HEROIC SOCIETY
As the Franks, in the compilations of national history made by the Jesuit colleges and other French schools, appear stripped of all their characteristic features and reduced to wise monarchs, pious queens and devoted warriors of the Church, so ancient and primitive history, thanks to the rhetoric and the naïve ideas of scholars, has been painted in brilliant and untrue colours of the same kind as those with which Lebrun or Luca Giordano painted their pompous and theatrical pictures. Kings who devoted themselves to sage counsel in order to aid their subjects while at the same time not diminishing the splendour of their courts and the brilliancy of their happy nobles, philosopher kings such as made Plato sigh for the day when philosophers should rule or kings philosophise; loyal and valiant knights, eager to sacrifice themselves for the common welfare; statesmen who used to accomplish pilgrimages at speed in order to bring back from afar to their waiting citizens laws more wise than their own; good fathers of families, admirable mothers, brave and obedient young men, loving and modest maidens, every one a personification of some virtue or even of all virtues at once, models of human perfection: such are the figures which sanctified by their venerable antiquity fill alike volumes and imaginations. These are the heroes of Greek and Roman history: and all this splendid cloth-of-gold decoration must be torn off and cleared away if we would attempt to discover in the deepest recesses of the memory of mankind the true heroes, the heroes of reality, not of literature, of life, not of the stage: ignorant, superstitious, fierce, selfish, harsh to their families, cruel to their inferiors, avaricious, grasping, and yet, in spite of or even because of these same characteristics of barbarism, heroes: virtuous with the one kind of virtue possible and necessary in primitive times, the virtue of strength, discipline, and a deep and uncompromising sense of religion.
The misrepresentation of the primitive hero as a wise and virtuous member of a civilised society reaches its height, so far as political history is concerned, in the failure to understand the three chief words which sum up the constitution of the state: king, people and freedom. By a misunderstanding of the first, it is believed that the original form of the state was monarchy, the absolute monarchy which rests on the strength of the people and keeps in check the nobles: which is really a late development in history, if not the latest. Into this error had fallen Jean Bodin, whom Vico chose as the object of his polemic. But Bodin, more acute than other political writers, involved himself in a contradiction, because though he accepted the common error he nevertheless, observing the effects of an aristocratic republic in the supposed freedom of ancient Rome, propped up his system by distinguishing between state and government, and asserting that Rome in the earliest period was popular in state but aristocratically governed; and since this prop was too weak to bear the whole weight of the facts he at last confessed that this republic was aristocratic both in government and in state, thus contradicting the whole of his own doctrine as to the necessary succession of states. The truth is that the kings of these earliest periods were at Rome, as at Sparta and elsewhere, not monarchs at all. The fathers, patricians or heroes were monarchical kings only in the period of domestic monarchy, when each family lived separately; but they were kings of a special kind, subject to no one but God, armed with religions of terror and consecrated with the most cruel penalties. On emerging from this first state, when the fathers united into a patrician order, their king was simply one or more of themselves, the mere magistrate of the order. Hence Rome, after expelling the Tarquins by a purely aristocratic revolution, did not change her state at all. She preserved her kings in the shape of two consuls, "annual kings," two aristocratic kings who were "deprived of no single detail of the royal power." The two kings of Sparta had the same character; they were liable like the consuls to be held accountable for their actions and could be condemned to death by the ephors.
