of their sovereigns. Hence, one has to conclude that such a hero is desired by afflicted peoples, reasoned about by philosophers, and imagined by poets. However, civil nature, as we considered it in an Axiom,562 does not tend towards this sort of benefit. All the things about which we have reasoned here concerning the heroism of the earliest peoples gains light and splendor from the Axioms posited above563 concerning Roman heroism, which will be common both to the heroism of the Athenians in the times when, as Thucydides tells us, they are governed by the most severe Areopagites, which, as we have seen, was an aristocratic senate, and to the heroism of the Spartans, who were a republic of the sons of Hercules—that is, of lords—as a thousand proofs above have demonstrated [§592].

678

Epitomes of poetic history I. This entire divine and heroic history of the theological poets was described to us with much infelicity of expression in the myth of Cadmus.564 He kills the great serpent; he deforests the great ancient forest of the Earth. He sows the teeth of this serpent; this is a fine metaphor, as was stated above [§541], for the hard curved wood which prior to the discovery of the use of iron must have served as the teeth of the earliest ploughs, and with these, which are still called “teeth,” they ploughed the earliest fields of the world. He casts a great stone—that is, the hard earth that the clients, or familial servants, wished to plough for themselves, as was explained above [§583]. Born from the furrows were armed men; these represent the heroic contests over the first agrarian law in which, as we stated [§584], the heroes emerged from their grounds—which is to say that they were the lords of those grounds—and united in arms against the plebeians. And they fought not among themselves but with the clients rebelling against them. And the furrows signify those orders in which they united and by which they formed and settled the first cities   Axiom 80.   Axioms 84–91. 564   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.1–130. 562 563

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The New Science on the basis of arms, as is all stated above [§§338, 446, 563]. And Cadmus changes into a serpent; thus does the authority of aristocratic senates come into being, or, as the most ancient peoples of Latium would have said, Cadmus fundus factus est565 [“Cadmus has become the ground”], and, as the people of Greece said, Cadmus changed into a Draco, who wrote laws in blood.566 All of this is that which above [§446] we promised to make it possible to see, that the myth of Cadmus contains many centuries of poetic history and is a great exemplar of the infant muteness in which the world in its childhood toiled to express itself, which is one of the seven great sources of the difficulty about myths that we will enumerate below [§814]. This shows with how much felicity of expression Cadmus knew how leave a history written in his common alphabetic letters, which he supposedly brought to Greece from the Phoenicians!567 And Desiderius Erasmus (by a thousand inanities unworthy of a man with such great erudition that he was called the “Christian Varro”) suggests that it [the myth of Cadmus] contains the history of the letters discovered by Cadmus.568 If this were so, then this brilliant history (the history of so great a benefit to the nations as the discovery of letters which, because of its brilliance, ought to have had the widest repute) was instead hidden by Cadmus for humankind in Greece within the folds of this myth in obscurity until the times of Erasmus, so as to keep secret from the common run one of the greatest discoveries of commonplace wisdom, that it is from the “common run” [volgo] that such letters are called “common” [volgari].

II. 680

By contrast, with wondrous brevity and congruity Homer569 tells this whole history, compressed into the hieroglyph left on the scepter of Agamemnon. Vulcan made this scepter for Jove, for Jove with the first lightning bolts after the Flood founded his regime over gods and men— that is, the divine regimes in the familial state. Later, Jove gave the scepter to Mercury, and it was the caduceus with which Mercury brings the first agrarian law to the plebs; hence there came into being the heroic regimes of the first cities. Here, Mercury gave the scepter to Pelops, Pelops gave   See Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19.   See Plutarch, Life of Solon 17. 567   For this claim, see Herodotus, Histories 5.58. Vico is here using the trope of antiphrasis; his meaning is closer to “how little felicity of expression.” 568   See Erasmus, De recta latini graecique sermonis pronunciatione, in Opera omnia emendatiora (Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1703), 1:927. 569  Homer, Iliad 2.102–107. 565 566

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Book Two it to Thyestes, Thyestes to Atreus, and Atreus to Agamemnon, which is the entire succession of the royal household of Argos.

III. But this same Homer570 with greater fullness and explicitness tells us the history of the world in his description of the shield of Achilles.

681

I. In the beginning, one sees on that shield heaven and earth, the sea, the sun, the moon, the stars. This is the epoch of the creation of the world.

682

II. Later, there are two cities. In the first city, there are songs, wedding hymns, nuptials. This is the epoch of the heroic families composed of sons born of solemnized nuptials. In the second city, we see none of these things. This is the epoch of the heroic families composed of servants who do not covenant except in natural marriages, lacking any of the solemnity of the heroic nuptials in which heroes covenant.

683

Thus, both of these cities represent the state of nature—that is, the familial state—and it was exactly these two cities which Eumaeus,571 swineherd to Ulysses, recounts two fatherlands, both ruled by his father; in them, the citizens had fully divided up their things—that is, had no share in citizenship among the things they shared in common. Hence, the city without wedding hymns is precisely the “other people,” as Telemachus calls the plebs of Ithaca in an assembly;572 and Achilles, lamenting the outrage done to him by Agamemnon, says that he has been treated as a day laborer who has no share in governance.573 III. Later, in the city with nuptials, are seen parliaments, laws, judges, penalties, which is exactly how the Roman patricians responded in the heroic contests to the plebs, that nuptials and political power and the priesthood (on which ultimately depends the science of the laws and, along with this, judgments) were legitimately their own property, for the auspices which made for the greatest solemnity of nuptials were their property. Hence, VIRI [“men”] (which names in Latin what “heroes” does in Greek) is what they called husbands of solemn marriages, magistrates, priests, and, last of all, judges, as was stated in another place above [§657]. Thus, this is the epoch of heroic cities, which arose out of the families composed of servants with the most severe aristocratic constitution.

684

IV. The second city is besieged by arms, and each city loots the other in turn in the earliest raids.

685

 Homer, Iliad 18.478–607.  Homer, Odyssey 15.412–414. 572   See Homer, Odyssey 2.12. 573   See Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59. 570 571

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The New Science And therein the city without nuptials—that is, the plebs of heroic cities— becomes an entirely separate, enemy city. Here is wondrously confirmed what we reasoned upon above [§638], that the earliest foreigners, the earliest hostes [“enemies”], were the plebs of heroic peoples, against whom, as we have many times learned from Aristotle574 [§§271, 588, 611, 638, 688], the heroes swore eternal enmity. Hence, later, separate cities, because they were foreigners to one another, practiced with heroic thievery eternal enmity towards one another, as we reasoned above [§§636–637].

686

V. And, finally, one sees described on the shield the history of the arts of humanity, starting during the epoch of families. For, first before all other things, one sees the Father and king who decrees with his scepter that the roasted oxen be divided among the harvesters. Next, one sees vineyards planted, then flocks, shepherds, huts, and last of all are described dances. This image so beautifully and truly lays out the order of human things: first were discovered the arts pertaining to the necessary (so there is agriculture giving bread first and then wine); and later were discovered the arts pertaining to the advantageous (so, herding); and subsequently were discovered the arts of pertaining to the comfortable (so, architecture for cities); and finally the arts pertaining to the pleasurable (so, dances).

On Poetic Physics 687

Let us pass now to the other branch from the trunk of Poetic Metaphysics, from which poetic wisdom branches off into Physics and subsequently into Cosmography, and from this into Astronomy, whose fruits are Chronology and Geography. We will offer this second part of our reasoning on Poetic Metaphysics, beginning with Physics.

688

The theological poets gave consideration to a physics for the world of nations and, accordingly, defined Chaos575 as the confusion of the seeds of humans in the state of the infamous sharing of women in common; it was from this confusion that later physicists were given to think about the confusion of seminal matter of the universe in nature, and to explain this confusion they used the already discovered, and hence congruous, term of the poets. There was confusion in Chaos because none of the orders of humanity were there. There was darkness because it was deprived of that civil light by which the heroes were called brilliant. They also imagined it as Orcus, a malformed monster who devours everything, for men in that infamous sharing did not have the form proper to men and were sucked into nothingness because, owing to the uncer-

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 Aristotle, Politics 5.9, 1310a9.   See Hesiod, Theogony 211–232.

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tainty of their offspring, they left nothing of themselves. This Orcus was later taken up by physicists as the primal matter of natural things, which, unformed, is greedy for forms and devours all forms. However, the poets also gave Chaos the monstrous form of Pan, the forest god who is the numinous presence of all satyrs, inhabiting not cities but the woods; and who is a character to which are reduced the impious men wandering through the great forest of the Earth, those who have a human aspect, but profane and bestial customs. Later by forced allegories, as we will observe below [§910], philosophers deceived by the word πᾶν [pan], which means in Greek “all,” took Pan to be the formed universe. The learned also believed that the poets had an understanding of primal matter in the myth of Proteus, with whom Ulysses wrestles in Egypt, Proteus in the water and Ulysses out of it; Ulysses is not able to take hold of him, because he is always changing into new forms.576 However, such sublimity of learning on their part was great gullishness and simplicity on the part of the earliest men who, like children looking in a mirror and trying to take hold of their reflections, believed, because of the various modifications of their gestures and appearances, that there was a man in the water who was changing into various forms. Eventually, the heavens cast forth lightning bolts, and Jove gave beginning to the world of men by putting in them the conatus577 that is proper to freedom of the mind, just as by the motion that is proper to bodies, which are agents of necessity, he gave a start to the world of nature, insofar as what seems to be conatus in nature is the motion of insensate bodies, as was stated above in the Method [§340].578

689

From such conatus came the civil light whose character was Apollo, and in this light, there became distinct the civil beauty by which the heroes were beauty, and whose character was Venus; later, physicists took this as the beauty of nature, indeed, as all of formed nature, which is beautiful and adorned with all sensible forms. The world of the theological poets came from four sacred elements: from the air where Jove casts lightning bolts; from the water of the perennial springs whose numinous presence is Diana; from the fire by which Vulcan cleared the forests; and from the cultivated earth—that is, Cybele or Berecynthia. All four of these are the elements of divine  Homer, Odyssey 4.450–459. As Battistini notes, the protagonist in this scene is Menelaus, not Odysseus. 577   On conatus, see the note at §340. 578   Another translation, equally possible grammatically, would make the second main clause’s subject “the world of nature,” rather than Jove: “Jove gave beginning to the world of men by putting in them the conatus that is proper to freedom of the mind, just as the world of nature took its start by the motion that is proper to bodies, which are necessary agents.” 576

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The New Science ceremonies—that is, the auspices, fire, water, and spelt guarded by Vesta, who as was stated above [§549] is the same as Cybele or Berecynthia. She goes crowned by cultivated lands fortified by walls and accompanied by villages which, because they are placed on high, are figured as towers (hence, in Latin, extorris [“exiled”] is used as if it were from exterris). With this crown is enclosed what is still called the orbis terrarum, which is, properly speaking, the world of human beings. Consequently, the physicists were later moved to meditate upon the four elements from which the world of nature is composed.

691

These same theological poets gave to the elements and to countless kinds of natures coming from the elements forms that were living and sensate and, for the most part, human, and devised the many and varied divinities upon which we reasoned above in the Poetic Metaphysics [§375]. Hence came the congruity which allowed Plato to impose his tenets about “mind” or “intelligence” so that Jove is the mind of ether, Vulcan the mind of fire, and so on. So much did the theological poets understand such intelligent substances, that up to Homer’s time they did not understand a human mind which on the strength of reflection is opposed to the senses. On this there are two golden passages in the Odyssey,579 where the mind is called either a “sacred force” or a “hidden strength,” which are the same.

On the poetic physics concerning man— that is, on heroic nature 692

However, the greatest and most important part of physics is the contemplation of the nature of man. This is to contemplate how the authors of the gentile human race in a certain way generated themselves and produced their own human form in both of its two parts, namely, by terrifying religions and by horrific paternal powers. By sacred ablutions, they brought forth [edussero] from their gigantic bodies the form of our correct bodily statures; and by the same household discipline they brought forth [edussero] from their bestial spirits the form of our human spirits.580 All of this was reasoned upon above in the Poetic Economics [§§520, 524], and this is the proper place in which it must be repeated.

693

Now, the theological poets, under the aspect of a very rude physics, saw in man these two metaphysical ideas, being and substance.  Homer, Odyssey 18.34 and 18.60.   Vico’s choice of the verb edussero (a form of educere) suggests a strong connection between his thinking in this passage and his earlier claim at §520 that educere and educare originally referred to the education of the soul and the education of the body. 579 580

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Certainly, the heroes of Latium used the word “being” in quite unrefined terms to mean “eating”; this must have been the earliest significance of the verb sum [“to be”], which was later used with the former and the latter significance (this conforms with our rustics today using “he eats” to say “he still lives”).581 For sum in its significance as “being” is most abstract (in that it transcends all beings); most pervasive (in that it penetrates through all beings); most pure (in that it circumscribed by none of these beings). They felt “substance” as if it meant “a thing which stands under and sustains,” a thing resting in the heels, for a man stands on the base of his feet. Hence, Achilles carried his fate in his heel, for there his fate rested— that is, his lot in life and in death.582 The composite of the body they reduced to solids and liquids. They declared as solids the viscera—that is, flesh—and so among the Romans visceratio was used for the division that the priests made for the people of the flesh of the sacrificial victims,583 so that by vesci they understood “to nourish oneself ” in cases where the food was meat. They declared as solids bones and joints, which they called artus (what they called artus was derived from ars, which for the ancient people of Latium signified “bodily strength,” whence came artitus, “vigorous of person”; later, ars was used for any composite of precepts which held fast some faculty of the mind). They declared as solids the sinews, which, when the poets were mute and spoke through objects, they took to mean “strength”; and it was from the sinew called fides, in the sense of a “cord,” that they used fides for “strength of the gods,” and from sinew or cord or strength they later made the lute of Orpheus). In this correct sense, they located strength in the sinews, given that they extend the muscles that need to be extended for the use of one’s strength. And, finally, they declared as solids marrow: also in a correct sense, they located the very bloom of life in this marrow, whence the word medulla was used by a lover for the woman he loved, and medullitus for that expression of ours, “with all one’s heart” (and love, when it is great, is said to “burn the marrow”). The liquids they reduced only to blood insofar as they also called neural and spermatic substance “blood,” as is demonstrated in the use of the poetic phrase, sanguine cretus584 [“born of blood”] to express “being engendered”; they did this also in the correct sense, for such substance is the very bloom of blood. And also, in a correct sense, they deemed blood to be the juice in the tissue of which flesh is composed, whence in Latin the word succiplenus585 [“full of sap”] retained the meaning of “fleshy,” “steeped in good blood.”  In a more recent expression, “you are what you eat.”   See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.13.8. 583   See Cicero, De officiis 2.16.55; Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.22.2. 584  Virgil, Aeneid 4.191. 585   See Terence, Eunuch 317. 581 582

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As for the other part of the form proper to humans, the soul, the theological poets located it in air (a word which is also used in Latin for “soul”), and they deemed air to be the vehicle of life (retained in Latin in the proper sense of the expression anima vivimus586 [“by breath we live”]; and in the poetic expressions, ferri ad vitales auras587 [“to approach the living air”] for “to be born,” ducere vitales auras588 [“to draw in the living air”] of “to live,” and vitam referri in auras [“to return life to the air”] for “to die”; and in common Latin, the expressions animam ducere589 [“to draw breath”] for “to live,” animam trahere590 [“to drag in a breath”] for “to be in agony,” and animam efflare and animam emitter591 [“to emit breath”] for “to die”), whence, perhaps, the physicists were moved to place the world soul in air. And the theological poets, also in the correct sense, put the life coursing in us within the blood coursing in us, in which correct motion our life consists.

696

They must also, in the correct sense, have felt that spirit is the vehicle of sensation, which Latin retains in the proper meaning of the expression animo sentimus [“by the spirit we sense”]. And, also in the correct sense, they made animus masculine and anima feminine,592 for the spirit works upon the soul (it is the igneus vigor [“fiery strength”] of which Virgil593 speaks), and as a result the spirit must have its subject in the nerves and in neural substance, and the soul in the veins and in the blood. And so, the vehicle of the spirit is ether, and the vehicle of the soul is air, in keeping with the proportion by which the animal spirits are as swift as the vital spirits are slow; and just as the soul ministers to motion, so the spirit ministers to conatus594 and, consequently, begins conatus (this is the igneus vigor [“fiery strength”] of which Virgil spoke above). The theological poets sensed this, without understanding it, and Homer called it a “sacred force” and a “hidden strength” and an “unknown god”595; the peoples of both Greece and Latium, whenever they said or did a thing the beginning of which they sensed was superior to themselves, said that some god had willed a thing of this sort. This beginning was called by those same peoples of Latium mens animi596 [“mind of the spirit”]. And so, in their rude way, they understood that lofty truth which the natural theology of the metaphysicians later demonstrated by virtue of invin Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline 2.9.  Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.857, 6.1227; Virgil, Aeneid 1.387. 588   Vico’s source might be Virgil, Aeneid 1.387–388, which contains the expression carpere vitales auras. 589  Cicero, De natura deorum 2.54.136. 590  Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.6.8 and 4.12.11; Tacitus, Annals 1.42.4. 591  Plautus, Persa 638, and Truculentus 876. 592   On the animus/anima relation, compare Vico’s discussion at De antiquissima 5; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians p. 86[88]. 593  Virgil, Aeneid 6.730. 594   On conatus, see the note at §340. 595   See, for example, Homer, Odyssey 18.146. 596   See Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.758; Catullus, Carmina 65.4. 586 587

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cible reasoning against the Epicureans, who want ideas to be the result of bodies—namely, the truth that ideas come to man from God. They understood generation in its proper fashion, and we do not know if the learned who come later have been able to discover a better one.

697

That fashion is entirely contained in the term concipere [“to conceive”], used as if it were derived from concapere [“to take in”], which expresses the natural tendency observed by physical forms (to this nowadays we must add the weight of air demonstrated in our times) to incorporate any neighboring objects, to overcome resistance, and to adapt and shape those objects to their own form. Decay they explained most wisely with the term corrumpi, which signifies the breaking up of all the parts which compose a body in contrast to the term sanum [“whole”], for life consists in all the parts remaining whole; so they must have deemed disease to tend toward death, because of the damage to the solidity of the body.

698

They reduced all the internal functions of the spirit to three parts of the body: the head, the breast, and the heart.

699

And they declared all cognition to be in the head, and insofar as all their cognition was imaginative, they located in the head memory, which in Latin is called fantasia; and in the return to barbarous times, they used the word fantasia for ingenuity and, in turn, called a “man of ingenuity” an “imaginative man,” as we are told of Cola di Rienzo in the barbarous Italian of a biography written by an author from our times. This biography contains natures and customs most similar to those of the ancient heroes about whom we are reasoning. This is a great argument for the recurrence that, in natures and customs, the nations make. However, imagination is nothing other than the resurfacing of reminiscences, and ingenuity is nothing other than laboring over the things which have been recalled. Now, because the human mind in the times about which we are reasoning has not been rendered subtle by the art of writing, nor been spiritualized by any practice of counting or reckoning, nor made abstract by the many abstract terms which abound in languages now, as was stated above in the Method,597 it exercised all its strength in these three beautiful faculties coming from the body; and all three faculties pertain to the first operation of the mind whose regulative art is the art of topics, just as the regulative art for the second operation of the mind is the art of criticism, and just as the latter is the art of judgment, the former is the art of invention, in conformity with what was stated in the final corollaries of the Poetic Logic [§§495–498]. And just as invention of things naturally comes first, judgment of them second, so it was convenient for the 597

  Or, more precisely, in the Poetic Metaphysics (§378).

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The New Science infancy of the world to exercise itself in the first operation of the human mind at a time when the world had need of discovering the necessities and advantages of life, all of which were provided prior to the arrival of the philosophers, as we will more fully demonstrate in the Discovery of the True Homer. Consequently, with reason the theological poets called Memory the “mother of the Muses,” which we found above [§508] to be the arts of humanity.

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700

And in this part we cannot leave out an important observation of great consequence to what was stated above in the Method [§338], that now one is scarcely able to understand and completely unable to imagine how these earliest men who founded gentile humanity would have thought: their minds would belong so much to singulars and be so confined as to deem every new facial expression as a new face, as we observed in the myth of Proteus [§688], and to deem every new passion as another heart, another breast, another spirit. Hence there are those poetic expressions used not out of the necessity of counting, but on account of the nature of human things which take a plural as its singular—such as in the expressions, ora, vultus, animi, pectora, corda.

701

They made the breast the seat of all the passions, under which in the correct sense they placed two kinds of leaven or principles: that is, the irascible principle in the stomach insofar as it is there that, in rising to overcome some evil pressing upon us, we are made to feel the bile contained in the biliary vessels expanding because of the ventricle which, agitated by the stomach’s peristaltic motion, presses upon them and spreads bile in the stomach. They put the concupiscent principle598 for the most part in the liver, whose office belongs to the blood, and the poets called these praecordia, the organs where Titan implanted the signature passions which arise in other animals. And they understood in these precursors that concupiscence is the mother of all passions and that these passions are with our humors.

702

They declared the heart to be the seat of all counsel, whence the heroes agitabant, versabant, volutabunt corde curas [“would worry, turn, revolve their concerns in their heart”], for they did not think about things to be done except when shaken by passion, since they were stupid and insensate. Consequently, in Latin, they called cordati those were wise, and vecordes599 those were fools. And their resolutions they called sententiae, for as they sensed, so they judged. Hence, heroic judgments were all true in their form, although they were often false in their matter. 598   For the distinction between the concupiscible and irascible powers of the sensitive appetite, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1.81.2 and 1-2.23-25. It is possible that Vico knew the distinction from Aquinas. More likely, he knew it from later medieval and Renaissance authors (particularly Suarez) who use the same terminology, though often in the service of projects alien to Aquinas. 599   See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.9.18.

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Corollary on heroic sentences Now because the earliest men of gentile humanity had minds no less focused on singulars than the minds of beasts, for whom every new sensation completely cancels out the old one (this is the reason that they are not able to think synthetically or discursively), accordingly, all their sentiments must have been singular to the one who sensed them. Hence, that sublime sentence which Dionysius Longinus600 admires in the ode of Sappho which Catullus later translated into Latin, where the lover in the presence of the woman who is his beloved expresses himself with a likeness:

703

Ille mi par esse deo videtur601 [“That one seems to me equal to a god”],

and yet the likeness falls short of sublimity of the highest rank; for the sentence is not made singular to himself, as Terence does by saying: Vitam deorum adepti sumus602 [“We have attained the life of gods”],

and yet this sentiment, although it is proper to the one speaking, nevertheless, on account of the mannerism in Latin of using the first person plural for the singular, still has the air of a common sentiment. By contrast, the same poet in another comedy raises the same sentiment to sublimity of the highest rank, when it is made singular and so proper to the one sensing it: Deus factus sum603 [“I am become a god”].

Accordingly, those abstract sentences belong to philosophers, for they contain universals, and reflections upon these passions belong to false and frigid poets.

704

Corollary on heroic descriptions Eventually, these earliest men reduced the external functions of the spirit to the five senses of the body, senses still discerning, lively, and alert, since they had little or no reason and were all robust imagination.  Longinus, On the Sublime 10.2.  Catullus, Carmina 51.1 602  Terence, Self-Tormentor 693. 603  Terence, The Mother-in-Law 843. 600 601

705

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706

They spoke of audire [“hearing”] as if it were haurire [“drawing in”], for the ears drink in the air struck by other bodies. They spoke of cernere oculis604 [“separating out by eye”] for seeing distinctly (hence, perhaps, came the Italian verb “to sift” [scernere]), for the eyes are like a sieve and the two pupils are like holes, and so just as lines of dust issue from a sieve on their way to touching the earth, so lines of light issue from the eyes through the pupils on their way to touching things which are seen distinctly. It is this line of sight that was later reasoned upon by the Stoics and was successfully demonstrated in our time by Descartes.605 And they spoke of usurpare oculis606 [“capturing by eye”] for seeing in general, as if one could possess the things being seen by seeing them. With the verb tangere607 [“to touch”], they also spoke of stealing, for something is taken away from bodies that are touched in the touching of them, as is now more fully understood by more perceptive physicists. They spoke of smelling as olfacere, as if one made the smells by smelling; this was later by careful observation found to be true by natural philosophers, that the sense makes what are called the sensible qualities; and, finally, they spoke of tasting as sapere, and this verb is properly used for things which give off a flavor, for in tasting one tests things for the flavor which is proper to the thing. Hence, later by a beautiful metaphor “wisdom” [sapienza] was the word for the use of things according to the uses they have in nature, rather than those which opinion devises.

707

It is for this that one is given to admire divine providence, that at a time when men had fallen into a bestial state, it gave us the senses as the guardians of our bodies (senses that are wondrously keener in beasts than they are in men), and so, because of their very nature, men had the most discerning senses for preserving themselves; later, when they entered the age of reflection, by which they could make use of counsel so as to guard their bodies, the senses became less keen. It is on account of all this that heroic descriptions, as we have them in Homer, shine forth with such light and splendid clarity that they were impossible to imitate, much less equal, for all later poets.

Corollary on heroic customs 708

Because of such heroic natures furnished with such heroic senses, heroic customs were similarly formed and established.   See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.20.46.   See Descartes, Optics 1.2. 606  Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.301. 607  Plautus, Aulularia 740; Terence, Adelphoe 178; Cicero, De lege agraria 2.25.67; Ad familiares 2.17.4. 604 605

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The heroes, on account of their still recent origins from giants, were to the highest degree gullish and savage, as we had stated of the Patagonians, most restricted in their understanding, most capacious in their imagination, and most violent in their passions. Because of this, they must have been clumsy, crude, harsh, savage, arrogant, difficult, and obstinate in their purposes, and at the same time most tractable when presented with new and contrasting objects, just as we always observe in stubborn rustics who yield to any rational motivation stated to them, but because of their weakness in reflecting will return to their original purpose as soon as the reason which moved them becomes unstuck from their minds. And, by this same deficiency of reflection, they were straightforward, resentful, magnanimous, and generous; this is how Homer describes Achilles, the greatest of all the heroes of Greece. From these examples of heroic customs, Aristotle608 advances the precept in his Poetics that the heroes whom tragedy takes as its subjects be neither the best nor the worst, but that they be a mixture of great vices and great virtues. For that heroism of virtue, which becomes complete in its best idea, belongs to the philosophers, not the poets. And that heroism of gallantry belongs to poets who came after Homer,609 who either devised myths of a new cast or took myths which were originally grave and severe, as accorded with the founders of nations, and altered, and eventually corrupted, them to accord with the effeminate customs of later times. A great proof of this, which as the same time must be a great canon for the historical mythology upon which are reasoning, is Achilles. On account of Briseis being taken from him by Agamemnon, he makes such a clamor that it fills heaven and Earth and yields material sufficient for the entire Iliad from start to finish, and yet he does not show in the entire Iliad even the slightest sense of amorous passion from being deprived of her.610 And Menelaus, who on account of Helen moved all of Greece against Troy, does not show throughout that entire long and great war even the smallest sign of amorous distress or jealousy that she is being enjoyed by Paris, who seized her from him. All that has been stated in these three corollaries on heroic sentences, descriptions, and customs pertains to the Discovery of the True Homer, a discovery which will be made in the following book.611

 Aristotle, Poetics 13, 1453a7–12 and Poetics 15, 1454b8–14.  In the Scienza nuova prima (§280), Vico explicitly names Moschus (fl. 150 BCE) and Anacreon (c. 582–485 BCE) 610   Here Vico shows himself to be a pioneer of the thesis that emotions that are often assumed to be universally present in human cultures (e.g., “amorous passion”) are not necessarily so. Rather, Vico implies, such emotions have a history; they should not be taken for granted. 611   For the sentences, see §§825, 828, 895. For the descriptions, see §§785, 827, 894. For the customs, see §786 and §829. 608 609

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On Poetic Cosmography 710

Just as the theological poets posited as principles in physics the substances which they imagined were divine, so they described a cosmography in agreement with this physics, positing a world formed of gods of the heavens and gods of the underworld (called in Latin dii superi and dii inferi) and of the gods positioned in between heaven and Earth (who must have been the gods called at first in Latin medioxumi).612

711

The first place of this world they contemplated was the heavens, and the heavenly things must have been for the Greeks the first μαθήματα [mathe¯ mata]—that is, “sublime things”—and must have been the first θεωρήματα [theo¯re¯ mata]—that is, “divine things for contemplation.” The word in Latin for the contemplation of these things was derived from those regions of heaven called templa caeli, which the augurs designated for taking the auspices, for divining from the trajectories of stars falling at night (hence for Bochart613 the name Zoroastrian means “contemplator of stars”).

712

There was for the first poets no heaven higher than the heights of the mountains, where the giants because of the first lightning bolts of Jove settled after their wild wandering: this is the heaven which reigned on Earth and, subsequent to this starting point, made for great benefits for humankind, as was fully explained above [§§64, 379]. Hence, they must have deemed that the heavens were the peaks of those mountains, and from the acuity of these mountains the word in Latin, caelum [“heaven”], came to be used also for a chisel, the instrument for engraving in stone or metal; so too in exactly this way children imagine that the mountains are columns which support the canopy of heaven; so too Arabs have given these principles of cosmography in the Koran. Two of these columns continued later as those “of Heracles,” as we will see more fully below [§§726, 750] (the original word in Latin, columen, must have been a prop or stay, and later came to be the rounded columns of architecture). It was aloft in a canopy of this sort, says Thetis to Achilles in Homer,614 that Jove along with the other gods went to feast on Mount Atlas. Thus, as we stated above [§399] when reasoning upon the giants, that myth of war made by the giants on heaven and their piling up the highest mountains, Ossa on Pelion and Olympus on Ossa, so as to scale to the heavens and to cast out the gods, this must have been invented after Homer. For in the Iliad,615 certainly, he always tells of the gods situated  Plautus, Cistellaria 6.11; Apuleius, De dogmata Platonis 1.11.204; Servius, Commentary on Aeneid 3.134. 613   On Bochart, see the note at §62. 614  Homer, Iliad 1.423–424. 615  Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484; 5.360, 387. 612

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on the peak of Mount Olympus, whereby it would suffice to shake Olympus alone, so as to make the gods fall. Nor does this myth, although the Odyssey refers to it, accord well with the Odyssey,616 for in that poem the underworld is no deeper than a ditch, the place where Ulysses sees and reasons with the heroes who have passed over to there. Hence, inasmuch as the Homer of the Odyssey had a curtailed idea of the underworld, it is necessary that he would have had a proportionally curtailed idea of the heavens, conforming to the one held by the Homer who is author of the Iliad; consequently, it is demonstrated that this myth is not from Homer, as we promised to demonstrate above. In this heaven, the gods at first reigned on Earth and consorted with heroes, following the order of the natural theogony reasoned upon above [§317], starting with Jove. In this heaven, right was rendered on earth by Astraea, crowned in ears of grain and additionally furnished with a balance, for the first human justice was administered by the heroes for men with the first agrarian law, as we have seen above [§§265, 597, 604], insofar as men sensed first, weight, then measure, and, quite late, number, on which reason settled last of all.617 Thus, Pythagoras, because he understood no things more abstracted from bodies than numbers, posited the essence of the human soul in number.618 Through this heaven, the heroes went riding on horseback, as does Bellerophon on Pegasus,619 retained in Latin in the expression volitare equo620 [“to fly by horse”] for “going riding on horseback.” In this heaven, Juno whitens the Milky Way621 with milk, not with her own, for she is sterile, but with that of the mothers of the families who nursed legitimate offspring on account of those heroic nuptials whose numinous presence was Juno. In this heaven, the gods were carried on high in carts of poetic gold, for whose grain it was called the golden age. Within this heaven, wings were used, but not to fly or to signify swiftness of ingenuity. Hence, they were the wings of Hymen, who is the same as the heroic Love; of Astraea; of the Muses; of Pegasus; of Saturn; of  Homer, Odyssey 11.36–43.   On the necessarily abstract nature of number, see §642. For the triplet “measure, number, weight,” see Wisdom 11:21. 618   See Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 8.1.25. 619   See Hesiod, Theogony 319; Pindar, Olympiad 13.63; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.3.2. 620   Vico may be thinking of volare equo, as in Virgil, Aeneid 12.650–621 or of equites volitare, as in Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.239, and Tacitus, Annals 15.58.2. 621   On the “Milky Way,” see Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.9 and Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.25.2. 616 617

713

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The New Science Fame; of Mercury winged both on his temples and his heels, and whose caduceus is winged, the one with which he brought from this heaven the first agrarian law to the rebelling plebeians in the valleys, as was stated above [§604]; of the dragon, Draco, for the Gorgon is also winged on her temples, signifying neither ingenuity nor flight. So, it was in this heaven that wings were used, but to signify heroic rights, all of which are founded in their claim to the auspices, as was fully demonstrated above [§488]. In this heaven, Prometheus steals fire from the sun, which the heroes must have made with flint stone and applied to the thorny underbrush dried out on the mountains by the burning summer sun. From this heaven, Vulcan fell because of a kick from Jove. From this heaven, Phaethon fell from the chariot of the sun. From this heaven, the apple of discord fell. This myth has been completely explained above [§§579, 650–652]. And from this heaven must finally have fallen the ancilia, the shields sacred to the Romans.

714

The first of the deities of the underworld which the theological poets imagined was water, and the first water was that of the perennial fountains which they called “Styx” and by which the gods swore, as was stated above [§527]. Hence, perhaps, Plato622 opined that the center of the earth was an abyss of waters. Now, Homer623 in the contest of the gods makes Pluto fear that Neptune will open up the earth with earthquakes and leave the underworld exposed to men and gods. However, given that the abyss is in the deepest entrails of the earth, earthquakes would have done the complete opposite: the underworld would have been submerged and completely covered over with water. This is what we had promised above [§634] to demonstrate, that this allegory of Plato poorly accords with the myth. On account of what has been stated, the earliest underworld must have been no deeper than the spring of the fountains, and the earliest deities of these fountains was believed to be Diana, of whom poetic history recounts as having three forms, for she was Diana in heaven, the huntress Cynthia on Earth, and Proserpine in the underworld.

715

The idea of the underworld was extended by burial, whence the poets call the grave “an underworld,” an expression also used in the Sacred Books.624 As a result, the underworld was no deeper than a ditch, where

  See Plato, Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b.  Homer, Iliad 20.57–65. 624   See for example, Genesis 37:35, Numbers 16:30–33, Job 10:21–22, Proverbs 27:30, Ecclesiastes 12:5, Isaiah 14:15, Ezekiel 32:21. 622 623

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Ulysses in Homer625 sees the underworld and therein the souls of the heroes having passed away. For in this underworld were imagined the Elysian fields626 where, in connection with burial, the souls of the buried enjoy eternal peace. And the Elysian fields are the blessed seat of the gods, the Manes—that is, the good souls of the dead. Later, the underworld had depth no greater than the height of a furrow: this is where Ceres—that is, the same Proserpine who is the seed of the grain—is abducted by the god Pluto, and stays there for six months, returning later to see the light of the heavens. By this will later be explained [§721] the golden bough with which Aeneas descends into the underworld, which Virgil627 devised to give continuity to the heroic metaphor of the golden apple, which we have found above [§§539, 540, 544, 546] to be ears of grain.

716

Finally, the underworld was taken as the plains and valleys (opposed to the heights of a heaven) situated in the mountains, where those scattered in their infamous liaisons remained. Hence, the god of this underworld is Erebus, called the son of Chaos—that is, the confusion of human seed—and he is the father of civil night, of the night-darkening family names, just as heaven is illuminated by the civil light by which the heroes are called brilliant. In this underworld runs the river, Lethe—that is, the river of oblivion—for such men left no name for themselves to their posterity, just as Glory in heaven makes eternal the name of these shining heroes.

717

Consequently, Mercury, as was stated above [§§604, 688] concerning his character, carries into this underworld the agrarian law with his rod and calls forth souls from the Orcus who devours all. This is the civil history preserved by Virgil in those words, . . . hac ille animas evocat Orco628 [“. . . with this he calls forth the souls from Orcus”].

He calls the lives of lawless and bestial men from their wild state. This state devours men in their entirety, for they leave nothing of themselves to their posterity. Hence, later mages tried to work magic with wands in the empty belief that with them they could raise the dead, and the Roman praetor struck slaves on the shoulders with a staff and, in doing so, made them become free, almost as if with this they made them return from death to life. And sorcerous mages use in their sorcery the wands which the wise mages of Persian used for divining the auspices. Hence, divinity was attributed to these wands, and they were considered by the nations as gods  Homer, Odyssey 11.36–43.  Homer, Odyssey 4.563–568 and Virgil, Aeneid 6.638–641. 627  Virgil, Aeneid 6.137. 628   See Virgil, Aeneid 4.242. 625 626

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The New Science that could make miracles (as Trogus Pompeius629 makes certain for us in the abridgement of his work by Justin).

718

This underworld is guarded by Cerberus,630 by the doglike practices of a Venus lacking decent regard for others. And Cerberus is triple-throated— that is, he has an enormous gullet, in keeping with three as a superlative, as we more fully observed above in another place [§§491, 535]—and so, like Orcus, he devours everything. And, when he emerges up onto the earth, the sun turns backwards: when he enters in the heroic city, the civil light of the heroes turns back to civil night.

719

At the bottom of this underworld runs the river Tartarus,631 where the damned are tormented: Ixion turns his wheel, Sisyphus rolls his stone, Tantalus dies of both hunger and thirst, a myth which was completely explained above [§583]. And the river which tortures with thirst is the same river where there is no contentment, which is what Acheron and Phlegethon signify.632 To this underworld, mythologists ignorant of these things later banished Tityus and Prometheus. However, it was in heaven that they were chained to a rock where their entrails were devoured by an eagle flying in the mountains, the torment coming from superstition belonging to the auspices, as we have explained above [§387].

720

All these myths, the philosophers later discovered to be most congruous for meditating upon and explaining their moral and metaphysical things. And this awakened Plato633 to understand three divine punishments, which only the gods give and which men cannot give: the punishment of oblivion, the punishment of infamy, and the punishment of remorse by which a guilty conscience torments us. And he understood that it was through the via purgativa of the passions of the spirit which torment men (which he understood by the underworld of the theological poets) that one enters upon the via unitiva, along which the human mind goes toward God by means of contemplation of the eternal divine things (which he interprets to be what the theological poets understood by their Elysian fields).

721

However, it was with ideas entirely different from these moral and metaphysical ones (different insofar as the ideas which the theological poets stated were political, as was naturally necessary for them to do as the founders of nations) that the founders of gentile peoples descended into the underworld. To there descended the Orpheus, who founded the Greek nation; and although forbidden in his departure from turning to look back, he did   See Trogus Pompeius, Historiae philippicae 43.3.3.   See Virgil, Aeneid 6.417. 631   See Homer, Iliad 8.13–14; Virgil, Aeneid 6.577–579. 632  Servius, Commentary on Aeneid 6.107. 633   See Plato, Republic 10 (614a–621b) and Laws 10.12 (933e–934a). 629 630

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Book Two so turn and lost his wife, Eurydice, returning to the infamous sharing of women in common.634 To there descended the Heracles of whom every nation recounts some version as the one who founded it, and there he descended so as to free Theseus, who founded Athens635 and who himself descended there so as to lead out Proserpine—who, as we have stated, is the same as Ceres—so as to bring back the seeds ripened into grain. However, this descent is explained most fully of all later by Virgil, who in the first six books of the Aeneid sings of the political hero and in the second six sings of the military hero; and it is by his profound knowledge [scienza] of heroic antiquity that he tells us that Aeneas made his descent in keeping with the advice and guidance of the Cumean Sybil [§§381, 464] (one of whom we have stated every gentile nation had, and the names of twelve of whom have come down to us), meaning that he descended as a result of divination, which is the commonplace wisdom of gentile humanity. In keeping with a bloody religion, Aeneas—who is pious in the piety professed by the most ancient heroes in the savagery and brutality of the recent bestial origins which was demonstrated above [§517]—sacrificed his associate, Misenus—that is, through that cruel right which, we also stated above, is the right which the heroes held over their earliest associates, upon which we also reasoned above [§558]; from there he carries on into the ancient forest—that is, the earth everywhere uncultivated and wooded. He throws a sleep-inducing morsel to Cerberus, who then falls asleep, just as Orpheus had put him to sleep with the sound of his lyre—a lyre which, as we have shown above [§§523, 615], was the laws—and just as Heracles bound him with the knot by which he defeated Antaeus—that is, with the first agrarian law conforming to what we have stated about it above [§§265–266, 597, 604]—and it was on account of his insatiable hunger that Cerberus was devised as being triple-throated with a capacious gullet expressed by the superlative, three, as was explained above [§§491, 535, 718]). Thus Aeneas descends into the underworld, which we found [§716] was originally no deeper than the height of a ditch; and he presents to Dis (the god of heroic riches, of poetic gold, of harvest, the Dis who was the same as Pluto, who abducted Proserpine, who was the same as the Ceres who is the goddess of grain) the golden bough: here, the great poet636 takes the metaphor of the golden apple—which we found above [§§539, 540, 544, 546, 716] to be ears of grain—and transfers it to the golden bough as the harvest. Where this bough is torn off, another comes in its place,637 for no subsequent gathering of a harvest comes until a year after the previous gathering has been made. And when the gods are so   See Hyginus, Fables 164; Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.24; Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.30.3. 635  Hyginus, Fables 79; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.5.12. 636   That is, Virgil. 637   See Virgil, Aeneid 6.143–144. 634

305

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The New Science pleased and so willing, the bough comes easily into the hand of the one who seizes it, but otherwise there is no strength in the world which is able to tear it off, for grain comes forth naturally where God wills; and where God does not so will, there is no human industry which is able to gather in its harvest. From there Aeneas carries on through the middle of the underworld to the Elysian fields, for the heroes, by remaining settled in the cultivated fields, later in death enjoyed with burial eternal peace, as we have explained above [§529]. And from there Aeneas sees his ancestors and descendants, for it was with the religion of burial—which the poets called “the underworld,” as was also seen above [§715], that they founded the first genealogies from which history took its start, as was also stated above [§529].