As these states had been falsely considered monarchical, so, no less falsely, they had been taken as popular in character. The people referred to in this way does not coincide with, in fact it excludes, the plebs: the "populus" was simply the patrician order, and freedom meant simply the freedom of the patricians, the liberty of the master: and the "patria" was appropriately so called, because it really was res patrum, the property of a few fathers. It is absurd to think that the plebs, a horde of the most worthless labourers treated as slaves, could possess the right of electing the king, and that the fathers confined themselves to merely approving this election in the senate. The relations between fathers and plebeians were quite other than neighbourly peace, mutual trust and hearty co-operation. The heroes, according to a passage of Aristotle, took a solemn oath to be eternal enemies of the plebs: that was the form their democratic spirit took. And the "Roman virtue" which sets before us so many and such glorious examples, gives no example of kindliness to the common people. Brutus, who dedicated his house in the persons of his two sons to the cause of freedom: Scaevola, who terrified Porsena by punishing his own right hand in the fire: the stern Manlius, who executed his own son when he returned victorious through a successful breach of military discipline: Curtius, who leapt in full armour with his horse into the fatal chasm: Decius, who devoted himself for the safety of his army: Fabricius and Curius, who refused the Samnite gold and the kingdom of Pyrrhus: Attilius Regulus, who went to certain death to preserve the sanctity of a Roman's oath: what did these men ever do for the commons, except increase their miseries by war, plunge them deeper into the waters of usury, and immure them more closely in the private dungeons of the nobles where they were flogged bare-backed like the vilest slaves? And woe to any aristocrat who allowed himself the slightest desire to alleviate these miseries! He was promptly accused of sedition and treason and sent to his death; the fate that in Rome befel Manlius Capitolinus, who saved the Capitol from the fires of the Gaul, and yet for his democratic sympathies was thrown from the Tarpeian rock; the fate that came in Sparta, the hero-city of Greece as Rome was the hero-city of the world, to the great-souled king Agis, the Manlius Capitolinus of Lacedaemon, who, for trying to lighten the burden of the unhappy commons by a law abolishing debts and to aid them by another giving them testamentary rights, was strangled by the ephors. The famous "Roman virtue" amazes any one who is obsessed by the modern idea of a virtue consisting in justice and benevolence to all mankind. What virtue could live with such pride? What moderation with such avarice? What mercy with such cruelty? What justice with such inequality?
The heroes treated their own families no less harshly than the plebs. The education of children was stern, rough and cruel. The Spartans, in order that their sons might not fear pain and death, beat them within an inch of their lives in the temple of Diana, so that they often fell dead in agonies of pain beneath their father's blows. In Greece as in Rome it was lawful to kill innocent new-born children, a custom the reverse of the modern, by which the delights which surround little children shape the softer side of human nature. Wives were bought by the dowries of the heroic period, a survival of which was the practice solemnly observed in Rome of marriage "coemptione et farre" (a similar custom is ascribed by Tacitus to the ancient Germans and must be considered universal among barbarous peoples), and were maintained simply as a necessity of nature for the procreation of children and in other respects treated like slaves; as can still be seen in many parts of the old world and almost everywhere in the new. The acquisition of children and the thrift of the wife were simply reckoned as so much profit to the father and husband.
The counterpart of this political and domestic system is found in the ordinary life of the period, which was innocent of all luxury, refinement and ease. Pastimes were arduous, such as wrestling and hunting, to harden body and mind, or else dangerous, like jousting or hunting big game, to accustom men to think lightly of wounds and death. Wars were carried on under a religious aspect and were always therefore extremely bitter. From such wars resulted the system of heroic slavery, by which the conquered were held to be men without God, so that they lost civil and natural liberty at once. Foreigners were considered enemies: the earliest nations were intensely inhospitable. Brigandage and piracy were recognised; and Plutarch says that the heroes considered it a great honour and prize of valour to be called "robbers."
It was, in fine, a society immediately proceeding out of that of the gods, which as we know was the climax of the state of nature. In its passage from the prehistoric age as we should say in modern language into the dawn of history it still retained much of the earlier customs, those customs which Vico thinking of the lonely Polyphemus in his cave called "Cyclopean rules." The age of gold out of which it came, innocent, kindly, humane, tolerant and dutiful, as scholars and poets believed, was in reality one perpetual "superstitious fanaticism," tormented by a continual terror of the gods, to placate whom men used to offer human sacrifice, traces of which remain among the historic Phoenicians, Scyths and Germans, the tribes of America and even the Romans themselves, who afterwards substituted for it the ceremony of throwing straw puppets into the Tiber. Even the sacrifice of children was not unknown; memories of it are preserved in Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia and elsewhere. But in this age of the gods, in spite of or by means of this cruel superstition, were founded the great institutions of humanity; religious cults together with augurial divination, marriage and burial. Weddings, judgment-seats and altars, and the removal of the bodies of the dead from the reach of the malignant air and the wild beasts "taught the human brutes to be pious" as Foscolo says in his Sepolcri, merely versifying Vico's prose. These "Cyclopes" who conjoined and confused in themselves the functions of king, wise man (that is divination) and priest, at first placed their dwellings on the heights of mountains, in places airy and therefore healthy, naturally fortified, and near the perennial springs, where were the nests of eagles and vultures, the birds with which augury dealt. Hence the importance of water and fire, which became symbols of the family; the earliest marriages were solemnised "aqua et igni" between parties who shared a common spring and hearth, and therefore belonged to the same household; so that they must have been between brothers and sisters. The period of the cyclopes was a strongly moral period. It was not true of it that "pleasure and law were one" in the sense fancied by later effeminate poets; for these men, whose minds like those which we may still find among the peasants of to-day were insensible to the refinements of vice, found that alone pleasant which was lawful and that alone lawful which was useful. They were just with the justice of a savage towards his god; continent, for they had made an end of promiscuous intercourse; brave, hard-working and high-spirited, as they were bound to be, surrounded as they were by hardships and perils. It was only later that these primeval groups of humanity descended into the plains and began to till them, and then, from living inland as they did at first, travelled gradually to the sea, learnt the art of navigation and founded colonies.