722

The earth of the theological poets was sensed as connected with the guarding of boundaries, whence it has its name, “earth.” The heroic origin of this name is preserved in Latin by the term territorium, which signifies the district within which power is exercised; the Latin grammarians are in error in believing that territorium is derived from the terrendo [“to terrify”] of the lictors, that terror of the fasces by which they removed the throng to make way for the magistrates. Instead, in the times in which the term territorium came into being, there were not great throngs in Rome (which, during two hundred and fifty years of rule, subdued more than twenty peoples and extended their power no more than twenty miles, as we heard stated above by Varro [§88]). Therefore, the origin of this term is that these boundaries of the cultivated fields out of which later arose civil powers that were guarded by Vesta with bloody religions, as was seen above [§§549, 690]; here, we found that the Latin Vesta is the same as the Greek Cybele or Berecynthia, who is crowned with towers—that is, by lands on fortified sites. From this crown, what is called the orbis terrarum started to form—that is “the world of nations”—and later this was sphere was enlarged by the cosmographers and called the orbis mundanus, and in one word, mundus, is expressed the world of nature.

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723

This poetic world was divided into three realms—that is, three r­egions—first, that of Jove in the heavens; second, that of Saturn on Earth; and third, that of Pluto in the underworld—and Pluto was called Dis, the god of heroic riches, of the first gold, of grain, for the cultivated fields make for the true riches of peoples.

724

Thus, the world of the theological poets was formed of four civil elements, which the physicists later took as natural elements, as was stated more fully just above [§690]: these were the elements of Jove—that is, air—and Vulcan—that is, fire—and Cybele—that is, earth—and the underworld Diana—that is, water. For Neptune was recognized late by the poets because, as was stated above [§634], the nations descended late to the coasts. And the word Ocean was used for any sea of unlimited prospect, and land that it encircled was called an island, as Homer calls

307

Book Two Aeolia the island surrounded by Ocean. It was from this Ocean that must have come, as we will demonstrate just below [§742], the steeds of Rhesus made pregnant by Zephyr, the Greek west wind, and must have been born the horses of Achilles also made pregnant by Zephyr. Later, geographers observed that the whole Earth is encircled by seas like a great island and called all the seas which encircle the Earth “the ocean.” Finally, in this time, they started from the idea by which they called any short incline a mundus (whereby the phrases in mundo est638 and in proclivi est639 meant “it is easy”), and later they had the idea by which all that by which a woman is cleaned [monda], refined, and put together was called mundus muliebris640 [“feminine adornment”]. Later, they understood that the Earth and heavens have a spherical shape in which every part of a circumference inclines towards every other part, and that the ocean bathes the Earth on every side, and that the whole is adorned with countless, varied, diverse sensible forms; given all this, the universe was called mundus, which conveys in a most beautiful and sublime metaphor that by which nature adorns itself.

725

On Poetic Astronomy This system of the world endured up until the time of Homer, where it was somewhat further developed: in the Iliad, Homer641 always tells us the gods dwell on Mount Olympus, and we have heard [§712] what he makes Thetis, mother of Achilles, say to Achilles, that the gods went to feast on Mount Atlas.642 Thus, the highest mountains of the Earth must have been believed in the time of Homer to be columns which supported the heavens, just as Abyla and Calpe on the Straits of Gibraltar continued to be called the Columns of Heracles, Heracles who succeeded Atlas when he tired of supporting any more the heavens upon his shoulders.

726

An astronomical physicophilological demonstration of the uniformity of principles in all the ancient gentile nations However, as the undefined strength of the human mind developed a great deal more and as contemplation of heavens with a view to taking  Festus, De verborum significatu 2–3.  Plautus, Asinaria 663; Terence, Andria 701. 640  Festus, De verborum significatu 20–21. 641  Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484; 5.360, 567. 642  Homer, Iliad 1.423–424. 638 639

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The New Science the auspices obliged peoples to observe the heavens at all times, the heavens rose much higher in the minds of nations, and, with the heavens, the gods and heroes rose much higher. Here, we are aided in the discovery of a poetic astronomy by making use of the following three pieces of erudition from philology. The first is that astronomy came to be in the world from the Chaldean peoples; the second is that the Phoenicians brought from the Chaldeans643 to the Egyptians the practice of using the quadrant and the science of the elevation of the polestar; the third is that the Phoenicians must have accepted from these same Chaldeans gods who dwell in the stars, and subsequently brought them to the Greeks. These three pieces of erudition from philology should be composed with the following two truths from philosophy: first, the civil truth that unless nations are unbound from religion by the late stages of liberty (which do not arrive unless they are in the late stages of decadence), they naturally withhold accepting foreign divinities; second, the physical truth that, because of a trick of the eye, the planets seem larger to us than the stars.

728

Having posited these principles, let us state that among all gentile nations, in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, and even, as we will see, in Latium, astronomy came into being from commonplace origins that were uniform: through a uniform allocation, the gods were elevated to the planets and the heroes were assigned to constellations, for the planets appear much larger than the stars. Hence, the Phoenicians found among the Greeks an array of gods ready to revolve with the planets and an array of heroes ready to compose constellations, and this facility was the same for the Phoenicians as it was for the Greeks, who later discovered gods and heroes among the peoples of Latium. And one is allowed to say, based on these examples, that the Phoenicians found the same facility among the Egyptians as they did among the Greeks. In this fashion, the heroes (along with the hieroglyphs signifying either their rights or their insignia, as well as a good number of the greater gods) were raised to the heavens as an array ready through learned astronomy to give their names to heavenly bodies which previously did not have names, to give form, as it were, to the matter of the stars—that is, the constellations—as well as of the planets.

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Thus, starting from a commonplace astronomy, the earliest peoples wrote on the heavens the history of their gods, of their heroes. And there was retained that eternal property that the matter worthy of history is the memory of men filled with divinity and with heroism, the former on account of their works of ingenuity and recondite wisdom, the latter on account of their works of virtue and commonplace wisdom; so, poetic history offered learned astronomers the motive to depict in the heavens heroes and heroic hieroglyphs with one group of stars rather than an643

  See §§60, 474.

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Book Two other, with one part of the heavens rather than another, and to connect the major gods with some planets rather than others (and the names of these gods later came to be our names for these planets). And, to speak about a thing pertaining more to the planets than to the constellations, certainly Diana, the goddess of the modesty preserved in nuptial couples, who lies completely silent all night with the sleeping Endymion, was connected with the moon, which gives light at night.

730

Venus, the goddess of civil beauty, is connected with the most radiant, gay, and beautiful planet of all. Mercury, the divine herald clothed in civil light along with the many wings—the hieroglyphic for nobility—in which he is adorned while bringing the agrarian law to the rebelling clients, is located on a planet which is so covered over by the rays of the sun that it is rarely seen. Apollo, the god of that civil light whence the heroes are called “brilliant,” is connected with the sun, source of natural light. Mars, so bloody, is connected with a planet similar in color. Jove, king and father of gods and men, is above all of them, but below Saturn, for as father of both Jove and Time, Saturn takes a yearly orbit longer than the other planets; as a result, wings poorly suit him if by forced allegory they mean to signify the quickness of time (given that Saturn takes a year that is much slower than all the other planets), but he brought those wings to heaven along with his scythe, which signifies not the reaping of the lives of men, but the reaping of the harvests by which the heroes counted years, and the wings signify the claims of the heroes over the cultivated fields. Finally, the planets, going along with carts of gold—that is, the carts of the grain—with which they went through heaven when heaven was on Earth, now rotate in their assigned orbits. Through all that upon which we have reasoned here, one has to say that the dominion and influence which the stars and planets are believed to have over sublunary objects was attributed to them from what prevailed in both gods and heroes when they were on Earth.

731

So much does this influence depend on natural causes!

On Poetic Chronology In conformity with this astronomy, the theological poets offered starting points of their chronology. For Saturn, who was so called from satis (from the Latin word meaning “sown ground”644) and who was called Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks (for whom χρόνος [chronos] means “time”), gives us to understand that the earliest nations, which were composed entirely of rustics, started their reckoning years with the harvest 644

  On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3.

732

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The New Science they made in gathering grain, the only or, at least, the major thing over which rustics travail all year. And at first mute, they must have reckoned years by as many ears of grain or by as many straws or by making as many gestures of reaping as were the years they meant to signify. Hence, there are two passages in Virgil (more learned about heroic antiquity than anyone else ever was), the first of which is infelicitous and, with a mimetic art of the highest kind, expresses infelicitously with a contorted order the infelicity of the earliest times in expressing themselves, Post aliquot mea regna videns mirabor aristas645 [“After several ears of corn, I will look in wonder upon my regime”],

where post aliquot aristas means post aliquot annos [“after several years”]; the second passage is somewhat more explicit, saying Tertia messis erat646 [“It was in the third harvest”],

just as even today rustics of Tuscany (a nation held in high esteem in all of Italy for its reputation for speaking) instead of saying, for example, “three years,” say “we have harvested three times.” And the Romans preserved this heroic history upon which we are reasoning here—that of signifying a poetic year with harvests—by giving the name annona [“grain supply”] to those concerned with the surplus, principally, of grain.647 733

Consequently, we are told that Heracles was the founder of the Olympiads, the period of time which had currency among the Greeks, from whom we have all that we do have from gentile antiquity. For he set fire to the forests so as to reduce them to the fields for planting, from which they gathered the harvest, by which they originally reckoned years. And these games must have started with the Nemeans to celebrate the victory brought back from the fire-spewing lion of Nemea, a lion which we have interpreted above [§§3, 4, 540] as the great woods of the Earth. They subsumed the Earth under the idea of the strongest animal (so much toil was needed to domesticate it!). They gave it the name “lion,” and later this name was transferred to the strongest of animals, as was reasoned upon above in the section on the Beginnings of Gentile Coats of Arms.648 And the lion was assigned by the astronomers to the house in the zodiac connected to the house of Astraea, crowned in ears of grain. This is the cause of images of lions and images of the sun frequently being seen at Roman circuses, of the turning posts at those circuses—which must have originally been turning posts made of grain—being seen   See Virgil, Eclogues 1.69.   See Ovid, Heroides 6.57. 647  Voss, Etymologicon, p. 36. 648   No section of the Scienza nuova bears this name. The reference is likely to §484. 645 646

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topped with eggs, of the circus itself being a lucus—that is, a clearing which is the deforested eye, as was reasoned upon above in the section on giants. It is here that the astronomers later affixed this significance to the elliptical figure described by the sun in the yearly elliptical orbit it makes. This significance would be more congruous with the egg that Kneph carries in his mouth than the one that Manetho gives it, that the egg signifies the genesis of the universe. Therefore, it is with the natural theogony upon which we have reasoned herein above [§§69, 317, 489, 634] that we determine the temporal course. In the times that correspond to the occasions of certain early necessities or advantages of humankind, which everywhere took its start from the religions, this course is the AGE OF GODS, which must have lasted at least nine hundred years, starting from the various versions of Jove among the gentile nations—that is, from the time when the heavens cast forth lightning bolts after the Universal Flood. And the twelve major gods imagined within this time, starting with Jove, are posited as twelve smaller epochs and reduce poetic history to a temporal certainty. So, for example, Deucalion, who mythical history tells us came immediately after the Flood and the giants, founds the family with his wife, Pyrrha, by means of marriage: he was born in the Greek imagination during the age of Juno, goddess of solemnized nuptials. Hellenus649 founds the Greek language and, through his three sons, divides it up into three dialects: he was born in the age of Apollo, god of song in whose time poetic speech must have started in verse. Heracles undertakes the great task of killing the Hydra or Nemean lion—that is, reducing the earth to planted fields—and bringing back from Hesperia the golden apples—that is, brings back the harvests, an enterprise worthy of history, not pomegranates, a deed worthy of a dandy: he becomes distinct in the age of Saturn, god of plantings. So too Perseus must have shined in the age of Minerva—that is, during the birth of civil power—given that his shield bears the head of Medusa, which is the shield of Minerva. And, finally, Orpheus must have been born after the age of Mercury: by singing to the wild beasts of Greece of the strength of the gods of the auspices, the science of which was held by the heroes, he established again the Greek heroic nations and gave them their name, HEROIC TIMES, for it was in such times that there were actually heroic contests of this sort; hence, along with Orpheus flourished Linus, Amphion, Museus, and the other poet-heroes; among them, Amphion raises with stones—that is, with plebeians (Latin retains this association in using lapis [“stone”] to mean a dull-witted person)650—the walls of Thebes three hundred years after Cadmus had founded Thebes, exactly as it was three hundred years after the founding of Rome that Appius, grandson of the decemvir, sang to the Roman plebs (whom, as we stated in another place above [§§661, 649   On Hellen, the son of Deucalion and mythical father of all the Greeks, see Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.38.1, and Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.2–3. 650  Terence, The Self-Tormentor 831, 917.

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The New Science 681], AGITABAT CONNUBIA MORE FERARUM651 [“practiced marriage in the manner of wild animals”], animals that are the wild beasts of Orpheus) of the strength of the gods of the auspices, the science of which was held by the nobles, and so reduced the plebs to duty and confirmed the Roman constitution as heroic.

735

Furthermore, here we must take note of the four species of anachronism contained under the genus of events posited too early or too late. The first is that of positing times that must have been filled with deeds as void of them. So, it was during the age of the gods, as we have found, that there were the origins of almost all the human civil things, and yet the most learned Varro runs through this age as if it were a time of darkness.652 The second is that of positing times which must have been void of deeds as filled with them; so it was with the age of heroes, which ran for two hundred years and was considered filled with deeds on the basis of the false opinion that myths are to be discovered in the forges of the heroic poets and, above all, of Homer, deeds which ought to be returned from an age void of them to the age of the gods. The third is that of positing times as a unit that ought to be kept separate, so that within the lifetime of just one man, Orpheus, Greece does not pass from wild beasts to the splendor of the Trojan War. This is the monstrosity of chronology that we made it possible to see in the Annotations on the Chronological Table [§79]. The fourth is that of positing times as separate which ought to be considered a unit: so, the Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy are thought to have been conducted more than three hundred years after the wanderings of the heroes, whereas it was by these very heroes that these colonies were conducted with their wanderings and as a result of their wanderings.

Chronological canon for giving the beginnings of universal history, which must have begun its course prior to the monarchy of Ninus, from which that universal history is presumed to start 736

On the strength, therefore, of what we have called a natural theogony (this has given what we have called a rational poetic chronology) and by means of the discovery of the aforementioned kinds of anachronisms in  Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6.   The threefold division of obscure, fabulous, and historical times comes from Varro’s lost work Antiquitates rerum divinarum, by way of Censorinus’s De die natali 21.1. Censorinus was a Roman grammarian of the third century CE. 651 652

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Book Two poetic history noted above, now we will establish the following canon for chronology for giving the beginnings of universal history, which must have begun its course prior to the monarchy of Ninus, from which that universal history is presumed to start. At first, humankind was dispersed because it was lost in the Great Forest of the Earth: this wild wandering started in Mesopotamia, as we have postulated with discretion in the Axioms,653 and for the impious race of Shem in Near Eastern Asia, ran its course in only one hundred years, and for the two other races of Ham and Japheth in the rest of the world, ran its course in two hundred years. After this, because of the many religions of Jove which we proved above [§§47, 193, 380] were spread after the Universal Flood throughout the earliest gentile nations, the princes of nations started to settle, each in the land where on account of fortune they were discovered to be dispersed, the nine-hundred-year AGE OF THE GODS ran its course, at the end of which, because they were dispersed throughout the Earth to search for food and water, which are not found on the shores of the sea, the nations that had all been founded inland must have descended to the coasts, whence came to the Greek mind the idea of Neptune, whom we found [§634] was the last of the twelve major divinities. Similarly, among the peoples of Latium, nine hundred years ran their course from the age of Saturn—that is, the golden age in Latium—to Ancus Marcius’s coming down to the sea to take Ostia.654 Eventually, two hundred years ran their course, which the Greeks counted the HEROIC AGE, starting with the corsair raids of King Minos, followed by the naval expedition that Jason made to Pontus, and later by the Trojan War, and ending with the wandering of heroes up until the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. It was thus that Tyre, the capital of Phoenicia, must have been brought from inland to the shore and, subsequently, more than a thousand years after the flood, to an island near the Phoenician sea. And because Tyre was celebrated prior to the heroic age of the Greeks for its seafaring and for its colonies spread throughout the Mediterranean and even beyond on the Ocean, this comes to be clear proof that the beginning of all of humankind was in the Near East, and that the earliest nations were spread throughout the remaining parts of the world by, first, the wild wandering throughout the inland places of the Earth; second, the heroic law by both land and sea; and, finally, the maritime trade of the Phoenicians. These beginnings for the migrations of peoples, conforming to what we proposed in an Axiom,655 seem more reasonable that those which Wolfgang Lazius656 has imagined.   Axioms 42 and 99.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.33.9 655   Axiom 100. 656   Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565), physician and historiographer of Ferdinand I, and author of De aliquot gentium migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, lin653 654

313

314 737

The New Science Now, on account of the uniform course that all the nations make, which was proved above [§727] by the uniformity by which the gods were raised to the stars, brought by the Phoenicians from the Near East to Greece and to Egypt, one has to say that the reign of the Chaldeans in the Near East must have run its course over just as much time; as a result, it went from Zoroaster to Ninus, who founded the first monarchy in the world—that is, the monarchy of Assyria—and, similarly, from Hermes Trismegistus to Sesostris—that is, the Ramses in Tacitus,657 who founded a monarchy which was also quite great. And because both were inland nations, they must have gone from divine governance through heroic governance, and, subsequently, through popular liberty to arrive at monarchy, which is the last form of human governance in order for the Egyptian division of ages through which the world ran its course prior to them to stand. For, as we will demonstrate below [§§1006, 1008, 1104], monarchy cannot come to be except in the unrestrained popular liberty to which the optimates come to subject their power during civil wars; when later this power is divided up among peoples into its least parts, the whole of it is easily claimed by those who, with their partisanship for popular liberty, eventually emerge as monarchs. However, Phoenicia, because it was a maritime nation enriched by trade, must have maintained itself in popular liberty—that is, the first form of human governance.

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738

Thus, with the understanding alone, without any need of memory (which has nothing to do unless the senses supply it with what has been done), it seems that we have given universal history its beginnings, both for ancient Egypt and in the Near East, which is more ancient than Egypt, and within the Near East, the beginnings of monarchy in Assyria. Up until now, in absence of the course taken prior to this monarchy, with the many and varied causes that go into the forming of monarchy as the last of the three forms of civil governance, it has come into history fully born at one stroke, like a frog born in a summer shower.

739

In this fashion, chronology comes to have certainty, in the progression of customs and deeds by which humankind must proceed, for, through an Axiom658 posited above, chronology has started its teaching where its subject matter takes its start: from Κρόνος [Kronos] (from whom the Greeks derived the word χρόνος [chronos], “time”), Saturn, who counts the years in terms of harvests; and from Urania, who contemplates the heavens with a view to taking the auguries; and from Zoroaster, who contemplates the stars so as to offer oracles from the falling stars (these were the first μαθήματα [mathe¯ mata], the first θεωρήματα [theo¯re¯ mata], the first sublime or divine things which the nations contemplated and guarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis (first edition 1557). 657  Tacitus, Annals 2.60.3. 658   Axiom 106.

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Book Two observed, as was stated above [§§391, 477, 711]). And later with the ascent of Saturn into the seventh sphere, thenceforth Urania became the contemplator of the planets and stars, and the Chaldeans, with the advantage of their boundless plains, became astronomers and astrologers, measuring the motions and observing the aspects of these planets and stars, and imagining their influence upon the bodies called “sublunary” and also, though vacuously, upon the free wills of men. These sciences retained the first names, which were given to them with complete propriety: the name “astronomy”—that is, the science of the laws of the stars—and the name “astrology”—that is, the science of the language of the stars—both of which names signified “divination”; so, from those aforementioned theorems came the term “theology,” the science of the language of the gods in their oracles, auspices, and auguries. Hence, eventually mathematics descended to measure the Earth, whose measure could not have had certainty without demonstrated measurements of the heavens; and the first and principal part of such measuring is shown by the word proper to it, “geometry.” Because, therefore, those two men do not take their start in their teaching where the matter which they treat takes its start (for they start with the astronomical year which, as was stated above,659 did not come into being among nations for at least a thousand years and, besides, could only have made certain for them the conjunctions and oppositions which constellations and planets make in the heavens, but nothing about things which take and run their course here on Earth, something upon which the generous strength of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly is wasted), accordingly, those two men whose ingenuity is a wonder to behold along with their stupendous erudition—Joseph Justus Scaliger in his De emendatione temporum and Denis Pétau in his De doctrina temporum660—because they fail completely in taking the proper start, bear little fruit for the beginnings and progress of a universal history.

740

On Poetic Geography Now, finally, it remains for us to purify the other eye of poetic history— that is, poetic geography. This purification is done through that property of human nature which we counted as one of the Axioms,661 that “whenever men have no true idea about things which are unfamiliar and distant, or must explain them to others who have no such idea, they describe them in terms of their similarity to things which are familiar and nearby”; so, the corpus of poetic geography as a whole and in its   The reference is to a passage that appears in the 1730 edition, but was deleted from the 1744 text. 660   The work by Scaliger that Vico mentions was published in 1583. Pétau’s text was published in 1627. 661   Axiom 2, paraphrased (compare §122). 659

741

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The New Science parts came into being from ideas as small as Greece itself,662 and because the Greeks later went throughout the world, it came to be enlarged into the larger form in which it remains depicted to us now. And the ancient geographers were in agreement with the following truth (although later they did not know how to make use of it), that ancient nations, in taking themselves to foreign and distant lands, gave names native to themselves to the cities, mountains, rivers, hills, straits, islands, and promontories.

742

Within Greece, therefore, came into being that part of the East called Asia, or India; of the West called Europe, or Hesperia; of the North called Thrace, or Scythia; of the South called Libya, or Mauretania. Thus, they named the parts of the world after their names for the smaller world of Greece on account of the likenesses that the Greeks observed between the places they saw in the world and the ones they saw in Greece. There is clear proof of this as the cardinal winds, which retain in their geography the names that they certainly must have had in the first place within Greece. As a result, the mares of Rhesus663 were impregnated on the shores of Ocean—we will see [§753] that this is the word for any sea of unlimited prospect—by Zephyr, the West Wind of Greece, and also on the shores of Ocean (in the primary signification just stated) the horses of Achilles must have been conceived by Zephyr; so too were the mares of Erichthonius said by Aeneas to Achilles to have been impregnated by Boreas, the North Wind of this same Greece.664 This truth about the cardinal winds is confirmed for us by the immense extension given by the Greek mind (itself developing to an immense extent) to their Olympus, from the name in Homer’s time for the mountain where the gods had their abode to the name for the starry heavens which it continued to have for them.665

743

Given these beginnings for geography, the great peninsula situated to the east of Greece continued to have the name Asia Minor since the name “Asia” was transferred to the eastern part of the larger world, which continued to be called Asia in an unqualified sense. By contrast, Greece itself, from the perspective of being west of Asia, was called “Europe”—the Europa whom Jove seized in changing himself into a bull666—and later the name “Europe” was the great continent distinct from Asia which went all the way to the ocean in the West. They called the western part of Greece “Hesperia,” where in the fourth quarter of the horizon arose at night the star, Hesperus; later, they saw   On the “restricted” character of ancient geography, compare Bacon, Redargutio philosophorum (Works III, 564). 663   See Homer, Iliad 10.435–437, 474–481. 664  Homer, Iliad 16.149–151 and Iliad 20.221–225. 665   See Virgil, Eclogues 6.86, Georgics 1.96, Aeneid 9.106; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.212. 666   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.836–875. 662

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Italy in the same place, and called it “Hesperia Magna”; and eventually Spain stood in the same place, and they called it “Hesperia Ultima.” The Greeks of Italy, by contrast, from their perspective called the part of Greece east of them across the sea “Ionia,” and the sea between these two parts of Greece continued to be called the “Ionian Sea”; later, because it was similarly situated as an Asiatic Greece relative to a native Greece, native Greeks called Asia Minor, from their perspective east of them, “Ionia.” And, it is reasonable that it was out of this earlier Ionia that Pythagoras came to Italy from the Samos which was one of the islands over which Ulysses was lord; he did not come to Italy from the Samos belonging to that later Ionia.667 It was from a Thrace which was native to Greece that Mars came, who was certainly a Greek deity, and consequently it was from Thrace that Orpheus must have come, the earliest of the Greek theological poets.

744

It was from a Greek Scythia that Anacharsis668 came, who left oracular writings in Greece which must have been similar to the oracles of Zoroaster, which need to have originally been an oracular history; hence, Anacharsis was accepted among the most ancient of the prophetic gods. These oracles were later translated by imposture into the dogmas of philosophy, just as the Orphic hymns were supposed to be made by Orpheus, even though they, like the oracles of Zoroaster, have nothing poetic about them and smell of the schools of Platonism and Pythagoreanism.

745

Accordingly, it was from this Scythia through a Hyperborea native to Greece that the two famous oracles, those at Delphi and Dodona, must have come to Greece, as we suspected in the Notes on the Chronological Table [§100]. For Anacharsis was killed by his brother Caduidas, because he tried to institute in Scythia—that is, among the Hyperboreans native to Greece—humane orders by means of Greek laws. This shows how much the barbarian philosophy of Van Heurn669 profited him: he did not even know how to discover such laws for himself! For these same reasons, consequently, Abaris must also have been a Scythian (he is said to have written the Scythian oracles, and these oracles can have been none other than the ones called above the oracles of Anacharsis), and he wrote them in the same Scythia where Idanthyrsus, who came a long time after, wrote with things themselves. Hence, one is necessarily given to believe that they must have been written by some impostor from some time after philosophy was introduced into Greece, and consequently the oracles of Anacharsis, because of the vanity of the learned, were accepted as oracles of a recondite wisdom, which have not come down to us.   See Homer, Iliad 2.634.   Anacharsis, disciple of Solon, mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 1.8. 669   See the note on Van Heurn at §44. 667 668

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746

Zalmoxis was a Getaen (just as Mars was a Getaen) who (as Herodotus670 relates) brought to the Greeks the dogma of the immortality of the soul.

747

Thus, it was from a Greek India that Bacchus must have come triumphant from an Indian East, from some Greek land rich in poetic gold. And Bacchus comes triumphant upon a chariot golden with grain, whence he is the tamer of serpents and tigers, just as Heracles is a tamer of hydras and lions, as was explained above [§§540, 543].

748

Certainly, the name “Morea” has been preserved up until our time as a term for the Peloponnesus, which proves for us that Perseus, certainly a Greek hero, made his expeditions within a Mauretania native to Greece, for the Peloponnesus bears the same relation to Achaea as Africa does to Europe. Consequently, Herodotus understood so little of his own antiquities (for this he is reproved by Thucydides671) that he tells us that Moreans at one time were white: certainly, the Moreans were white in the Greece of his time, which even today is called White Morea.

749

Thus, it must have been from the plague from this Mauretania that Aesculapius672 saved the island of Cos with his art, for if he had to save it from a plague from Morocco, he would have had to save Cos from all the plagues in the world.

750

It was in this Mauretania that Heracles must have shouldered the burden of the heavens, which Atlas in his old age had grown weary of supporting; originally, he was called Atlas for Mount Athos, the stretch of land dividing Macedonia and Thrace into which Xerxes673 later made a foray; in that place between Greece and Thrace, there is a river which continues to be called Atlas.674 Later, when it was observed that in the Strait of Gibraltar, Mount Abyla and Mount Calpe divide Africa and Europe by a similar strait of water, it was said that Heracles planted there the columns which, as we stated above [§§712, 726], supported the heavens, and the mountain in Africa near that place was called “Atlas.” And in this fashion, one can make out some verisimilitude in the response which in Homer675 Thetis makes to her son Achilles, that she is not able to take his complaint to Jove because he had gone from Olympus with the other gods to feast on Atlas; this response is based on the opinion, as we observed above [§§4, 89, 399, 712]), that the gods had their abode on the peaks of the highest mountains. And if they had been on the Mount  Herodotus, Histories 4.94.   See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2. 672   Actually, Hippocrates, as Vico himself states correctly at Scienza nuova prima §448. For the plague story, see Pliny, Natural History 7.37.123. 673  Herodotus, Histories 7.22–23. 674   Named by Herodotus at Histories 4.49. 675  Homer, Iliad 1.423–424. 670 671

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Atlas in Africa, it would be too difficult for anyone then to believe, since Homer676 himself says that even the winged Mercury arrived only with the greatest difficulty at the island of Calypso located in the Phoenician Sea, and this island was much closer to Greece than the regime which is nowadays called Morocco. Thus, it must have been from a Greek Hesperia that Heracles brought the golden apple to Attica; it was also there that the nymphs called the Hesperides—that is, the daughters of Atlas—kept safe that golden apple.

751

Thus, the Eridanus where Phaethon fell must have been the Danube in Greek Thrace, which flows into the Black Sea. Later, when the Greeks observed that the Po is the other river in the world which, like the Danube, runs from west to east, they called the Po the “Eridanus,” and the mythologists made Phaethon’s fall take place in Italy. However, it was only the things from Greek heroic history, and not those of other nations, which the Greeks fixed in the stars, among which is Eridanus.

752

Finally, the Greeks went as far as the Ocean, and there extended their narrow idea of ocean to any sea which was of unlimited prospect (hence, Homer677 said that Aeolia was girded by ocean), and along with this idea, they extended the name of ocean, which now signifies the sea that encircles the Earth, which they believed was a great island; and there was an enlarging of the power of Neptune, who from the abyss of waters, which Plato678 places in the bowels of the Earth, makes earthquakes with his great trident—the rude beginnings of this Poetic Physics that have been explained by us above [§714]).

753

Such beginnings for geography can acquit Homer unconditionally of the weighty errors that are wrongly imputed to him.

754

I. The lotus-eaters,679 who ate the bark of a plant called the “lotus,” must have been much closer when Homer says that Ulysses made the journey from Malea to the lotus-eaters in nine days: for if the lotus-eaters were, as been said of them, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, it would be not only difficult, but impossible to believe that Ulysses made this journey in nine days; this is the error noted by Eratosthenes.680

755

II. The Laestrygones in Homer’s681 time must have had days longer than other peoples within Greece itself, not longer than all the other people of

756

 Homer, Odyssey 5.46 and 55.  Homer, Odyssey 10.3–4. 678  See Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b. 679   See Homer, Odyssey 9.80–84. 680   Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 BCE), Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. Vico’s source, as Battistini notes, is Strabo, Geography 1.2.17. 681  Homer, Odyssey 10.80–86. 676 677

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The New Science the Earth; this passage led Aratus682 to locate the Laestrygones under the heading of Draco. Certainly Thucydides,683 who is a weighty and precise writer, tells us about the Laestrygones in Sicily, who must have been the northernmost people of that island.

757

III. For the same reason, the Cimmerians had the longest nights of all peoples in Greece, for they were situated in the northernmost part of Greece, and accordingly, on account of their long nights, they were said to inhabit a place near the underworld. Because of this, their name was later transferred to the distant inhabitants of the Sea of Azov. And, consequently, the people of Cumae, because they were situated near the grotto of the Sybil, which led to the underworld, must have been called Cimmerians, because it was believed they were similarly situated. For it is not believable that Ulysses was sent by Circe and that without any magic (for, as we observed above [§437], Mercury had given him a secret antidote to the witchcraft of Circe), he went in a single day to those Cimmerians who later remained near the Sea of Azov in order to see the underworld, and that he returned that same day from there to the Circeii, which is now called Mount Circello, near Cumae.

758

With these same principles pertaining to Greek poetic geography, it is possible to solve many great difficulties pertaining to the ancient history of the East; there, peoples who originally must have been situated in the Near East must have been taken to be far-off peoples, particularly those in the North and the South.

759

For what we stated concerning poetic geography in Greece is found to be the same for ancient geography in Latium. Latium must have originally been quite confined in that for two hundred and fifty years of rule, Rome subdued a good twenty peoples and did not extend its power much more than twenty miles, as we stated above [§§88, 160, 722]. Italy was certainly limited by its borders with Cisalpine Gaul and Magna Graecia, and it was only later because of Roman conquests that the name extended to the range which endures to this day. Thus, the Tyrrhenian Sea must have been rather small in the days when Horatius Cocles alone stood against all the Etruscans on a bridge.684 Later, because of Roman victories, the name was extended further to include the lower coast of Italy.

760

It was actually in this way and not otherwise that the earliest Pontus, where Jason made his naval expedition, must have been the land nearest   Aratus, Greek poet, c. 315–240 BCE.  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.2.1. 684   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.10. 682

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to Europe, from which it is divided by the strait called Propontis; this land must have given its name to the Sea of Pontus, which was extended later as far into Asia as where later Mithridates ruled. For we are told in this same myth that Aeëtes, father of Medea, was born in Chalcis, a city in Euboea, an island within Greece itself which is now called Negropont, which must have given this first name to what is certainly still called the Black Sea. The earliest Crete must have been an island within that archipelago, which is a labyrinth of islands, as we have explained above [§635]. And only subsequently after Minos must have been renowned for his corsair raids upon the Athenians did Crete later go to the island in the Mediterranean, where it still remains. Now (since we have been called back from Latium to Greece) those vainglorious Greeks, while they went throughout the world, spread everywhere the fame of the Trojan War and the wanderings of the heroes, not only Trojan heroes such as Antenor, Capys, and Aeneas, but also Greek heroes such as Menelaus, Diomedes, and Ulysses.

761

They observed that there was spread throughout the world a character representing the founders of nations similar to the character of the Heracles of theirs called the Theban Heracles, of whom Varro counted throughout ancient nations a good twenty versions, among which had been that whom the Latins had called “the god Fidius.” Thus, it came to pass that, on account of a vanity which the same as the Egyptians (who said that their Jove Ammon was more ancient than all the other versions of Jove in the world and that all the versions of Heracles of the other nations took their name from their Egyptian Heracles, in keeping with the two Axioms685 proposed above whereby they erroneously believed that they were older than all other nations in the world), the Greeks made their Heracles go through every part of the Earth, purifying it of monsters, so as to bring only glory back home. They observed that there was a poetic character representing shepherds who spoke in verse, among whom was the Arcadian Evander.686 And thus Evander went from Arcadia to Latium and there received within his dwelling his native Heracles and there took Carmenta as his wife (a name derived from carmi, “verses”), who in Latium discovered l­etters— that is, the forms of the sounds called “articulated,” which are the matter of verse. And finally, to confirm all the things stated here, they observed these poetic characters within Latium just as they had done, as we saw above [§§593, 624], when they found their Curetes spread over Saturnia—that is, ancient Italy—over Crete, and over Asia. 685 686

  Axioms 42 and 43.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.5.2.

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763

However, since these Greek words and ideas arrived in Latium during that most primitive time when nations were closed off to foreigners, during the times of Servius Tullius when Livy says that not even the famous name of Pythagoras, much less the man himself, could have passed through so many nations of such diverse languages and customs to reach Rome. It was precisely with a view to this difficulty that we postulated above687 what we are inclined to think a necessary conjecture, that on the shores of Latium there was some Greek city later buried in the shadows of antiquity that taught the peoples of Latium letters, which, as Tacitus688 tells us, were originally similar to the most ancient letters of Greece. This is a strong argument for the people of Latium having received Greek letters from the Greeks of Latium, not from those of Magna Graecia, much less from Greeks across the sea, with whom they had no acquaintance until the time of the war with Tarentum, which later led to their war with Pyrrhus. For otherwise the people of Latium would have used the later letters of Greece and not retained their earlier letters derived from the ancient Greek ones.

764

Thus, the names of Heracles, Evander, and Aeneas entered into Latium from Greece through the following customs of nations.

765

First, because in their barbarism nations love their native customs, even as soon as they start to become more genteel, they delight in foreign ways of speaking as much as in foreign wares and fashions; and, accordingly, in Latium, they exchanged their god Fidus for the Heracles of the Greeks, and instead of the native oath, mediusfidius [“by Fidus”], they introduced mehercule [“by Heracles”], edepol [“by Pollux”], mecastor [“by Castor”].

766

Further, on account of the vanity that nations have, of which we have spoken many times, they boast of well-reputed foreign origins, particularly when they have some motive for believing in this from the times of their barbarism. So, during the return to barbarism, Giovanni Villani tells us that Fiesole had been founded by Atlas and that the Trojan king, Priam, ruled in Germany, and similarly the people of Latium did not wish to acknowledge Fidus, their true founder, in favor of Heracles, a Greek founder, and wished to exchange the characters representing their poet shepherds for the Arcadian Evander.

767

In the third place, when nations observe things belonging to foreigners which they cannot explain with certain terms from their own native language, they are necessarily better served by foreign terms.

768

Fourth and lastly, we add the property of early peoples upon which we reasoned above in the Poetic Logic [§410], that of not knowing how to abstract qualities belonging to a subject: since they do not know how to

687 688

  Axiom 103.  Tacitus, Annals 11.14.4.

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Book Two abstract, they name a subject in terms of its qualities. We have arguments for this which are quite certain in Latin turns of phrase. The Romans knew nothing of things pertaining to luxury, but, given that they observed such things in Tarentum, they called anyone “perfumed” a “Tarentine.” They knew nothing of things pertaining to military strategy, but, given that they observed such things in Carthage, they called them punica artes [“Punic arts”].689 They knew nothing of things pertaining to pomp, but, given that they observed such things in Capua, they said supercilium campanicum690 [“Capuan aloofness”] for “pomp” or “pride.”

769

Thus, Numa and Ancus were “Sabines,” because they did not know how to speak of the “religiosity” which marked the customs of the Sabines. Thus, Servius Tullius was a “Greek” because they did not know how to speak of “astuteness,” an idea that must have remained mute for them up until later when they became familiar with Greeks in the defeated city of which we just spoke. And he was a “servant,” because they did not know how to speak of the “weakness” which relinquished bonitary domain over the fields to plebeians by bringing them the first agrarian law, as was demonstrated above [§§107, 420, 613, 640, 653]; for this, perhaps, he was killed by the Fathers.691 For astuteness is a property which follows upon weakness, customs which were unknown to Romans in their openness and virtue. In truth, it is a great affront which they make against Roman origins, and which they do as an offense towards the wisdom of the Roman founder, Romulus, when they hold that Rome did not have heroes in its body politic for the creation of kings and, as a result, must have suffered to be ruled by someone who was a base slave. Such is the honor given to Romulus by those critics preoccupied with writers, similar to another kind of honor given to the Romans which followed later—namely, that after they had founded a great power in Latium and defended it against the entirety of Etruscan power, they went searching like lawless barbarians throughout Italy, Magna Graecia, and overseas in Greece for laws by which to institute orders for their liberty (this was done to maintain repute for the myth that the Law of the Twelve Tables came to Rome from Athens).

Corollary on Aeneas coming to Italy With a view to all upon which we have reasoned here, one is able to demonstrate the fashion in which Aeneas came to Italy and founded the Roman people in Alba, to which the Romans traced their origins. There  Livy, Ab urbe condita 25.39.1.   See Cicero, De lege agraria 2.34.93. 691  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.48.3–4. 689 690

770

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The New Science was a Greek city of this sort located on the shores of Latium that came from a Greek city in Asia where Troy was; it was unknown to the Romans until they extended their conquests from inland down closer to the sea, which they started to do after Ancus Marcius, the third Roman king, and which began with Ostia, the coastal city which was so close to Rome that when later Rome increased further, it made Ostia its port. It was in the same fashion that Rome received into its protection both the Arcadian peoples of Latium, who were refugees by land, and later those Phrygian peoples, who were refugees by sea. And thus, by two anachronisms did the Arcadians and the Phrygians seek safety within the asylum of Romulus, the Arcadians in a time after Romulus and the Phrygians in a time prior to him.

771

If such is not the way things went, then the origins of Rome from Aeneas baffles and confounds all understanding, as we remarked in the Axiom692 stated above. As a result, so as not to be so baffled and confounded, the learned, starting with Livy,693 have placed this origin among myths without noticing, however, as we stated above in the Axioms,694 that myths must have some public impetus for the truth. For Evander was so powerful in Latium that he received Heracles into his household five hundred years before the founding of Rome; and Aeneas founded the royal house of Alba, which, through fourteen kings, grew to such brilliance that it became the capital of Latium; and the Arcadians and the Phrygians, who wandered for so many years, eventually repaired to the asylum of Romulus! So how is it that shepherds from Arcadia in the inland of Greece, who by nature have no knowledge about things pertaining to the sea, drifted across the sea and penetrated into the middle of Latium just when Ancus Marcius, the third king after Romulus, was the first to lead a colony down to the sea nearby? How is it that they came along with the scattered Phrygians not only two hundred years before the time when, in the judgment of Livy, not even the name of Pythagoras, the most celebrated man of Magna Graecia, could have passed from Croton through the middle of so many nations so diverse in language and custom to arrive in Rome; but also four hundred years before the Tarentines knew anything of Romans, who were already powerful in Italy?

772

However, it is also the case—as we have stated many times through the Axiom695 posited above—that these folk traditions must have their beginning in some great public impetus for the truth, since an entire nation preserved them for such a long time. What then? What needs to be stated is that some Greek city was on the shores of Latium, like so many others that were and later remained on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. This city prior to the Law of the Twelve Tables   Axiom 103.   See Livy, Ab urbe condita pr.6. 694   Axiom 16. 695   Axiom 16. 692 693

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Book Two was defeated by the Romans and by the heroic right of barbarous victors was demolished, and the defeated were received in the condition of socii to the heroes. And these Greeks, using poetic characters, called those wandering inland lost in the forest “Arcadians”; and they called those wandering overseas “Phrygians,” just as the Romans called those defeated “received into the asylum of Romulus,” and put to lease—that is, those in the condition of day laborers under the order of clientship instituted by Romulus when he opened the asylum in the clearing for those who fled there. It was upon those defeated and put to lease (whom we place in the time between the expulsion of kings and the Law of the Twelve Tables) that the Roman plebeians must have been a distinct class because of the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, which permitted to them bonitary domain over the fields, and when they contested beyond this, Coriolanus tried, as was stated above [§§108, 654], to reduce to the day laborers of Romulus. And later when the Greeks made a clamor everywhere about the Trojan War and the wandering of heroes and, especially in Italy, the wandering of Aeneas (for they had previously observed in Italy their own Heracles and Evander and Curetes in conformity with what was stated above [§762]), it was in this fashion that at some point these traditions in the hands of a barbarous people were altered and corrupted. It was in this fashion, as we said, that Aeneas became the founder of the Roman people of Latium. This is the same Aeneas who Bochart696 tries to say never set foot in Italy, who Strabo697 says never left Troy, and who Homer698 (who has more weight here) tells us died in Troy and left his rule to descendants. Thus, in two different ways, we see the vanity of nations, first, that of the Greeks, who made such a clamor throughout the world about the war in Troy, and second, that of the Romans in boasting of their famed foreign origins: the Greeks imposed and the Romans eventually accepted Aeneas as the founder of the Roman people. This myth could not have come into being but from the time of the war with Pyrrhus, when the Romans started to delight in the things of Greece, for such is the custom that we observe celebrated by nations which have had much experience with foreigners over a long period of time.

773

On the naming and describing of heroic cities Now, because the parts of geography are nomenclature and c­ horography— that is, the naming and the description of places and, principally, of 696   On Bochart, see the note at §62. According to Battistini, the reference is to Bochart’s De quaestione num Aeneas numquam fuerit in Italia (1672). 697  Strabo, Geography 13.1.53. 698  Homer, Iliad 20.293–308.

774

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The New Science c­ ities—for the completion of the Poetic Wisdom, it remains to reason upon these things.

775

It was stated above [§525] that heroic cities were discovered to be founded by providence in places which were strong locations, which the ancient people of Latium during their age of gods must have called with the divine term arae [“altars”] and must have also named arces [“citadels”] as places strong by their location. For in the return to barbarous times, lordships were first called rocce, “steep and rocky cliffs,” and later from this rocche, and then eventually castella [“castles”]. The same was actually the case for the word arae, which must have extended to include the entire district belonging to each heroic city, a district which was called, as was observed above [§§546, 611, 722], ager in claims relative to its borders with foreigners and called territorium in claims concerning its jurisdiction over citizens. All of this is in a golden passage in Tacitus,699 where he describes the ara maxima [“the great altar”] of Heracles in Rome. Because it offers such weighty proof for these principles, we record it here in its entirety. Igitur a foro boario ubi aeneum bovis simulacrum adspicimus quia id genus animalium ARATRO subditur sulcus designandi oppidi captus ut magnam Herculis ARAM complecteretur ARA HERCULIS erat [“Therefore, from the oxen market where we see the statue of the bronze cow—because it is this kind of animal which is yoked to the plough—begins a furrowing designating the town so as to encompass the great altar of Heracles, which was the altar of Heracles”]. There is also another golden passage in Sallust,700 when he tells us of the famed altar of the Philaenus brothers, which remained at the border between two powers, Carthage and Cyrene.

776

Altars of this sort are actually spread throughout all of ancient geography. And, starting with Asia, Keller701 observes in his Ancient Geography that all the cities of Syria had the word “are” either before or after the proper name, whence Syria itself was called Aramea and Aramia. However, in Greece, Theseus founded the city of Athens on the famed Altar of the Unfortunates, deeming men “unfortunate” by the correct idea—that is, those lawless and impious men—and from the quarrels belonging to that infamous sharing in common, these men had recourse to the strongly situated lands of the strong, as we stated above [§§553–557], themselves completely alone, weak, and needing all the goods held by the pious men who produced humanity. Hence, in Greek, the word ἄρά [ara] also means “oath,” for, as we also reasoned out above, upon these earliest altars of gentile humanity were the earliest victims, called, as we saw above [§§101, 517, 549], Saturni hostiae, the earliest ἀναθήματα [anathe¯ mata] who are translated in Latin as Diris devoti [“those pledged  Tacitus, Annals 12.24.  Sallust, The Jugurthine War 79. 701   Christoph Keller (1638–1707), German philologist. The reference is to Keller’s Notitiae orbis antiqui (Leipzig, 1706), p. 459. 699 700

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to the Furies”]: these were the impious and violent men who dared to enter into the ploughed lands of the strong to pursue of the weak, who fled to escape from the violent (hence the verb “to escape,” means “to save oneself ”), and those impious and violent men were consecrated to Vesta and killed; this is retained in Latin in the use of the word supplicium [“prayer”] to signify “penalty” and “sacrifice,” as it is used by Sallust702 among others. In these significations, Latin corresponds quite congruously to Greek, in which the word ἄρά [ara], which, as was stated, means votum [“oath”], but, in addition, signifies noxa—that is, an object which has done damage—and also signifies the Dirae who are the Furies.703 It is precisely they who are those earliest devoti of whom we speaking here and about whom we will have more to say in Book Four [§957]—that is, those consecrated to the Furies upon the earliest altars of gentile humanity. As a result, the word hara, which retained the significance of a “stable,” must have signified in ancient Latin a “victim.” From this word is certainly derived the word haruspex [“soothsayer”], one who makes divinations from the innards of victims killed upon altars. And from what was stated above concerning the Great Altar of Heracles, Romulus must have founded Rome upon an altar similar to that of Theseus, within the asylum opened up in the clearing, for it is retained in Latin that they never make mention of such a clearing or sacred wood where there is not some altar raised to some divinity. As a result, when Livy tells us above [§§17, 114, 160, 532, 561] in general terms that these asylums were vetus urbes condentium consilium704 [“the age-old counsel of founders of cities”], he discloses for us the reason why in ancient geography one reads of so many cities with the name “altar.” Hence, one needs to admit that it was because of his knowledge of antiquity that Cicero705 called the Senate the ara sociorum [“the altar of associates”], insofar as it was to the Senate that the provinces took their official complaints against governors who governed over them avariciously, therefore recalling the origin of associates in those earliest socii in the world.

777

We have already demonstrated, then [§§775–776], that “altar” is a word for the heroic cities in Asia and throughout Europe in Greece and Italy. In Africa there remained according to Sallust706 the famed altar of the Philaenus brothers mentioned just above. Returning to Europe, they even today use the expression “altars of the Sicilians” for the cities in northern Transylvania inhabited by the ancient nation of the Huns who, along with the Hungarians and the Saxons, compose this province. In Germany, one reads in Tacitus,707 there is an “altar of the Ubians.” In Spain, the word “altar” also remains as the name for many cities.

778

 Sallust, On the Catiline Conspiracy 9.2.  Virgil, Aeneid 4.473 and 12.869. 704  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5. 705  Cicero, Against Verres 2.48.126. 706  Sallust, The Jugurthine War 79. 707  Tacitus, Annals 1.57. 702 703

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The New Science However, in the Syrian language, the word ari means “lion.” And we demonstrated above [§§561–563] in the natural theogony of the twelve major divinities, that in Greek it was out of their defense of their altars that the idea of MARS came into being, a divinity whom they called ῎Αρης [Are¯ s]. As a result, through the same idea of strength, in the return to barbarous times, so many cities and noble houses bore the lion as their insignia. This word, uniform in its sound and significance for so many nations so different and distant from one another in place, time, and custom, must be whence the Latin word aratum [“plough”], the moldboard for which is called urbs.708 And, consequently, from this word must have come the Latin words arx [“citadel”] and arceo [“to enclose”], whence also ager arcifinius was used by writers de limitibus agrorum [“for the boundaries of fields”]; and from this word must come, in addition, the words arma [“arms”] and arcus [“bow”], from the correct idea that strength reposes in driving back harm and holding it at a distance.

779

And, behold, POETIC WISDOM has been demonstrated as justly deserving two lofty and sovereign praises, the first of which has certainly and constantly been attributed to it, that it founded the humankind of gentile humanity; and those two forms of vanity, first that of the nations and second that of the learned, the former with its ideas of empty magnificence, the latter with its ideas of inopportune philosophical wisdom, while wanting to affirm this about poetic wisdom, have instead denied it. The other praise, for which, indeed, a folk tradition has come down to us, is that the wisdom of the ancients made sages who, in the same spirit, were equally great as philosophers and lawgivers and captains and historians and orators and poets, whence that wisdom is so greatly desired. However, in making them thus, they were more like precursors, such as we have found in those myths in which, as wombs or matrices, is discovered the precursor to all recondite wisdom; one can say that within these myths, the nations have in a rude way709 and by the human senses described the principles of this world of sciences, a world that later by reasoning and by maxims has been clarified for us by the particular reflections of the learned. This accords with all that we had to demonstrate in Book Two, that the theological poets were the sense, the philosophers were the intellect of human wisdom.

 Varro, De lingua latina 5.143.   The 1744 printed edition has “with the mind” (colla mente), clearly a typographical error. The autograph has “in a rude way” (rozzamente), the reading typically reproduced by modern Italian editions. 708 709

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On the Discovery of the True Homer1

  Book Three of the 1744 Scienza nuova is certainly the most comprehensive treatment of Homer to appear in Vico. But Vico had considered the Homeric question earlier, particularly in a series of Dissertationes that he appended to the Diritto universale in 1722 as a continuation of De constantia iurisprudentis 2.4, “Homer and His Two Poems” (Cristofolini 833–867). Portions of that text are well translated by John D. Schaeffer at BV 61–69.

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Although poetic wisdom was demonstrated in the preceding book to have been the commonplace wisdom of the peoples of Greece (who were, first, theological and, later, heroic poets), it ought necessarily to follow that the wisdom of Homer would not be different in kind. Yet Plato has left the opinion so deeply impressed upon us that Homer was furnished with a sublime, recondite wisdom; hence all the other philosophers have followed in his wake, and above all Plutarch,2 who labored over this for an entire book. Therefore, we will herein offer a particular examination of whether Homer ever was a philosopher (on which question, Dionysius Longinus has also written an entire book mentioned by Diogenes Laertius3 in his Life of Pyrrho).

780

On the Recondite Wisdom That Has Been Opined about Homer For let us concede what certainly must be granted, that Homer must have gone along with the whole common sensibility and, accordingly, the common customs of Greece in its barbarous times, for such common sensibilities and such customs are matters proper to poets. And, accordingly, let us concede that which he tells us, that they had esteem for the gods in terms of their strength: so it was because of the supreme strength of Jove that he tries to demonstrate in the myth of the Great Chain4 that Jove himself is king over men and gods, as was observed above [§387]. On the basis of this commonplace, he makes it believable that Diomedes wounded Venus and Mars with the help of Minerva,5 who in a contest between gods disarms Venus and strikes Mars with a blow from a rock.6 This is the Minerva who in the common belief is the goddess of philosophy! And such is the good use she makes of arms worthy of the wisdom of Jove! Let us concede his telling us of customs most brutal (customs which, although contrary to what the authors of the natural law of the gentile peoples7 have claimed to be eternal among nations, were then current among the barbarous Greek peoples believed to have spread humanity throughout the world): the custom of poisoning arrows (hence, Ulysses accordingly goes to Ephyra to find poisonous herbs) and the custom of not burying enemies killed in battle but leaving them unburied as food for birds and dogs (hence at such great cost Priam ransoms the corpse of   The reference is to the Pseudo-Plutarch’s De vita et poësi Homeri.  In fact, the attribution of a book about Homer to Longinus occurs not in Diogenes Laertius, but in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia once attributed to Suidas; see Suidas, Lexicon (entry on “Longinus”). 4   See Homer, Iliad 8.18–27. 5  Homer, Iliad 5.330–340, 855–861. 6  Homer, Iliad 21.424–426. 7   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. 2 3

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The New Science Hector from Achilles, even though Achilles has bound that corpse naked to his chariot and dragged it for three days around the walls of Troy).8

782

Yet, since the end of poetry is to domesticate the ferocity of the common run, of whom the teachers are the poets, it did not belong to a man wise about such sensibilities and customs so savage to arouse wonder in the common run in order to delight in them, and with delight be even more confirmed in them. It would not belong to a wise man to arouse pleasure in the base common run at the baseness of the gods, much less of heroes: so one reads that in a contest Mars insultingly calls Minerva a “dog fly”;9 Minerva punches Diana;10 Achilles and Agamemnon—the former, the greatest of the Greek heroes, the latter, the prince of the Greek league, and both kings—insultingly call one another dogs, something rarely said by servants in the comedies of today.11

783

And what word, by God!,12 is more proper and deserved than “stupidity” in describing the wisdom of Agamemnon, a leader who had to be constrained by Achilles to do what he ought in restoring Chryseis to Chryses her father, priest of Apollo, a god who for her abduction made his revenge upon the Greek army with the cruelest of plagues?13 What other word for a leader who deemed himself put on the spot by this, and believed that he could recover his honor by practicing a justice which follows from a wisdom of this sort, who wrongfully took Briseis from Achilles,14 who carried with him the fate of Troy (and as a result of Achilles departing in disgust with his people and his ships, Hector could do what wished to the remaining Greeks who had escaped the plague)? Behold, here is the Homer who up until now was believed to have instituted the orders of Greek political life—that is, civil life—who starts with a thread of this sort to weave the entire Iliad, whose principal actors are such a leader, and Achilles is such a hero, as we made it possible to see when we reasoned upon the Heroism of the Earliest Peoples! [§667]. Behold, here is the Homer whose skill in devising poetic characters is beyond all telling, as we will make it possible to see herein [§§808–809], but the greatest of which characters are so incongruous with our civil human nature! However, these characters are perfectly suited to heroic human nature in its punctiliousness, as we stated above [§667].  Homer, Iliad 22.335–355, 395–404.  Homer, Iliad 21.394. 10  Homer, Iliad 21.424–426. 11  Homer, Iliad 1.225. 12   See Vico’s comment on this oath at §482. 13  Homer, Iliad 1.369–390. 14  Homer, Iliad 1.184–187, 322–325. 8 9

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What ought we to say about the fact that he tells of his heroes (and above all, the wise Ulysses) taking such delight in wine and, when they are afflicted, taking all their comfort in getting drunk?15

784

These are truly precepts for consolation, most worthy of a philosopher! It makes Scaliger16 resentful that all the comparisons in Homer are taken from wild beasts and other primitive things. However, one must concede that this was necessary for Homer to make himself better understood by the common run, which was wild and primitive. Nevertheless, as successful as they are (his comparisons are incomparable), they certainly do not belong to an ingenuity domesticated and civilized by some philosophy.

785

Nor could this truculence and savagery of style come into being from the spirit of any humane and devout philosophy, a style with which Homer describes so many, so varied, and bloody battles, so many, so different fashions and kinds of killing, all so extravagantly cruel and making particularly for the sublimity of the Iliad as a whole. The later constancy, which is established and confirmed by the study of the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have devised gods and heroes who are so fickle. Some, even when they are in commotion and disturbed, are quieted by the slightest impetus of some reason at odds with this. Others, while they are boiling with violent wrath, upon remembering some tearful thing, melt into bitter weeping17 (so during the return to barbarism in Italy, at the end of which comes Dante—the Tuscan Homer18 who sings of nothing other than history—one reads of Cola di Rienzo, whose biography expounds vividly, as we stated above [§699], the customs of the Greek heroes of which Homer tells us; when Cola makes mention of the misfortune of the Roman state oppressed by the powerful at that time, he and those present to his account break out into outright tears). By contrast, others, when afflicted with extreme grief, if some dainty thing presents itself (as when the feast of Alcinous presents itself to the wise Ulysses19), completely forget their woes and devolve one and all into gaiety. Others in complete repose and quiet, at the innocent statement of another which does not go well with their present  Homer, Odyssey 8.88–89.   Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1594), 3.51. 17   See, for example, Iliad 24.507–515. 18   Though Vico’s praise for Dante as the “Tuscan Homer” is genuine, bearing some comparison to Gravina’s 1708 Della ragion poetica, Vico denies that Dante is as purely poetic as Homer. Despite living just after the height of Italy’s barbarism, Dante is partly formed by abstract metaphysical study, which Vico takes to be naturally opposed to poetry. “If he had known nothing of scholastic thought or of Latin, he would have been a greater poet,” Vico claims in the 1725 version of the New Science (§314). The Homer/Dante parallel is further weakened by Vico’s sense that, unlike Dante, the historical existence of Homer is doubtful. 19  Homer, Odyssey 8.199–201. 15 16

786

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The New Science humor, become so resentful of it and fly into such a blind rage that they threaten the speaker with an immediate and frightful death. This is what Achilles20 does when he receives Priam in his tent, Priam (who at night, with Mercury as his escort, goes through the middle of the Greek camp completely alone and by himself so as to ransom, as we stated in another place above [§§667, 781], the corpse of Hector); when Priam has been admitted, Achilles makes dinner for him. And, on account of one statement that he will not go along with, which fell inadvertently from the mouth of an unfortunate father out of devotion to a child so brave, Achilles forgets all the laws imagined about hospitality, holds himself aloof from the trust which brought Priam alone and by himself, a trust which Priam had in Achilles alone, moved in no way by the numerous, weighty misfortunes of such a king, in no way by the devotion of such a father, in no way by reverence for a man so old, restrained in no way by a fortune common to all, which avails like no other thing in moving us to compassion. Mounting in his bestial wrath, he thunders about wanting to cut off Priam’s head. At the same time, this Achilles is impiously stubborn in not remitting a private offense done by Agamemnon (no matter how weighty this was, it could not justly be avenged with the ruin of his fatherland and all its nations), and it pleases him, as he carries within him the fate of Troy, to see in ruin all the Greeks miserably beaten by Hector21; neither devotion to the fatherland nor glory for his nation move him to bring succor to them; he does finally bring succor, but only to satisfy his private grief over Paris having killed Patroclus.22 And not even in death is he placated over the taking of Briseis, until the unfortunate and beautiful princess maid Polyxena, from the ruined household of the once rich and powerful Priam, has become a wretched slave sacrificed before his tomb, and until his ashes, thirsting for vengeance, have soaked up the last drop of her blood.23 And we will pass in complete silence over what cannot be understood, how someone who had the sense of gravity and congruousness belonging to the thought of a philosopher managed to discover the many myths appropriate to old women dealing with children, with which Homer crowded his other poem, the Odyssey.

787

Such customs—rude, base, ferocious, savage, unstable, irrational, and irrationally stubborn, fickle, and foolish—can only belong—as we demonstrated in Book Two in the Corollaries on the Heroic Nature [§§670– 677]—to men with a weakness of mind like children, a robustness of imagination like women, and a boiling of passions like the most violent young. Hence, one has to deny to Homer any recondite wisdom.  Homer, Iliad 24.552–570.  Homer, Iliad 24.552–570. 22   This is a lapsus on the part of Vico, who presumably knows that Hector kills Patroclus. 23   The story of Polyxena does not appear in the Iliad. Instead, see Euripides, Hecuba 218, 521–582; Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.25.4; Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.439–480. 20 21

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The things upon which we reason here are the matter from which doubts started to arise, which imposed upon us the necessity of searching for the TRUE HOMER.

On the Fatherland of Homer Such was the recondite wisdom believed until now to belong to Homer. Now, let us look into his fatherland, for which almost all the cities in Greece were in contention. Indeed, there was no lack of those who wished for him to be a Greek from Italy, and so as to make this determinate, Leone Allacci in De patria Homeri toils in vain.24

788

However, because there has come down to us no writer more ancient than Homer, as Josephus resolutely maintains against the grammarian Apion,25 and because writers also came a long time after him, it is necessitated by our metaphysical art of criticism that to consider him an author of nations (as he has been considered) and, based upon this, to discover the truth about both the Homeric age and fatherland from Homer himself. Certainly, concerning the Homer who is author of the Odyssey, we can be sure that he was from the southwest of Greece from that golden passage26 where Alcinous, king of the Phaecia—today, Corfu—offers to Ulysses as he tries to depart a ship well outfitted with his vassals; these vassals, he says, are expert seamen who could take Ulysses if needed as far as Euboea—today, Negropont. Euboea was said by those who chanced to see it to be quite far away, as if it were the Ultima Thule of the Greek world. From this passage it is evidently demonstrated that the Homer of the Odyssey was other than the Homer who was author of the Iliad. This is insofar as Euboea was not very far from Troy—that is, was located in Asia in a place on the banks of the Hellespont, the narrow strait on which today there are two fortresses called the Dardanelles, a name which preserves even to this day its origin from the word “Dardania,” which was the ancient territory of Troy.

789

And certainly there is in Seneca27 the celebrated question among Greek grammarians about whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were by the same author. The contest among Greek cities, each vying for the honor of having Homer as its citizen, came about because almost every one of them   Leone Allacci (1586–1690), Greek scholar who was keeper of the Vatican library. The reference is to Allaci’s De patria Homeri (1640). 25   Josephus does not say that Homer is the oldest of all writers. Rather, he says that “throughout the whole range of Greek literature no undisputed work is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer” (Against Apion 1.2.12). Taken without qualification, Vico’s claim would imply that Homer is older than Moses, against the presumed intention of Josephus. 26  Homer, Odyssey 7.321–323. 27   See Seneca’s essay “On the Shortness of Life” §13. 24

790

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791

The New Science ­ bserved in his poems words, phrases, and dialect belonging to the vero nacular language of each. What is stated here serves as the Discovery of the True Homer.

On the Age of Homer 792

We can be sure about the age of Homer from the following authoritative passages from his poems.

793

I. Achilles in the funeral for Patroclus allows one to see almost all the kinds of games that were later celebrated in Greece at its most cultivated.28

794

II. Already discovered were the arts of casting in low relief and of engraving in metal, as is demonstrated among other things by the shield of Achilles,29 which we observed above [§§681–686]. Painting had not yet been discovered, for casting abstracts by means of some relief, and engraving does the same by means of some depth, but painting abstracts from surfaces absolutely, which is the most difficult labor of ingenuity. Hence, neither Homer nor Moses ever mentions things which are painted, an argument for their antiquity!30

795

III. The delights of the gardens of Alcinous, the magnificence of his royal household, and the merriness of his feasts31 prove for us that the Greeks already admired luxury and pomp.

796

IV. The Phoenicians were already bringing to the shores of Greece ivory, purple dye, and that Arabic incense which is the scent of the grotto of Venus;32 in addition, they brought linen more subtle than the dry skin of an onion,33 embroidered clothes and, among the gifts of suitors to regale Penelope, clothing composed of a fabric of such a refined and soft texture that expanded in the fuller places and contracted in those more slender.34 A discovery worthy of the softness of our times!

797

V. The coach in which Priam brings himself to Achilles is made of cedar,35 and the scent of cedar perfumes the cave of Calypso;36 in this there is a fine taste and sensibility, not intelligible to Roman pleasure  Homer, Iliad 23.262–897.  Homer, Iliad 18.478–607. 30   The exclamation mark is present in both the 1744 printed edition and the autograph, but not in modern Italian editions. 31   For the gardens, see Odyssey 6.291–293 and 7.112–132; for the palace, see Odyssey 8.82–111; for the banquets, see Odyssey 8.167–183. 32  Homer, Odyssey 8.363. 33  Homer, Odyssey 19.232–233. 34  Homer, Odyssey 18.292–294. 35  Homer, Iliad 24.266–274. 36  Homer, Odyssey 5.59–61. 28 29

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when those under Nero and Heliogabalus were most mad for wasting their substance on luxuries. VI. There are described the most refined baths at Circe’s.37

798

VII. The servants of the suitors are beautiful, nimble, and blond-haired, exactly the sort of amenity wished for by our present customs.

799

VIII. Men fondle their hair like women, for which Hector and Diomedes reproach the effeminate Paris.38

800

IX. And, just as we are told that his heroes always ate roasted meat, the food which is the simplest and plainest of all, for it needs nothing other than coals (this custom was retained later in sacrifices, and the Romans retained the word prosiicia for meat of victims roasted on altars and then cut up to be shared with feasting guests), so later they roasted it on spits like unconsecrated meat. So that when Achilles offers a meal to Priam,39 he butchers a lamb, and Patroclus then roasts it, prepares the table, and puts bread upon the table in baskets, for the heroes did not celebrate banquets that were not also sacrifices in the days when they themselves were priests. This is retained in Latin in epulae—that is, the dainty banquets celebrated for the most part by the great—and in epulum—a public feast given for the people—and in the sacred meals in which banqueted those priests who were called epulones; accordingly, Agamemnon himself kills two lambs40 with whose sacrifice are consecrated the terms of war with Priam. Such was the magnificence that then went along with an idea which today seems to us to belong to a butcher! Later must have come boiled meat, which besides fire needs to have water, a kettle and, with these, a tripod (Virgil also makes his heroes eat this way and makes them roast meat on spits).41 Eventually come sauced foods, which need, besides all the things already stated, sauces.

801

Now, to return to the heroic meals of Homer, granted that he describes the most refined food of the Greek heroes to be grain mixed with cheese and honey,42 nevertheless in two comparisons he makes use of fishing.43 And Ulysses,44 when he feigns poverty and begs alms from the suitors, tells them that to hospitable kings—that is, to kings charitable to poor wayfarers—the gods give the fishy seas—that is, seas abounding in the fish which make for great refinement at meals.  Homer, Odyssey 10.360–363.  Homer, Iliad 3.55; 11.385. 39  Homer, Iliad 24.621–627. 40  Homer, Iliad 3.292–294. 41  Virgil, Aeneid 1.212–213. 42   See Homer, Iliad 11.631 and 631–640; Odyssey 10.234–235; 20.69. 43   Actually, more than two. See Homer, Iliad 16.406–408; Odyssey, 5.51–53; 10.124; 12.251–254; 22.384–388. 44  Homer, Odyssey 13.113. 37 38

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802

X. Finally, and what is most important to our purpose, Homer seems to have come at a time after the fall of the heroic law in Greece when they had started to celebrate popular liberty, for heroes contract in marriages with foreigners, and bastards come to be part of the succession of rule.45 And so the need must have come, for it was a long time previously that Heracles was stained with the blood of the brute centaur, Nessus, and consequently went mad and died—that is, as was explained in Book Two [§658], brought an end to heroic law.

803

Therefore, concerning the age of Homer, since we do not intend to scorn the authority of all these things which were observed and gathered from his two poems, more so from the Iliad than from the Odyssey, which Dionysius Longinus46 deems Homer to have composed as an old man, we encourage the opinion of those who place him long after the Trojan War, a period of time which runs the length of four hundred years, which comes to be about the time of Numa. And also, we believe that we are making them happy in not placing him much later in a time nearer to us. For it was after the time of Numa that they say Psammeticus opened Egypt to the Greeks, who, according to an infinite number of passages, particularly in the Odyssey, had a long time before opened Greece to trade with the Phoenicians,47 and the Greek people grew used to delighting in the information related by the Phoenicians no less than in their wares, as today Europeans do with information from the Indies. Hence, these two things are in agreement: first, that Homer never saw Egypt and, second, that he tells us many things about Egypt and Libya and Phoenicia and Asia and, above all, Italy and Sicily, on account of the information which the Greeks had from the Phoenicians.

804

However, we do not yet spy how those many, refined customs are in agreement with the equally many wild and savage customs about which he tells us at the same time, particularly in the Iliad. As a result, ne placidis coëant immitia48 [“lest harsher things grow together with milder”],

it would appear these two poems were for many ages and by many hands labored over and directed. 805

Thus, by these things stated here about the fatherland and the age of the one believed to be Homer up until now, our doubts advance in search of the true Homer.   See Homer, Odyssey 4.11.  Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13. 47   See Homer, Odyssey 4.81–83, 617–19, and 15.414–428. 48  Horace, Ars poetica 12. 45 46

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On the Unaccountable Faculty of Homer for Heroic Poetry However, besides the lack of philosophy in Homer, which we demonstrated above, and besides the discoveries made about his fatherland and age, which impose upon us doubts about whether perhaps he was not actually a common man, we are encouraged to go further by the desperate difficulty that Horace proposes in his Art of Poetry,49 the difficulty of being able after Homer to devise tragic characters, or personae, of a new cast. Today, this desperate difficulty is combined with another, that the personae devised by New Comedy are also completely fictional (indeed, the Athenians required by that that New Comedy appear in the theater with personae which were completely fictional, and this was so successful in Greek that dramatists in Latin, for all their haughtiness, despaired of their competence to compete, as Fabius Quintilian said in his judgment, cum Graecis de comoedia non contendimus50 [“we do not compete with the Greeks in comedy”]).

806

To this difficulty from Horace we conjoin to others of wider scope. First, how is it that Homer, who came earlier, was so inimitable a heroic poet, while tragedy, which came into being later, had the rude start that is known to everyone and that we will later herein [§§910–911] observe more closely?

807

Second, how is it that Homer came before the philosophers and the arts of poetry and criticism, and yet was the most sublime of all the sublime poets, and how is it that after the discovery of philosophy and the arts of poetry and criticism there was no poet who could come within a long distance of keeping up with him? However, even if we leave aside our two difficulties, the difficulty from Horace combined with what we have stated about New Comedy ought to have given some footing, in the research of Patrizzi, Scaliger, Castelvetro, and the other bold teachers of the art of poetry, for an investigation into the reason for this difference. This reason can have no other foundation than upon the origins of poetry discovered herein above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§376–384] and, as a consequence, in the discovery of the poetic characters of which the essence of this same poetry solely consists. For New Comedy puts forward a treatment of the customs of our present humanity. It is upon these customs that Socratic philosophy meditated. There, from the general maxims of Socratic philosophy concerning human morality, the Greek poets were able because they were profoundly 49 50

 Horace, Ars poetica 128–130.  Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.10.38.

808

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The New Science learned in this philosophy (as was Menander, in comparison with whom Terence was called in Latin a “Menander by half ”51), were able, I say, to devise certain brilliant exempla for ideal men, and by the light and splendor of these were able to direct the common run, who are as teachable by grasping strong examples as they are incapable of learning through reasoned maxims. Old Comedy took arguments, or true subjects, and placed them in a mythical setting just as they were; so in one of these, the bad Aristophanes put the very good Socrates into a mythical setting and ruined him.52 However, tragedy casts upon the stage heroic hatred, contempt, wrath, and vengeance, which arise from sublime natures, and out of these natures naturally come sentiments, words, and actions of a kind capable of ferocity, crudity, and atrocity and whose trappings inspire wonder. And all these things have the highest conformity with one another and uniformity with their subject. Such labors are known to have been done by the Greeks only in their heroic time, at the end of which Homer must have come. It is demonstrated by our metaphysical art of criticism that myths, which in their coming-into-being had correctness and propriety, reached Homer distorted and incongruous, as one can observe in all the reasoning herein above [§§512, 514, 515, 533, 569, 708] throughout the entire Poetic Wisdom; these myths were originally true histories which gradually were altered and corrupted, and it is thus corrupted that they eventually came to Homer. Hence, he belongs to the third age of heroic poets and after the first, which invented these myths for use as true narrations (this is the primary signification proper to the word μῦθος [muthos], which the Greeks defined as a “true narration”). In the second age, these myths were altered and corrupted. It is in the third that Homer eventually received them thus corrupted.

809

However, to call ourselves back to what we proposed and to the reason for the effect we have designated, Aristotle in his Poetics says that only Homer knew how to invent poetic lies.53 For his poetic characters, which were incomparable in the sublime congruity admired by Horace,54 were imaginative genera, as we defined these in the Poetic Metaphysics [§381]; with these genera, the Greek peoples connected all the different particulars pertaining to each genus. So, they connected with Achilles, the subject of the Iliad, all the properties of heroic virtue—that is, resentfulness, punctiliousness, wrath, implacability, and a violence that arrogates all right to might (exactly the properties gathered by Horace55 when he describes this character). To Ulysses, the subject of the Odyssey, they connected all the properties of heroic wisdom—that is, atten  See Suetonius, Life of Terence.   See Plato, Apology of Socrates 18b–d, 19a–c. 53  Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19. 54   See Horace, Ars poetica 129–130. 55   See Horace, Ars poetica 120–122. 51 52

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tiveness, forbearance, dissimulation, duplicity, and a deception which always preserves propriety in words and indifference in actions, whence others drag themselves into error and deceive themselves. And to both these characters they connected particular actions following from each of the two genera, which were so conspicuous that the Greeks even in their dullness and stupidity were able to direct and move themselves towards noticing these genera and relating the particulars to their genus. These two characters, because they had been formed by an entire nation, could not have been devised except as naturally uniform (and it is only in a uniformity agreeable to the common sense of an entire nation that consists the decorum—that is, the beauty and grace—of a myth), and because they were devised by the strongest of imaginations, they could not have been devised except as sublime.56 Because of this, there remain two properties eternal to poetry: first, the sublime in poetry must always become united with popular sensibility; and, second, the people from whose earlier labors come these poetic characters cannot later look upon human customs otherwise but in terms of the conspicuous characters so brilliant and exemplary.

Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer With the things thus far established, we combine the following philosophical proofs.

810

I. There is the proof which above was numbered among the Axioms,57 that men naturally tend to preserve in collective memory the orders and laws which hold them within their societies.

811

II. There is the truth understood by Castelvetro,58 that first history must come into being, then poetry, for history is a simple declaration of truth, but poetry is, moreover, an imitation of it, and this man, otherwise most acute, did not know how to make use of this truth to discover the true beginnings of poetry by combining it with the philosophical proof that we posit as Proof III:

812

III. namely, that because there were certainly poets prior to commonplace historians, the earliest history must have been poetic.

813

  As Battistini observes, whereas Burke strongly opposes the sublime against the beautiful (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), Vico tends to preserve their connection, without simply identifying them. 57   Axiom 45. 58  Castelvetro, Poetics of Aristotle 1. Compare Aristotle’s claim that poetry is more philosophic than history, since its statements are about universals and not just singulars (Poetics 9, 1451b37). 56

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814

IV. There is the proof that myths in their coming-into-being were true and strict narrations (hence μῦθος [muthos], myth, was defined as a true narration, as we stated in many places above [§§401, 403, 808]). At first, they came into being as quite disturbing and, accordingly, were later considered improper and thus altered, so that subsequently they were considered improbable, then obscure, then scandalous, and in the end unbelievable. These are seven sources of difficulty with myths that can easily be encountered in the whole of Book Two.

815

V. And, as was demonstrated in the same Book [§§512, 514, 515, 533, 569, 708], Homer received them thus marred and corrupted.

816

VI. There is the proof that poetic characters, in which the essence of myth consists, came into being from a necessity of nature, being incapable of abstracting the forms and properties of subjects, and consequently these characters must have been the manner of thinking for entire peoples placed under this natural necessity in the time of the greatest barbarism; it is an eternal property of this manner of thinking always to enlarge ideas of particulars, on which there is a fine passage in the ethical writings of Aristotle,59 where he reflects that men of limited ideas make a maxim out of every particular. The reason for this saying must be that the human mind is indefinite, but it cannot pay homage to its near-divine nature when it is narrowed by the robustness of the senses, except by enlarging those particulars with the imagination. Hence was it, perhaps, that later in Greek and Latin poets alike the images of both gods and heroes appear greater than those of men. And in the return to barbarous times, paintings particularly of the eternal Father, of Jesus Christ, and of the Virgin Mary are exceedingly great in size.

817

VII. Because barbarians lack the ability to reflect, an ability which when ill-used is the mother of mendacity, the earliest Latin heroic poets sang true histories—that is, sing of the wars of Rome—and in the return to barbarous times, on account of a barbarism whose nature is of this sort, the Latin poets—Gunther, William of Apulia, and others—sang of nothing other than history, and the writers of romances in these same times believed that they were writing true histories. Hence, Boiardo and Aristo, who came in times illuminated by the philosophers, took the subjects of their poems from the history of Bishop Turpin of Paris. And it is through this same barbarous nature which, on account of a deficiency of reflection, does not know how to feign (hence that nature is naturally truthful, open, trusting, generous, and magnanimous) that Dante, although he was learned in the loftiest recondite knowledge [scienza],60 for all that in his Comedy put on display true persons and represented the true deeds of those who had passed away, and accord-

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59 60

 In fact, Aristotle’s Rhetoric 2.21.   See the note on Dante at §786.

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ingly gave to his poem the title Comedy, for it was the Old Comedy of Greeks, as was stated above [§808], that placed true persons in a mythical setting. And Dante was similar in this to the Homer of the Iliad (whom Dionysius Longinus61 calls entirely “dramatic”—that is, mimetic—just as the Homer of the Odyssey was entirely “narrative”). And Francesco Petrarch, although he was most learned, also offered Latin poems about the second Carthaginian War, and in his Triumphs in Tuscan, which has the marks of heroic poetry, he makes nothing but a collection of histories. And from here arises a luminous proof that the earliest myths were histories. For satire spoke ill of persons who were not only true but also quite well-known; tragedy takes for its arguments the personae of poetic history; Old Comedy places in a mythical setting renowned and living personae; New Comedy, born in times of discerning reflection, eventually devised personae who were completely fictional (just as in Italian New Comedy did not return until the start of the century so wondrously learned, the Cinquecento). Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there ever devised a fictional persona who was the protagonist of a tragedy, and the taste of the common run is weighty confirmation of this for us, taste which does not want musical drama, whose arguments are always tragic, unless they are taken from history, but it tolerates fictional arguments in comedy, for since they are private, and, accordingly, unknown, they are believed to be true. VIII. Since poetic characters62 were such, their poetic allegories, as was demonstrated above throughout the Poetic Wisdom [§483], by necessity must have contained only historical meanings belonging to the earliest times of Greece.

818

IX. There is the proof that these histories must have naturally preserved the memory of communities of people—through the first philosophical proof63 mentioned above [§811], that in the childhood of nations, they must have had wondrously strong memories. And this was not without divine providence, for up until the time of Homer, and for some time after that, writing as commonly regarded had not yet been discovered, as we have learned in many places above [§§66, 429, 440, 788], from Josephus in opposition to Apion. In such human need, the peoples, who were almost entirely body and almost entirely without reflection, had the most vivid senses for sensing particulars, the strongest imagination for apprehending and enlarging them, the most acute ingenuity for relating them to their imaginative genera, and the most robust memory for retaining them. These faculties do belong, it is true, to the mind, but they set their roots in the body and take their life from the body. Hence,

819

 Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13.   For other passages about “poetic characters,” see §§381, 416, 429, 562. 63   See also Axiom 50. 61 62

344

The New Science memory is the same faculty as imagination, which consequently is called “memory” in Latin (so that in Terence64 one finds the word memorabile used to signify “a thing that can be imagined,” and in common Latin, the word comminisci means “to devise,”65 which is proper to the imagination, whence the word commentum66 for an invented fiction—and, in addition, “imagination” is taken for ingenuity) as in the return to barbarous times the expression “imaginative man” was used to signify a “man of ingenuity” (as was said of Cola di Rienzo by an author contemporary to him who wrote his biography). And thus, it has three different aspects: it is memory when it remembers things; imagination when it alters or counterfeits them; ingenuity when it gives them compass and puts them into a congruous and settled order. This is the cause for the theological poets calling Memory the “mother of the Muses.”

820

X. Accordingly, the poets must have been the earliest historians of nations, and it is here that Castelvetro did not know how to make use of this statement to discover the true origins of poetry; he and all the others who have reasoned upon this from Aristotle and Plato on down could have easily noticed that all gentile histories have mythical beginnings, as was proposed above in the Axioms67 and was demonstrated in the Poetic Wisdom [§384].

821

XI. There is the proof that the nature of poetry68 determines that it is an impossible thing for someone to be equally sublime as both a poet and a metaphysician. For metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses; the poetic faculty must immerse the entire body in the senses. Metaphysics rises up to universals; the poetic faculty must dive deep into particulars.

822

XII. There is the proof on the strength of the Axiom posited above,69 that one can come to any faculty which one does not have naturally by industry, but improvement by way of industry is completely denied to someone who does not already have that faculty by nature; the art of poetry and the art of criticism serve to make our ingenuity cultivated, not great, for refinement is a minor virtue, and greatness naturally scorns all things which are small; indeed, just as a raging torrent cannot but carry with it turbid waters and roll stones and tree trunks along in the violence of its course, so these things are the base expressions found so often in Homer.  Terence, Andria 625.  Cicero, De natura deorum 2.29; Livy, Ab urbe condita 26.27.9. 66  Terence, Andria 225; Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.19.5. 67   Axiom 46. 68   Ragion poetica, literally “poetic reason”—a likely allusion to Della ragion poetica (1708) by Neapolitan jurist Gianvincenzo Gravina, with whom Vico was personally acquainted and mentions in his autobiography (Battistini 44). 69   Axiom 51. 64 65

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XIII. However, these expressions do not make Homer any less the father and prince of all the sublime poets.

823

XIV. For we have learned [§809] that Aristotle deemed the lies of Homer to be incomparable, which is the same as Horace deeming that his characters are inimitable.

824

XV. His is a sublimity reaching to the heavens in his poetic sentences, which we have demonstrated in the Corollaries on Heroic Nature in Book Two [§§703, 704]) must be conceived of true passions, or that they made themselves truly felt on the strength of a burning imagination; accordingly, they must have been individual to those who felt them. Hence, we defined maxims on life, because they are general, as the sentences of philosophers; and reflections upon the passions similarly belong to false and frigid poets.

825

XVI. The poetic comparisons in Homer taken from savage and wild things are, as we observed above [§785], certainly incomparable.

826

XVII. The atrocity of Homeric battles and deaths, as we also saw above [§785], make for all that inspires wonder in the Iliad.

827

XVIII. However, such sentences, such comparisons, such descriptions, we also proved [§785], could not have been natural to a calm, genteel, gentle philosopher.

828

XIX. There is the proof that the customs of the Homeric heroes are those of children in terms of their fickleness of mind, of women in terms of their robustness of imagination, of violent youth in terms of the roiling fervor of their wrath, as we have demonstrated above [§§708, 787]), and consequently it is impossible for them to be devised so naturally and so successfully by a philosopher.