In this way families or gentes existed before states. States were in fact formed of families grouped into an order of gentes maiores or "ancient noble houses" as they were afterwards called to distinguish them from others added later to the order (for instance at the time of Junius Brutus, to fill the vacancies in the Roman senate after the expulsion of the kings) and called "gentes minores." But these gentes had within themselves an element of differentiation and strife. Families were not composed, as is generally believed owing to the common mistake of giving modern meanings to ancient words, of wives and children alone; but also of slaves, famuli, those who, being less strong and remaining longer in the nomadic state of nature, finally "as sometimes wild animals, driven either by extreme cold or by hunters, to save their life betake themselves to inhabited places" had sought refuge with the stronger, in the fortresses of the fathers. In return for the protection thus granted they tilled the father's land, and were bound and as it were tied to them, and hence called nexi; they followed them and served them, and therefore gained the name of clientes. The relation of slaves to fathers was the second form of human relation, the first being the natural one of matrimony; it constituted the feudal status, which has wrongly been believed peculiar to a certain definite period of barbarism, the Middle Ages, whereas it existed in all heroic societies, and was the eternal feudal principle whence sprang all the republics of the world. As Tacitus says, speaking of the Germans, the chief oath of these slaves and clients was to guard and defend each his own master and to assign to his master's glory his own deeds of valour (suum principem defendere et tueri, sua quoque fortia facta gloriae eius adsignare, praecipuum iuramentum erat); which is one of the severest conditions of the feudal system. Moreover the father's children are rather confused with the slaves than distinguished from them. They are distinguished by their title of liberi, but are identified by their similar position of obedience and lack of separate personality.
The need felt by the fathers of securing themselves against the frequent mutinies of the slaves led to the mutual alliance of fathers, the patrician order and the heroic state. Of this state the slaves constituted the first plebs. They had no citizen's rights, since they were not citizens; no solemnities of marriage, since the auspices were a monopoly of the fathers; nor the right of making wills, since that right had and always kept the political character of a command. They were therefore excluded from the comitia curiata held by the patricians under arms, which survived later for dealing with sacred questions; profane matters being everywhere in the earliest times, at Rome as in Greece and Egypt, considered as sacred. The king of the patricians, whom we have called the magistrate of the order, was thus especially their leader and general in their resistance to the slaves or plebeians.
But the heroes did not provide for the stability of their order by means of forcible resistance alone. Just as, when they abdicated their position of sovereignty in their respective families for one of subordination to the higher sovereignty of the order, they formed a kind of noble or armed feudal system, so to keep their slaves more or less reconciled to obedience they granted them, without admitting them to citizenship, a kind of rustic feudalism. The origin of property is thus explained in a way entirely different on the one hand from the charmingly poetical theory according to which men adorned with all the virtues of the golden age when justice dwelt on earth, foreseeing the disorder that might result from communism, themselves with kindly arbitration marked out the limits of fields, endeavouring not to assign to one nothing but fertile, to another nothing but barren ground; to one a waterless portion, to another one abounding in perennial streams: and different on the other hand from the "philosophical" origin by a voluntary submission to the wise, or that invented by "politician kings" who derived property from violence. The granting of this rustic feudalism, which might be called the first agrarian law, distinguished three kinds of land-tenure: bonitary for the people, quiritary or noble, supported by arms, for the fathers, and eminent, belonging to the whole order. And since the strength of the order rested upon its wealth, it did all in its power to prevent the enrichment of the plebs; and in war—here we see the social motive of the "Roman clemency"—deprived the conquered of their arms only, leaving them in bonitary possession of their lands and imposing upon them a suitable tribute. For the same reason the patricians were very reluctant to go to war, for then the plebeian multitude gained experience of warfare and became dangerous.