829

XX. There is the proof that what is inept and incongruous was, as was also proved herein above,70 an effect of the misfortune of the Greek peoples of having to toil to express themselves in the extreme poverty that language had while it was being formed.

830

XXI. And even if these poems contained within them the most sublime mysteries of recondite wisdom (we have demonstrated in the Poetic Wisdom [§384], that they certainly did not contain this), their sound could not have been conceived by the direct, orderly, and weighty mind agreeable to a philosopher.

831

  For the ineptitudes, see §822; for the indecencies, see §§781–782; for the poverty of language, see §§456–460. 70

346

The New Science

832

XXII. There is the proof that heroic speech, as was seen above in Book Two in the Origins of Language [§§431, 435, 438], was a speech of likenesses, images, comparisons, born from the lack of genera and species (which are needed to define things in terms of their properties) and, consequently, born through a natural necessity common to entire peoples.

833

XXIII. There is the proof that through natural necessity, as was also stated in Book Two [§§449, 463–465, 468–471], the earliest nations spoke in heroic verse. In this also one is given to admire providence, that at a time in which the characters of writing as commonly regarded had not yet been found, the nations spoke in verse so that by meter and rhythm they could more easily preserve the collective memory of their familial and civil histories.

834

XXIV. And such myths, such sentences, such customs, such speech, such verse were all called heroic and had currency in times which history has allocated to the heroes, as was more fully demonstrated above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§634–661].

835

XXV. Therefore, all the aforesaid were properties of entire peoples and, consequently, common to all the particular men of such peoples.

836

XXVI. We deny, however, on account of that very nature from which came all the aforesaid properties, by which Homer was the greatest of poets, that he was ever a philosopher.

837

XXVII. In addition, we demonstrated above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§361–363, 515] that the meanings of the recondite wisdom of the philosophers, which came later, were imposed upon the Homeric myths.

838

XXVII. However, just as recondite wisdom is not for any but a few particular men, so we have seen above [§809] that the decorum of heroic poetic characters (in which consists the complete essence of heroic myth) cannot be pursued today by men most learned in the philosophies, or the arts of poetry and criticism. It is for this decorum that Aristotle gives Homer the privilege of being incomparable in his lies, which is the same as the privilege that Horace gave to Homer, of being inimitable in his characters.71

Philological Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer 839

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To this great number of philosophical proofs, made in large part on the strength of a metaphysical art of criticism of the authors of gentile na71

  See Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19, and Horace, Ars poetica 129–130.

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tions (among whom we number Homer insofar as we certainly have no profane writer more ancient than him, as Josephus the Jew72 resolutely maintains), we now add the following philological proofs. I. There is the proof that all ancient profane histories have mythical beginnings.

840

II. There is the proof that barbarian peoples closed off from all other nations in the world, such as the ancient Germans and the peoples of the Americas, are discovered to preserve in verse the beginnings of their histories, conforming to what was seen above [§470].

841

III. There is the proof that Roman history starts with the writings of the poets.

842

IV. There is the proof that in the return to barbarous times, Latin poets wrote these histories.

843

V. There is the proof that Manetho, high priest of Egypt, translated the most ancient history of Egypt written with hieroglyphs into a sublime natural theology.

844

VI. And in the Poetic Wisdom [§515] we demonstrated that this was what the Greek philosophers did to the most ancient history of Greece told in myths.

845

VII. Hence, above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§384–403], we were obliged to take a path which was the reverse of the one taken by Manetho, one moving away from a mystical sense given to these myths and reestablishing the historical sense belonging to them. The naturalness and facility with which we have done this, without force, circumvention, or distortion, proves that the historical allegories which these myths contain are proper to them.

846

VIII. This is a weighty proof of what Strabo73 affirms in a golden passage: that prior to Herodotus, or rather prior to Hecataeus of Miletus, the history of the Greek peoples was written by the poets.

847

IX. And in Book Two [§§464–472] we demonstrated that the earliest writers of nations, ancient as well as modern,74 were poets.

848

X. There are two golden passages in the Odyssey75 where, in trying to give acclaim to someone who has spoken well about history, it is said that he

849

  Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12.  Strabo, Geography 1.2.6. 74   Here “modern” simply means “post-ancient.” 75   For one passage, see Homer, Odyssey 11.368. For the other, Battistini suggests that Vico may have in mind Odyssey 8.487–498. 72 73

348

The New Science has recounted that history like a musician or singer. That is, they must have been exactly the same as those who were their rhapsodists, common men who each preserved some part of the collective memory of the books of Homeric poetry.

850

XI. There is the proof that Homer left none of his poems in writing (as many times we have noted [§§66, 429, 440, 819] that Flavius Josephus the Jew resolutely states against Apion the Greek grammarian).

851

XII. There is the proof that the rhapsodists went to the fairs and festivals throughout the cities of Greece, each singing some part of the books of Homer.

852

XIII. There is the proof that it was from the origin of their name in the two words of which it was composed that the rhapsodists were “stitchers of songs,” songs which must certainly have been gathered by none other than their own peoples; similarly, they also meant for the word ὅμηρος to be derived from ὁμού [homou]—simul [“at the same time”]—and from εἴρειν [eirein]—connectere [“to bind together”]—whence the word means a “surety” insofar as it is something which binds together a creditor and debtor, an origin which is farfetched and forced when applied to a surety, but is easily and properly applied to our Homer as someone who binds together, or composes, myths.

853

XIV. There is the proof that the Pisistratids, tyrants of Athens, divided and disposed, or rather made others divide and dispose, the poetry of Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hence one understands the extent to which prior to this that poetry must have been a confused mass of things, since there is an infinite difference that can be observed between the style of the one Homeric poem and the other.

854

XV. There is the proof that the same Pisistratids instituted the orders by which, from that point on, the rhapsodists sang them at the Panathenaic festivals, as Cicero writes in his De natura deorum76 and Aelian,77 on which he is followed by Scheffer.

855

XVI. However, the Pisistratids were expelled from Athens a few years before the Tarquins were expelled from Rome. As a result, since Homer has been placed in the time of Numa, as we proved above [§803], a long age must have later run its course in which the rhapsodists continued to preserve collective memory of Homer’s poems. This tradition takes all credibility away from the other tradition that it was Aristarchus78 who in the time of the Pisistratids had made the redaction, division, and ordering of the poems of Homer, for this could not have been done without  In fact, Plato’s Hipparchus 228b.  Aelian, Variae historiae 8.2, cited by Scaliger at Poetices libri septem 1.41. 78   Aristarchus of Samos (216–144 BCE), ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer, and pioneer of heliocentrism. 76

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77

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writing as commonly regarded, and so after such writing there would be no need for rhapsodists to sing through the parts of the poems from memory. XVII. As a result, as for Hesiod (who left his works in writing): given that we have no authority that he was preserved in collective memory by rhapsodists (as Homer was) and in spite of the chronologists who in their fruitless diligence placed him thirty years prior to Homer, he must have come after the Pisistratids.79 Not unlike the Homeric rhapsodists were those Cyclic Poets, who preserved all of Greek mythical history from its beginning with the gods up until the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. These poets, so called from the word κύκλος [kuklos], could not have been other than idiotic men who sang myths to common peoples gathered into a circle around them at festivals. This is exactly the circle which Horace in his Art of Poetry calls the vilem patulumque orbem80 [“the base and wide circle”]; on this Dacier81 would not be satisfied with commentators who say that by this Horace meant to say “long episodes.” And perhaps Dacier’s reason for not being satisfied is this, namely, that it is not necessarily the case that an episode must also be base insofar as it is long: consider, for example, the episodes of Rinaldo’s delighting in Armida in the enchanted garden and of the old shepherd reasoning with Erminia: granted, both are long, but not on account of this base, for the former is ornate, the latter is delicate and refined, and both are noble.82 However, with this expression, Horace,83 after he gave tragic poets the advice that they take their arguments from the poems of Homer, came up against the difficulty that in this fashion they would not be poets because their myths would have been invented by Homer. And yet Horace responds to them that the epic myths of Homer will become tragic myths, if they will stay with three pieces of advice. The first is that they not make the idle paraphrases, which we observe even today when men read Orlando Furioso or Orlando Inamorato or some other romance in verse to a base and wide circle made up of do-nothing people at feasts, and, after having recited each stanza, explain it with more words in prose; the second is that they not make of themselves faithful translators; the third and last piece of advice is that they not make of themselves servile imitators. Instead, following the customs that Homer attributes to his heroes, they make issue from these same customs  In making Homer older than Hesiod, Vico reverses his earlier stance, for which see Scienza nuova prima §§310, 443, and De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1 (Cristofolini 389[4], BV 48). 80   See Horace, Ars poetica 132. 81   André Dacier (1651–1722), French translator of (and commentator on) Horace’s Ars poetica. As Battistini observes, Vico almost certainly did not read Dacier’s original French notes, but a translation of those notes into Latin. 82   See Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered 16.9–17 and 7.8–13. 83  Horace, Ars poetica 128–135. 79

856

350

The New Science new sentiments, new speeches, new actions conforming with them, and thus upon the same subjects they will make themselves into new Homeric poets. Thus, in this same Art of Poetry, the same Horace84 calls a “cyclic poet” a roadway or festival poet. Authors of this sort are ordinarily read as those called κύκλιοι [kuklioi] and ἐγκύκλιοι [enkuklioi], and the collection of their work is called κύκλος ἐπικός [kuklos epikos], κύκλια ἔπη [kuklia epe¯ ], ποίημα ἐγκύκλικον [poie¯ ma enkuklikon], and sometimes without any addition of words, just κύκλος [kuklos] (as Gerald Langbaine85 observes in his preface to Dionysius Longinus). As a result, it is in this manner that Hesiod, who contains all the myths of the gods, is able to be before Homer.86

857

XVIII. It is for this reason that the same must be said of Hippocrates, who left works no longer written in verse but in prose, works so numerous and so lengthy that they could not have been naturally preserved by collective memory. Hence, he is to be placed around the time of Herodotus.

858

XIX. It is on account of all this that Voss87 with too much good faith believed he had refuted Josephus with those heroic inscriptions—first, that of Amphitryon, second, that of Hippocoon, and, third, that of Laomedon— impostures similar to those made even in our day by those who make counterfeit medals; Marten Schoock supports Josephus against Voss.

859

XX. To this we add that Homer never makes mention of Greek common alphabetic letters, and the letter written by Proetus to Eureia to trap Bellerophon is said, as we have observed in another place above [§433], to have been written in σήματα [se¯ mata].

860

XXI. There is the proof that when Aristarchus emended the Homeric poems, they still retained many variations in dialect, many incongruities in speech, which must have been idiomatic to different peoples of Greece, and also much metrical license.

861

XXII. The fatherland of Homer is not known, as was noted above [§§788–789].  Horace, Ars poetica 136.   Gerard Langbaine (1608–1658), English philologist who taught at Oxford (where he was the Provost of Queen’s College). Langbaine translated and commented on Longinus’s On the Sublime in 1636. 86   Vico’s thinking about the relation between Homer and Hesiod poses a special challenge to interpreters. This section’s conclusion stands in apparent contradiction to its beginning, as well as what Vico claims elsewhere about Homer’s priority to Hesiod (Chronological Table and §97), even as it seems to receive some support at §901. 87   See G. J. Voss, Aristarchus sive de arte grammatica libri septem 1.10. 84 85

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XXIII. Almost all the peoples of Greece laid claim to him as their citizen, as was also observed above [§790].

862

XXIV. Above [§789] have been drawn strong conjectures that the Homer of the Odyssey was from southwest of Greece, and that the Homer of the Iliad was from northeast of Greece.

863

XXV. Not even the age of Homer is known by anyone.

864

XXVI. The opinions about this are so numerous and so varied that he is placed, at one extreme, in the time of the Trojan War and, at the other extreme, in the time of Numa.

865

XXVII. Dionysius Longinus,88 unable to dissimulate about the great diversity of style between the two poems, says that Homer composed the Iliad when he was young and later composed the Odyssey when he was old. Such are the particulars truly known about someone who is unknown to us in the two things most relevant to his history, namely, his time and place, about which we have been left in the dark when told of this great light of Greece!89

866

XXVIII. This should remove all faith in Herodotus or whoever is the author of that Life of Homer,90 which recounts enough fine, varied, and minute things that they fill an entire volume; it should remove all faith in the Life of Homer written by Plutarch91 who, because he was a philosopher, spoke with greater sobriety.

867

XXIX. However, perhaps Longinus formed his conjecture because Homer explains in the Iliad the wrath and arrogance of Achilles, which are the property of the young, and in the Odyssey tells of the duplicity and caution of Ulysses, which are the customs of the old.

868

XXX. There is also a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he took his name from this blindness, which in Ionian dialect means “blind.”92

869

XXXI. And Homer himself tells of blind poets who sing at the feasts of the great, such as the blind poet who sings at the feast which Alcinous gives for Ulysses93 and also the other blind poet who sings at the feast of the suitors.

870

 Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13.   The exclamation mark is present in both the 1744 printed edition and the autograph, but not in modern Italian editions. 90   The author of this text, though not known, does not seem to have been Herodotus, despite the claim of its opening lines. Scholars conventionally refer to the unknown author as the Pseudo-Herodotus. 91   That is, the Pseudo-Plutarch. 92  Earlier (at §852) Vico proposes an interestingly different explanation of the name “Homer.” 93  Homer, Odyssey 8.63–64. 88 89

352

The New Science

871

XXXII. And it is a property of human nature that those who are blind have memories whose strength is a wonder.94

872

XXXIII. And, finally, there is the proof that he was poor and that he went through the marketplaces of Greece singing his own poems.

Discovery of the True Homer 873

Now, when men of the most acute ingenuity and excellence in learning and erudition read all these things upon which we have reasoned and which are told to us by others about Homer and his poems in the first edition of The New Science, they suspected (although not because it was a point we had voluntarily or purposefully made, inasmuch as it was not even something upon which we had reflected since we were without the method by which this science is now reasoned) that the Homer believed in up until now was not the true Homer. All these things, I say, draw us to affirm that what has come to pass with Homer is exactly the same as what has come to pass with the Trojan War: although it offers a famous epoch in history, more perceptive critics have judged that it was a war that never happened in the world. And certainly, as with the Trojan War, so too with Homer, if there were not certain great vestiges that are his poems, we would have to say from such difficulties that Homer was an ideal poet, who was not a particular man in nature. However, the many great difficulties, together with the poems as they have come down to us, seem to force us to affirm something in the middle: that this Homer was an idea—that is, a heroic character of the Greek people, inasmuch as they told their histories in song.95

The lack of congruity and the lack of verisimilitude belonging to the Homer believed in up until now becomes, with the Homer herein discovered, agreeableness and necessity 874

On account of a discovery of this sort, all the things in both the speeches and the narrative which were lacking in congruity and verisimilitude in

  For this ancient commonplace, see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.117.   The “true Homer” thus emerges as a poetic character. Vico’s answer to what later comes to be known as the “Homer question” is unintelligible apart from the theory of poetic characters he develops earlier in The New Science, particularly at §209 and §381. 94 95

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the Homer believed in up until now, become in the Homer herein discovered entirely agreeable and necessary. And, in the first place, the very things left to us that are most especially uncertain compel us to say: I. That the peoples of Greece so contested his fatherland and almost all wanted him to be their citizen, because these peoples of Greece were Homer.

875

II. That there was such variation of opinion concerning his age, because this Homer truly lived on the lips and in the collective memory of these peoples of Greece from the Trojan War down to the times of Numa, which made for a span of time of four hundred and sixty years.

876

III. And the blindness and

877

IV. the poverty of Homer belonged to the rhapsodists who, since they were blind (hence each of them was called omèro), had strong memories and who, since they were poor, sustained their lives by going to sing throughout the cities of Greece the Homeric poems, of which they were the authors, for they were part of those peoples who had composed with them their histories.

878

V. Thus, a young Homer composed the Iliad, when Greece itself was young and, consequently, burned with sublime passions such as arrogance, wrath, and vengeance—passions that suffer no dissimulation and love generosity—and admired Achilles for his heroic strength. However, an old Homer later composed the Odyssey, when Greece had somewhat cooled its spirit with reflection. This reflection is the mother of foresight, whence Greece admired Ulysses as a hero of wisdom.

879

As a result, in the time of the young Homer, the peoples of Greece took pleasure in crudity, baseness, ferocity, savagery, atrocity. In the times of the old Homer, they delighted in the luxuries of Alcinous, the delicacies of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens, the pastimes of the suitors, and not just the attempts on the chaste Penelope, but even the siege of and battle for her. No one time period, it seemed to us above [§§803–804], can be composed of all of these customs. This difficulty was so potent that the divine Plato,96 so as to solve it, claimed that Homer had foreseen by inspiration these nauseating, morbid, dissolute customs. However, he thus made Homer a foolish institutor of the orders of Greek civilization. For even if he condemned them as corrupt and decadent customs, he would still have taught customs which must have come   Compare Plato, Ion 534b–d.

96

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The New Science long after the ordering of the Greek nations and so would have taught them with a view to accelerating the natural course made by the human things and hastening the Greeks towards their corruption.

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880

VI. In this fashion, it is demonstrated that the Homer who is author of the Iliad had preceded by many years the Homer who is author of the Odyssey.

881

VII. It is demonstrated that the former Homer was from southwest of Greece and sang of the Trojan War waged in his country. And the latter Homer was from northeast of Greece and sang of a Ulysses who ruled in that part of Greece.

882

VIII. Thus, Homer is lost in the crowd of the peoples of Greece and is vindicated of all the charges made against him by critics, and particularly of charges of:

883

IX. vile sentences,

884

X. base customs,

885

XI. crude comparisons,

886

XII. idiomatic expressions,

887

XIII. metrical license,

888

XIV. inconsistent variations in dialect, and

889

XV. having made men into gods and gods into men [§890] (Dionysius Longinus97 did not trust himself to uphold these myths except with support of philosophical allegories, which is to say that as they sounded when sung to the Greeks, they could not have produced the glory of one who had instituted the orders of Greek civilization; this is the same difficulty which we made against Orpheus being the founder of the humanity of Greece in the Annotations on the Chronology Table [§§80–81], recurring in the case of Homer).

890

However, all the aforesaid properties, and particularly the last, were properties of the Greek peoples themselves who, at their founding, as was demonstrated in the Natural Theogony above [§§69, 489, 634], made their gods to have such piety, religiosity, chastity, fortitude, justice, and magnanimity as they had themselves; and, later, with the turning of many years, with their myths becoming obscure, and with their customs becoming corrupt, they deemed, as we reasoned at length in the Poetic Wisdom [§§512, 514, 515, 533, 569, 708], their gods to be 97

  Compare Longinus, On the Sublime 9.7.

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­dissolute—through the Axiom proposed above98 that men naturally bend obscure or doubtful laws to their own passion and advantage, for they fear that gods who are opposite in their customs will be opposed to their prayers. XVI. However, all the more justly do those two great privileges belong to Homer (these actually are one privilege) that Homer alone knows how to devise, according to Aristotle,99 poetic conceits and, according to Horace, poetic characters. Hence, Horace100 confesses that he himself is no poet, for he is unable or does not know how to observe what he calls colores operum [“the shading of the work”], which sounds like what Aristotle calls “poetic conceits” (so in Plautus101 one reads obtinere colorem in the sense of “giving voice to conceit which from every perspective has the appearance of truth,” which a good myth must do).

891

However, beyond these two, come all the other privileges given to him by teachers of the art of poetry; Homer is incomparable in:

892

XVII. his wild and savage comparisons,

893

XVIII. his crude and atrocious descriptions of battle and death,

894

XIX. those sentences of his filled with sublime passions, and

895

XX. in his expression, filled with clarity102 and brilliance.

896

All these were properties of the heroic age of the Greeks, during which and on account of which Homer was an incomparable poet, for in an age of vigorous memory, robust imagination, and sublime ingenuity, he was at no point a philosopher. XXI. Hence, neither philosophies nor the arts of poetry and criticism, which came later, would make a poet who could even come within striking distance of Homer.

897

And what is more, he makes certain claim to the three immortal eulogies given to him:

898

XXII. first, that it was he who instituted the orders of the Greek ­polity— that is, Greek civility;

899

XXIII. second, that he was the father of all the other poets; and

900

  Axiom 54.  Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19. 100  Horace, Ars poetica 86–87. 101  Plautus, Miles gloriosus 186. 102   Evidenza, a technical term from the rhetorical tradition, meaning something like “vividness” or “brightness” (Greek enargeia). 98 99

356 901

The New Science XXIV. third, that he was the source of all the Greek philosophies. None of these eulogies could have been given to the Homer believed in up until now. Not the first because, starting from the times of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Homer comes one thousand, eight hundred years after Greek civilization started to be founded by marriages—this was demonstrated through the whole course of the Poetic Wisdom [§§523, 724] which founded that civilization. Not the second, because the theological poets certainly flourished prior to Homer—that is, Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus, and others— and among them, the chronologists have placed Hesiod and made him come thirty years prior to Homer. Cicero in his Brutus103 affirms that there were other heroic poets prior to Homer, and Eusebius104 in his Preparation for the Gospel names Philammon, Thamyris, Demodocus, Epimenides, Aristaeus, and others. Not, finally, the third insofar as—this we have demonstrated at length and fully in the Poetic Wisdom [§§361–363, 515]—the philosophers did not discover their philosophies in the Homeric myths, but thrust them upon those myths. But poetic wisdom itself, through its myths, gave the philosophers occasions for meditating upon their lofty truths, and additionally gave them the resources for explicating those truths, conforming to what we promised at the beginning of Book Two and have made it possible to see throughout the whole of that book.

The poems of Homer are found to be the two great treasure houses of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece 902

But, above all, on account of this discovery, we add the following most fulgent praise:

903

XXV. Homer was the earliest historian from all of gentile antiquity to reach us.

904

XXVI. Hence, his poems, as we shall observe [§915], ought subsequently to rise to the lofty reputation of being the two great treasure houses of customs for ancient Greece. For the same fate has come to pass for the poems of Homer as came to pass for the Law of the Twelve Tables: since the latter were believed to be laws which Solon gave to the Athenians and which subsequently came to

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103 104

 Cicero, Epistulae ad Brutum 18.71.  Eusebius, Preparatio evangelica 10.11.

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the Romans, we have considered the history of natural law of the heroic gentile peoples of Latium to be hidden up until now; similarly, because these poems have been believed to issue from the labor of one particular man, a rare and supreme poet, we have considered the history of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece to be hidden up until now.

A rational history of dramatic and lyric poetry We have already demonstrated above [§808] that there were three ages of poetry prior to Homer: first, the age of theological poets, who themselves were heroes and sang true and severe myths; second, the age of heroic poets, who altered and corrupted those myths; third, the age of Homer, who received those altered and corrupted myths.

905

Now, the same metaphysical art of criticism that was applied to the history of the most obscure antiquity—that is, the art of explaining the ideas which the most ancient nations proceeded to make naturally—can illuminate and distinguish the history of dramatic and lyric poetry, on which the philologists have written too obscurely and confusedly. These philologists have placed Amphion among the lyric poets, a most ancient poet from heroic times; they say that he invented the dithyramb and, with this, the chorus, that he introduced satyrs singing in verse, and that the dithyramb was a chorus led as a company singing verses made in praise of Bacchus. They say that, during the time of lyric poetry, distinguished tragic poets flourished, and Diogenes Laertius105 affirms that the earliest tragedy was represented by the chorus alone. They say that Aeschylus106 was the first tragic poet, and Pausanias recounts that he was commanded by Bacchus to write tragedies (although Horace tells us that Thespis was the author of the genre in the passage of the Ars poetica107 which starts the treatment of tragedy with the satyr drama and says that Thespis introduced satire upon carts used at harvest time). They say that later came Sophocles, whom Palaemon108 said was the “Homer of the tragic poets,” and that Euripides finally brought tragedy to its completion, whom Aristotle109 calls τραγικώτατον [tragiko¯taton, “most tragic”].   Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 3.56.   On Aeschylus, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.66; Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.21.2. 107  Horace, Ars poetica 275–277. 108   That is, Polemon, the successor of Xenocrates as head of the Academy. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 4.20. 109  Aristotle, Poetics 13, 1453a28–29. 105 106

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The New Science They say that during this same age came Aristophanes, who invented Old Comedy and opened the path to New Comedy (a path that Menander110 later walked down) by means of his comedy entitled The Clouds, which brought Socrates to his ruin. Later, some among them placed Hippocrates in the time of tragic poetry; others placed him in the time of lyric poetry. But Sophocles and Euripides lived somewhat before the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, and the lyric poets came even later, which seems to upset the chronology placing Hippocrates in the time of the Seven Sages of Greece.

907

For this difficulty to be solved, one must say that there were two kinds of tragic poet and, in addition, two kinds of lyric poet.

908

The older lyric poets must have been, first, the authors of hymns in praise of the gods, hymns of the kind which are called Homeric hymns, composed in heroic verse. Later, there must have been poets of that lyric in which Achilles sings on a lyre the praises of heroes who have passed away.111 Similarly, among the people of Latium, the earliest poets were the authors of Salian verse, which were hymns sung at festivals for the gods by priests called “Salii” (perhaps so called from the verb saltare [“to dance”], just as a company of dancers introduced the first chorus among the Greeks), and fragments of this poetry are the most ancient memorials of the Latin language to reach us (they have the air of heroic verse, as we observed above [§469]). And all of this is agreeable to the beginnings of humanity among the nations—that is, in its earliest times, which were religious—which must have praised nothing but the gods (just as in the more recent return to barbarous times this religious custom returned, and the priests who alone were literate in that time composed nothing but the poetry of sacred hymns). Later, in heroic times, they must have admired and celebrated nothing but the strong deeds of the heroes, such as those which Achilles sang. Thus, Amphion of Methymna must have been this sort of sacred lyric poet, one who, in addition, was the author of the dithyramb, and the dithyramb was the earliest precursor of tragedy composed in heroic verse, the earliest kind of verse sung by the Greeks, as was demonstrated above [§§449, 463]; so, the dithyramb of Amphion was the earliest satire, the satyr drama from which Horace112 takes his start in reasoning about tragedy.

909

The new lyric poets were the melic poets whose prince is Pindar; they wrote in a verse which in our Italian speech would be called arie per  Menander (342–290 BCE), Athenian dramatist who admired Euripides. His plays were popular in antiquity but few of them are known to us, except in fragments. 111  Homer, Iliad 9.186–189. 112  Horace, Ars poetica 220–229. 110

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musica [“arias set to music”], and this sort of verse must have come after iambic verse, which is the kind of verse that, as was demonstrated above [§463], was commonly spoken by the Greeks after heroic verse. Thus, Pindar came during times of the pomp of virtue in a Greece in admiration of the Olympic games, during which the lyric poets sang. Similarly, Horace came during the most fulgent times of Rome—that is, the times under Augustus. And melic poetry came to the Italian language during the most tender and gentle times. Later, the tragic and comic poets ran their course within the following limits. Thespis in one part of Greece and Amphion in another during harvest time gave the beginnings of satyr drama—that is, the Old Tragedy with satyrs as actors, who in their rudeness and simplicity, must have discovered the earliest masks by clothing their feet, shins, and thighs with the skins of goats, which they must have had on hand, and painted their faces and breasts with the dregs of wine, and armed their foreheads with horns (because of which, perhaps, even now wine harvesters are among us commonly called “horned”). And so, it could be true that Bacchus, god of the wine harvest, did command Aeschylus to compose tragedies.113 And all of this is agreeable with the times when the heroes said that the plebs were monsters having two natures—namely, the nature of men and goats, as was more fully demonstrated above [§§567, 649, 654, 688]. Thus, there is strength in the conjecture, first, that it is from this mask that tragedy took its name rather than from the goat given as a prize to the one who victorious in making this sort of verse (a prize called a τράγος [tragos] which Horace reflects upon, without making any use of it later, and also calls base114); and, second, that tragedy takes its start from this chorus of satyrs. And satire preserved the following eternal property which it had from when it came into being, that of speaking basely and injuriously, for the rustics in their rude masks upon carts carrying grapes held the license held even today by the wine harvesters of our prosperous Campania—the so-called abode of Bacchus—the license to speak basely about the lords. Consequently, one can understand how little truth there was in the learned later thrusting their philosophical mythology onto the myth of Pan (they say that the myth signified the universe because Pan’s name signifies πᾶν [pan], “all”), how little truth there was in the hairy lower parts of Pan meaning the Earth, his breast and ruddy face denoting the element of fire, and his horns signifying the sun and moon. By contrast, the Romans have preserved for us an historical mythology in their term satyra, which, according to Festus,115 was a dish consisting of various kinds of food (hence, later, came the expression lex per   See Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.21.2.  Horace, Ars poetica 220. 115   Sextus Pompeius Festus, second-century-CE grammarian and author of De verborum significatu. 113 114

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The New Science satyram for a law containing different types of things); and similarly, in the satyr drama upon which we are here reasoning, Horace116 relates to us (since not a single one of them comes down to us from either the peoples of Latium or of Greece) that different kinds of persons made an appearance: gods, heroes, kings, artisans, and slaves. For the satire that remained among the Romans did not treat diverse subjects, but instead assigned each poem its own argument.

911

Later, Aeschylus brought Old to Middle Tragedy, namely, a tragedy of satyr dramas with human masks translating the dithyramb of Amphion, which was a chorus of satyrs, into a chorus of men. And this Middle Tragedy must have been the beginning of Old Comedy, where great figures were placed in a mythical setting and so a chorus was still appropriate. Later came Sophocles, first, and Euripides afterwards, who left us tragedy in its final form. And with Aristophanes Old Comedy came to an end, on account of the scandal following from his figure of Socrates. And Menander left us New Comedy, which labors over private and fictitious figures who, because they are private, can be fictitious and still be believable as true, as we reasoned above [§§806, 808]; hence, the chorus must have no longer came on stage, because the chorus is a public figure which reasons only upon public things.

912

In this fashion, the satyr drama came to be composed in the heroic verse later preserved in Latin, for the earliest peoples spoke in heroic verse and later spoken in iambic verse. And, accordingly, tragedy was naturally composed in iambic verse, and in comedy this was done out of empty observance of the example of tragedy, at a time when the Greek peoples were already speaking in prose. And iambic verse is certainly agreeable to tragedy, insofar as it is a verse born for venting wrath which proceeds by way of what Horace called the “swift foot,” as was suggested in an Axiom above;117 similarly, they say commonly that Archilochus invented iambics for venting his own wrath against Lycambes, who was not willing to give his daughter in marriage, and that he did so with such bitterness that daughter and father were reduced to hanging themselves from despair.118 This must be the history of the heroic contest over connubium, in which uprising plebeians must have hanged the nobles along with their daughters.

913

From here came that monstrosity in the art of poetry, that the same verse, in its violence, speed, and excitement, is agreeable both to a poetry as great as tragedy (Plato deemed it to be greater than epic119) and to a poetry as refined as comedy, and that the same meter proper, as was  Horace, Ars poetica 227.   See Axiom 62 and Horace, Ars poetica 252. 118   This legend is reported at Horace, Epode 6.13. 119   Compare Plato, Republic 3, 394b–c. 116 117

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stated, for venting wrath and rage, in which tragedy must break forth with great atrocity, is equally good for the jests, games, and tender loves which make for all the pleasantness and delightfulness of comedy. These terms, “lyric” and “tragic” poetry, when they are not defined, make for Hippocrates being placed around the time of the Seven Sages, someone who ought to be placed around the time of Herodotus, because he came at a time when for the most part they still spoke in myths (so his own biography is colored with myths, and Herodotus tells his histories for the most part through myths); and not only had speaking in prose been introduced, but also writing in the common alphabetic characters (in which Herodotus wrote his histories, and Hippocrates wrote on medicine in the many works which are left to us, as was stated in another place above [§§98, 857, 906]).

914

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On the Course That the Nations Make

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The principles pertaining to this science were established in Book One, and the origins of all the divine and human things of gentile humanity were researched and discovered in the Poetic Wisdom of Book Two; in Book Three, the poems of Homer were discovered to be the two great treasure houses of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece, just as the Law of the Twelve Tables had already been discovered to be the weightiest of testimony about the natural law of the gentile peoples of Latium. On the strength of all this and with illumination from both philosophy and philology, as a consequence of the Axioms1 concerning an ideal eternal history, we now add to this in the present Book Four THE COURSE THAT THE NATIONS MAKE, proceeding in all their great variety and with such different customs with a consistent uniformity based upon the division of time into the THREE AGES which the Egyptians said had run their course in the world prior to them, the ages of GODS, of HEROES, and of MEN. For based upon this division, the nations will be seen to be sustained by a consistent and uninterrupted order of causes and effects, always proceeding in the nations from three kinds of natures, and from these three natures come three kinds of customs, and from these customs are observed three kinds of natural law for gentile peoples, and as a consequence of these laws, are instituted the kinds of order for civil constitutions, or republics. And so as men who have come into human society might communicate to one another all these aforesaid kinds of most important things, they form three kinds of language and as many kinds of character; and so as to justify them, there are three kinds of jurisprudence assisted by three kinds of authority and as many kinds of reason in as many kinds of judgment; these kinds of jurisprudence enjoy currency through three sects of time professed over the whole course of the life of nations.

915

These specific threefold unities, along with many others to follow that will also be enumerated in Book Four, all come to a head in one general unity—that is, the unity of the religion of a divine providence, which is the unity of spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations. Because we have reasoned upon these things above in a diffuse way, here we will demonstrate the order of their course.

Three Kinds of Natures The first nature, on account of the strong deception of an imagination which is most robust when reason is at its weakest, was a poetic or creative nature, which we might be permitted to call a divine nature in that it gave to each body the being of substances animated by gods, and gave each body this being from its own idea. This was the nature of the theological poets, who were the most ancient wise men in all the gentile nations at a time when all the gentile nations were founded upon beliefs held by each one of the nations about its own gods.   Axioms 13, 68, 95, 96.

1

916

366

The New Science In addition, it was a savage and brutal nature, but on account of that same straying of the imagination, they feared the terrifying gods whom they themselves had devised. And because of this, there remained two eternal properties, first, that religion is the only means powerful enough to bridle the savagery of peoples and, second, that religions go well when those who preside over them are the same ones who have inner reverence for them.2

917

The second nature was a heroic nature believed by the heroes themselves to be of divine origin, for in believing that everything was done by gods, they considered themselves to be the sons of Jove, as they had been engendered by the auspices of Jove. Natural nobility for them rested in a correct sense upon this heroism insofar as they themselves belonged to the human species, and it was on account of this belonging that they were princes of the human race. They vaunted this natural nobility over those who, so as to save themselves from the strife of that infamous bestial sharing of things in common, repaired later to the asylums of those heroes. Since they came there without gods, they were considered beasts— thus have we reasoned upon both natures above [§§449, 508, 553–561].

918

The third nature was a human nature, intelligent and, consequently, modest, kind, and reasonable, a nature which recognizes as law conscience, reason, and duty.

Three Kinds of Customs 919

The first customs were completely filled with religion and devotion, the customs we are told of Deucalion and Pyrrha3 coming just after the Flood.

920

The second customs were wrathful and punctiliousness, the customs we are told Achilles had.

921

The third customs were dutiful, taught to each by one’s own point of departure for the duties of civil life.

Three Kinds of Natural Law

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922

The first law was divine, for they believed both themselves and their things to exist entirely by reason of the gods, based on the opinion that the gods were everything, or made everything.

923

The second law was heroic—that is, a law of force, but one held back by religion, which alone can keep force within the bounds of duty, where there no human laws or none strong enough to restrain it.   Compare Hobbes, Leviathan 12: “the failing of virtue in the pastors maketh faith fail in the people.” 3   See Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.365–380. 2

367

Book Four Accordingly, providence has disposed that the earliest gentile peoples, by nature ferocious, were persuaded by a religion of this sort, so that they would naturally acquiesce to force and to deem, since they were not yet capable of reason, that reason lies in the fortune with a view to which they took counsel in divination of the auspices. This law of force is the law of Achilles, who put all of reason in the point of his spear. The third law is the human law dictated by human reason fully developed.

924

Three Kinds of Governance The first governance was divine, what the Greeks would call “theocracy,” in which men believed that each thing was decreed by the gods; this was the age of oracles, which are the most ancient of the things that we read about in history.

925

The second was heroic, or aristocratic, governance, which is as much as to say “governance by the optimates”—in the sense of those with the greatest strength—and in Greek this was also called “governance by the Heraclids,” or those who came from the race of Heracles—in the sense of “nobles”—who were spread throughout all of ancient Greece and later remained in Sparta; also in Greek this was called “governance by the Curetes,” which the Greeks observed in Saturnia—that is, ancient Italy—and in Crete and in Asia; and, subsequently, “governance by the Quirites” among the Romans—that is, governance by priests armed in public assembly. In this governance, on account of their distinguishing a nature that is more noble because, as was stated above [§449], it is believed to be of divine origin, all civil rights were enclosed within the ruling orders of these same heroes, and to the plebeians, reputed to be of bestial origin, they permitted only the uses of life and natural liberty.

926

The third was human governance in which, on account of the equality of that intelligent nature which is the nature proper to man, all were equal under the laws insofar as all are born free in their cities: such is the case in popular liberty, where all or the majority comprise the just strength of the city, and in monarchy, where monarchs make all equally subject to their laws. And since monarchs are the only ones who have at hand armed force, they are the only ones distinguished in civil nature.

927

Three Kinds of Languages Three kinds of languages.

928

Of these, the first was a divine language in thought expressed through mute religious actions—that is, through divine ceremonies—whence

929

368

The New Science there remains in the Roman civil code l­egitimating actions4 by which they paid homage to everything done which pertained to their civil advantage. This language fits in with religion on account of that eternal property: that for them reverence was more important than reasoning (this was necessary in those earliest times when gentiles did not yet know how to speak articulately).

930

The second was expressed through the heroic devices by which coats of arms speak, a kind of speech, as we stated above [§487], that remained in military discipline.

931

The third was expressed through speech, the language used by all nations today to articulate themselves.

Three Kinds of Characters 932

Three kinds of characters.

933

Of these, the first were divine characters which, in the proper sense, were called “hieroglyphics.” About these we have proved above [§487] that at their beginnings they were used by all the nations. And there were certain imaginative universals naturally dictated by an innate property of the human mind to delight in uniformity—this we posited in an Axiom.5 This they could not do by abstractions made through genera; it was done by the imagination through portrayals, and under these poetic universals they subsumed all the particular species pertaining to the genus (so, under Jove they subsumed all the things pertaining to the auspices, under Juno all the things pertaining to nuptials, et cetera).

934

The second kind were heroic characters, which were also imaginative universals under which they subsumed various species of things pertaining to heroism (so, under Achilles all the deeds of a strong warrior, under Ulysses, all the counsels of a wise man). These imaginative genera, because the human mind later advanced to abstract forms and properties from subject matter, passed on into intelligible genera, whence later came the philosophers, from whom the authors of New Comedy, who arrived in the times of Greece’s greatest humanity, took intelligible genera pertaining to human customs and from them made portrayals in their comedies.

935

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Finally, they invented common alphabetic characters, accompanied in their progress by the vernacular languages. Given that the vernacular languages are composed of words which are the genera, so to speak, of all the particulars which had previously been spoken by the heroic languages (so, to take the example adduced above [§460], the heroic phrase “the blood in my heart boils” was made into the expression “I   A technical term in Roman law; see Papinian, Digest 50.17.17.   Axiom 47.

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am angry”), thus, out of one hundred and twenty thousand hieroglyphic characters (the number of characters still used today, for example, by the Chinese), they made a few letters under which they subsumed like genera one hundred and twenty thousand words (of which the vernacular articulated Chinese language is composed). This invention is certainly labor for a mind that has to be greater than human (hence, we learned above [§428] from Bernard von Mallinckrodt and Ingewald Eling that they believed it to be a divine invention). And a common sense open to wonder is what easily moved nations to believe that men excelling in divinity had invented letters of this sort (so the Illyrians believed of St. Jerome, the Slavs believed of St. Cyril, et cetera, which conforms with the observation and reasoning of Angelo Rocca6 in his Biblioteca Vaticana, a book in which the authors of letters that are called “common” [volgari] are depicted alongside the alphabets they invented). These opinions are convicted of manifest falsity by a single question: why did these divine men not teach their own alphabets? This is an objection we made above [§§430, 649] about Cadmus: he brought letters to Greece from Phoenicia, and yet the Greeks later used letters whose form was quite different from that of the Phoenicians. We stated above [§443] that over such languages and such letters, the commoners were lords, whence both the languages and the characters are called “common” [volgari].

936

Because they are lords over both these languages and letters, free peoples ought to be lords over their laws, for they give those laws the meanings that the powerful are drawn to observe, even if they are not willing, as was noted in the Axioms.7 It is naturally forbidden to monarchs to deprive peoples of this lordship. However, it is this same nature of human civil things which forbids that this lordship is separable from peoples that makes for the greater part of the power of these monarchs, for they are able to decree the royal laws, by which the powerful must abide, according to the senses given to them by their peoples. Through this lordship over common alphabetic letters and vernacular languages, it is necessarily through the order of civil nature that free popular republics must precede monarchies.

Three Kinds of Jurisprudence Three kinds of jurisprudence—that is, wisdom.

937

The first was a divine wisdom called, as we saw above [§381], mystical theology, which means “the science of divine speaking” or u ­ nderstanding

938

  Angelo Rocca (1545–1620), founder of the Angelica Library at Rome, and editor of the printed version of the Vulgate. 7   Axiom 92. 6

370

The New Science the divine mysteries of divination; thus, it was a knowledge [scienza] in divination of the auspices and a commonplace wisdom whose wise men were the theological poets, the earliest wise men of gentile humanity; from this mystical theology they were called mystae, which the knowledgeable Horace8 renders “interpreters of the gods.” As a result, to this earliest jurisprudence belonged interpretari in its primary and proper usage, as if they were saying interpatrari, “to enter into the company of the Fathers” (this is what the gods were originally called, as was observed above [§448]), which Dante calls indiarsi, “to enter into the mind of God.”9 And this jurisprudence deems the just to be only in the solemnities of divine ceremonies, whence the Romans came to have such great superstition about their legitimating acts, and in their laws, they retained the phrases iustae nuptiae and iustum testamentum for “solemnized” nuptials and testaments.

939

The second was the heroic jurisprudence of caution around propriety in the certain use of words—that is, the wisdom of Ulysses who in Homer always speaks so discerningly that, in his pursuit of the advantage he intends, he always preserves propriety in his use of words. Hence, the entire reputation of the ancient Roman jurists consists in their cavere10 [“being cautious”]. And their de iure respondere11 [“responding according to the law”] was also nothing other than their cautioning those who had to try their claims in court to present to the praetors the actual circumstances in such a way that they would plainly fall under formulas for actions so that the praetor would not be able to deny them their claim. Thus, in the return to barbarous times, the entire reputation of the learned was founded in their being cautious concerning contracts and last wills and in their knowing how to formulate legal claims and articles, which was exactly the cavere and the de iure respondere of the Roman jurists.

940

The third is the human jurisprudence, which has regard for the truth about the deeds themselves, and from kindness makes the legal code bend to all which equity in cases requires. This is the jurisprudence celebrated in free popular republics and, even more so, under monarchies, both of which are human governments.

941

As a result, divine and heroic jurisprudence took hold of the certain in the times when the nations were rude; human jurisprudence has regard for the true in the times when these same nations are enlightened. And

 Horace, Ars poetica 391.   See Dante, Paradiso 4.28. 10   As Battistini observes, cavere is a juridical term; see Cicero, De officiis 2.19.65; Pro Murena 9.19. 11   For this phrase, see Cicero, De legibus 1.4.12 and 2.12.29. 8 9

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Book Four all of this is a consequence of the definitions of the certain and the true, and of the Axioms12 posited about them in the Elements.

Three Kinds of Authority There were three kinds of authority. Of these, the first is a divine authority of which no account can be demanded from providence. The s­econd—heroic authority—rests entirely upon the solemnizing formulae of the laws. The third—human authority—rests upon the experienced persons of singular prudence in things pertaining to action and of sublime wisdom in intelligible things.

942

These three kinds of authority, used by jurisprudence along the course that the nations make, follow the three sorts of authority senates have, which change along the same course of nations. Of these, the first authority over domain (which remains in the use of the word autores for those from whom we have some claim to a domain, and this domain in the Law of the Twelve Tables is always called auctoritas). This authority had its source in the divine governance from the familial state, in which divine authority must have belonged to the gods, for it was believed in the correct sense that all that is belonged to the gods.

943 944

It was fitting that later, in heroic aristocracies where the senate is composed (as they are composed in our times) of lords, such authority belonged to those regnant senates. Hence, the heroic senates gave their approval to what had been previously treated by the people. As Livy13 says, EIUS QUOD POPULUS IUSSISSET DEINDE PATRES FIERENT AUCTORES [“whatever the people first proposed, the Fathers would subsequently have authority”], and yet this was not during the interregnum of Romulus, as history tells us, but from times at the end of the aristocracy in which citizenship had been shared in common with the plebs, as was reasoned upon above [§§110, 598]. This order, as the same Livy14 says, saepe spectabat ad vim, “often threatened revolt,” such that if the people wanted to come out on top, it had, for example, to nominate consuls to whom the Senate was inclined, exactly as is the case when people under monarchies nominate magistrates. After the laws of Publilius Philo, by which it was declared that the Roman people were the free and absolute lord over civil power, as was stated above [§§26, 38, 104, 112, 113], the authority of the Senate was tutelary, conformable to the approval which tutors give to transactions in their treatment of wards who are lords over their patrimony, an ­authority called   Axioms 19, 111, 113.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.17.9. 14   Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.9.6. 12 13

945

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The New Science auctoritas tutorum [“tutorial authority”]. The Senate granted this authority to the people in those formulations of laws conceived previously in the Senate; it was with these formulations, conformable to the authority which tutors grant to their wards, that the Senate was present to people (present in the great assemblies, present in the act of decreeing those laws if the people wished to decree them); otherwise, it would “antiquate” and probaret antiqua [“give their approval to the older way”]—which is to say that the people would declare that it did not wish anything new. All of this was so that the people in its decreeing of laws would not, on account of its own infirm counsel, do some public harm and so that, consequently, in its decreeing of laws, it would be regulated by the Senate. Hence, the formulations of laws that were brought by the Senate to the people for it to decree were defined by the knowledgeable Cicero15 as perscriptae auctoritates [“authorization in writing”], which is not the personal authority such as tutors have when by their presence they give approval to the actions done by their wards, but rather an authority articulated at length in writing (as the verb perscribere suggests) and distinct from formulations for actions which are written per notas [“with abbreviations”], not intelligible to the people. This was the order instituted by the Publilian law: thenceforth, the authority of the Senate (to say it as Livy16 relates it to us) VALERET IN INCERTUM COMITIORUM EVENTUM [“would prevail while the vote of the assembly was undetermined”].

946

Eventually, republics of popular liberty passed over to monarchies, and the third kind of authority followed, authority from trust, or a reputation for wisdom, and, accordingly, the authority of counsel, for which the jurists under the emperors were called auctores. And such authority must be the authority belonging to senates under monarchs, who have complete and absolute liberty to follow or not to follow the counsels of their senates.

Three Kinds of Reason

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947

There are three kinds of reason.

948

The first: the divine reason of which God alone has understanding and which is known to men only inasmuch as it has been revealed by God, first to the Hebrews and later to Christians, through internal mental speech (for such are the words used by a God who is all mind), but also with the external speech from the prophets as well as from Jesus Christ to the apostles, and by them it was made apparent to the Church; for the gentiles, it was revealed through auspices, through oracles and through physical signs believed to be divine prescriptions because they were believed to come from gods whom the gentiles believed to be composed 15 16

 Cicero, Ad familiares 1.2.4.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.17.10.

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of physical bodies. As a result, for a God who is all reason, reason and authority are the same thing; hence, in good theology, divine authority has the same place as that of reason. Here, one may admire providence, which in the earliest times when men of gentile humanity did not understand reason—that this, above all, was the case in the familial state—it permitted them to stray into the error of holding the authority of the auspices in place of reason, and by believing in the divine counsel of these auspices, they governed themselves through that eternal property, that when men do not see reason in human things, and even more so if they see reason opposed to them, they acquiesce to the inscrutable counsels hidden in the abyss of divine providence. The second was reason of state,17 called by the Romans CIVILIS AEQUITAS [“civil equity”], defined by Ulpian above in the Axioms18 as reasoning not naturally familiar to all men, but to those few with practical experience in governance who know how to see what belongs to the preservation of humankind. In this, the heroic senates were naturally wise, and the Roman Senate was wisest of all in the times of not only aristocratic liberty, when the plebs were still excluded from the treatment of public things, but also popular liberty for the entire time that the people in acting publicly made itself regulated by the Senate—that is, for the entire time up until the Gracchi.

949

Corollary on the wisdom of the ancient Romans in matters of state Here a problem arises, which seems difficult to solve. How was it that in the rude times of Rome, the Romans were supremely wise in matters of state and in their enlightened times Ulpian says in his day only a few understood matters of state, those with practical experience in governance? It is on account of the same natural cause which produced the heroism of the earliest peoples that the ancient Romans, who were the heroes of the world, themselves had a natural regard for civil equity, which was extremely scrupulous about the words by which they gave voice to their laws; and by this superstitious observance of their words, they made a path for their laws that went straight past everything as it actually happened, even when the resulting laws were severe, harsh, cruel, just as today, on account of what was stated more fully above [§§38, 321–322], just as today we have the practice of “reason of state.” And so civil equity naturally places everything under that law, queen over all the others, conceived by Cicero19 with a gravity equal to the subject matter: SUPREMA   See the note at §320 on “reason of state,” as well as §950 and §953 below.   Axiom 110. 19  Cicero, De legibus 3.3.8. 17 18

950

374

The New Science LEX POPULI SALUS ESTO [“let the safety of the people be the supreme law”]. For in heroic times when the state was aristocratic, the heroes, as was proved more fully above [§584], held privately a large share of the public advantage—that is, familial monarchies preserved for them by the fatherland—and since such great particular interests were preserved for them by the republic, they naturally subordinated their minor private interests to it. Hence, they were naturally not only magnanimous in defending the public good that is the good of the state, but also wise in offering counsel on matters of state. And this was the lofty counsel of divine providence, for these Fathers (those sons of Polyphemus in their primitive life observed above [§§296, 338, 522, 629] by Homer and Plato) without such a private interest so greatly identified with the public interest could not otherwise have been induced to pay homage to civil life, as was reflected upon above [§584] in another place.

951

By contrast, it is during humane times that states become either free and popular or monarchical, for in the first state, citizens make decrees about a public good that is portioned out into as many small parts as there are citizens making up the people that gives the decrees; and in the second state, subjects are commanded to attend to their own private interests and to leave concern for the public interest to the sovereign prince. Add to this the natural causes which produce these forms of state. They are completely contrary to the causes which produce heroism: as we demonstrated above [§§670–673], they are an affection for ease, a tenderness toward children, love of women, and a desire for life. On account of all this, men today naturally incline to attend to the ultimate circumstance of what happens, in order to render equal their private advantages; this is the AEQUUM BONUM given consideration by the third kind of reason upon which we are here reasoning, what is called “natural reason” and what the jurists come to name AEQUITAS NATURALIS, the only kind of reason of which a multitude are capable. For a multitude gives consideration to minor instigations that bear upon justice, which rewards the kind of legal cases concerned with what has happened to individuals; and in monarchies, they need a few who are wise in matters of state so as to give counsel according to civil equity during public emergencies in cabinets, and a great many jurists wise in a private jurisprudence professing natural equity, so as to administer justice to peoples.

Corollary Foundational history of Roman law

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952

The things reasoned upon here concerning the three kinds of reason can be the foundations for establishing the history of Roman law.

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For governance must conform to the nature of the men being governed, as was proposed above in an Axiom,20 for it is from the nature of the men governed that such governance emerges, as was demonstrated by these principles above [§§925–927]. And, accordingly, the laws must be administered in conformity with the form of governance, and because of this, they ought to be interpreted in conformity with this form. This is what it seems that no one has done among all the jurists and legal interpreters: they have strayed into the same error in which previously historians of things pertaining to Rome strayed; they tell us of laws decreed at various times in the Roman republic, but they give no notice to the relationship which those laws must have to the changes in constitution through which the republic passes. Hence, the actual deeds emerge so stripped of the causes proper to them, the causes which must have naturally produced them, that Jean Bodin,21 equally erudite as a jurist and a political theorist, argues for the things done by the ancient Romans during the period of liberty which historians falsely tell us was popular that they were the effects of an aristocratic republic conformable to the actual liberty discovered here. On account of all this, we would ask all those who embellish about the history of Roman law: why did the oldest jurisprudence practice such rigor with a view to the Law of the Twelve Tables; why did jurisprudence of the middle period, starting with the edicts of the praetors, practice a reasoning that was kinder and yet still respectful of those laws; why did the new jurisprudence, without even the veil of some regard for those laws, take up a generous profession of natural equity? In response, these embellishers, so as to offer some account, give one which is a grave offense against Roman generosity when they say that the rigor, the solemnity, the scrupulousness, the subtleness with words, and, finally, their secrecy about these laws was an imposture done by the nobles so as to keep in their own hands the laws which made for the better part of power in the city. Instead, practices of this sort were so far from being some imposture that they actually were customs which emerged from the nature of those nobles, a nature which along with those customs produced the constitution that naturally dictated these practices and no others. For during the times of the extreme savagery of those belonging to the earliest humankind, since religion was the only means powerful enough to domesticate them, providence, as was seen above [§629], disposed men to live under divine governance and laws that were sacred to rule everywhere, which is to say laws which were arcana and kept secret from the commoners; these laws came so naturally to men in the familial state, because they were guarded by mute languages that articulated them   Axiom 69.   See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.6.

20 21

953

376

The New Science with the consecrated solemnities which remained as legitimating acts. And these solemnities were believed by the simpleminded to be as much needed for one of them to be certain of the willingness and efficacy of another when they were sharing common advantage, as today with the intelligence now natural to us, it is enough for certainty to have a simple word or even some bare sign. Later, when human governance succeeded aristocratic civil constitutions and that governance naturally preserved paying homage to religious customs, they continued because of that religion to guard the laws as arcana and as secret, for such arcana were the soul which gave life to an aristocratic republic. And because of this religion, they gave the severe observance to the laws, which is the rigor of civil equity, preserved principally by aristocracies. Later, since there arrived popular republics which are naturally open, generous, and magnanimous and since decrees must be issued by a multitude which we have demonstrated [§951] naturally understands natural equity, there arrived at the same pace the languages and letters that are called “common” [volgari]; over them, as we stated above [§443, 936], the multitude has lordship, and with them they decreed and wrote down laws and naturally proceeded to make public what was secret—that is, the ius latens [“hidden law” which Pomponius22 tells us the plebs would suffer no longer (hence their wish that the laws be written down on tables after common alphabetic letters had arrived in Rome from Greece, as was stated above [§763]). This order to the human civil things was eventually found arranged for monarchical constitutions in which monarchs wish to administer the laws according to natural equity and, consequently, conformable with what the multitude understands; accordingly, in the legal code, they make the powerful equal to the weak (this only a monarchy can do). And civil equity, or “reason of state,” was understood by a few wise in public reason and was preserved, in keeping with its eternal property, as an arcana within cabinets.

Three Kinds of Judgments

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954

The kinds of judgments were three.

955

The first were divine judgments during the so-called state of nature— that is, the familial state—when there was no civil power from laws and the paterfamilias appealed to the gods about the harm which was done to him (this was the earliest and proper sense of the expression implorare deorum fidem23 [“to implore the faith of the gods”]). They called upon the 22 23

  Digest 1.2.2.3 and 6.  Cicero, De natura deorum 1.6.13.

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gods as witnesses to their claims (this was the earliest and proper sense of the expression deos obtestari [“call upon the gods as witnesses”]). And such accusations and defenses were, by a property native to the term, the earliest orations in the world (so in Latin the term oratio continued to be used for “accusation” and “defense,” for which there are fine passages in Plautus and Terence;24 and the Law of the Twelve Tables preserved two golden passages, first, FURTO ORARE [“to plead about theft”] is used for agere [“to bring suit”] and, second, PACTO ORARE [“to plead concerning a contract”], not the adornare on Lipsius’s reading,25 is used for excipere [“to stipulate”]). As a result, because of these orations, they continued in Latin to call oratores those who made set speeches on cases in court.26 Such appeals to the gods were originally made by gentile peoples, so simple and rude in their credulity that they were heard by gods whom they imagined resided on the peaks of mountains—so Homer27 tells us that they were on Mount Olympus, and Tacitus28 writes of a war between the Hermunduri and the Chatti because of their superstition that nowhere by the gods except on the peaks of high mountains preces mortalium nusquam propius audiri [“were the prayers of mortals more properly heard”]. The claims established in these divine judgments were themselves considered gods since these were times during which gentile peoples imagined that all things were gods:29 so, Lar represented the household domain; the Dii Hospitales represented one’s claim to shelter; the Dii Penates, paternal power; Deus Genius, the right to marriage; Deus Terminus, the domain of one’s farm; Dii Manes, one’s claim to burial. A golden vestige of this claim to burial remains in the Law of the Twelve Tables, IUS DEORUM MANIUM30 [“the laws belonging to the Dii Manes”].

956

After such orations—that is, such beseeching and imploring—and after such callings for gods as witnesses came the act of cursing the criminals themselves; hence, among the Greeks, certainly in Argos, there were temples dedicated to such cursing. And those accursed were called αναθήματα (or, as we say, “excommunicated”) and oaths were taken against them

957

 Plautus, Asinaria 113; Epidicus 355. Terence, Andria 141 and 407.   Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), Flemish humanist philosopher and philologist. The reference is to Leges regiae et leges decemvirales studiose collectae (Opera omnia, p. 281). 26   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 416. 27  Homer, Iliad 1.18. 28  Tacitus, Annals 13.57.1. 29   “Gentile peoples imagined that all things were gods”—as distinct from first imagining them to be nondivine, but subsequently speaking about them as if they were divine, clothing their prosaic perceptions in mythical garb. See the note at §384 distinguishing Vico’s position from euhemerism. 30   See Cicero, De legibus 2.9.22. 24 25

378

The New Science (this was the earliest sense of the expression nuncupare vota [“to pronounce an oath”], which signified making solemnized oaths—that is, oaths consecrated with formulaic expressions), and those accursed were consecrated to the Furies (they were the true diris devoti [“those pledged to the Furies”]) and then were killed (so the Scythians, as we observed above [§§100, 516], fixed a knife in the earth, gave adoration to it as a god, and then killed a man with it; and in Latin, they used the verb mactare for such killing, which remained a sacred term used during sacrifices, whence they continue to use mattar in Spanish and ammazzare in Italian as verbs meaning “to kill”; and we saw above [§776] that in Greek, the word αρά continued to mean a “harmful object,” an “oath” and a Fury, and that in Latin, the word ara meant both “altar” and “victim”). Consequently, there remained among all nations some kind of excommunication (Caesar31 left a quite developed memorial to the version of this among the Gauls; among the Romans, they retained the interdict against fire and water reasoned upon above [§§371, 610]; many of these consecrations passed over into the Law of the Twelve Tables: someone who had violated a tribune of the plebs was “consecrated to Jove”; an impious son was “consecrated to the gods for the Fathers”; someone who set fire on another’s grain and was so burned alive was “consecrated to Ceres”). One sees that the cruelty of these punishments is similar, as was stated in the Axioms,32 to the brutality of the most brutal witches and that their victims must have been those whom above [§§191, 517, 549, 776] Plautus33 called Saturni hostiae [“victims of Saturn”]!

958

Along with these judgments practiced privately, peoples went forth to wage wars that were called pura et pia bella34 [“pure and pious wars”]; such wars were waged pro aris et focis, for civil things both public and private, from the perspective under which all human things were regarded as divine: hence, all wars in heroic times were religious wars. For heralds, in denouncing the city to which they were sent, called the gods out of the city and consecrated their enemies to the gods. Hence, kings over whom the Romans triumphed were presented to Jove Feretrius on the Capitoline and then killed,35 in keeping with the example of the impious and violent men who were the earliest enemies and the earliest victims consecrated by Vesta on the earliest altars in the world; and captured peoples were considered to be men without gods, in keeping with the example of the earliest familial servants. Hence, slaves, as if they were inanimate things, were called mancipia [“possessions”] in the Roman language and in Roman jurisprudence they had loco rerum [“the status of things”].  Caesar, De bello gallico 6.13.   Axiom 40. 33   See the note on Plautus at §191. 34   Livy speaks of iusta ac pia bella; see Ab urbe condita 3.25.3, 9.8.7, 39.36.12, 42.47.9. 35  Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.12.3; 10.44.8. 31 32

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Corollary on duels and reprisals As a result, there was one kind of divine judgment in the barbarism of nations, duels, which must have come into being most anciently under governance by the gods and must have been conducted for a long time within heroic republics; concerning these heroic republics, we related in the Axioms36 a golden passage from Aristotle37 in his Politics, where he says that they did not have judiciary laws for punishing damages or correcting private violence. This (based on the false opinion held up until now owing to the vanity of the learned about the philosophical heroism of the earliest peoples, which followed from the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients38) has not been believed until now.

959

Certainly, among the Romans, they were late to introduce—and only then by a praetor—the interdict Unde vi [“On force”], and the civil actions De vi bonorum raptorum [“Concerning the use of force with stolen goods”] and Quod metus caussa [“Action whose cause is duress”], as was stated in another place [§638]. And throughout the later recourse to barbarism, private reprisals lasted down to the times of Bartolus,39 which must have been the same as the “condictions” and “private actions” of the ancient Romans, for condicere, according to Festus, meant “to denounce.” As a result, the paterfamilias was required to make a denunciation to someone who had unjustly taken what was his that it be restored before he could make use of reprisals. Hence, such formal denunciations remained as a solemnity in personal actions, something that Ulrich Zasius40 acutely understood.

960

However, duels contained real judgments, which, insofar as they were made in re presenti [“in the moment”], have no need of a formal denunciation. Hence, they remained in the vindicae [“interim ownership”] in which one took a gleba, or clod, from the wrongful possessor with a feigned show of force which Aulus Gellius41 calls festucaria, “of straw” (derived from the true force made in earlier times for which it must have been called vindicate) and must have taken that clod to the judge in order to say of it, AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I declare this ground to be mine by the law of the Quirites”].

961

Consequently, those who write that duels were introduced on account of a lack of proofs write falsely; instead, they ought to write that it was on account of a lack of judiciary laws.   Axiom 85.  Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b. 38   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. 39   Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–1357), Italian jurist and author of Tractatus de repressalis (1354). 40   Ulrich Zasius (1461–1535), German jurist and humanist, friend of Erasmus, initial supporter and eventual opponent of Luther. 41   Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 20.10.10. 36 37

380

The New Science For certainly Frotho, king of Denmark, decreed that all contested matters be concluded by means of combat, and so he forbade their being ended by legitimate judgments. Because their matters were not concluded with legitimate judgments, the laws of the Lombards, Salians, English, Burgundians, Normans, Danes, and Germans are filled with duels. On account of this Cujas42 in his On Feuds says the following: Et hoc genere purgationis diu usi sunt Christiani tam in civilibus quam in criminalibus caussis re omni duello commissa [“Christians have long used this kind of cleansing in both civil and criminal cases, settling everything with duels”]. Because of this, there remain in Germany those who are called Ritter who profess a knowledge [scienza] of duels, and who oblige all those given to duels to tell the truth; for if duels permitted witnesses and, consequently, judges were to intervene, they would turn into either criminal or civil judgments.

962

This has not been believed of the earlier barbarism that duels were practiced, because no memory of it has come down to us. However, we do not know how to understand how the sons of Polyphemus, in whom Plato recognizes the most ancient paterfamilias in the state of nature, could have suffered to be harmed, to say nothing of suffering humanely. Certainly, Aristotle43 has said in the Axioms44 that in the most ancient republics, to say nothing of the familial state before cities, they did not have laws for correcting damages or punishing offenses when citizens committed private transgressions against one another, as we demonstrated above [§960] was the case in ancient Rome; and accordingly, Aristotle also claims in the Axioms that this is the custom of barbarous peoples, for as was suggested in the Axioms, peoples are barbarous at their start because they have not yet been domesticated by laws.

963

However, there are two great vestiges of these duels—one in Greek history, the other in Roman history—that peoples must have started wars, called in ancient Latin duella, with combat between the particular men who had been offended, even if they were kings and watched by both their peoples hoping to see the offence publically defended or avenged. Thus, for example, the Trojan War started with combat between Menelaus and Paris45 because the former considered the latter the one who abducted his wife, and because this combat remained indecisive, it followed that Greeks and Trojans waged war upon each other. And we noticed above [§641] that the same custom for the nations of Latium in the war   Jacques Cujas (1520–1590), French jurist. The reference is to De feudis 1.  Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b. 44   Axiom 85. 45  Homer, Iliad 3.344–382.

42

43

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between the Romans and the Albans, which was completely ended by the combat between the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, one of whom must have abducted Horatia. In armed judgments of this sort, they deemed right to be in the fortune of the victor. This was the counsel of divine providence so that, among gentile peoples who were barbarous and whose reasoning was far too limited to understand right, wars would not breed further wars and they would have some idea of justice or injustice from men whom the gods were for or against: so, the gentiles scorned even the saintly Job who from his regal fortune fell insofar as God was against him. And during the return to barbarous times, accordingly, the defeated party, even if he was just, barbarously had his right hand cut off. From customs of this sort observed by peoples in the private realm, there emerged what moral theologians call the external justice of wars, whence nations might repose in the certainty of their powers.

964

Thus, the auspices which founded the paternal monarchical power of the Fathers in the familial state and which arranged and preserved aristocratic rule in heroic cities and which, when shared in common with the plebs of those peoples, produced free republics (as is so plainly recounted to us in Roman history) eventually legitimated with the fortune of arms the conquests of those successful at conquering. All this can come to pass in no other way than from an innate concept of providence, which nations universally have, to which they must conform when they see the just afflicted and the wicked prosper, as was stated in another place in the Idea of the Work [§27]. The second judgments, because of their recent origin from divine judgments, were observed with extreme scrupulousness for words, a scrupulousness which must have retained from the previous divine judgments the name religio verborum [“religious regard for words”], conformable with divine things being universally conceived in terms of consecrated formulae, even the smallest letter of which cannot be altered, whence for ancient formulae for actions it was said qui cadit virgula caussa cadit [“he who misses a comma loses the case”]. This was the natural law of heroic gentile peoples naturally observed in ancient Roman jurisprudence. And such were the fari of the praetor—that is, “an unalterable pronouncement”—so called from the dies fasti, “the days” on which the praetor offered a legal reckoning; because only the heroes took part in such reckonings of this in heroic aristocracies, they must have been the FAS DEORUM [“divine law”] of times in which, as we explained above [§449], the heroes named themselves gods (it was from here that later the word fatum was used for the ineluctable order of causes which produces the things of nature). For such would be God’s way of speaking. Hence, perhaps comes the sense of the Italian verb ordinare, which, and especially when reasoning about laws, means “to give commands that necessarily must be followed.”

965

382 966

The New Science On account of this order, which, when reasoning about judgments, signifies the solemn formulae for action which dictated the cruel and base punishment against the renowned defendant Horatius, the duumvirs were not able to acquit him, even if he had been found innocent, and (as Livy46 recounts) the people to whom he appealed acquitted him magis admiratione virtutis quam iure caussae [“more from admiration for his virtue than from the justice of his case”]. And this ordering of judgments was needed during the times of Achilles, who rested all right upon strength, on account of that property of the powerful (this Plautus47 describes in a way consistent with his grace: pactum non pactum, non pactum pactum [“an agreement is no agreement, no agreement is an agreement”]). In these cases, promises are not always in accord with the wishes of the arrogant, and the arrogant do not always wish to fulfill their promises. Thus, so that they do not break out in suing, strife, and killing, it was the counsel of providence that they would naturally hold in opining about justice that their right was such and as extensive as explicated in solemn verbal formulae. Hence, the reputation of ancient Roman jurisprudence and of the older scholars in our own times stood upon taking precautions for their clients. This natural law of the heroic gentile peoples afforded Plautus the plots for many of his comedies: lowlifes are unjustly defrauded by the trickery of young men in love with their slaves because, although they acted innocently, they are found guilty under some legal formula. And not only can they not bring the fraud to trial with some legal action, but one of them reimburses the deceptive young man for the price of the sale of the slave; another begs a different young man to be content with half the penalty incurred for unproven theft; another flees the city out of fear that he will be convicted of corrupting another young man’s slave. This is how much in the times of Plautus natural equity ruled in making judgments!

967

Not only was this strict law naturally observed among men, but because of their nature, men also believed that it was observed by the gods themselves in their oaths; so, Homer48 tells us that Juno makes an oath to Jove (who not only witnesses the oath, but also judges it) that she had not solicited Neptune to set a storm in motion against the Trojans insofar as she did it through the god Somnus as her intermediary, and Jove remains satisfied with this. Thus, Mercury feigning to be Sosia swears to the one who truly is Sosia that if he is tricking Sosia, then Mercury may turn against him. And yet it is not credible that Plautus in his Amphitryon49 was try Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.12.  Plautus, Aulularia 260. 48  Homer, Iliad 14.354–360, 15.36–44. 49  Plautus, Amphitryon 392. 46 47

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ing to introduce gods who would teach the people in the theater how to make false oaths. And it is even less credible for Scipio Africanus and for the Laelius who was called the “Roman Socrates,” the two wisest princes of the Roman republic with whom Terence is said to have composed his comedies. Yet Terence50 in his Lady of Andros devises one Davus, who is made to place a baby in front of the door of Simo but uses the hands of Mysis to do it, so that if it comes to pass that he is asked about it by his master, he could in good conscience deny that he had put the baby there. But what is the weightiest of proofs is that in Athens, a city of discerning and intelligent men, in response to the verse by Euripides51 which Cicero renders in Latin,

968

iuravi lingua, mentem iniuratam habui [“The tongue swore, but I kept my mind unsworn”],

the spectators in the theatre roared in disgust, for they naturally tended toward the opinion that UTI LINGUA NUNCUPASSIT, ITA IUS ESTO [“as the tongue declares, so goes what is lawful”], as is decreed in the Law of the Twelve Tables. How far the unfortunate Agamemnon was able to absolve himself of his rash oath, because of which he consecrated and killed his innocent and pious daughter Iphigenia! Hence can one understand why Lucretius,52 because he did not recognize providence, could make about the deed of Agamemnon the impious exclamation, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! [“such are the evils religion enjoins!”],

as we proposed above in the Axioms.53 Finally, we affix to what we have proposed the following reasoning upon two things from Roman jurisprudence and history that are certain. First, it was in later times that Gallus Aquilius54 introduced the civil action De dolo [“On Fraud”]; second, Augustus granted to judges a register for resolving cases of those who had been tricked or seduced.55

969

Because they were inured to this custom in peace, nations later in war, when they were defeated, depending on the terms of the surrender, either endured unfortunate oppression or engaged in fortunate mockery before the anger of the victors.

970

Unfortunate oppression is what the Carthaginians endured when they accepted from the Romans peace terms which would make for the safety

971

 Terence, Andria 722–730.   See Euripides, Hippolytus 612; Cicero, De officiis 3.29.108. 52  Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.101. 53   Axiom 40. 54   Aquilius Gallus, consul in 66 BCE, orator and distinguished jurist, friend of Cicero. 55   See Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Augustus 33. 50 51

384

The New Science of their lives, their city, and their substance: they understood by the term “city” its buildings (which in Latin is called urbs), but for city, the Romans used the term civitas which signifies the “community of citizens”; so when the Romans later executed the peace terms and decreed that the Carthaginians abandon their city situated on the seashore and retire inland, they refused to obey and, newly armed for their defense, were declared by the Romans rebels; by heroic right in war, the Romans took Carthage barbarously and set fire to it.56 The Carthaginians would not acquiesce to the peace terms offered by the Romans, which they had not understood in contracting them (for they had previously become intelligent, partly through an African acuity, partly through maritime business which makes nations more discerning). But the Romans hardly considered the war to be unjust. Although there are a few who deem that the Romans started to wage unjust wars with their war against Numantia, which was brought to an end by Scipio Africanus himself, everyone agrees that their unjust wars had their beginning during the later one against Corinth.

972

However, something from the return to barbarous times better confirms what we have proposed. Emperor Conrad III offered to Weinsberg, whose resistance had been fomented by his rival for the empire, as terms for its surrender that only the women could come out safely, bringing with them as much as they could carry upon their back. At that point, the pious women of Weinsberg came carrying their children, spouses, and parents, and the victorious emperor stood at the city gate in the very act of enjoying the fruits of his victory, naturally a moment wont to be insolent; and yet he did not hearken to that wrath which is terrifying in magnates and must be cause for mourning when born of obstacles made in the face of those acquiring and preserving their sovereignty. Standing at the head of his army girded with swords drawn and lances poised to make a slaughter of the men of Weinsberg, he looked and suffered all of them to pass safely before him, the one who had intended to put all of them to the sword. This is how much the natural law of human reason articulated by Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf ran its course through every time period in every nation!

973

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What has been reasoned upon up until now, and all that will be reasoned upon later, emerges from those definitions that we proposed above in the Axioms57 concerning the true and the certain with regard to laws and pacts. And they emerge because it is as natural during barbarous times to observe right belonging to the strict use of words—what is properly called FAS GENTIUM58 [“the law of peoples”]—as it is natural during humane times to deem right to belong to the kind use of equal advan  Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.6.   Axioms 111, 113, 114. 58   For this expression, see Tacitus, Annals 1.42.2. 56 57

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Book Four tage in equal cases—what is properly called FAS NATURAE [“the law of nature”], that immutable law of human rationality, which is the true and proper nature of man. The third judgments were extraordinary judgments, in which the truth behind the deeds is lord, and these judgments in accordance with the dictates of conscience, for each are kindly succored by laws in whatever is demanded by equal advantage for equal cases. They are endowed with the natural modesty, which is the offspring of understanding, and consequently guaranteed by good faith, which is the child of humanity. This is in agreement with the openness belonging to popular republics and even more so with the generosity belonging to monarchies, where the monarchs in these judgments are ostentatious about being above the law and subject only to their conscience and to God.

974

And from these judgments, practiced in modern times for peace, the three systems of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf have arisen for war. Having observed in these systems many errors and defects, Father Nicola Concina59 has meditated upon a system more in conformity with good philosophy and more advantageous to human society so that, for the glory of Italy, he teaches this system to this day as a professor at the illustrious University of Padua along with metaphysics, of which he is the first chair.

Three Sects of Times All the aforesaid things were practices throughout three sects of times.

975

Of these, the first were times belonging to the religious, who had currency under divine governance.

976

The second were times belonging to the punctilious like Achilles, who in the return to barbarous times were those who fought duels.

977

The third were times belonging to the civil—that is, the modest—during the times of the natural law of the gentile peoples for which Ulpian60 offers specificity in his definition by adding the word “human”: IUS NATURALE GENTIUM HUMANARUM [“the natural law of human gentile peoples”]. Hence, for those writing in Latin under the emperors, what ought to be done by subjects is called officium civile61 [“civil duty”], and any breach of the duty taken in the interpretation of the laws as contrary to natural equity is called incivile [“uncivil”]. And this is the final sect of times for Roman jurisprudence, starting in the times of popular liberty: hence, at first, the praetors, so as to accommodate Roman nature, customs, and governance which had changed, were required to sweeten the severity and soften the rigidity of the Law of the Twelve Tables decreed

978

59   Nicola Concina (1694–1762), Dominican priest and professor of metaphysics at Padua, and correspondent of Vico from 1733. 60   Digest 2.14.7.1. 61   On the officium civile, compare Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 2.4.27.

386

The New Science during what was natural for heroic times in Rome; later, the emperors were required to strip away the veils with which the praetors had covered the laws and to display natural equity, with all the openness and generosity agreeable to the gentleness to which the nations were accustomed.

979

Accordingly, the jurists justify, as one can observe, by appeal to the “sect of their times” whatever their reasoning is concerning the just. For these sects are proper to Roman jurisprudence, and with respect to them, the Romans were in agreement with all the other nations of the world; they were the sects taught by divine providence (the Roman jurists established this as the principle of the natural law of the gentile peoples), not the sects of the philosophers (which some erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code have imposed upon it by force, as was stated above in the Axioms62). And the emperors themselves, when they wished to offer reasons for their laws or other orders given by them, stated that they were led in doing whatever they did by the “sect of their time,” as is gathered in the passages of Barnabé Brisson63 in his De formulis Romanorum. They did this insofar as the customs of the age are the school for princes: so, Tacitus64 uses the term “age” in naming the decadent sect of his times when he says corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur [“the age is called to corrupt and be corrupted”], whereas today we would use the word “mode.”

Additional Proofs Treating the Properties of Heroic Aristocracies 980

So constant and continuous and orderly a succession of human civil things, within the chain of such and so varied causes and effects observed in the course which nations make, ought to constrain our minds to accept the truth of these principles. However, so as not to leave any place for doubt, we will add to them an explanation of other civil phenomena that cannot be explained except in terms of the discovery that was made above [§§582–598], the discovery of heroic republics.

On Guardianship Over Boundaries 981

This is because the two greatest of the eternal properties of aristocratic republics are, as was stated above [§586], their two kinds of guardianship, first, that over boundaries and, second, that over orders.   Axioms 104 and 114.   Barnabé Brisson (1531–1591), French humanist jurist. 64  Tacitus, Germania 19.3. Vico quotes this passage in a letter from 1726 to Esperti, suggesting that the age of Tacitus is an age “quite similar to our own”— that is, “delicate and showy” (Battistini 322–323). 62 63

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Guardianship over boundaries started to be observed, as was seen above [§§434, 486, 550], with the sanguinary religions under divine governance. For they had to place limits on the fields in order to remedy the infamous sharing of things in common in the bestial state, and with these limits were settled the boundaries, first, of families, later of clans, or households, then of peoples, and finally of nations. Hence, each of the giants, as Polyphemus says to Ulysses,65 stayed with his wife and children in his cave lest one might meddle in the things belonging to another, thus preserving what they were wont to do in their recent brutal origin. And they savagely killed those who entered within their boundaries, as Polyphemus tried to do to Ulysses and his companions; it is in this giant, as has been stated many times [§§296, 338, 522, 629, 950, 962], that Plato66 saw the Fathers in the familial state. Hence, we demonstrated above [§632], was derived the longstanding custom of cities regarding one another from the perspective of being eternal enemies.

982

So much for the smooth division of the fields of which the jurist Hermogenianus tells, accepted on good faith by all the interpreters of the Roman legal code! And it is from this early, most ancient beginning of human things, the place where the subject matter itself starts, that it would be reasonable to start also the doctrine teaching de rerum divisione et acquirendo earum domino [“on the division of things and the acquisition of domain over them”]. This guardianship over boundaries is naturally observed in aristocratic republics, which, as the political theorists have noted, are not made through conquest. Instead, after the infamous sharing of things in common dissipated and peoples were well settled upon their boundaries, there came popular ­republics—which made for the expansion of empire—and, eventually, the monarchies that are even better for this expansion. This and nothing else must be the cause for the Law of the Twelve Tables not recognizing simple possession, and in heroic times it was usucaption that served to solemnize the natural handing over of property, as the best interpreters read in the definition called dominii adiectio, the addition of civil domain to some previous natural acquisition. However, during times of popular liberty, there later came the praetors, and they assisted with simple possession by means of their interdicts; and usucaption started to be dominii adeptio, a way of acquiring civil domain from the very beginning. And whereas, at first, cases concerning possession did not actually appear in court (for the praetor recognized such cases through the extrajudicial proceedings stated above [§638]), today the legal judgments that are most certain are the ones called “possessory.”  Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115.  Plato, Laws 3.2–4, 678c–681e.

65 66

983

388 984

The New Science Hence, in Rome, largely during popular liberty and completely under the monarchy, there fell away from distinctions among bonitary, quiritary, optimal, and, eventually, civil domain; originally, these terms conveyed meanings quite different from their present meanings. The first, natural domain, was preserved by continuous, physical possession. The second, a domain which could be legally vindicated, was current among the plebeians, communicated to them by the nobles with the Law of the Twelve Tables; however, for legal vindication, a plebeian was required to call upon the noble as “author” because of whom he had the domain, as was fully demonstrated above [§§603, 621]. The third, domain free from any encumbrance, public as well as private, had currency among the patricians themselves prior to the ordering of the census which was the basis of popular liberty, as was stated above [§620]. The fourth and last, the domain which the city itself had, is now called “eminent” domain. The distinction between optimal and quiritary domain was obscure even during those times of popular liberty such that jurists of the final period of jurisprudence took no countenance of it. But under monarchy, the domain which is called bonitary (born of simple natural handing over of property) and so-called quiritary domain (born of ­mancipation—or civil transfer) were actually confused by Justinian67 in the institution of De nudo iure Quiritium tollendo and De usucapione transformanda. And the well-known distinction between things which were mancipi [“transferable”] and things which were nec mancipi [“nontransferable”] was completely abolished. And they retained “civil domain” in the sense of domain amenable to the legal process of vindication, and optimal domain in the sense of domain not subject to any private encumbrance.

On Guardianship Over Orders 985

Guardianship over orders started in times of divine governance because of jealousy—hence we saw above [§513] a jealous Juno, the goddess of solemn marriages—for the sake of proving at that time the certainty of families against the nefarious sharing of women in common. This guardianship is the natural property of aristocratic republics which wish for kinship ties, succession, and, consequently, wealth (and, through all these, power) to remain within the noble order. Hence, testamentary laws came late to the nations: so, Tacitus68 tells us that among the ancient Germans there was no testamentary law; this is why King Agis, when he tried to introduce them into Sparta, was actually strangled by the ephors, guardians of the liberty of the Lacedaemonian lords, as was stated in another place [§§592, 668].

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67 68

 Justinian, Institutes 7.25.1; 7.31.1.  Tacitus, Germania 20.

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Consequently, one can understand with what great discernment the embellishers on the Law of the Twelve Tables assigned to the eleventh table the title AUSPICIA INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO69 [“The auspices will not be communicated to the plebs”]: on these originally depended all legal claims in both the public and private realms, which were all preserved in the noble order; the private ones were claims to nuptials, paternal power, direct kinship, paternal kinship, tribal kinship, legal succession, disposing by testament and to guardianship, as was reasoned upon above [§§110, 598]. As a result, after having in the first tables established, by giving a common share of all these legal claims to the plebs, the laws proper to a popular republic (particularly by giving a common share in the testamentary law), they later, with a single article in the eleventh table, gave it a completely aristocratic form. However, in their great confusion of things, they also say something which, although it is mere divination, is true, that the last two tables transferred into laws some of the ancient customs of those Romans, a statement which verifies that the ancient Roman constitution was aristocratic. Now, to return to what we proposed, after humankind had everywhere been settled by the solemnity of marriage, there came popular republics and, much later, monarchies. Within these, by means of intermarrying with the plebs of the people and of testamentary succession, the orders of the nobility were disturbed, and, consequently, their wealth gradually proceeded to leave the noble households. For it has been fully demonstrated above [§§110, 513, 527, 598] that the Roman plebeians contracted natural marriages up until Year 309 of Rome, when the patricians finally shared the connubium—that is, the right to contract solemnized nuptials.