The detachment of law from force was slow, and traces of the latter remained in every part of the former. In the heroic republic there were at first no laws providing for the punishment of offences and the restitution of private injuries; hence, failing judiciary laws, arose the need of duels and reprisals, which perpetuated the customs of the age of innocence or of the gods. Poetry and history describe some of these duels, which were armed judgments: for instance, that of Menelaus and Paris under the walls of Troy, and that of the Horatii and Curiatii, between Rome and Alba. It was a plan of divine providence, in order that between barbaric nations of scanty understanding and incapable of listening to reason war should not always beget war: that right and wrong might be to some degree determined by a belief in the favour or disfavour of the gods as the cause of victory or defeat.
These ordeals by battle were accompanied and superseded by ordeals by verbal formulae, used in their religious habit of mind with the most minute and scrupulous exactitude and with care not to alter a single letter (religio verborum). Horatius, who by killing his sister fell under the law "horrendi carminis," could never have been acquitted by the decemvirs, however free from blame they thought him; and the people acquitted him, says Livy, "more through admiration of his valour than the justice of his cause" (magis admiratione virtutis quant iure causae). In later days Roman law still retained this character of verbal precision to such a degree that it forms the crux of several of Plautus's comedies, in which panders are at the mercy of enamoured young men who have led them to violate some legal formula.
The private law of this society corresponded closely with its economic constitution. It was an entirely natural society, confined to the necessaries of life, and did not use money; hence the law knew nothing of contracts formed, according to the law of a later period, by mere consent. All obligations were ratified by giving the hand; the first buying and selling was barter; the rent of a house consisted in a mortgage on the soil for building it, the rent of land in planting it; companies and credit were unknown.
The material character of the first contracts and the forcible character of early legal processes were gradually modified as time went on, and became symbolic. As the fiction of force in marriage-rites recalled the actual force with which the giants dragged the first women into caves, so no less the ceremonies of mancipatio, usucapio and vengeance had formerly been acts really performed. Mancipatio was performed as we said with the actual hand, that is with real force; for instance, in occupation, the original source of all rights of possession; usucapio by the permanent planting of the body upon the thing possessed; vengeance was originally a duel or a "conditio," private retaliation. Then they became ceremonies or fictions: mancipatio became a civil transference with solemn acts and phrases (si quis nexum faciet mancipiumque uti lingua nuncupassit ita ius esto—"If any one makes a thing bond to him and his possession, let the law be so that he publish it with his tongue"); usucapio a tenure which is supposed to last as long as life; retaliation a series of personal actions accompanied by a solemn declaration of them to the debtor. There were worn in the forum as many masks as there were legal personalities, and under the "person" or mask of a paterfamilias were hidden all the children and all the slaves of the house. Instead of abstract forms, which were not yet thought of, living bodily forms were used. Heredity for instance was invented as mistress of hereditary property, and imagined to exist completely in every particular piece of inherited goods; the idea of indivisible right again, was materialised in the glebe or clod of earth presented to the judge with the formula "hunc fundum" This ancient jurisprudence was throughout poetical; its fictions turned facts into falsehoods and falsehoods into facts, made the unborn live, the living dead, and the dead to survive in their posterity. It created numbers of empty legal personalities without subjects (iura imaginaria), rights invented by the imagination; and the formulae in which the laws were expressed were called because of their strict rhythm of such and so many words "verses"—carmina. The fragments of the Twelve Tables, if carefully considered, end their sentences for the most part in an Adonian verse, which is ultimately a fragment of the hexameter metre; and Cicero, realising this, begins his "Laws" with the sentence Deos caste adeunto pietatem adhibento. Cicero also tells us that the Roman boys used to sing the laws of the twelve tables "like a regular song" (tanquam necessarium carmen), and Aelian says the same of the Cretan children and the laws of Minos. The Egyptian laws according to one tradition were "poems of the goddess Isis," and those given by Lycurgus to the Spartans and by Draco to the Athenians were formulated in verse. The whole of the ancient Roman law was a "serious poem," or as Vico says elsewhere a "kind of Roman drama," poema quoddam dramaticum Romanum, performed by the Romans in the forum; and ancient jurisprudence was a "severe poetry."