986

Nor in that miserable state, which was almost that of the basest slaves (as Roman history also recounts for us) could they have made any pretense to intermarrying with those nobles. This is one of the most important things which led us to state in the first edition of this work70 that, if we do not offer these beginnings to Roman jurisprudence, then Roman history is more unbelievable than the mythical history of the Greeks told to us up until now, for we did not know of the latter what it was trying to say, but in Roman history we sensed that that it was completely contrary to the order of human desires that the most miserable men would make pretense, first, to nobility in the contest over connubium, later, to honors by their seeking a common share in the consulate, and, finally, to wealth with the last pretense of being made priests. Whereas, it is the case by an eternal and common civil nature that men first desire wealth, after this, honors, and, last of all, nobility. Hence, by necessity, one has to say that because the nobles had conveyed to the plebeians certain domain over the fields with the Law of the   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6 and 10.8.9.  See Scienza nuova prima §§109, 598, 657.

69 70

987

390

The New Science Twelve Tables—which we demonstrated above [§§109, 598, 657] was the second agrarian law in the world—and because the plebeians were still foreigners (for it is possible to concede this domain to foreigners), by experience the plebeians actually perceived that they were not able to leave the field intestate to their kin, because they did not contract solemnized nuptials among themselves and so did not have direct kinship, paternal kinship, or tribal kinship, much less disposal of the fields by testament, not being citizens. No wonder, given that these men had little or no understanding, as is proved by the Furian, Voconian, and Falcidian laws, inasmuch as all of them were plebiscites; and they needed all three to affirm eventually with the Falcidian the desired advantage, namely, that estates not be absorbed by bequests. Accordingly, because they perceived that, upon the deaths of plebeians that came to pass within three years of the Law of the Twelve Tables, the fields assigned to them returned in this way to the nobles, they made pretense with the connubium to citizenship, as was reasoned upon above [§598]. However, the grammarians, confused by all the political theorists, imagined that Rome had been founded by Romulus with the constitution which cities now have, not knowing that the plebs of heroic cities were for many centuries considered to be foreigners and, consequently, contracted natural marriages among themselves. And, accordingly, the grammarians have not noticed that there was as much an actual as there was a verbal incongruity in taking the Latin expression from history, plebei tentarunt CONNUBIA PATRUM [“the plebs held the nuptials of the Fathers”] as if it meant cum patribus [“with the Fathers”] (for the marriage laws do speak in this way—for example, patruus non habet cum fratris filia connubium [“an uncle will not hold connubium with the daughter of his brother”], as was stated above [§598]). If they had noticed this, they would certainly have understood that the plebeians did not make pretense to the right of intermarrying with the nobles, but of contracting solemnized nuptials, which was the right of the nobles.

988

Consequently, if one considers the legal successions—that is, the decrees of the Law of the Twelve Tables that the paterfamilias be succeeded in the first place by their own and, lacking these, by paternal kin and, failing that, by tribal kin—the Law of the Twelve Tables seem like a Roman Salic law, a law which one can also observe in Germany in their earliest times: hence, one can conjecture that the same was the case for other nations early in the return to barbarism and that it eventually remained in France and, outside of France, in Savoy. This law of legal succession is later called by Baldus71 (in congruity with what we have proposed) IUS GENTIUM GALLORUM [“the law of the Gallic gentes”]. The same can be done for that Roman law on legal succession by paternal and tribal kinship: one can reasonably call it IUS GENTIUM ROMANORUM   Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), medieval Italian jurist born in Perugia, student of Bartolus de Saxoferrato. See Baldus, Commentaria in primam Digesti veteris patrem 1.9, cited by Bodin in Six Books on the Commonwealth 6.5.

71

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[“the law of the Roman gentes”], and by adding to gentes the adjective HEROICARUM [“heroic”] and by more congruously using ROMANUM [“Roman”] to modify ius, it would be exactly the same as the IUS QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM [“law of the Roman Quirites”]—this we proved herein above [§595] has been the natural law common to all heroic gentes). And the things we have said concerning the Salic law, that it excludes women from succession in regimes, are not, as it might seem, overturned by the fact that Tanaquil, a woman, governed the Roman regime. For that was said as a heroic phrase for a king who, weak in spirit, made himself ruled by the wily Servius Tullius, who invaded the Roman regime with the favor of the plebs, to whom he had conveyed the first agrarian law, as was demonstrated above [§§107, 604, 613, 620, 640, 653, 769]. Corresponding to what happened to Tanaquil, in the same manner of heroic speech that recurred during the return to barbarous times, Pope John was called a woman72 (it was to counter this myth that Leone Allaci wrote an entire book73), for he showed great weakness in falling before Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, as was revealed by Baronio and, after him, by Sponde.74

989

With a difficulty of this sort thus resolved, we can say in the same manner that, at first, the expression IUS QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM meant IUS NATURALE GENTIUM HEROICARUM ROMANARUM, in the same way that the law current in free republics and, even more so, under monarchies was called by Ulpian75 (when he defined it by giving weight to the words) IUS NATURALE GENTIUM HUMANARUM. And on account of all this, it seems that the title of the Institutes should be read not as DE IURE NATURALI, GENTIUM, ET CIVILI but rather DE IURE NATURALI GENTIUM CIVILI (taking out, along with Hermann Vulteius,76 not only the comma between the words naturali and gentium—for which Ulpian supplies the HUMANARUM that follows GENTIUM—but also the conjunction et, which comes before the word civili).

990

For the Romans must have attended to a law which was their own since, from its introduction in the age of Saturn, they had preserved it, first, with their customs and, later, with their laws, just as Varro77 in his great work Rerum divinarum et humanarum treats Roman things as having altogether native origins, mixed with nothing foreign.   A reference to the much-disputed legend of “Pope Joan.”   Leone Allaci, Confutatio fabulae de Ioanna papissa, ex monumentis graecis (1645). 74   The reference is to two church historians: Cesare Baronio (1536–1607) and Henri de Sponde (1568–1643). 75   Digest 2.14.7.1. 76   Hermann Vultejus (1565–1634), German jurist. 77   See Augustine, City of God 6.4. 72 73

392 991

The New Science Now, to return to legal succession in heroic Rome, we are strongly impelled in many ways to doubt that in ancient Roman times daughters enjoyed legal succession when women generally did not. For we are no way impelled to believe the heroic Fathers had the slightest sense of tenderness; rather, in many ways, we are greatly impelled to believe the complete opposite. For the Law of the Twelve Tables called for someone related by paternal kinship, even someone seven degrees removed, to exclude a son found to be mancipated from legally succeeding his father. And the paterfamilias held the sovereign law of life and death over his sons and, consequently, held despotic domain over the possessions of his sons. This same paterfamilias contracted intermarrying for his sons in order to bring women into his household worthy of that household; the history of this is told to us in the verb spondere, which in its proper sense means “to promise another,”78 whence came the word sponsalia [“betrothal”].79 The paterfamilias considered adoptions as good as nuptials for strengthening failing families by means of bringing in an adopted outsider as a son-in-law. He considered mancipating his sons a way of punishing or penalizing them; he had no understanding of legitimizing illegitimate sons, for only concubines were freed or foreign women, with whom one did not in heroic times contract in solemn marriages, lest the nobility of the children degrade from that of the grandfather. Testaments, for any frivolous reason or for none at all, were annulled or broken or followed to no effect, so that legitimate succession could run its course. To this extent, the paterfamilias was naturally blinded by the brilliance of his name in the private realm, and thereby naturally enflamed to pursue the glory of the name he shared in common with others, Rome! All these customs are proper to aristocratic republics—that is, heroic ­republics—all of which have the property of making for the heroism of the earliest peoples.

992

And worthy of reflection is that most incongruous error, taken up by those erudite embellishers of the Law of the Twelve Tables, who try to have them brought from Athens to Rome: for the whole time before that law brought in testamentary and legitimate successions, inheritance intestate from the Roman paterfamilias must have fallen under the kind of things called res nullius. However, providence disposed, lest the world should fall back into that infamous sharing of things in common, that certainty of a domain would be preserved by and through the very form of the aristocratic republics. Hence, these legitimate successions must have naturally been celebrated by all the earliest nations prior to any understanding of testaments, which are proper to popular republics and, even more so, to

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78 79

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.46.8–9.   See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 564.

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monarchies, as Tacitus80 plainly tells us was the case for the ancient Germans—a passage which allows us to understand that the same custom belonged to all the earliest barbarous peoples. Hence, we conjectured above [§988] that the Salic law, which was certainly celebrated in Germany, had been universally observed by nations in the time of the second barbarism. But the jurists of the final kind of jurisprudence believed (owing to that source of countless errors noted in this work, that of judging unfamiliar things of the earliest times in terms of things from more recent times) that the Law of the Twelve Tables called for the daughters in families to inherit from fathers who died intestate because of the word SUUS [“one’s own”], on the assumption that the masculine gender of the word includes women as well.

993

However, heroic jurisprudence (upon which in this book we have reasoned so much) takes the words of laws as having the sense most proper to them, so that the word SUUS does not signify anything other than the son of the family. Of this, we are convinced by the invincible proof of the legal formula providing for the education of posthumous children introduced some centuries later by Gallus Aquilius,81 which conceives of the children with the expression SI QUIS NATUS NATAVE ERIT [“if there be a male or female born”], lest there be doubt later that the term NATUS should be understood in the restricted sense. Hence, on account of ignorance of these things, Justinian82 in his Institutes says that the Law of the Twelve Tables, with the term ADGNATUS [“paternal kin”], called for application to male and female kin alike, but that later jurisprudence of the middle period made these laws more rigid, restricting them to sisters of the same blood. What must have come to pass is the complete opposite of this: first, the term SUUS, applied to those called daughters because they belonged to the same family and, later, the term ADGNATUS, applied to those called daughters because they were sisters of the same blood. Here it was by good luck that this came to be called jurisprudence of the “middle” period, because starting from these cases softens the rigor of the Law of the Twelve Tables, which came after the oldest form of jurisprudence that guarded over words with extreme scrupulousness, as has been fully stated above [§§938–940] for both forms of jurisprudence. But when public power had passed from the nobles to the people, because the plebs put all their strength, all their wealth, all their power in having many children, tenderness from blood ties started to be felt: previously, the plebs of heroic cities must not have felt this, for the children were begotten to be made into slaves for the nobles; and the  Tacitus, Germania 20.   Aquilius Gallus, consul in 66 BCE, orator and distinguished jurist, friend of Cicero. 82  Justinian, Institutes 2.3.2. 80 81

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The New Science plebs were in a position to generate at a time when they would produce ­offspring in the spring season, so that those offspring would be born not only healthy, but also hardy. From the spring season, they were called vernae [“slaves”], according to the Latin etymologists, from which the “vernacular” languages are named, as was stated above [§§443, 556]. And mothers must have hated rather than loved them, since from them they felt only the pain of bearing them and only the trouble of nursing them, without taking any pleasure in their advantage for the mothers’ lives. However, as much as the multitude of plebs endangered aristocratic republics, which belong, and say they belong, to the few, they aggrandized popular republics and, even more so, monarchies; hence, imperial laws make for such favor toward women on account of the dangers and pains of childbirth. Consequently, it was after the times of popular liberty that the praetors started to give consideration to rights from blood ties and give regard to them with the possession bonorum [“of goods”]. They started to repair with their remedies the faults and deficiencies of testaments, so as to promote the popular sharing of wealth, which alone is admired by the common run.

995

Finally came the emperors who, overshadowed by the splendor of nobility, gave themselves to promoting the claims of a human nature common to both the plebeians and the nobles, starting with Augustus who applied himself to protecting trusteeships (through this, prior to Augustus, goods passed to those incapable of inheritance, but only when the heirs bearing this responsibility were exacting in its execution) and gave them such assistance that in his own lifetime they bore necessity in legal claims that constrained heirs to give effect to those claims. There followed many senatorial decrees by which maternal kinship emerged as an order equal to paternal kinship, until Justinian came along and abolished the distinction between legacies and trusteeships, blurred the distinction in the inherited portions established in the Falcidian and Trebellian laws, minimized the distinction between testaments and codicils, and ab intestato made paternal and maternal kin all but equal. And the last Roman laws are so profuse in their favor of last testaments that, whereas in older times they were vitiated on the slightest pretext, now they must always be interpreted in a manner more in support of its inclination.

996

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On account of the humanity of the times (in which popular republics love their sons and monarchies wish for fathers devoted to a love of their sons), because the cyclopean right which the paterfamilias had over the person of their sons had fallen away, and so that this right of their possessions would also fall away, the emperors introduced, first, peculium castrense [“assets from military service”] so as to encourage them toward warfare; then, they extended this to peculium quasi castrense [“assets

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from quasi-military service”] so as to encourage them toward military bureaucracy; and, finally, so as to make content those sons who were neither soldiers nor clerks, they introduced the peculium adventicium [“extrinsic assets”]. They abolished the effectiveness of paternal power in adoptions, which were no longer kept restricted to a few direct kin. They universally approved of formal adoptions, somewhat difficult in cases where a citizen who was a paterfamilias became subject to another paterfamilias. They gave mancipation the reputation of being a benefit rather than a penalty. They gave the full force of solemnized nuptials to legitimations decreed under subsequens matrimonium [“subsequent marriages”]. However, above all, because that imperium paternum [“power of fathers”] seemed to lessen their majesty, they were disposed to call it patria potesta [“paternal power”] on the basis of their own example, one introduced by the great discernment of Augustus who, so as not to arouse the jealousy of the people, who might then try to take some part of his power, took for himself the title of “tribunal power”—that is, the power to protect Roman liberty. While the tribunes of the plebs had actual power, they never held public power [imperio] in the republic (as in the time of Augustus himself, when a tribune of the plebs ordered Labeo to appear before him, this prince of one of the two sects of Roman jurists reasonably refused to obey, for the tribunes of the plebs never held public power).83 As a result, neither the grammarians nor the political theorists nor the jurists have observed why, in the contest over sharing the consulate with the plebs, the patricians (so as to content the plebs without prejudicing themselves by sharing any part of their public power) made a way out for themselves by creating the military tribunes, some of whom were nobles, some of whom were plebeians CUM CONSULARI POTESTATE [“with consular power”], as one always reads in history, not cum imperio consulari [“with consular public power”], which one never reads. Hence the free Roman republic was conceived in its entirety with that dictum divided into three parts: SENATUS AUCTORITAS POPULI IMPERIUM TRIBUNORUM PLEBIS POTESTAS [“the authority of the Senate, the public power of the people, the power of the tribunes of the plebs”]. And these two terms are retained in the laws with that elegance native to them: imperium is a word used for more significant magistrates, such as consuls and praetors, and extending to those able to condemn others to death; potestas is a word used of less significant magistrates, such as aedile, and modica coercitione continetur [“involved more limited coercion”]. Finally, the Roman princes, when their clemency toward humanity was fully developed, took to favoring slaves. And they restrained the cruelty of lords against their unfortunate slaves. They amplified the effects of   See Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.12.3–4.

83

997

998

396

The New Science manumission and restricted the solemnities surrounding it. And citizenship, which at first was given only to important foreigners who had merited it from the Roman people, was granted to anyone born in Rome, even someone whose father was a slave, as long as his mother was free either by birth or enfranchisement. It was because of this sort of free birth in the city that the NATURAL LAW was previously called the natural law of the GENTES—or noble households—because during heroic times all constitutions were aristocratic republics (to which this law was proper, as was reasoned upon above [§§553–557]), and later came popular republics, in which the entire nation is lord over public power, and, subsequently, monarchies, in which monarchs represent the entire nations subject to them, and so this natural law was retained in the expression NATURAL LAW OF THE NATIONS.

On Guardianship Over Laws 999

Guardianship over orders carries in its train guardianship over magistracies and priesthoods and, consequently, guardianship over the laws and the science of their interpretation. Hence it is that one reads in Roman history, in the times in which there was an aristocratic republic, that within the senatorial order (which then belonged entirely to the nobles) were kept enclosed connubium, the consulate, and the priesthoods, and that within the college of pontiffs (to which none were admitted except the patricians), as is the case with all other heroic nations, the science of the laws was guarded as sacred, or secret (which mean the same). This endured among the Romans for one hundred years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, as the jurist Pomponius tells us, and the word VIRI [“men”] retained in those times the same meaning in Latin which the word “heroes” had in Greek, and they used this term to name solemnized husbands, magistrates, priests, and judges, as was stated in another place [§657]. But here we will be reasoning upon guardianship over laws, since it was the greatest property of the heroic aristocracies, and so was the last to be shared by the patricians with the plebs.

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This guardianship was scrupulously observed during divine times; as a result, the observance of divine laws is called “religion,” an observance continued by all later forms of governance, in which divine laws must be observed in keeping with certain unalterable formulae of consecrated words and solemn ceremonies. There was no greater property of aristocratic republics than this guardianship over the laws. Accordingly, Athens (and, on the example of Athens, almost all the cities of Greece) proceeded quickly to popular liberty on account of what the Spartans (who were an aristocratic republic) said about the Athenians, that the laws in Athens were many and written down, and the laws in Sparta were few and thus observed.

Book Four The Romans during the aristocratic constitution were the most inflexible guardians of the Law of the Twelve Tables, as was seen above [§952]; as such, their laws were called by Tacitus84 FINIS OMNIS AEQUI IURIS [“the summation of all equitable law”]. For, after these laws that were deemed sufficient to make liberty equal (and this must have been decreed after the decemvirs, even though, in the manner of ancient peoples thinking in poetic characters, the laws were named after them, as has been demonstrated [§§422, 638, 957, 960]), there were no or very few later consular legal decrees pertaining to private law. And, similarly, on account of this, they were called by Livy85 FONS OMNIS AEQUI IURIS [“the source of all equitable law”]; for they were the source of all interpretation. The Roman plebs decreed laws in the same fashion as the Athenian plebs: all their laws were singular because they were not capable of universal laws. Sulla, who was head of the noble party, somewhat repaired this disorder when he defeated Marius, who was head of the plebeian party, with quaestiones perpetuae [“standing investigative commissions”], but when he stepped down from the dictatorship, they returned no less than before to multiplying laws which (as Tacitus86 tells us) were singular. And it is this multitude of laws, as the political theorists have noted, which is the quickest path for arriving at a monarchy. Accordingly, to establish a monarchy, Augustus made a great number of laws, and subsequent princes used the Senate above all to make senatorial decrees pertaining to private legal claims. Nevertheless, during those same times of popular liberty, they guarded with such severity the formulae for legal actions that all the eloquence of Crassus, whom Cicero87 called the Roman Demosthenes, was needed to show that an expressed pupillary substitution contained an implied and vulgar one; and all the eloquence of Cicero88 was needed to fight for an “R” missing from the legal formula, because of which letter Sextus Aebutius made pretense to holding on to the farm of Aulus Caecina. Finally, after Constantine had completely abolished the formulae, it reached the point that every particular impetus to equity made for the waning of the laws. So great is the docility of human minds, under human forms of governance, for recognizing natural equity. Thus, starting from that article in the Law of the Twelve Tables entitled PRIVILEGIA NE IRROGANTO [“privileges shall not be imposed”], observed in the Roman aristocracy by the numerous singular laws made, as was stated, during popular liberty, it reached a point under the monarchy where the princes did nothing but concede privileges, and there is   See Tacitus, Annals 3.27.1.   Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.34.6. 86  Tacitus, Annals 3.27.3. 87   See Cicero, Epistulae ad Brutum 36.138. 88  Cicero, Pro Caecina 17–18, 49–52. 84 85

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The New Science nothing that better conforms with natural equity than privileges, when they are granted in connection with merit. Indeed, all the exceptions today given to the laws can truly be said to be privileges that are dictated by the particular merits of the actual case, which draw them beyond the common disposition of the laws.

1002

Consequently, we believe it came to pass that during the crudeness of the recourse to barbarism, the nations lost recognition of the Roman laws, so much so that in France there were grave penalties, and in Spain there was even death, for anyone who cited any such law in his own case. Certainly, in Italy, while the nobles took it as a disgrace to direct their affairs by Roman laws and professed to be subject to those of the Lombards, the plebeians who only slowly became unused to their customs continued to practice some aspects of Roman law on the strength of what is customary. This is why laws in Latin, the Justinian corpus and other laws, became buried in the West and why laws in Greek, the Basilica and other laws, became buried in the East. However, later with the rebirth of monarchies and the reintroduction of popular liberty, Roman law comprised in the books of Justinian was so universally accepted that Grotius89 affirms that it is today a natural law for the peoples of Europe.

1003

Yet there is much to admire of Roman gravity and wisdom that, in spite of these changes in the constitution, the praetors and jurists were zealous to move as little and as slowly as possible away from the proper sense of the words of the Law of the Twelve Tables. This, perhaps, is the principal reason why the Roman Empire grew so great and endured so long, for in spite of the changes in its constitution, it was solicitous of holding as firmly as possible to its beginnings, which were the same as those of this world of nations (as all the political theorists agree that there is no better counsel than this for constitutions enduring and growing great). Thus, the same cause that produced among the Romans the wisest jurisprudence in the world, upon which we have reasoned above [§§950–951], made them the greatest power in the world. It is this cause of Roman greatness which Polybius founds too generally upon the religion of the nobles,90 which Machiavelli, by contrast, founds upon the magnanimity of the plebs,91 and which Plutarch,92 envious of Roman virtue and wisdom, founds upon their fortune in his book De fortuna Romanorum, to which, in a different and less direct way, Torquato Tasso93 wrote his generous Reply.  Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena §53.   See Polybius, Histories 1.3.7; 1.64.9; 18.11.4. 91   See Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 2.1. 92  Plutarch, Opera moralia 44. 93   Torquato Tasso, Risposta di Roma a Plutarco nella quale reprova la sua opinione della fortuna de’ romani e della fortuna o della virtù d’Alessandro (1588). 89 90

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Additional Proofs Taken from the Moderating Which Happens of the Subsequent Constitutions of Republics Because of the Prior Ways of Governing All the things stated in Book Four provide evidence to demonstrate that, for the entire life which nations live, they follow a course in keeping with the order with the three kinds of republics—that is, civil constitutions— and no more, and that all three kinds stand upon the first—that is, divine governance—and taking their start from divine governance, through the Axioms94 posited above as principles of the ideal eternal history, they must run through this series of human things: first in the republics of optimates, next in free popular republics, and finally under the monarchies. Hence, Tacitus,95 although he does not look at them in this order, says, as we noted in the Idea of the Work [§29], that besides these three forms of public constitution ordered by the nature of peoples, others that by human contrivance are mixtures of these three are more to be desired from the heavens than they are capable of being achieved, and even if by chance they do hold for a time, they are not long-lasting.

1004

However, so as not to leave any doubts about this being the natural succession of political, or civil, constitutions, it will be discovered that, following this succession, there are republics which are naturally mixed and that in them one form is not mixed with another (such a constitution would be a monstrosity) but a subsequent form is mixed with the prior way of governing. This mixture is founded upon the above Axiom96 that when men change, they retain for some time an impression of what they were previously wont to do. Accordingly, we say that as the earliest gentile Fathers came out of their bestial life and into a human one, in religious times in the state of nature under divine governance, they retained much of the savagery and brutality of their recent origins; hence, Plato97 recognized in the Polyphemus of Homer the earliest paterfamilias in the world. Thus, during the forming of the earliest aristocratic republics, they retained intact the sovereign private power which the paterfamilias has in the state of nature, and because, on account of their supreme arrogance, none of them was obliged to cede to another (for they were all equal), by forming an aristocracy they subjected themselves to the sovereign public power of their ruling orders. Hence, the lofty domain which each paterfamilias had in the private realm proceeded to make for the composition of a lofty and superior domain which the senate itself had in the public realm, since it was from the sovereign private   Axioms 65–68.  Tacitus, Annals 4.33.1. 96   Axiom 71. 97  Plato, Laws 3.2–4, 678c–681e. 94 95

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The New Science power which they held over their families that these same Fathers composed the sovereign public power of their orders. Except in this fashion, it is impossible to understand otherwise how cities were composed from families, cities which, accordingly, must have come into being as aristocratic republics, naturally mixed with sovereign family power.

1006

Meanwhile, the Fathers preserved the authority belonging to this domain with their ruling orders, until the plebs of these heroic peoples were brought by laws from these same Fathers to have a common share in certain domain over the fields, in connubium, in positions of power, in priesthoods and, with the priesthoods, also in the science of the laws; the republics remained aristocratic, but later the plebs of these heroic cities became more numerous and inured to war, putting fear to the Fathers, who in these republics of the few must themselves have been few, and the plebs, assisted by their strength in numbers, started to decree laws unauthorized by the senate, and so the republic changed and became popular rather than aristocratic. For none of them could have lived, even for a moment, with two supreme legislative powers without any distinction between them of subjects, times, and territories, concerning which, during which, and within which they would decree the laws. So, the dictator Philo accordingly declared with the Publilian law that the Roman republic was by its nature actually a popular republic. In the midst of such change, so that the authority pertaining to domain might retain what it could of its changed form, it naturally became a tutelary authority, just as the power that the Fathers held over their adolescent children, upon their deaths, became the authority that a tutor has over another. Through this authority, free people (who were the masters of public power, but, like adolescents who possessed rule, were still weak in counsel about public matters) made for themselves to be governed by senators who were like tutors, and so free republics were naturally aristocratic in governance. However, later, the powerful within these popular republics ordered this public counsel toward the private interests from which came their power, and free peoples, for the sake of private advantages, made for their own seduction by the powerful to subject their public liberty to the ambition of the powerful; and with the divisions into parties, factions, civil wars tending to the destruction of these nations, the form of monarchy was introduced.

On the eternal and natural royal law through which nations come to rest under monarchies S N L 400

1007

This monarchical form was introduced in keeping with the eternal and natural royal law sensed by all the nations which recognize Augustus to

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be the founder of monarchy among the Romans; this law is not clear to interpreters of the Roman legal code, all of whom are preoccupied with the myth of the royal law of Tribonian (of which he plainly confesses he is the author in his Institutes98 and at another point attributes it to Ulpian in his Pandects).99 However, it is well understood by the Roman jurists, who knew well the natural law of the gentile peoples, and it was in keeping with this sound understanding that Pomponius, in his brief history of Roman law, when reasoning about this royal law, left for us in writing the following expression: REBUS IPSIS DICTANTIBUS REGNA CONDITA100 [“regimes are founded by the dictates of the things themselves”]. This natural royal law is conceived in terms of the following natural formulation of eternal advantage: given that, in free republics, all guard their own private interests and make public arms serve those interests (even though this tends toward the destruction of their nations); in order that these nations might be preserved, there arises a single man (such as Augustus among the Romans) who by force of arms takes upon himself all the public concerns and leaves his subjects to care for their own private things, along with such concern for public things, and as much of it as he qua monarch permits to them. And thus are peoples saved, who would otherwise proceed toward their own destruction. The commonly learned agree with this truth when they say that universitates sub rege habentur loco privatorum [“under kings corporate entities have the status of private persons”], for the majority of citizens no longer have any concern for the public good; Tacitus,101 someone exceedingly wise about the natural law of the gentile peoples,102 signals in his Annals that this unfolds within the family of the Caesars in keeping with the following order of human civil ideas. As the end of Augustus approached, pauci bona libertatis incassum disserere [“a few conversed without effect about the goods coming from liberty”]; when Tiberius came, omnes principis iussa adspectare [“everyone looked expectantly to the prince for their orders”]; under the three Caesars after him, first came incuria [“indifference”] and finally ignorantia reipublicae tanquam alienae [“ignorance of the republic, which at that point was so foreign to them”].103 Hence, when the citizens have become foreigners in their own nation, it is necessary for a monarch to support and to represent this nation in his own person. Now, because in free republics the people must be partisans of someone powerful if he is to bring in a monarchy, monarchies are by nature a form   Institutes 1.2.6; Codex 1.17.1.7.   Digest 1.4.1.pr. 100   An inexact rendering of a passage found at Digest 1.2.2.11. 101  Tacitus, Annals 1.4. 102   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. 103   Compare Tacitus, Histories 1.1. 98 99

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The New Science of popular governance. First, this is by laws with which monarchs endeavor to make all their subjects equal. Then, this is through that property of monarchies by which sovereigns, in humiliating the powerful, keep the multitude free and secure from the powerful oppressing them. Later, this is through that other property of monarchies by which sovereigns maintain a multitude satisfied and content with the sustenance needed to live and the benefits of natural liberty. And, finally, this is by the privileges granted by monarchies either to entire orders, which we call the “privileges of liberty,” or to particular persons by promoting men of extraordinary merit to civil honors outside of the ordinary—that is, by singular decrees dictated by natural equity. Hence, monarchy best conforms to a human nature where reason is most developed, as was stated in another place [§927].

Refutation of the principles of a political teaching based upon the system of Jean Bodin 1009

At this point in our reasoning, one can understand how much Jean Bodin scientifically establishes the principles of this political teaching!104 He disposes the forms of civil constitution in keeping with an order of this sort: first, there were monarchies; then, having passed through tyranny, there were free and popular constitutions; and, finally, there came the aristocracies. There would be enough at this point to refute him fully with the natural succession of political forms, especially given what has been demonstrated in this book by the countless proofs based in what is actually the case. However, it pleases us ad exuberantiam [“with a view to abundance”] to refute him in terms of what is impossible and absurd in his position.

1010

That man, certainly, agrees with us in this truth: that the cities are composed from families.105 However, in addition, by a common error reproved above [§§552, 582–585], he believed that these were families only with children. Now, how, we ask of him, could monarchies arise from such families?

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There are two means: either force or fraud.106 104   Modern Italian editions do not reproduce the exclamation point here. Both the autograph and the 1744 printed edition, however, clearly attest its ­presence—a sign of the “exuberant” character of Vico’s polemic against Bodin. 105   See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.1 and 1.2. 106   Compare Machiavelli, Prince 7, and Discourses on Livy 2.13, as well as the locus classicus in Cicero, De officiis 1.13.

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How could one paterfamilias subdue others through force? For if during the free republics (for Bodin, these came after tyrannies), each paterfamilias consecrated himself and his family to a fatherland preserving their families (and for Bodin each paterfamilias had already been domesticated by monarchy), must one not, then, deem that such a paterfamilias, still a Polyphemus recently emerged from his origins in the most ferocious and bestial of liberties, would actually rather be killed along with his entire family than suffer inequality?107

1012

And could he subdue them through the fraud adopted by those who affect rule over others by seducing them with liberty or power or wealth? How by liberty, if in the familial state all the Fathers were sovereigns? How by power, if it is the nature of the sons of Polyphemus to abide alone in their caves and care for their own families, and not to meddle with what belongs to others (as they are wont to do because of their recent brutal origins)? How by wealth, if in the simplicity and parsimony of those earliest times wealth was completely unintelligible to them?

1013

The difficulty grows immeasurably greater in that, during the earliest barbarous times, there were no fortresses, and heroic cities composed of these families were for a long time without walls (as Thucydides108 above [§§76, 645] made certain). And in the midst of jealousies within the state (which were most deadly during heroic aristocracies, as we stated above [§513]), Valerius Publicola109 came to be suspected of tyranny for having built a house on high, and so as to justify himself, he dismantled what he had made in one night, and the next day made the lictors lay his consular fasces at the feet of the people. The custom of cities being without walls endured longest among nations that were the most ferocious; as a result, one reads that in Germany Henry the Fowler was the first who started to induce peoples living in the villages in which they were spread out to practice city life and to surround cities with walls.

1014

So much for the earliest founders of cities being men describing with a plough the walls and gates of a city (gates which the Latin etymologists110 say were so called from the expression a portando arato [“by lifting the plough”] because they lifted the plough up high wherever they wanted an opening for a gate)! Consequently, because of, on the one hand, the ferocity of barbarous times and, on the other, the scant security of royal palaces, in the court of Spain there were over eighty royal killings in sixty years, such that the fathers of the Council of Elvira, one of the oldest in the Latin church, condemned this wickedness, frequently doing so under penalty of excommunication.   For a similar argument, see Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 8.5.4.  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.2.3. 109   Publius Valerius, consul from 475 to 460 BCE. For the anecdote, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.7. 110   See Varro, De lingua latina 5.32.142 and Voss, Etymologicon, p. 465. 107 108

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However, the difficulty rises to infinity, if we posit families of children only. Then, whether by force or by fraud, the children had to be instruments of the ambition of others, and either betrayed or killed their own fathers. As a result, the earliest state would not have been a monarchy but an impious and wicked tyranny; so did those young nobles in Rome conspire against their own fathers in favor of the tyrant Tarquin,111 on account of the hatred they had for the rigid laws (laws as proper to aristocratic republics as benign laws are proper to popular republics, clement laws are to kingdoms, and dissolute laws are to tyrannies), and those young men who conspired at this made a trial of it at the expense of their own lives: two of them, the sons of Brutus, were both decapitated,112 a penalty dictated by their father himself. So much for Roman rule being monarchical and the liberty ordered by Brutus being a popular liberty!

1016

On account of these many great difficulties, Bodin and all the other political theorists ought to acknowledge that families were monarchical in the familial state, which has been demonstrated herein, and that they were families composed not only of children, but also of familial servants (from whom the families were principally called, and they were found herein [§556] to be the precursors of the slaves who came about later when cities waged wars). And in this fashion, free men and slaves are the matter of which republics are composed. Bodin does posit these as the matter of the republics, but he cannot account with his presuppositions for how this can be so.

1017

On account of this great difficulty, it inspires wonder in Bodin113 himself, reckoning with his presuppositions for how free men and servants can be the matter of which republics are composed, that people of his own nation were called the “Franks,” and yet were observed in their earliest times to have been treated as the basest of slaves. This is because on account of his own presuppositions he is not able to see that nations were made complete by adding those released from the knot of the Petelian law. As a result, the Franks who inspire wonder in Bodin are the same as the same rustic vassals who inspire wonder in Hotman114—those called homines [“men”] because, as has been demonstrated in this book [§§559, 597], they comprised the plebs of the earliest peoples who belonged to the heroes. These multitudes, as has also been demonstrated [§1006], drew the aristocracies toward popular liberty and, eventually, to monarchies. And they did this on the strength of the vernacular language in which were conceived the laws for both of these final constitutions, as was reasoned   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.3.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.5. 113   See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5. 114  Hotman, De verbis feudalibus commentarius, p. 764. 111 112

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upon above [§953]. Hence, in Latin they called this common language vernacula [“the vernacular”] insofar as it came from the word for those who were slaves because they were born with a household—this is what the word verna means—rather than made so during war, and we have demonstrated above [§§443, 556, 994] that there were such slaves among all the ancient nations from the time of the familial state. Also because of this, the Greeks no longer called themselves “Achaeans” (hence Homer115 calls heroes “sons of the Achaeans”) but instead called themselves Hellenes, after the Hellenus who gave the vernacular Greek language its start, exactly as the sons of Israel no longer called themselves that as they had in early times, but instead continued to call themselves the “Hebrew people” after Heber, whom the Fathers meant to be the one who propagated the sacred language.116 This is how much Bodin, and all the others who write on political theory, saw that luminous truth demonstrated throughout this work and particularly from the evidence of Roman history, that it was the plebs of peoples who always and for all nations changed the constitution from aristocratic to popular and from popular to monarchical. And as the plebs are the ones who founded the vernacular languages, as has been fully proved in the Origins of Languages [§443], so they are the ones who have given nations their names, as has just been seen! So it is that the ancient Franks, Bodin’s wonder notwithstanding, gave their name to his France. Finally, the aristocratic constitutions within our present experience are very few and are remainders from times of more recent barbarism—that is, Venice, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy, Ragusa in Dalmatia and Nuremberg in Germany—while the others were popular constitutions governed aristocratically.

1018

Hence, again, Bodin (whose own presuppositions mean that the Roman regime was monarchical and, after the expulsion of the tyrants, mean that popular liberty was introduced into Rome) does not see that during the earliest times of a free Rome there emerge effects which do not conform with the design from his principles because they are proper to an aristocratic republic and, as we observed above [§663], so as to emerge honorably from this, at first he says that Rome had a constitution which was popular but governance which was aristocratic; but then, strongly constrained by the truth, in another place he confesses with gross inconsistency that it was the constitution and not just the governance which was aristocratic. These errors leading political theory astray are born because, as we observed above in a different place [§§105, 663, 666], the following three words have not been defined: “people,” “regime,” and “liberty”: so, it has 115 116

 Homer, Iliad 1.162, 237, 240, 276, 368, 392.   See Augustine, City of God 16.11 and 18.39.

1019

406

The New Science been believed that the earliest peoples were composed of both plebeian and noble citizens, even though from a thousand proofs herein [§597] it has been found that there were only noble citizens. So, it has been believed that liberty in ancient Rome was for the people—namely, a liberty freeing the people from the lords—whereas it has been found herein to be liberty for the lords—namely, a liberty freeing the lords from the tyranny of the Tarquins. Hence, they erected statues to those who killed these tyrants, because they killed them for the sake of the orders of those regnant senates. Kings, during the ferocity of the earliest peoples and during the scant security afforded by royal palaces, were aristocrats: the two in Sparta were kings for life, a republic which was beyond doubt aristocratic, as has been demonstrated herein [§§423, 592, 664, 668, 1000]; and later there were two annual consuls in Rome (whom Cicero117 in his Laws calls REGES ANNUOS [“annual kings”]). After this order was made by Junius Brutus (as Livy118 plainly reveals), Roman rule was not changed in any way relative to royal power; as we observed above [§§106, 664], during their rule, these annual kings made appeals to the people, and, after it was done, they were required to render to the people an account of the rule administered by them; in reflecting on this, we said that during heroic times, one king would every day expel another from his seat (as Thucydides says to us). And we put this together with the return to barbarism, in which one reads that the thing most uncertain and variable was the fortune of rule; we pondered [§645] upon Tacitus119 (who in the propriety and energy in the words themselves endeavors to give his prescriptions) starting his Annals with the words urbem Romam principio reges HABUERE [“the city of Rome at its beginning had kings”], which is the weakest of the three kinds of possession made out by the jurists when they use the words habere [“to have”], tenere [“to hold”], and possidere [“to possess”]; and he uses the word URBEM—which, properly speaking, means the buildings of a city—in order to signify a possession preserving to itself only the physical; he does not say civitatem—that is, the community of citizens whose spirit, as a whole or as a majority, makes for public reason.

Final Proofs Which Confirm That This Is the Course of Nations 1020

There are other proofs from the suitability of effects to the causes assigned to them in this science in its principles for confirming the natural course made during the life of nations; the majority of them are scat Cicero, De legibus 3.8.  Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.7. 119  Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1. 117

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tered above and stated without any order, but here, within this natural succession of human civil things, they will be unified and disposed. Accordingly, penalties during familial times were most cruel, inasmuch as they are the punishment of the sons of Polyphemus (it was in this familial state that Apollo flayed Marsyas alive120). And they continued into aristocratic republics (hence, Perseus with his shield, as we explained above [§§423, 542, 616], turns to stone those who look upon it; and the Greek word for punishments, παραδείγματα [paradeigmata], is used in the same sense as the Latin word exempla, in the sense of “exemplary punishments”); and in the return to barbarism, the death penalty, as we also observed above, was called “ordinary.”121 Hence, the laws in Sparta, a republic demonstrated by us with so many proofs to be aristocratic, which were judged primitive and crude by both Plato and Aristotle,122 required the illustrious King Agis to be actually strangled by the ephors;123 and the laws in Rome, while it had an aristocratic constitution, meant that the renowned Horatius, although victorious, had to be beaten naked with a rod and subsequently hanged upon a wretched tree—both examples were stated above for other purposes.124 Because of the Law of the Twelve Tables, they condemned to be burned alive those who had set fire to another’s grain; condemned to be torn from the Tarpeian Rock those who bore false witness; and condemned to be dismembered alive those who defaulted on debts; this last penalty Tullus Hostilius did not spare Metius Fufetius, king of Alba, his peer who had failed to keep faith in their alliance, and Romulus himself, prior to this, had been dismembered by the Fathers simply on suspicion of this condition.125 This is what we say to those who suggest that such penalties were never practiced in Rome.

1021

The milder penalties practiced in popular republics came later, when decrees are given by the multitude, which, because it is made up by the weak, is naturally inclined to compassion. And these were the penalties of which Horatius was acquitted, that renowned defendant who in a heroic rage killed his sister whom he had seen weeping over the public’s good fortune, acquitted by Roman people magis admiratione virtutis quam iure caussae [“more from admiration for his virtue than from the justness of his case”] (according to the elegant phrasing of Livy126 observed above in another place [§966]). And just as in the mildness of

1022

  For the myth of Marsyas and Apollo, see (among other sources) Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.58–59; Pliny, Natural History 16.89; Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.382–400. 121   This observation does not in fact appear in the present text. A similar passage can be found at Scienza nuova prima §438. 122   See Plato, Laws 1.6, 630d, and Aristotle, Politics 2.9, 1271b and 7.2, 1324b. 123   See Plutarch, Life of Agis 19–20. 124   On Agis, see §§592, 668, 985; on Horatius, see §§268, 500, 521, 662, 966. 125   See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.28 and 1.16.4. 126  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.12 120

408

The New Science popular liberty we heard, a little while ago [§1021], Plato and Aristotle reprehending the laws of Sparta during the time of freedom in Athens, so does Cicero127 cry out against the inhumanity and cruelty of bringing the charge of treason against the Roman Rabirius, a private citizen and knight. Finally came the monarchies, in which princes enjoy hearing of themselves the gracious title “clement.”

1023

Accordingly, because of barbarous wars in heroic times that ruined defeated cities, those who surrendered were turned into herds of day laborers who were scattered throughout the countryside to cultivate the fields of the victorious people—these, as we reasoned above [§§560, 595], were the heroic inland colonies—and consequently, on account of their magnanimity, popular republics, as long as they were regulated by their senates, took from the defeated the natural law of heroic peoples and left them completely free to benefit from the natural law of humane peoples (as Ulpian128 calls it); hence, with the extension of conquests, they restricted to Roman citizens all claims to what was later called propriae civium Romanorum [“things proper to Roman citizens”]—that is, nuptials, paternal power, direct kinship, paternal kinship, tribal kinship, quiritary or civil domain, mancipation, usucaption, stipulation, testament, tutelary rights, and inheritance; and prior to their subjection, free nations must have claimed all of these as civil rights of their own. Finally came the monarchies, which tried under Antonius Pius to make the entire Roman world into a single Rome, for it is a wish proper to great monarchies that the entire world be made into a single city (so Alexander the Great used to say that the entire world was his city, and his phalanx was fortress to that city).129 Hence, the natural law of the nations, promoted by the Roman praetors in the provinces, came at the end of a long age to give laws domestically to the Romans themselves. The heroic law that the Romans held over the provinces went by the wayside, for the monarchs want to make all their subjects equal with their laws; and Roman jurisprudence (which in heroic times paid homage entirely to the Law of the Twelve Tables and, later in the time of Cicero, as he relates in his book De legibus,130 had started to subsume its practice under the edicts of the Roman praetors) eventually, from the Emperor Hadrian onward, was entirely preoccupied with the Perpetual Edict,131 which was composed and ordered by Salvius Julianus almost entirely from provincial edicts.  Cicero, Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo 4, 11, and 13.  Compare Digest 2.14.7.1. 129   The source is De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute 1, attributed to Plutarch. But the pairing with Caracalla suggests (as Battistini notes) that Vico’s source is Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.6. 130  Cicero, De legibus 1.5.17. 131  The Edictum perpetuum, a revision of the Edictum praetoris, was composed and decreed under the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). See Eutropius, Breviarium ab Urbe condita 8.17. 127 128

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So, from the small districts agreeable to a well-governed aristocratic republic, and by way of the later conquests to which a free republic is well disposed, eventually came monarchies, which have beauty and magnificence to the extent that they are great.

1024

So, from deadly suspicions of aristocracies and by way of the roiling of popular republics, the nations finally came to repose under monarchies.

1025

However, it pleases us to demonstrate how this physical and composite order of human civil things can be in agreement with the order of numbers, things that are abstract and most simple.

1026

Civil things started with the governance of the one with familial monarchies; then, they passed over to the governance of the few with heroic aristocracies; they advanced forward to the governance of the many and of all in popular republics, in which all or the majority make for public reason; finally, they return to governance of the one in civil monarchies. And one cannot understand a division within the nature of numbers more adequate than the one in keeping with the order of one, few, many, and all; and, in keeping with the few, many, and all, each retaining according to its kind a rational unity (since numbers consist of indivisibles, as Aristotle132 has said) and once that which is all has been surpassed, there must be a return to the one, and so all of humanity is contained between familial and civil monarchy.

Corollary Ancient Roman law was a serious poem, and ancient jurisprudence was a severe poetry, within which are found the earliest roughed-out features of a legal metaphysics; and how for the Greeks philosophy came from the laws There are a good many effects that are quite great, particularly in Roman jurisprudence, whose causes cannot be found elsewhere than in these same principles, and above all these effects accord with the Axiom133 that insofar as men are naturally inclined to pursue the true and, by their affection for it, attain the certain when they cannot pursue the true: consequently, mancipations started literally with a hand [vera mano] as a way of speaking about “true strength” [vera forza], for “strength” is abstract whereas a “hand” is sensible. And the hand among all nations signifies “power”; hence come the Greek words cheirothesiai [“those upon whom hands are placed”] and cheirotoniai [“those for whom hands are raised”]—the former being those who were elected when hands were 132 133

 Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.9, 1085b.   Axiom 9.

1027

410

The New Science placed upon the heads of those chosen for power, the latter being those who were given approval after being elected when hands were raised for them—solemnities that were proper to mute times and conform to the return to barbarous times when similar approval was given to kings who were chosen. Thus, this true mancipation was literally an occupation, that earliest and great natural source for all domain; Romans continued to use the word in war, and so slaves from war were called mancipia, and booty and conquests in war were called res mancipi because those defeated in these Roman conquests became res nec mancipi. This shows how far mancipation came into being within the walls of a single city, Rome, as a mode of acquiring civil domain in the private transactions of these same Romans!

1028

Conforming with this true mancipation, there came in its train a true usucaption—namely, the acquisition of domain, which is the meaning of capio, “to take”—by means of true use (the term usus in Latin can mean “possession”). And so possession was originally exercised by continuously and physically holding onto the thing that was possessed; as a result, possessio must have come from a sort of porro sessio [“taking a seat going forward”] (it was on account of this continuous act of sitting—or remaining settled—that homes in Latin were called sedes [“seats”]) and did not come from pedum positio [“taking a stand”], as Latin etymologists say, for the praetors gave their assistance and maintained with their edicts the former, not the latter, sense of possession. It is from the Greek word for such possession, θέσις, that Theseus must have had his name, and not from his fine posture, as the Greek etymologists say, for the men of Attica founded Athens by remaining settled there for a long time. This is the usucaption that legitimizes states among all nations.

1029

Again, in the heroic republics of Aristotle,134 which had no laws for redressing private damages, we saw above [§269] that redress was made with true strength (such were the first duels or private wars in the world), and “condictions” were private reprisals, which in the recourse to barbarism lasted down to the times of Bartolus.135

1030

Insofar as the ferocity of these times started to be domesticated, as violence in the private realm started to be prohibited by judiciary laws, as strength in the private realm proceeded to be unified into the public strength called “civil power,” the earliest peoples, poets by nature, must have naturally imitated the true strength which they had previously used so as to preserve their rights and claims. And so, they made a myth out of natural mancipation and made from it a solemn act of civil tradition (which is represented with the sign of a contrived knot to imitate the chain by which Jove had enchained the giants to those earliest empty  Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.   Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–1357), Italian jurist and author of Tractatus de repressalis (1354). 134

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lands and by which, later, those peoples enchained their clients—that is, their familial servants). This mythical mancipation was celebrated in all their civil advantages with the legitimating actions, which must have been the solemnizing ceremonies of peoples who were still mute. Later, when speech came to take on an articulated form, so as to be certain of the goodwill of another in their contracts with each other, they tried to invest their pacts, which were acts signifying that knot, with solemnizing words, in which they conceived certain and precise stipulations. And later at war they conceived in similar terms the laws which make for terms with a defeated city; these were called “peace terms” from the word pacio, which is the same as the word pactum [“pact”]. A great vestige of this remains in the formula with which they conceived the terms of surrender with Collatia; as Livy136 relates it, the pact was actually a contract of receivership made by means of questions and answers; hence, with perfect propriety, those who surrendered were called recepti [“those received”], which conforms with what the Roman herald137 said to those speaking on behalf of Collatia: ET EGO RECIPIO [“And I receive you”]. So much for stipulations in heroic times only being made with Roman citizens! And so much for the good sense of those who believed that Tarquinius Priscus, with the formula by which Collatia surrendered, ordered for nations how they had to make a surrender! In this fashion, the law of the heroic gentes of Latium remained fixed in the famous article of the Law of the Twelve Tables, conceived in the following terms: SI QUIS NEXUM FACIET MANCIPIUMQUE UTI LINGUA NUNCUPASSIT ITA IUS ESTO [“if anyone shall make bond or conveyance, as he has declared with tongue, so shall it be law”]. This is the great source of all ancient Roman law, and anyone who compares Roman with Attic law must confess that this article did not arrive in Rome from Athens.

1031

Usucaption, at first taking physical possession, proceeded later to become, with contrived possession, the spirit of holding on to something.

1032

In the same way, heroic redress was mythologized with a merely contrived strength, and heroic reprisals passed on later to being personal actions, preserving the solemnity of denouncing those who were debtors. The childhood of the world had use of no other counsel, given that children, as was proposed in an Axiom,138 excel in the power to imitate truth of which they are capable, in which consists the faculty of poetry, which is nothing other than imitation. Thus, they brought into the piazza as many masks as there were personae—persona, properly speaking, means nothing other than  Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.38.2.   In fact, the formula was pronounced by Tarquinius Priscus, rather than by the heralds. 138   Axiom 52. 136 137

1033

412

The New Science “mask”—and as many masks as there were names, which, during times of mute speech made up of real words,139 must have been familial insignia, by which, it has been discovered, the peoples of the Americas distinguish their families, as was stated above [§559]; and behind the mask— or persona—of the paterfamilias was hidden all his children and all his servants, and behind a real name—that is, the household insignia—were hidden all his direct kin and all those from the same tribal household; hence, we saw Ajax, tower of the Greeks, and Horatius, standing alone on a bridge against all the Etruscans, and in the return to barbarism we encounter forty Norman heroes expelling from Salerno the entire army of Saracens. And consequently, there was a belief in the amazing strength of the paladins—that is, the sovereign princes—of France, who are still so called in Germany, above all with Count Roland, later called Orlando.

1034

The reason for this comes from the principles of poetry found above [§§34, 209, 501, 934], that the authors of Roman law during an age not able to understand intelligible universals made imaginative universals; just as later, poets brought personages and masks into the theater by art, in the same way that these earlier poets had brought “names” and “personae” into the forum by nature. For persona must not have been derived from personare, which means “to resonate everywhere”: there was no need in the small theaters of those early cities (at a time, according to Horace,140 when the people who were spectators were so few that they could easily be counted) to use masks for the voice to resonate enough to fill the entire theater (besides, the length of the second syllable is incongruous with that of sono, which is short). Instead, it must have been derived from personari, a verb which we conjecture must have meant “to dress in the pelts of wild beasts,” something which only heroes were allowed to do. Its companion verb obsonari remains for us, which must have originally meant “to feed upon the flesh from wild hunts,” which must have been the “first rich feasts,” Virgil’s141 exact description of the feasts of his heroes. Hence, the first rich spoils must have been the pelts of wild beasts killed and brought back by the heroes in the first wars that they waged against wild beasts so as to defend themselves and their families, as was reasoned upon above [§536]; the poets clothe their heroes in such pelts and, above all, Heracles in the pelt of a lion. And it is because of this origin for the verb personari, we conjecture, that Italians use the word “personage” for a man of lofty station who is representative of greatness.

1035

Through these same principles, because they could not understand abstract forms, they instead imagined physical forms and imagined them   On “real words,” compare Bacon, De augmentis scientarum 6.1 (Works I, p. 651). 140  Horace, Ars poetica 205–206. 141  Virgil, Aeneid 1.209–213, 3.224. 139

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as having their animate nature. And they contrived Inheritance as the mistress of inherited wealth, and they envisioned her in her entirety in each particular thing from an inheritance, in exactly the same way that they would call the glebe or clod taken from a farm to a judge by the legal formula for redress: HUNC FUNDUM [“this ground”]. And thus, if they did not understand, they at least sensed in a rude way that rights are indivisible. In conformity with such natures, ancient jurisprudence was entirely poetic. It devised as done what has not been done; as not done what has been done; as born what has not yet been born; as dead what is living, as dead living during a pending inheritance. It introduced so many empty masks without a subject, which are called the iura imaginaria, “rights mythologized by imagination.”142 And it rested its entire reputation on finding myths of the sort which might offer gravity as a servant of the laws and justification as a minister to deeds. As a result, all the legal fictions of ancient jurisprudence were masked truths, and the legal formulae by which they spoke legal decrees (by their circumscribing limits with a certain number and a certain kind of words, no more, no less, no different) were called carmina, which, we learned above [§500], were what Livy said dictated the punishments against Horatius. This becomes confirmed by a golden passage of Plautus143 in his Comedy of Asses, where Diabolus says that the parasite is a great poet because he knows best how to discover the cautionary measures, or formulae, which we just saw were called carmina.

1036

As a result, all of ancient Roman law was a serious poem that the Romans presented in the forum, and ancient jurisprudence was a strict poetry. It is quite congruent with our purposes that Justinian in the proem to his Institutes calls upon ANTIQUI IURIS FABULAS [“the myths of ancient law”]: these words must have been derived from some ancient jurist who understood the things upon which we are here reasoning, even though Justinian makes mocking use of them. In contrast to that mocking, it was from these myths that Roman jurisprudence evoked its principles, as has been demonstrated herein. And from these masks, which were used in such dramatic myths that were both true and severe (these masks were called PERSONAE), Roman jurisprudence derived the earliest origins of its teaching de iure personarum [“on the rights of persons”].

1037

But the arrival of the human times of popular republics was the start of the intellect’s appearance in great assemblies; and the abstract and universal claims reasoned out by the intellect were thenceforth said consistere in INTELLECTU IURIS144 [“to consist in an understanding of the law”]—that is, in an understanding of the will of the lawgiver who

1038

 Vico’s translation of iura imaginaria.  Plautus, Asinaria 746–748. 144   Compare Papinian, Digest 5.3.50, as well as the fuller account at Scienza nuova prima §193. 142 143

414

The New Science articulated in his laws a will named IUS, which itself was the will of the citizens who held a uniform idea of a common rational advantage; this must have been understood as being spiritual in its nature, for all those rights exercised upon bodies but not themselves physical (called nuda iuris, “right stripped of all physicality”) were said in intellectu iuris consistere. Therefore, because these rights are modes of spiritual substance, they are indivisible and, consequently, also eternal, for corruption is nothing but the division of something into parts.

1039

The interpreters of the Roman legal code have rested the entire reputation of this legal metaphysics on their consideration of the indivisibility of rights in accordance with the famous treatment of the subject, De dividuis et individuis. However, they have not given consideration to what is no less important, that is, their eternity. This they ought also to have noticed in the following two rules of that legal code which they established. The first established that cessante fine legis, cessat lex [“when the goal of a law ceases, the law ceases”]; here, they did not say cessante ratione [“when the reasoning on a law ceases . . .”], for the goal of laws is equal advantage in all cases, which can be lacking, but the reasoning on laws is a bringing of laws into conformity with what was actually done, a deed dressed in such circumstances as deeds are always dressed, and so, when it is alive, reasoning on law is ruler over such activity. The second rule is that tempus non est modus constituendi vel dissolvendi iuris [“the mode for the constitution or dissolution of a right in not temporal”], for time cannot start or end what is eternal, and in usucaption and prescription time neither produces nor brings to an end to rights, but rather is proof that the one who holds them intends to relinquish them; so, for example, to say that usufruct has ended is not to say that the right has ended, but that it is taken back from its servitude to its original freedom. From this come the following two very important corollaries. The first is that since rights are eternal in their intelligibility, that is, as ideals, and since men are temporal, these rights can come to men from nowhere but from God. The second is that all the countless, varied, and diverse rights which have been, are, and will be in the world are the various, diverse modifications of the power of the first man who was the prince of humankind and of the domain which he held over all the earth.

1040

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Now, given that the laws certainly came first and the philosophers came after, it is necessarily the case that Socrates, from having observed that the Athenian citizens in decreeing laws moved toward unity in an idea conformable with an equal advantage common to all parties, started to sketch intelligible genera, that is, universals abstracted by means of an induction which gathers together particulars in their uniformity and comes to compose a genus in that the particulars are uniform with one another.

Book Four Plato,145 from having reflected on how in these public assemblies the minds of particular men, each one passionately bent on his own advantage, conform themselves to a dispassionate idea of common ­advantage—that is, as they say, that “men tend to be partisan to their own private interests, but share a will toward justice in common”146— and so he ascended to a meditation upon the intelligible ideas of created minds about what is best, ideas that are distinct from those created minds and that can only be in God. He ascended to form the philosophical hero147 who commands the passions at his pleasure. Hence, Aristotle148 later left to us that divine definition of good law, that it is a “will separated from the passions”—which is to say that it is a heroic will. He understood justice as a ruler whose seat is this heroic spirit and which issues decrees to all the other virtues, for he had observed a legal justice149 whose seat is sovereign civil power and which decrees prudence in the senate, fortitude in the army, moderation in festive celebrations, and two particular kinds of justice, both distributive justice in the treasury and commutative justice, for the most part, in the forum, commutative justice using arithmetic proportion, distributive justice using geometric proportion;150 and he must have taken note of distributive justice because of the census, which is the basis of popular republics in that it distributes honor and penalties by geometrical proportion according to the patrimonies of citizens. For prior to the census, they understood only arithmetic proportion: hence, Astraea—heroic j­ustice—was depicted for us holding a balance, and hence, in the Law of the Twelve Tables, all the penalties (penalties which today philosophers, moral theologians, and writers learned de iure public [“on public law”] say must be dispensed by distributive justice in keeping with geometric proportion) we read that all these penalties invoked duplio [“double”] in cases of pecuniary harm and talio [“like for like”] in cases of physical harm. And because the talion penalty was discovered by Rhadamanthus, it was on this merit that he was made judge of the underworld, where he distributes certain penalties. The talion penalty is said by Aristotle in his Ethics to have been discovered by Pythagoras,151 who is the founder of a nation in Magna Graecia whose nobles were called Pythagoreans, as we have observed above [§427]; this discovery would have been a disgrace to the Pythagoras who came later, the sublime philosopher and mathematician.   See Plato, Parmenides 129b–e; Republic 4, 433a–b.   This “saying” seems to be a maxim of Vico’s own devising, as Battistini suggests. Similar language appears at Scienza nuova prima §9. 147   On the “philosophical hero,” compare Vico’s description to Plato, Laws 7.3, 792c–d and Laws 8.7, 840c. 148  Aristotle, Politics 3.16, 1287a32: “law is reason without passion.” 149   For the distinction between legal justice and natural justice, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.1, 1129b27. 150   See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.4, 1131b25–1132b20. 151   Compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, 1132b21. 145 146

415 1041

1042

416

The New Science

1043

One can conclude from all this that it was from the piazza of Athens that came such principles of metaphysics, of logic, of morals. And it was from the prescription which Solon gave to the Athenians, NOSCE TE IPSUM [“know thyself ”], that came—as we reasoned above [§§416, 424] in one of the corollaries in the Poetic Logic—popular republics; and from popular republics came laws, and from laws came philosophers; and so Solon, who was wise in commonplace wisdom, was believed to be wise in a recondite wisdom. Let this be a piece of a history of philosophy which is told philosophically and the last of many reproaches made in this book against Polybius,152 who said that if there were only philosophers in the world, there would be no need for religion: if there had been no religion and, consequently, no republics, there would have actually been no philosophers, and if the human things had not been led in this direction by divine providence, there would have been no idea of either science or virtue.

1044

Now, returning to what we proposed so as to conclude the argument upon which we are reasoning, from these human times onward, during which arrived popular republics and, later, monarchies, it came to be understood that legal cause (at first understood in terms of the precautionary formulae consisting of proper and precise words such that such causes were originally called cavissae, derived from the word for “taking precaution,” which was later retained in the contracted word caussae153) was actually the legal affair itself—that is, some business contracted with others; such affairs—or business—today are solemnized by pacts, which are agreed upon in the act of contracting in order to produce some transaction, and in the case of contracts which are valid titles for the transfer of domain, they solemnized the natural handing over of property so as to enact this passing of property from one person to another. And it is only in the case of contracts that are completed, as they say, by word of mouth—that is, by stipulations—that a case would have that older property of “taking precaution.” The things stated here illuminate even further the principles posited above [§§570–578] pertaining to obligations, which are born of contracts and pacts.

1045

In sum, since man, properly speaking, is only mind, body, and speech, and since speech somehow stands midway between mind and body,154 what is CERTAIN concerning justice takes its start in mute times with the certainty of bodily signs; later, with the discovery of so-called articulate speech, it carries over to certain ideas—that is, spoken formulae; finally, when our human reason is fully developed, to proceed to its terminus in what is TRUE in our ideas concerning justice, as determined by reasoning about the ultimate circumstances for what was done: this is a   On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179.   Compare Voss, Etymologicon, pp. 141–142, who arrives at the same conclusion. 154   As Mazzotta observes, the claim that speech links mind and body is a clear echo of Dante; see De vulgari eloquentia 1.3. 152 153

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Book Four formula unformed by any particular form which the very learned Varro calls the FORMULAM NATURAE155 [“formula of nature”], which, in the fashion of light, of itself informs in all the ultimate and detailed particulars of their surfaces, the opaque surfaces of what was done with the light shed upon those surfaces, just as all of this was discussed in the Elements.156

155   Drawn from Augustine, City of God 4.31. See also De uno Proloquium (Cristofolini 33[24]), where Vico says explicitly that he came across the passage from Varro while reading Augustine’s text, which he mentions by name. 156   See particularly Axioms 111 and 113.

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Book Five

On the Recurrence Of Human Things During the Resurgence That the Nations Make

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Book Five In countless passages scattered throughout this entire work on countless subjects, we have up until now observed a congruity inspiring wonder between the earlier period of barbarous times and the return to barbarous times;1 so, one can easily understand that there is a recurrence of human things during the resurgence that the nations make.

421 1046

However, so as better to confirm this, it pleases us in this final book to give a particular place to this argument so as to clarify in a better light this second time of barbarism (which has lain in greater darkness than the first time of barbarism, even though the first time was called by Marcus Terentius Varro, so learned about antiquities, “the Dark Time” in his distinguishing of different times); and so as to demonstrate how a God called “Best” and “Greatest” has made the counsels of his providence which give direction to the human things of all nations to serve the ineffable decrees of his grace. This is because after providence by superhuman means made clear and firm the truth of the Christian religion2 (with the virtue of martyrs pitted against the power of Rome and with the doctrine of the Church Fathers and miracles pitted against the empty wisdom of Greece3) and because, later, after there arose armed nations who would combat everywhere the true divinity of the author of the Christian religion, providence permitted a new order of humanity among the nations to come into being, so that, following the natural course of these same human things, this religion would be firmly established.

1047

It is by such eternal counsel that providence brought back times which were truly divine, times in which there were Catholic kings everywhere to defend the Christian religion of which they were the protectors, kings dressed in the dalmatics of deacons and consecrating their royal persons (hence is preserved the title, “Sacred Royal Majesty”). They took upon themselves dignities belonging to ecclesiastics (so, we are told by Symphorien Champier4 in his Genealogy of the Kings of France that Hugh Capet5 took the title of “Count and Abbot” of Paris, and Paradin6 in

1048

  Vico’s Italian speaks of i tempi barbari ritornati, literally “the returned barbarian times,” corresponding to what we now think of as “medieval” times. 2   The 1730 version of the Scienza nuova contains a section within the Poetic Logic titled “Demonstration of the Truth of the Christian Religion.” In 1744 Vico replaces that section with another one that preserves much of the 1730 section’s content, but drops the reference to the “Christian Religion” and changes the title (§§456–472). 3   A possible allusion to 1 Corinthians 1.18–2.5 on wisdom, or Colossians 2.8 on philosophy and empty deceit. 4   Symphorien Champier (1472–1539), doctor of Charles VIII and Louis XIII, object of Rabelais’s satire in Gargantua and Pantagruel. 5   Hugh Capet (c. 941–996), first king of the Franks of the House of Capet from 987 until his death. 6   Guillaume Paradin de Cuiseaux (1510–1590), author of Annales de Bourgogne (1566). 1

422

The New Science his Annals of Burgundy observes in the oldest documents that princes in France commonly had taken the title of “Duke and Abbot,” that is, “Count and Abbot”). It is thus that the first Christian kings were founders of military religious orders,7 by which they reestablished in their realms the Christian Catholic religion pitted against Aryans (by whom, Saint Jerome8 says, almost the entire Christian world was infected) and against the Saracens and a great number of other infidels.

1049

At this point, they truly returned to what were called the pura et pia bella [“pure and pious wars”],9 belonging to heroic peoples. Hence, all Christian powers still support with their crowns the cross raised up upon a globe, which they had once unfurled on banners when they waged the wars called the Crusades.

1050

Also inspiring wonder is the recurrence of human civil things during this return to barbarous times: ancient heralds, in declaring war, evocabant deos [“would call forth the gods”] out of the city against which they were declaring war, with an elegant formula full of splendor that is preserved for us in Macrobius;10 hence, they believed that defeated peoples remained bereft of gods and, consequently, bereft of auspices; this is the first principle for everything upon which we have reasoned in this work [§§14, 487], that on account of the heroic law of victory, the defeated retained none of their claims to civil rights, either public or private, because, as we have fully proved above [§§110, 525, 598], principally from Roman history, all of these during heroic times were dependent upon divine auspices; this was all contained in the formula for the heroic surrender which Tarquinius Priscus used in the surrender of Collatia, that peoples surrendering debebant DIVINIA ET HUMANA OMNIA11 [“owed all that is divine and human”] to the peoples who are victors. So too, the more recent barbarians, in taking a city, gave their attention first and foremost to scouting for, finding and carrying away from the city famous repositories or reliquaries for saints; hence it was that peoples in those times were quite careful to bury or hide them, and, accordingly, these are everywhere observed to be in the innermost and deepest places in churches. Here is the cause of almost all the removals of the bodies of saints coming to pass during those times. And the following   Literally, “they founded armed religions” (fondarono religioni armate). In view of the reference to the Arians (here and less directly at §1047), we translate as “military religious orders,” following a suggestion of Giuseppe Mazzotta. The phrase may also be an allusion to Machiavelli: “all the armed prophets conquered, and the unarmed ones were ruined” (Prince 6). 8   See Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians 19. 9   See note to §958. 10  Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.9.2, 3.9.6. 11   Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.38.2. 7

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vestige of this remains: defeated peoples must ransom all the bells of the city taken from the victorious generals. Moreover, because the fifth century was the start of the flooding12 of so many barbarous nations into Europe, and also into Africa and Asia, and because the conquering peoples were not able to understand the defeated, it came to pass, on account of the barbarism of the enemies of the Catholic religion, that in that Iron Age one can find no writing in the vernacular languages proper to those times, not Italian or French or Spanish or even German (Aventinus13 in his Annals of Bavaria suggests that they did not start to write documents in German until the times of Frederick of Swabia, and others suggest it was not until the times of Emperor Rudolf of Austria, as was stated in another place [§435]). And amongst all the aforesaid nations, we find only writing in a barbarous Latin, a language understood by a few nobles who were also ecclesiastics. Hence, all that remained, one would imagine, during all those unfortunate centuries was for nations to return to speaking a mute language among themselves.

1051

On account of this scarcity of common alphabetic letters, there must have everywhere been a return to the hieroglyphic writing with tribal devices, which for establishing certain domain, as was reasoned upon above [§§483–488], signified rights of lordship mostly over households, tombs, fields, and flocks. They returned to certain kinds of divine judgments, which were called “canonical purgations.” In the earlier barbaric times, as we demonstrated above [§§959–964], one species of these judgments was duels, which were not, however, acknowledged by canon law.

1052

They returned to heroic pillaging, and we saw above [§636] that just as the heroes had counted it an honor to be called “thief,” so later a title for lords was that of “corsair.”

1053

They returned to heroic reprisals, which, as we observed above [§960], endured up until the time of Bartolus, and this because the wars during more recent times of barbarism were, like the earlier times, all religious wars, as we saw above [§§562, 958, 1049].

1054 1055

They returned to heroic slavery, which endured for a long time even among those Christian nations. For during those times when duels were the custom, victors believed that the defeated had no god, as was stated above [§§958, 1050], when we were reasoning upon duels. And so, the victors considered them nothing more than beasts. This sensibility in n ­ ations   As Battistini observes, the “flooding” mentioned here can be compared to the “inundations” at §§20, 300, 466. 13   “Aventinus” is a pseudonym for Giovanni Tourmayer (1477–1534), teacher of Greek and mathematics, and author of the text which Vico mentions, the Annalium Boiorum libri septem (1534), 6.9.4 (p. 675 of a 1710 edition reprinted at Leipzig). 12

424

The New Science is preserved everywhere today among the Christians and the Turks: the term Turk means “dog” (hence, when Christians desire or are obliged to treat Turks with civility, they called them “Muslims,” which means “true believers”) and the Turks, by contrast, call Christians “swine”; and, consequently both practice heroic slavery in their wars (although Christians do so with greater mildness).

1056

Inspiring the most wonder of all, in relation to the recurrence that human things make, is that in those divine times, they started again those earlier asylums from the ancient world, within which (we heard above [§§17, 114, 160, 532, 561, 777] from Livy14) were founded all the earliest cities. For because of the currency everywhere of violence, plunder, killing on account of the extreme ferocity and savagery of those most barbarous centuries and because, as was stated in the Axioms,15 there was no efficacious means for holding in check men unleashed from all human laws other than the divine laws dictated by religion, men naturally, out of fear of being oppressed or destroyed, took themselves to the bishops and abbots of those violent centuries as more mild relative to such barbarism and put themselves, their families, and their patrimonies under the protection of those bishops and abbots and were received by them: submission and protection, these are the principal constituents of fealties. Hence it is that in Germany, which must have been the most savage and ferocious of all the other nations of Europe, there were almost more ecclesiastical sovereigns, whether bishops or abbots, than there were secular sovereigns, and, as was stated [§1048], in France all the sovereign princes had the title of either Count and Abbot or Duke and Abbot. Consequently, in Europe the number of the many cities, lands, and castles observed with the names of saints is boundless. For in either raised or hidden places, small churches were opened to hear Mass or to perform the other offices of devotion decreed by our religion; these churches can be defined as the natural asylums for Christians in those times, who built their dwellings there next to them. Hence, everywhere we observe that the oldest things from this second period of barbarism are the small churches, for the most part in ruins, but still in places of this sort. An illuminating example of all this would be our own Abbey of San Lorenzo of Aversa, which was incorporated into the Abbey of San Lorenzo of Capua: in Campania, Samnium, Apulia, and Old Calabria, and from the Volturno River to the Gulf of Taranto, this abbey governed 110 churches, either by itself or through abbots and monks subject to it, and the abbots of San Lorenzo were barons for almost all the aforementioned places.

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14 15

 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.   Axiom 31.

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The recurrence nations make in accordance with the eternal nature of fealties; and, consequently, the recurrence of ancient Roman law in feudal law These divine times were succeeded by certain heroic times, through the return of a certain distinction between, as it were, different natures, heroic and human nature; out of this distinction comes the cause of what is a source of wonder for Hotman,16 that the term used for rustic vassals in language of feudalism is “men.” Two other terms must have originally come from this one, hominium and homagium, which have the same meaning; Helmodius17 suggests, according to Cujas,18 that the word ­hominium—as if to say hominis dominium [“domain over a man”]—is more elegant than homagium—as if to say the hominis agium [“agency over a man”]—which leads a man, or vassal, wherever the baron wishes; and those with erudition about feudalism translate this latter barbarous term into its corresponding equivalent into an entirely classical Latin as obsequium, which originally was the readiness a man had to follow the hero wherever he led in order to cultivate the hero’s fields, and implicit in the term19 obsequium is the fealty that a vassal owes to the baron. This is inasmuch as obsequium means at the same time both the “homage” and “fealty” to which they must swear during the investiture of a fief. And obsequium for the ancient Romans never parted company from what was retained by the Romans in the expression opera militaris,20 and what our feudalists call militare servitium, that by which the Roman plebeians for a long time served the nobles at their own expense during war, as Roman history above [§§559, 618] made certain. And eventually, the work of this obsequium remained for the liberti—that is, those enfranchised by their patrons—to do (work which had its start, as we observed above [§§110, 114, 160, 532, 561, 613] in Roman history, in the times when Romulus founded Rome upon clienteles, where we found protections granted to country day laborers from the one who received them in his asylum; and these clienteles from ancient history, as we indicated in the Axioms,21 cannot be explained more properly than as fealties). So, erudite feudalists render the barbarous term, feudum, with the elegant Latin term, clientele.  Hotman, De verbis feudalibus, p. 764.   Helmodius, German historian of the twelfth century and author of Historia sclavorum. 18  Cujas, De feudis 2, p. 1178. 19   Literally, “eminently contains” (contiene eminentemente). “Eminent containment” is an important concept in medieval philosophy and appears in Descartes’s arguments for the existence of God at Mediations 3 (AT 41). 20  Hotman, Disputatio de Feudis, vol. 2, col. 857. 21   Axiom 82. 16 17

1057

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The New Science

1058

And we are plainly convinced that these are the beginnings of things by the origins of those terms, opera [“work”] and servitium [“service”]. For opera, by the meaning native to it, is the toil of a day laborer from the country; consequently, for the Latin word operarius, Italian says giornaliere [“day laborer”], and it is like such a worker, or day laborer, who does not have the privileges of a citizen, that Achilles complains of being treated by Agamemnon when Agamemnon injured him by taking his Briseis.22 Consequently, also in Latin, they retain the expression greges operarum [“herd of works”], and, similarly, even greges servorum23 [“herd of servants”], for at first these workers and later also slaves were reputed by the heroes to be beasts who pasci gregatim [“pastured in herds”]; so, Homer24 always names the heroes by their perpetual epithet, “shepherd of peoples,” and it was only later that there were shepherds of flocks and herdsmen. This is confirmed by the Greek word νόμος [nomos] (which means both “law” and “pasture,” as was observed above [§607]), for the first agrarian law accorded to the familial servants subsistence on the lands assigned to them by the heroes, and this subsistence was called “pasture” because it is proper to beasts, just as the subsistence proper to men is called “food.”

1059

This property of pasturing those first flocks in the world must have belonged to Apollo, whom we found [§533] to be the god of civil light— that is, of nobility—where mythical history tells us that he was a shepherd at Amphrysus,25 just as Paris was a shepherd, someone who was certainly Trojan royalty; so, the paterfamilias (called by Homer26 a king) decrees with his scepter that the roasted ox be divided among the harvesters in his depiction on the shield of Achilles, where above [§686] we have made it possible to see the history of the world and, fixed therein, the familial epoch. For it is proper to our shepherds not to pasture, but to guide and to guard flocks and herds, but in earlier times they could not have introduced this kind of shepherding until after the borders of cities were somewhat more secure, because raiding still had currency in heroic times. And this must be the cause of bucolic, or pastoral, poetry arriving during the most humane times, in Greek with Theocritus, in Latin with Virgil, and in Italian with Sannazaro.27

1060

The term servitum proves the recurrence of these same things in the more recent period of barbarism, whose opposite in this relationship,  Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59.   Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni 3.3.25. 24   See, for example, the description of Diomedes at Iliad 11.370 and Achilles at Iliad 16.2. 25   Compare Apollodorus, Epitome 3.10.4. 26  Homer, Iliad 18.556. 27   Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), Neapolitan poet, humanist, and author of epigrams. Vico likely has in mind his Arcadia, published in Naples in 1504. 22 23

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the baron, is called senior, in the sense in which signore [“lord”] is understood.28 As a result, the ancient Franks must have been those “servants born within the household” at which Bodin29 wonders and, in general, they are discovered above [§1017] to be the same as those whom the ancient Romans called vernae (because of these vernae, they called “the vernacular” the common languages introduced by the commoners, who we found above [§597] were the plebs of heroic cities, just as poetic language was introduced by the heroes, that is, by the nobles in the earliest republics). This obsequium of those enfranchised (after the power of barons had later been dispersed and so diffused among the people during civil wars in which the powerful have to depend upon the people, and after the power of the barons had consequently been reunified in the persons of monarchical kings) carried over into what is called obsequium principis (which Tacitus30 remarks is what is owed by subjects to monarchs).

1061

By contrast, on account of the belief in two natures, one heroic and the other human, feudal lords were called “barons,” in the same sense in which we found above [§§657, 684] that they were called “heroes” in poetic Greek and viri [“men”] in ancient Latin (this is retained in the use of the Spanish word baron,31 for a man, in contrast to vassals who, on account of their weakness, were called “women” in the heroic sense that we demonstrated above [§§78, 989]). In addition to what we have just reasoned upon, the word for barons, “lords” [signori], could only have come from the Latin word seniores [“elders”], for it was they who must have composed the first public parliaments of the new regimes of Europe, exactly as Romulus must have used the word senatus for the public council, which naturally must have been composed of the older of the nobility; and just as it was from these men (who were, and thus were called, patres [“fathers”]) that must have come the word patroni, those who granted slaves their freedom, so from them must have come the Italian word padroni, meaning those who are “protectors.” This term padroni retains the full propriety and elegance of its Latin term, just as its opposite, “rustic vassals,” corresponds with equal propriety and elegance to the Latin term clientes (those whom, as was explained above [§§107, 420, 597, 619], Servius Tullius admitted into the fealties by instituting the order of the census). These fealties of this sort were only a quick step away in the progression from the clienteles of Romulus, as was proved fully above [§§106, 263, 613]. And it is exactly those who were thus enfranchised who gave their name to the French nation, as was stated in the reply to Bodin in the preceding book [§1017].   See Hotman, pp. 799–800.   Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5. 30   Compare Tacitus, Annals 1.43, 3.75, 6.37. 31   More precisely (as Battistini observes), varon. 28 29

1062

428

The New Science

1063

In this fashion, the fealties came back, emerging from the eternal spring dictated for them in the Axioms,32 where we indicated the benefits that can be expected within civil nature; hence, the erudite feudalists in Latin called these fealties, with full propriety and elegance, beneficia. This is something that Hotman observes without making use of it: that the victors held for themselves the cultivated fields of those they conquered and granted to those impoverished by defeat the uncultivated fields to sustain themselves. And the fealties of that earlier world, discovered in Book Two, are found again here. And yet they started again (through what must have been their nature, as we reasoned upon above [§§106, 1057]) from the personal rustic fealties that we found to have originally been the clienteles of Romulus, clienteles that we observed in the Axioms33 to have been spread throughout the entire ancient world of peoples. During the splendor of Roman popular liberty, these heroic clienteles carried over into the following custom: the plebeians in their togas took themselves in the morning to pay court to the great lords and offered in their greeting, AVE REX [“Hail, King”], the title belonging to ancient heroes; they went with these lords to the forum and went back with them at night to their households. And the lords, conforming to the ancient heroes called “shepherds of the people,” offered them an evening meal.

1064

Such personal vassals must have been among the ancient Romans the earliest vades [“bondsmen”], and they retained this term later for those who were defendants, obliged to follow in person the plaintiffs into the courtroom, an obligation that was called vadimonium. Through our Origins of the Latin Language,34 it is shown that this term vades must have been derived from vas, the Greek word for which is βάς [bas] and the barbarian word for which is was, whence later came wassus and, eventually, vassallus. Vassals of this kind abound even today in the frigid North, which retains also a great deal of barbarism, above all in Poland, where they are called kmiets, and are a kind of slave, entire families of whom are gambled away by paladins as they must pass in service from one patron to another. These vassals must be those who are enchained through their ears and who by chains of poetic gold, that is, by grain coming from his mouth, are led by the Gallic Heracles wherever he wishes.

1065

Consequently, these carried over into real rustic fealties. They came to these by the first agrarian law, which we found among the Romans to be that which Servius Tullius established with the order of the census; this permitted to the plebeians, as we discovered [§107], bonitary domain over the fields to which they were assigned by the nobles under certain burdens, not only personal as previously, but also real; these must have been the first mancipes [“renters”], and they retained this term later for   Axioms 80–81.   Axiom 82. 34   Scienza nuova prima §369. 32

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those under obligation to the treasury for real estate. Of this same kind must have been those defeated, to whom, as Hotman just said, the victors granted the uncultivated fields from their conquests to sustain themselves: so too the Antaneuses returned and were tied to the land by the Greek Heracles, and so too those bound by the god Fidius—that is, the Roman Heracles—those whom, we found above [§§602, 658, 761, 766], were eventually unbound by the Petelian law. These bondsmen of the Petelian law, through the things upon which we reasoned above [§§26, 115, 658, 1017], by which it is proper to them to have fallen into bondage, explain perfectly why it must have been that vassals were originally called “lieges”35—that is, because they were bound by this knot—and they are now defined by the feudalists as those who must recognize as friends or enemies those who are friends or enemies of their lord. This is exactly the oath which the ancient German vassals offered to their princes in Tacitus36 in order to serve them in their glory, as we learned in another place [§559].

1066

These vassals, when these fealties attained the splendor of civil sovereignty, were defeated kings similar to those to whom the Roman people, with that solemn formula recounted in Roman history, REGNA DONO DABAT37 [“granted rule as a favor”]—that is to say, beneficio dabat [“granted it as a benefit”]—and they became allies of the Roman people by the kind of alliance which in Latin is called a foedus inaequale38 [“contract between unequals”] and were called royal friends of the Roman people in the sense in which the emperors called noble courtiers their friends; this unequal alliance was nothing other than the investiture of a sovereign fealty conceived with the following formula left to us by Livy himself, that such an allied king SERVARET MAIESTATEM POPULI ROMANI39 [“must be in service of the majesty of the Roman people”], exactly as the jurist Paulus says that the praetor renders justice servata maiestatem populi Romani [“by serving the majesty of the Roman ­people”]—that is, affirms those whose claims the laws grants, denies those whose claims the laws deny.40 As a result, such allied kings were lords over sovereign fealties subject to a greater sovereignty. Because of this, there was a return in Europe of a common sense that the title “YOUR MAJESTY” was mostly held by great kings who were lords of great kingdoms and numerous provinces. Along with such rustic fealties, from which these things started, there was a return of the emphyteusis41 by which the great ancient forest of the   Compare the definition of Hotman, Disputatio de Feudis, vol. 2, col. 819.  Tacitus, Germania 14.2. 37  Sallust, The Jugurthine War 5. 38  Livy, Ab urbe condita 35.46.10. 39  Livy, Ab urbe condita 38.11.2. 40   Digest 49.15.7. 41   On the emphyteusis, see the note at §489. 35 36

1067

430

The New Science Earth was cultivated. Hence there is still retained in Italian the laudemio, which means both what a vassal pays to the lord and what the emphyteuticary pays directly to his patron.

1068

There was a return of ancient Roman clienteles called commendations,42 which we made it possible to see. Hence, vassals were called in Latin by erudite feudalists, with elegance and propriety, clientes, and those fealties were called clientelae.

1069

There was a return of the census of the kind established as an order by Servius Tullius; by this census, the Roman plebeians were required for a long time to serve the nobles in war at their own expense. As a result, those vassals now called angarii and perangarii were in antiquity the Roman assidui, whom we found above [§618] suis assibus militabant [“served in the military at their own expense”]; and up until the Petelian law, which unbound the Roman plebs from the bond of feudal law, held legal claim of private incarceration over plebeians who were debtors.

1070

There was a return of precaria43 [“conditional tenancies”], which must originally have been lands given by lords at the entreaty of the poor so as to be able to sustain themselves by cultivating those lands. It is exactly this kind of possession that the Law of the Twelve Tables in no place recognizes, as has been demonstrated above [§638].

1071

And because barbarism with its violence undermines the faith needed for commerce and leaves peoples with other concerns other than fulfilling the things they need to do relative to the natural life, and because all rent had to be paid in what are called the natural fruits, accordingly there were also during those times the libellus for transfers of real estate; the advantage of these must have been, as was stated in another place [§571], that some had an abundance of one kind of fruit from their fields of which others had a lack, and accordingly they could exchange with one another.

1072

There was a return of mancipations, by which the vassal placed his hands in the hands of his lord, signifying his faith and subjection; hence, the rustic vassals, as we stated just above [§§433, 1064], through the census of Servius Tullius were the first mancipes of the Romans. And along with mancipation there was a return of the distinction between things which are mancipi [“transferable”] and things which are nec mancipi [“nontransferable”], for feudal bodies are nec mancipi—or inalienable—for the vassal and are mancipi for the lord (exactly as Roman provincial grounds were nec mancipi for the provinces and mancipi for the Romans). In the act of mancipation, there was a return of stipulations with infestucations or investitures, which we demonstrated above [§569] are the same.

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42 43

  Hotman, p. 750.   Hotman, pp. 788–789.

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Along with stipulations, there was a return of what we observed above [§§569, 939, 1044] in ancient Roman jurisprudence were originally and properly called cavissae, which later were retained in the contracted word caussae. In the second period of barbarism, these were guarantees [cautele], a word coming from the same Latin origin, and the solemnizing of these pacts and contracts was called homologare44 from the men [uomini], from whom we say above herein [§1057] are derived the terms hominium and homagium insofar as all contracts in those times must have been feudal contracts. Thus, along with guarantees, there was a return of pacts guaranteed in the act of mancipation, what are called stipulati by the Roman jurists (so called, we found above [§569], from the stipula [“stalk”] which sheathes [veste] the grain), and so it was in this same sense that the learned during this period of barbarism derived the expression pacta vestita, from these investitures, also called “infestucations.” And for pacts that were not guaranteed, ancient and medieval writers both used the same term with the same meaning, patti nudi. There was a return of two kinds of domain, direct domain and useful domain, which evenly correspond to the quiritary and bonitary domain of the ancient Romans.

1073

And direct domain came into being first, just as among the Romans quiritary domain was born first, which we found [§§109, 601, 984] had its start in domain over the lands which the nobles granted to the plebeians; if possession of these lands was lost, the plebeians were required to make a trial for the legal vindication in the formula, AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I declare this ground to be mine by the law of the Quirites”]. As we demonstrated above [§§603, 621], such a vindication was in this sense a commendation [laudazione] for the entire order of nobles, who during the Roman aristocratic republic made up the city itself, for they considered the nobles to be the authorities in the cases of civil domain by which the plebeians were able to vindicate their claims over those grounds. Such domain in the Law of the Twelve Tables was always called AUCTORITAS, because of the authority of domain held by the regnant senate over the Roman grounds at large, grounds over which later the people, in connection with popular liberty, held sovereign public power, as was reasoned upon above [§§386, 944]. Upon this authority in the second period of barbarism, as with countless other things in this work, we shed light by means of earlier ancient periods: such is the greater darkness of that second period relative to the first!45 There do remain, however, three clear traces of this later authority in three terms from feudalism.   Hotman, p. 765.   Why should the second period of barbarism be darker than the first? Vico seems to think that in comparison to Greek and Roman historians (particularly 44 45

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The New Science First, there is the “direct” of direct domain, which confirms that this legal action was originally authorized directly by a patron. Next, there is the laudemio, a term for the payment made for a fief, which must have been done as a commendation [laudazione] of authority, as we have stated [§621]. Finally, there is laudo, a term which must have originally signified a judicial sentence in cases of this kind, later retained in the judgments which were called “arbitrations.” For such judicial decisions seemed to end amicably in comparison with judgments pursuant to matters over leasable property [allodi] (which Budé46 opines were thus called as if to say allaudi, in the same way that laude in Italian becomes lode), for, at first, in such matters lords must have looked to the arms of duels for a judgment, as has been demonstrated above [§961]. This custom has endured even into my own age in the kingdom of Naples, where barons vindicated with duels, not civil judgments, incursions made by other barons within their feudal territories. And just as with the quiritary domain of the ancient Romans, so the direct domain of the older medieval barbarians eventually retained its significance in the domain that produces real civil actions.

1075

And this offers an illuminating place for contemplation in the recurrence that the nations make, as well as the recurrence that the later sort of Roman jurist makes in that later sort of man of learning during the recent barbarism.47 Just as the former had already in their later age lost sight of ancient Roman law, as we have made it possible to see above in a thousand proofs, so too the latter in their own later age lost sight of older feudal law. Accordingly, the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code resolutely deny that these two kinds of domain from barbarism were known by Roman law: they attend to the difference in the sound of the words and so fail to understand the identity of the things themselves.

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There was a return of goods ex iure optimo [“held by supreme right”] in those goods which erudite feudalists define as allodial goods free from any encumbrance, public or private; such goods are comparable to the few households which Cicero48 observes remaining in his time in Rome that were ex iure optimo. Nevertheless, just as goods of this sort went unnoticed in later Roman legislation, so too such allodial goods are actually nowhere to be found. Thucydides and Tacitus), medieval chroniclers possessed little of the critical sensibility. 46   Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), French jurist. The reference is to Annotationes in Pandectas (1508), vol. 2, p. 270. 47   This is a reference to Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1313–1357) and his school, sometimes known as the “commentators” or the “postglossators.” 48  Cicero, De haruspicum responso 7.14; De lege agraria 3.2.7.

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And just as with the previous Roman estates held ex iure optimo, so too the later allodial goods returned as real estate free from any private real encumbrance, but subject to public encumbrance. For there was a return of the fashion in which those goods manifested themselves, which was the transformation of the census established as an order by Servius Tullius into the census founding the Roman treasury, in the fashion that was discovered above [§619]. As a result, the allodial and feudal goods, the most general distinction made for the things covered by feudal law, were originally distinguished in that feudal goods tended to require the commendation of a lord, whereas allodial goods did not. Without these principles, all the learned feudalists should be at a loss as to how these allodial goods, which they render in Latin along with Cicero as bona ex iure optimo,49 came to be called GOODS OF THE DISTAFF, goods which in their proper significance, as was stated above [§657], belonged to the law of the strongest and were enfeebled by no extraneous encumbrance, not even public ones, goods which, as we also stated above, were those of the Fathers in the familial state, lasting long into the earliest cities, goods which those Fathers had acquired by the labors of Heracles. This difficulty, through these same principles, is easily resolved with this same HERACLES, who, when HE WAS SPINNING, became the SERVANT OF IOLE and OF OMPHALE, that is, the heroes became effeminate when they ceded their heroic claims to plebeians, whom the heroes considered to be women in comparison with themselves (considering and calling themselves VIRI, as was explained above [§657, 684, 1061]) and when they suffered their goods to be subject to the treasury of the census, which is the basis of popular republics and is later found to be congruous with establishing the monarchies. Thus, through this older feudal law of which later times lost sight, there is a return of grounds held ex iure quiritium [“by quiritary right”], which, as we explained [§§595, 624], was the right belonging to those Romans armed with lances in the public assembly who were called quires; because of them was conceived the formula in vindications, AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I declare this ground to be mine by the law of the Quirites”], which is, as was stated [§627], a commendation of the authority of the Roman heroic city; so too, in the second period of barbarism, feudal goods were called GOODS OF THE LANCE and tended to the commendation of the authority of lords. These were distinguished from the later allodial goods called GOODS OF THE DISTAFF, those with which a debased Heracles does his spinning, a servant to women. Hence, we offered above the heroic origin for the motto inscribed on the French royal coat of arms, LILIA NON NENT [“lilies do not spin”],50 that in that kingdom there is no   Hotman, p. 739.   See the note at §657.

49 50

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The New Science succession for women. For there was a return of those laws of clan succession in the Law of the Twelve Tables, the law which we found to be IUS GENTIUM ROMANORUM and which we learned from Baldus that the Salic law was called IUS GENTIUM GALLORUM; this Salic law was certainly celebrated throughout Germany and so must have been observed throughout all the other nations of the earlier barbarism in Europe, although it was later restricted to France and Savoy.

1078

1079

Finally, there was a return of the armed courts which we found above [§§25, 593–595, 624, 762, 926] to be the heroic assemblies held under arms, called Assemblies of the Curetes by the Greeks, of the Quirites by the Romans. And the earliest parliaments of the kingdoms of Europe were parliaments of barons, similar to the way in which in France they were parliaments of peers: just as French history plainly tells us that originally kings were the heads of the parliament, and that the kings created peers of the court who in their status as commissioners judged cases (hence, later, they continued to be called dukes and peers of France), so too Cicero51 says that the earliest Roman court conveyed over the life of a citizen was that in which Tullus Hostilius created the duumvirs who in their status as commissioners (to say it in the formula which Livy draws upon) IN HORATIUM PERDUELLIONEM DICERENT52 [“charged Horatius with treason”] because he had killed his sister. For in the severity of those heroic times, the murder of any citizen when, as has been fully demonstrated above [§597], cities were composed only of heroes was considered a hostile act against the fatherland, which is exactly what perdulllio is, and any such murder was called a parricidum [“patricide”] because it was done to a Father—that is, to a noble—since we saw above [§597] that in those times Rome was divided into the Fathers and the plebs. Consequently, from Romulus up until Tullus Hostilius, there was no prosecution of the killing of a noble, because the nobles must have been attentive not to commit such offenses, instead using duels, upon which we reasoned above [§963]. And because in the case of Horatius there was no one who could privately avenge Horatia with a duel, Tullus Hostilius instituted, for the first time, orders for judgments. Alternatively, the murder of a plebeian was either done by the patron himself (and so by someone who could not be prosecuted) or done by someone else who would make up for the patron’s loss, since the one murdered was his servant. Such is still the custom in Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.53 However, the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code do not see this difficulty because they rely on the empty opinion that the golden age was an age of innocence, just as the political theorists, for the same reason, have relied on that statement of Aristotle54 that in ancient repub Cicero, Pro Milone 3, 7.   An inexact reference to Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5. 53   Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5. 54  Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b. 51

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lics there were no laws for private injuries and offenses. Hence, Tacitus, Sallust, and other authors55 who are otherwise most acute when telling us about the origins of republics and laws offer an account of the earliest state prior to the civil state in which men, from the beginning, led lives like so many Adams in a state of innocence. However, it was only after they came into cities that these “men,” who inspire such wonder in Hotman—and from whom comes the natural law of the gentile peoples whom Ulpian calls HUMANARUM [“humane ­peoples”]— that the murder of some man was called homicidium [“homicide”]. Now, it was in parliaments of this sort that they must have discussed feudal cases concerning the feudal rights, feudal succession, or feudal devolution by crime or default; after these cases were confirmed many times in rendering such judgments, they became the feudal custom; this custom is older than any other in Europe and attests to the natural law of the gentile peoples56 being born from such feudal human customs, as was fully proved above [§§599–618].

1080

Finally, just as in the sentence to which Horatius was condemned, the king Tullus permitted the defendant to appeal to the people, which still consisted only of nobles, as was demonstrated above [§§500, 662], because with regnant senates there was no other remedy for a defendant than recourse to that same senate; so too, and not otherwise, the nobles during the return to barbarous times must have made a practice of invoking the kings themselves in their parliaments (as for example, the kings of France who originally were the heads of parliament57).

1081

There is a great vestige of these heroic parliaments preserved in the Sacred Council of Naples, whose presiding officer has the title “Sacred Royal Majesty”: on the one hand, its councilors are named milites [“soldiers”]58 and have the status of commissioners (for in the second period of barbarism, only the nobles were soldiers, and the plebeians served them in war, just as in the first period of barbarism we observed [§§559, 1033] in Homer and in Roman history); on the other hand, for its sentences, there was no appeal other than one invoking the judgement of the tribunal itself.

1082

From all the things here enumerated, one has to conclude that rule everywhere was aristocratic, not by constitution but by governance, just as in the frigid North, Poland still is today and just as Sweden and Denmark were 150 years ago, and that with time, if there are no extraordinary causes to impede its natural course, Poland will arrive at perfect monarchy. This is so true that Bodin himself goes even further and says that his own French regime during the Merovingian and Carolingian lines was aristocratic not just in terms of governance (as we say), but in terms of constitution.

1083

  See Tacitus, Annals 3.26.1; Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline 2.   On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. 57   See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.1. 58   In fact, the councilors were called “senatores,” as Battistini observes. 55 56

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The New Science Now, here we would ask of Bodin: how did the French regime become the perfect monarchy that it is now? Was it perhaps on account of some royal law by which the paladins of France divested themselves of power and conferred it upon kings of the Capetian line? Perhaps, if Bodin had recourse to the myth of royal law devised by Tribonian by which the Roman people divested itself of its sovereign power and conferred it upon Octavius Augustus, something revealed as a myth simply by reading the first pages of the Annals of Tacitus,59 in which he tells of the final things done by Augustus to give legitimacy in his own person to having started a Roman monarchy, something that all nations sensed had started with Augustus. Or was it perhaps because France was conquered by the armed forces of one of the Capetians? And yet all the histories hold themselves aloof from any such misfortune. Therefore, Bodin (and, along with Bodin, all the political theorists and all the jurists who have written de iure public) must give recognition to that eternal and natural royal law by which the free power in a constitution, because it is free, must be actuated. As a result, to the extent that the optimates relent, a people must be invigorated with a view to becoming free; and to the extent that a free people relents, a king must be invigorated with a view to becoming monarch. On account of this, just as the natural law of the philosophers, or that of the moral theologians, is the law of reason, so the natural law of the gentile peoples is the natural law of advantage and strength, which, as the jurists say, nations come to celebrate USU EXIGENTE HUMANISQUE NECESSITATIBUS EXPOSTULANTIBUS60 [“as usage requires and as human necessities demand”].

1085

It is by these many beautiful and elegant expressions from ancient Roman jurisprudence (by which the erudite feudalists have actually mitigated and could mitigate even further the barbarism of feudal doctrine insofar as it has been demonstrated herein that the ideas in what is most proper to them already agree) that Oldendorf61 and all the others with him can come to understand that if feudal law was born from the sparks of barbarians setting fire to Roman law, then Roman law was born from the sparks of a fealties celebrated in the first period of barbarism in Latium. From these fealties have come into being all the republics of the world. And just as we have demonstrated this above [§§599–618] in reasoning about these earliest republics, particularly in the Poetic Politics, so too in Book Five, in keeping with what we promised in the Idea of the Work [§25], we have discovered the origins of the new European regimes in the eternal nature of fealties.

1086

But finally, the way was opened in the universities of Italy for the study and teaching of the Roman laws contained in the books of Justinian, laws that were conceived in terms of the natural law of humane gen Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.  Ulpian, Digest 1.2.2 (but “expostulantibus” does not appear in the passage). 61   Amburgo Johann Oldendorp (1480–1567), German jurist and follower of Luther. 59

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Book Five tile peoples, and minds that were more developed and acted with greater understanding dedicated themselves to the cultivation of a jurisprudence of natural equity which holds those who are and are not nobles to be equal in the civil code, since they are equal in human nature. And so, just as in Rome Tiberius Coruncanius started to teach the laws publicly, the arcana started to slip out of the hands of the nobles, and little by little their power weakened, so this is exactly what came to pass for the nobles in the European regimes: they had been ruled by aristocratic governance and went on to be free republics and the most complete monarchies. These two forms of constitution, because both tend towards human governance, conveniently change from one to the other. But to return from them to an aristocratic constitution is almost an impossibility in civil nature. So much so that Dion of Syracuse, even though he belonged to the royal household and had cast out a monstrous prince, that is, Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, even though he was so endowed with the beauty of civil virtue that he was worthy of the friendship of the divine Plato, because he attempted to reinstitute the orders of an aristocratic constitution, he was barbarously killed. And the Pythagoreans—that is, the nobles of Magna Graecia, as we explained above [§427]—for their same attempt were all cut into pieces, and the few who saved themselves in a stronghold were burned alive by the multitude.62 For plebeian men, once they recognize that they are equal in nature to the nobles, naturally will not suffer to be unequal in the civil code, an equality that they pursue either in free republics or under the monarchies.

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1087

Hence, in the present humanity of nations, the few aristocratic republics that remain among us kept the multitude at the same time dutiful and content, with a manifold, diligent care and with discerning and wise provisions.

A depiction of the world of nations, ancient and modern, with observations conforming to the design of the principles of this science This course of the human civil things was not taken by Carthage, Capua, or Numantia, three cities because of which Rome feared for its empire over the world. For the Carthaginians were forestalled by their native African acuity, sharpened even more by maritime commerce; the Capuans were forestalled by the mildness of the climate and by the abundance of fortunate Campania; finally, the Numantians because they were in the early flourishing of their heroism when they were oppressed by a Roman power commanded by Scipio Africanus, victor over Carthage and assisted by the strength of the world. 62

  For this episode, see Polybius, Histories 2.39.

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The New Science However, the Romans, because they were forestalled by none of these things, journeyed at the correct pace, making for the rule of providence by way of commonplace wisdom; and journeying through all three forms of civil constitution according to their natural order, as the many proofs in this book have demonstrated, they remained in each until one form was naturally succeeded by another. And they were guardians of aristocracy until the Publilian and Petelian laws; they were guardians of popular liberty until the time of Augustus; they were guardians of monarchy as long as they were humanly able to resist the internal and external causes of the destruction of that form of constitution.

1089

Today, a completed humanity seems to be spread throughout all the nations. Given that great monarchies rule over this world of peoples, if there are yet some barbarous peoples, the cause is that their monarchies have remained under the commonplace wisdom of imaginary and savage religions, and this is compounded in some monarchies by the uneven nature of the nations subjected to them.

1090

Taking our lead from the frigid North, the czar of Muscovy, although Christian, is lord over men with sluggish minds. The khan of Tartary has dominion over a people as soft as the ancient Seres were, who used to make up the bulk of his great empire but are now part of the Chinese empire. The negus of Ethiopia and the powerful kings of Fez and Morocco reign over peoples quite weak and spread out.

1091

However, in the middle of the temperate zone, where men are born more even-natured, starting with the Far East, the emperor of Japan pays homage to a humanity similar to that of the Romans during the time of the Carthaginian Wars; because of this, he resembles them in the ferocity of his armed forces and, as learned travelers have observed, he has in his language an air similar to the Latin; and on account of an imaginary religion, quite terrifying and savage and with horrible gods, all of whom bearing deadly arms, he retains much of the heroic nature, for missionary fathers who have gone there relate that the greatest difficulty which they have encountered in converting these peoples to Christianity is that the nobles cannot be persuaded that the plebeians have the same human nature as they have. The emperor of the Chinese, because he reigns by a mild religion and cultivates letters, is most humane. And the emperor of the Indies is more humane than not, and for the most part uses the arts of peace.

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The Persian and the Turk have mixed the mildness of the Near East over which they are lords with the rude doctrine of their religion, and so the Turks in particular have tempered arrogance with magnificence, with pomp, with liberality, and with gratitude.

Book Five But in Europe, where celebrated everywhere is the Christian religion which teaches an idea of God infinitely pure and perfect and decrees charity for all of humankind, there are great monarchies most humane in their customs. For those located in the frigid North—in Sweden and Denmark until 150 years ago and even until today in Poland and ­England—seem, in spite of having a monarchical constitution, still to be aristocratic in their governance. But if they are not impeded from the natural course of things by extraordinary causes, they will arrive at the most complete monarchies.

439 1092

There are observed a greater number of popular monarchies in this part of the world alone, because of its cultivation of science, than are in all the other three together. Indeed, on account of the recurrence of the same public advantages and necessities, there has been a renewal of the form of the Aetolian and Achaean republican leagues. And just as the latter was understood by the Greeks as a necessity for their security against the great power of the Romans, so the Swiss cantons and the united provinces, or states, of Holland have instituted two aristocratic orders from many free popular cities, and these orders stand united in perpetual league in peace and in war. And the bulk of the German empire is a system of many free cities and sovereign princes whose leader is the emperor, and in acting with regard to the state of that empire, the system is governed aristocratically.63 And here one must observe that sovereign powers united in leagues, whether perpetual or temporary, come of themselves to form an aristocratic constitution into which enters that suspicious anxiety which is the property of aristocracies, as was demonstrated above [§1025].

1093

Hence, since this is the last form of civil constitution (for it is not possible to understand a constitution in civil nature that would be superior to aristocracies of this sort), this same form must have been the first, and we have demonstrated by so many proofs in this work that this first form was an aristocracy of Fathers, sovereign kings in their own families and united in ruling orders in the earliest cities. For this is the nature of principles, that they give the first things their start and bring the last things to their end. Now, to return to what we have proposed, today in Europe, there are no more than five aristocracies—namely, Venice, Genoa, Lucca in Italy; Ragusa in Dalmatia; and Nuremberg in Germany—and almost all of them lie within narrow borders. However, Christian Europe everywhere shines with such great humanity that there is an abundance of all the goods by which human life is able to flourish, not just those which make ease for the body, but also those which please both the mind and the spirit.   See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.5.

63

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The New Science And all that in the strength of the Christian religion, which teaches a truth so sublime that it accepts into its service the most learned of gentile philosophy and cultivates three languages as its own: Hebrew, the most ancient in the world; Greek, the most refined; and Latin, the most grand. As a result, the Christian religion is also, for human ends, better than all others in the world. For it unifies a wisdom decreed to us with a wisdom reasoned out on the strength of the doctrines culled from the best philosophers and erudition cultivated from the best philologists.

1095

Finally, taking passage over the ocean to the New World, the peoples of the Americas would now be running this course taken by human things if they had not been discovered by the Europeans.

1096

Now, in keeping with this recurrence of human civil things upon which Book Five in particular has reasoned, reflect upon the parallels drawn throughout this whole work on a great number of subjects between earlier and more recent times for nations both ancient and modern. You will have fully articulated the history of legislation and of deeds which is not particular to the Romans or to the Greeks, but one based upon identity in the substance by which it is understood and upon diversity in the modes by which it is articulated;64 you will have the ideal history of eternal legislation based on which the deeds of all nations run their course in their emergence, progress, maturity, decadence, and end, a course run even if it were the case (but it is certainly false) that from one time to the next, infinite worlds came to be from eternity.65 Hence, we could do no less than to give this work the invidious66 title, THE NEW SCIENCE, for it was too great an injustice to defraud it of its right and claim to a universal argument, inasmuch as that argument CONCERNS THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS and has that property which every science perfected in its idea has, a property explicated by Seneca67 in the vastness of the following expression: pusilla res hic mundus est, nisi id, quod quaerit, omnis mundus habeat [“the world is but a paltry thing unless it holds what all the world seeks”].   Here Vico’s language is unmistakably Spinozistic, recalling Ethics 1. See, for example, P15: “except for substance and its modes there is nothing” (Curley, A Spinoza Reader, p. 94); P28: “there is nothing except substance and its modes, and modes are nothing but affections of God’s attributes” (p. 103). 65   An allusion to Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De l’infinito universo et mondi, published in Venice in 1584. 66   Vico’s use of the term invidioso is intriguing, if not puzzling. Some light may be shed by a comparison to Dante, Paradiso 10.136–138: essa è luce etterna di Sigieri, / che, leggendo nel Vico de li Strami, / silogizzò invidïosi veri (“It is the eternal light of Siger, / Who, instructing in the Street of Straw, / demonstrated enviable truths”). See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 24–25. 67  Seneca, Natural Questions 7.30.5–6. Seneca’s Latin actually reads: Pusilla res mundus est, nisi in illo quod quaerat omnis aetas habeat. 64

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Conclusion of the Work

Concerning an Eternal Natural Republic, Best in Each of the Kinds of Republic Ordered by Divine Providence

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Conclusion Therefore, let us conclude this work with Plato,1 who makes a fourth kind of republic in which honorable and good men would be supreme lords: this would be a true, natural republic.

443 1097

Such a republic as Plato understood it was conducted by providence in such a way from the earliest start of the nations that men, stronger because of their gigantic stature, must have wandered over the peaks of mountains as do wild beasts that are stronger by nature, and with the first lightning bolts after the Universal Flood, they took themselves under the earth into caves in the mountains and subjected themselves to one superior in strength, which they imagined as Jove. And being all astonishment, as well as arrogance and savagery, they humbled themselves before a divinity. And one can understand no other counsel than the one in this order of human things, a counsel by which divine providence worked to settle them in their bestial wandering within the great forest of the earth so as to introduce the order of human civil things. For at that time a state was formed out of republics which were, so to speak, monastic, that is, out of solitary sovereigns under the governance of the Best and Greatest One whom they themselves devised, and in whom they believed, from the flashing of those lightning bolts; in the midst of these lightning bolts shone forth to them that true light of a God who governs men. Hence, later all the human advantages given to them, and all the aids tending to their human necessities, they imagined to be gods and, as such, feared and revered them. Consequently, caught between the strong restraint of a terrifying superstition2 and the stinging goad of bestial lust (both of these must have been most violent in such men) because they sensed the heavens in an aspect terrifying to them and, accordingly, impeding them in the practices belonging to Venus, they must have kept their impetus to the bodily movements of lust subject to conatus,3 and thus they started practicing a human freedom which keeps in check the movements of concupiscence and gives them a different direction; since this freedom does not come from the body whence comes concupiscence, it must come from the mind and, consequently, is properly human. Those men turned in the direction of seizing women by force, by nature shy and reluctant, dragging them into their caves and, so as to have intercourse with them, remaining settled with them in continuous, lifetime companionship. And so, with these first couplings that were human—that is, couplings that were chaste and religious—they afforded a beginning to marriage, through which they make certain children with certain wives and so become   Vico’s source for this attribution to Plato seems to be an Italian translation of Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic. The most relevant Platonic text is Republic 8, 544a. For the reference to “supreme lords,” compare Aristotle, Politics 4.8, 1293b. 2   Compare Virgil, Aeneid 6.506, 7.466, 9.60; Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.728. 3   See the note at §340 on conatus. 1

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The New Science c­ ertain fathers, and they founded the families, which they governed with a familial cyclopean power over their children and their wives proper to such savage and arrogant natures, so that with the later rise of the cities, men were found to be well disposed to fearing civil power. Thus did providence institute the order of certain domestic republics in the form of monarchies under fathers who in that state were princes, best in terms of sex, age, and virtue. The fathers in this state—this is what ought to be called the state of nature, the one which is the same as the familial state—must have formed the first natural orders as men of piety, chastity, and fortitude: they had settled on their lands so as to defend themselves and their families, they were no longer able to escape by fleeing, as they had done previously in their wild wanderings, but were required to kill the wild beasts that attacked them; and so as to sustain themselves along with their families, they no longer wandered in search of food, but tamed the lands and sowed grain. All this to save humankind.

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At the end of a long age, there were other men cast forth by the force of their own evil, evil caused for them by that infamous sharing in common of things and women. By that sharing they remained dispersed throughout the plains and the valleys in great numbers, men who were impious because they did not fear God, who were impudent because of intercourse in the manner of the bestial Venus, who were profane because of that same intercourse with their mothers and daughters; they were weak, astray, and alone, and after being pursued over a lifetime by violent men hardened by strife born from the same infamous sharing, they repaired at a run to the asylums of the Fathers, and the Fathers who received them into their protection came with clienteles to increase their familial regimes based on those familial servants. And they developed republics based on orders belonging to those who were naturally superior because of a virtue that was certainly heroic: they were superior because of their piety in worshiping a divinity (although it was divinity multiplied and divided by them, in their small enlightenment, into gods, gods formed in accordance with their varied apprehensions, as was deduced and confirmed by Diodorus Siculus4 and more clearly by Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel5 and by Saint Cyril of Alexandria in his book against Julian the Apostate) and, furnished with this piety, they were superior because of their prudence in taking counsel from the auspices of the gods; they were superior because of their temperance in having intercourse chastely with only one woman taken under divine auspices in continuous, lifetime companionship; they were superior because of their fortitude in killing wild beasts, taming the lands; and they were superior because of their magnanimity in succoring the weak and giving aid to those in danger; these were by nature Herculean republics in which those of piety, wisdom, chastity, fortitude, and magnanimity might defeat the   Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.210b.  Eusebius, De preparatione evangelica 2.2.

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proud and defend the weak, which is excellence with regard to the form of civil governance. However, eventually, the paterfamilias, bequeathed through religion and virtue a greatness by the toils of his clients, abused the legislation pertaining to protection, which made for harsh governance, and departed from the natural order which is the order of justice; at that point, the clients in families rebelled.

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However, because human society is without order, which is as much as to say that, without God, it cannot sustain itself even for a moment, providence naturally led the paterfamilias to unite with those belonging to him into orders against those rebelling and, so as to pacify those rebelling with the first agrarian law in the world, to permit them bonitary domain over the fields while keeping optimal domain—that is, familial sovereignty—for themselves. Hence the first cities came into being upon the regnant orders of nobles. And for want of a natural order conforming to what was then the state of nature—that is, status determined by kind, sex, age, and virtue—providence made a civil order come into being, along with the coming-into-being of these cities (and, first of all, one that is closest to nature, with a view to the nobility of the human species), and human beings could not be deemed noble in this state of things, except by the nobility that stems from human propagation with wives taken under divine auspices. And so, it was through heroism that the nobles reigned over the plebeians who did not covenant in marriage with solemnities of this sort. And since this ended the divine regimes by which families were governed by means of divine auspices and since those heroes were now required to reign on the strength of the form of heroic governance itself, the principal basis of such republics was a religion guarded with those same heroic orders, and it was through this religion that all rights and all claims to civil life belonged only to the heroes. However, because this nobility had become a gift of fortune, providence made for the emergence, among the nobles, of an order of the Fathers of families, who were naturally more worthy on account of their age. And among those in this order, providence made for the coming-into-being of those who, as kings, were more spirited and more hardened, and who ought to be made leaders by the others, so that they might settle into orders so as to resist and to terrorize rebelling clients. However, with the revolving of years, the human mind developed a great deal, and the plebs of the peoples believed otherwise about the emptiness of such heroism and came to understand themselves as having a human nature equal with that of the nobles; hence, they even tried for entrance into the civil orders of the city. Since it would be the case that at the end of that age the people ought to be sovereign, providence permitted that prior to this, the plebs would long strive with the nobles over piety and religion in heroic contests by which the nobles were required to share the auspices with the plebeians—and this tended towards their sharing

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The New Science all the claims of civil life, public and private, because they deemed these to be dependent upon the auspices. And so, it was their very concern for piety and the same affect of religion that led the people to be sovereign in the city; in this respect, the Roman people surpassed all other peoples in the world and, accordingly, were as a people lord over that world. In this fashion, as the natural order merged more and more into those civil orders, the popular republics came into being. In these republics, since everything was reduced to lot or balance, so that neither chance nor fate would reign therein, providence instituted that the order of the census would be the rule for honors. And thus, the industrious and not the idle, the frugal and not the prodigal, the provident and not the shiftless, the magnanimous and not the faint of heart—in a word, those enriched by some virtue or by some image of virtue and not those impoverished by their many knavish vices—were deemed best for governance. It was from such republics of this sort—entire peoples who wish in common for justice and so decree just laws, laws that are just because they are universally good (which Aristotle6 divinely defines as “a will without passion” and thus a heroic will in command of the passions)—that philosophy emerged, with a mandate, because of the form of these republics, not only to form heroes, but also, for the forming of these heroes, to take an interest in the truth. Providence instituted these orders so that, since virtuous actions were no longer done through a religious sensibility as they previously had been done, philosophy would make virtue intelligible in terms of its ideal, and on the strength of reflecting upon this idea, even men who did not have virtue would at least be ashamed of their vices (this alone can keep peoples trained to act badly to their duty). And from the philosophies, providence permitted eloquence to arise, so that by the very form of the popular republics where good laws are decreed, such eloquence should be impassioned by a justice that would inflame the people to decree good laws from these ideals of virtue. This is the eloquence that we resolutely determine to have flourished in Rome in the times of Scipio Africanus, in whose age civil wisdom and military valor both happily established Rome upon the ruins of Carthage as the imperial power of the world, which must have necessarily brought in its train an eloquence hardy and most wise.

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However, even as popular constitutions became corrupted, so too did the philosophies, which fell into skepticism, as learned fools gave themselves over to calumniating the truth. Consequently, there came into being a false eloquence, prepared equally to defend either of the opposing sides of a case. Thus arrived the misuse of eloquence, as in Rome (at a time when citizens were no longer content to make riches the basis of orders, but tried to make them the basis of power) did the tribunes of the plebs, like a furious wind upon the sea, stir up civil wars in their republics and send them into total disorder. And so, they made for a fall from 6

 Aristotle, Politics 3.16, 1287a32: “law is reason without passion.”

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complete liberty into complete tyranny, the worst tyranny of all being anarchy—that is, the unchecked liberty of free peoples. Against this great malady of cities, providence works with one of three great remedies, in keeping with the order of human civil things.

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This is because, first, providence disposes them to discover one who, like Augustus, will arise from within these peoples to establish a monarchy. And, given that all the orders and all the laws previously discovered for liberty are no longer strong enough to regulate them and to keep them in check, he has to take in hand all these orders and all these laws by the force of arms. And, by contrast, the very form of a monarchical constitution restricts the will of the monarch, whose public power [imperio] is otherwise infinite, to stay within the natural order of keeping their peoples content and satisfied with their republics and with their natural liberty. Without the generality of peoples being thus satisfied and content, a monarchical constitution is neither long-lasting nor secure.

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Second, if providence does not find a remedy of this sort from within, it goes in search of one from without, and given that such peoples are so corrupted that they have already become slaves by their nature to their unchecked passions (slaves to luxury, to refinement, to avarice, to envy, to pride, and to ostentation) and given that through the pleasures of a dissolute life they returned to all the vices proper to the basest of slaves (so that they are liars, rogues, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and contrivers), given all this, they become also slaves by the natural law of the gentile peoples,7 which comes from the nature of nations, and come to be subjects of better nations who have conquered them with arms, and because of this are preserved by being reduced to provinces. Indeed, here shine forth the two great lights of the natural order, first, that those who cannot govern themselves are left to be governed by others who can; second, that the world is always governed by those who are better by nature.

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However, if a people is rotting in a final stage of civil malady and neither assents to a native monarch nor comes to be conquered and preserved from without by a better nation, then providence works against this extreme evil with the following extreme remedy. Given that such a people become accustomed to thinking in a fashion no different from beasts— each thinking of his own particular advantage—and given that such a people in the last stage of refinement or, to put it better, arrogance, is inclined to resent and lash out at whatever trifle happens to displease it, in the fashion of wild beasts, thus, no matter how great the throng or press of their bodies, they live like brutal beasts in an extreme solitude of spirit and will, with not even two of them being able to agree, while each of them pursues his own pleasure and caprice. Through all this, and by stubborn factionalism and hopeless civil wars, they go on to make forests out of their cities and lairs of men out of these forests; in this fashion,

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  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.

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The New Science over long centuries of barbarism, they come to corrode the misbegotten subtleties of malice-filled ingenuity, which by the barbarism of reflection8 has turned them into wild beasts more brutal than those in the earlier barbarism of the senses. For the latter reveals a noble savagery, against which another can put up a defense, take flight, or be on guard. But the former, with a base savagery surrounded by blandishments and embraces, plots against the lives and the fortunes of those who are one’s own confidants and friends. Accordingly, when providence works upon peoples given to reflective malice of this sort, with its final remedy they are so stunned and stupefied that they no longer sense ease, refinement, pleasure, and ostentation, but only the necessary advantages of life. And with the small number of men who in the end remain, and with the abundance of things necessary for life itself, they naturally become agreeable. And through a return to that earlier simplicity of the earlier world of peoples, they are religious, truthful, and faithful, and thus there is a return among them of the piety, faith, and truth, which are the natural foundations of justice and the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God.

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With this simple and clear observation made concerning the things pertaining to all of humankind, even if nothing else came down to us from the philosophers, historians, grammarians, and jurists, one could certainly say that this is the great city of the nations founded and governed by God. This is because they have raised to the heavens, with their eternal praises of wise lawgivers, those like Solon, Lycurgus, and the decemvirs, insofar as up until now it has been opined that by their good orders and good laws they founded those three most luminous cities shining forever in their greater beauty and their greater civil virtues—that is, Sparta, Athens, and Rome—and yet these cities were of brief duration and limited extent relative to the universality of peoples. They were ordered with such orders and settled with such laws that, even in their very corruption, they take on those forms of constitution by which alone it is possible everywhere to be preserved and to endure consistently. And should we not declare this to be the counsel of a superhuman wisdom? Should we not say of a counsel that rules and conducts not with the force of laws (whose force Dio said above in the Axioms9 was similar to that of a tyrant) but by making use of the very customs of men, whose customs are so free from any force that in them men pay homage to their own   “The barbarism of reflection” is one of the better-known themes in Vico. It bears comparison both to Rousseau’s claim about the inverse relation of science and virtue and to Nietzsche’s thinking about “decadence.” 9   Axiom 104. The reference is to Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–115 CE), Greek orator, writer, philosopher, and historian of the Roman Empire. The passage Vico cites is from Discourse 76, “On Custom,” though its direct source (as Battistini notes) is almost certainly Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic. 8

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nature (whence the same Dio said that customs are similar to a king in that kings give decrees by pleasing—that is, rules and conducts divinely)? For men, indeed, have themselves made this world of nations: this was the incontestable first principle of this science, given that we despaired of discovering it from the philosophers and philologists. However, this world, without doubt, has issued from a mind which is often different from, at times at odds with, and always superior to the particular ends which those men have proposed, and it has made these restricted ends into means to serve fuller ends which always work to preserve the human race on this earth.

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Men intend to have intercourse in bestial lust and to abandon their offspring, and in the process make the chastity of marriage from which the families arise. Fathers intend to exercise intemperate paternal power over their clients, from which the cities arise. The regnant orders of nobles intend to abuse the lordly liberty they have over the plebeians and end up being enslaved to the laws that make for popular liberty. Free peoples intend to loosen the restraints of their laws and arrive at subjection to monarchs. Monarchs intend to debase their subjects in all the vices of dissoluteness that render monarchs secure and dispose their subjects to endure enslavement to stronger nations. The nations intend to disperse themselves, and those left behind go on to save themselves in their solitude and from there, like a phoenix, rise anew. That which did all this was, indeed, mind, for men did it with understanding. It was not fate, for men did it with choice. It was not chance, for there was a consistency in what men did which gave rise to the same things. Therefore, Epicurus, who is given to chance, is refuted by what men actually do, and with him his followers Hobbes and Machiavelli. Also refuted by what men actually do is Zeno, and with him Spinoza. On the contrary, what men actually do establishes in favor for the political philosophers, whose prince is the divine Plato, who establishes that the human things are ruled by providence.10 Hence, Cicero11 was in the right when he was unable to reason with Atticus about the laws, unless Atticus were to quit being an Epicurean and concede from the first that providence rules the human things. Pufendorf did not give recognition to providence among his hypotheses; Selden merely assumed it; and Grotius set it aside. However, the Roman jurists established it as the first principle of the natural law of the gentile peoples.   The assertion of a superficial opposition that conceals a deeper connection between the Stoics (“fate”) and the Epicureans (“chance”), joined to the claim that Plato and providence constitute an alternative superior to both, is found near the beginning (§12) of the first version of The New Science. Another variation of the theme occurs in the Autobiography. 11   Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21. 10

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The New Science For in this work it has been fully demonstrated that the earliest governance in the world had as its entire form a religion based on providence, and the familial state rested on this religion alone. Passing on from there to heroic civil, or aristocratic, governance, that religion must have been its principal basis of stability. Subsequently advancing on to popular governance, this same religion served as a means for such governance coming to pass. Settling at last upon monarchical governance, this religion must have been the shield of princes. Hence, when religion is lost for a people, nothing remains for them to live in society: no shield for defending themselves; no means for taking counsel; no basis that must support them; no form for them actually to be in the world.

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Consequently, let Bayle see if there can actually be nations in the world without some knowledge of God! And let Polybius see how much truth there may be in his statement that if there were philosophers in the world, there would have been no need in the world for religions.12 For it is by religions alone that the peoples do virtuous works through their senses, by which men are efficaciously moved to perform them, while the maxims reasoned by the philosophers concerning virtue serve only for an eloquence good for kindling the senses to do the duties of the virtues. This is the essential difference between our Christian religion (which is true) and all the others (which are false): in our religion, divine grace makes for virtuous works with a view to an infinite and eternal good that cannot fall under the senses, and as a consequence, it is with a view to this that the mind moves the senses to virtuous actions; whereas in false religions, they have proposed for themselves finite and transitory goods, in this life as in the next, where they expect a blessedness consisting of physical pleasures, and accordingly the senses must draw the mind towards doing virtuous works.

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By contrast, providence (through the order of civil things upon which this book has reasoned) makes itself plainly sensible to us with three sentiments: first, wonder; second, the veneration, which until now all the learned have had for the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients;13 and, third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek after and obtain this wisdom; for there were three actual lights from God’s divinity which gave rise to the three aforementioned beautiful and correct sentiments, which are later perverted by the vanity of the learned, together with the vanity of nations, as we proposed above in the first Axioms14 and which have been reproved throughout this entire book. These correct and beau  On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179. Modern Italian editions end this sentence with an exclamation point, but one does not appear in either the autograph or the edition printed in 1744. 13   On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. 14   Axioms 3 and 4. 12

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tiful sentiments are that all the learned admire, venerate, and desire to be united with the infinite wisdom of God. In sum, on account of everything that has been reasoned upon in this work, one is given finally to conclude that this science brings as inseparable from it the study of piety and that if one is not pious, one cannot in truth be wise.

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