This poetic atmosphere in heroic society and this metrical tendency in its language are facts borne out by many witnesses and proofs, by the observations and conjectures of scholars and by the narrations of travellers and missionaries. Hebraists are divided upon the question whether Hebrew poetry is metrical or rhythmical; but Josephus, Origen and Eusebius are in favour of metre, and St. Jerome asserts that a great part of the book of Job is in hexameter verse. The Arabs, who had no knowledge of writing, preserved their language down to the time when they overran the eastern provinces of the Greek empire by handing on the memory of their national poems. The Egyptians wrote the lives of the dead in verse; the Persians and Chinese committed to verse their earliest history, as also, according to Tacitus, the Germans and, according to Justus Lipsius, the Americans. And since of these two last nations the former was only known to the Romans late in their history and the latter to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, there is good reason to suppose that the same is true of all other barbaric nations ancient and modern.
The earliest metre, found not only in Greece but in Assyria, Phoenicia and Egypt, was the heroic or hexameter. Owing to the slowness of thought and the difficulties of pronunciation it was bound at first to have a spondaic character (hence the final foot in the line was always a spondee) and only later when mind and tongue became more active did it admit the dactyl. Then, when this activity still further increased, arose the iambic (pede praesto as Horace calls it) which approximates most nearly to prose; so much so, indeed, that the early prose writers before Gorgias practically used the iambic metre of poetry, and prose frequently passed over into iambic verse. Tragedy was composed in iambics, a metre which is naturally adapted to it, produced as it was to give expression to wrath, according to the story which makes Archilochus invent it to express his anger against Lycambus; and if comedy afterwards adopted the same metre, it was only by the "meaningless following of example," not because the iambic metre was naturally suited to it as it was to tragedy.
The primitive language of these societies was poetical not only through its use of metre but also by being composed through and through of lively metaphors, vivid fancies, striking resemblances, apt comparisons, expressions by means of cause or effect, whole or part, elliptic or pleonastic figures of speech, onomatopoeisms or imitations of sounds by words, abbreviations, compound words, minute circumlocutions, characteristic epithets, contortions in syntax and episodes. All these are ways of making oneself understood devised by men ignorant of the precise words required, or of a word, if in conversation, understood by both parties. The episode is characteristic of women and peasants, who are unable to select what they need and omit what is alien to their subject; contorted language is the result of inability to express oneself directly, or of being prevented from doing so, as may be seen in the case of irascible or contemptuous persons, who make use of the nominative and oblique cases but do not utter verbs. The very words of these languages taken one by one reveal in the frequency of their diphthongs a trace of the song out of which speech arose; and this abundance of diphthongs still remains in the Greek and French languages, which passed rapidly and prematurely from the age of spontaneity to that of reflection. The German language would certainly offer a rich store of heroic forms, with its abundance of compound words which so happily translate those of Greek, and its syntax which exceeds Latin in complexity as Latin does Greek. If German scholars, says Vico several times with a wistful glance at a field of study closed to himself, would use the principles of the New Science in research upon the origins of their language, they would certainly make wonderful discoveries.
The conception of the universe prevalent among the men of this period, and the histories of themselves which they related, of their origins, warfare and fortunes, were also poetical, or rather mythical. It was even the case as we have seen that their conceptions in the sphere of social history preceded those of a cosmological, physical or psychological character. By a rigid application of this principle Vico developed his doctrine of "natural theogony," arising naturally in the imagination on the occasion of certain human needs and utilities: the genesis of the twelve greater Gods, Di maiores, that is to say, the gods invented by the gentes maiores and, to a great extent, brought by them to the foundation of the state. Jupiter or the sky, with his language of lightning, was the author of the first laws of the family; Juno symbolised marriage, Diana matrimonial chastity, Apollo the light of civilisation; Vulcan, Saturn and Cybele were respectively the fire with which the forests were burnt to make clearings, the sowing of seed and the tilling of land; Mars symbolised the warfare of the heroes "pro aris et focis," and Venus civilised beauty. In addition to this celestial Venus arose a plebeian Venus to whom was given the attribute of doves; not as typifying the passion of love, but because they were "degeneres" common birds in comparison with the eagle. A double signification, patrician and plebeian, was given in the same way to Vulcan and Mars. The stormy relations of the fathers with the slaves, the struggles and penalties referred to in the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus, begin to be reflected in the twelve greater gods. Hercules, struggling with Antaeus, signifies the nobles of the heroic cities, and Antaeus the mutinied slaves led back into the primitive cities on the mountain-tops (Antaeus lifted up into the air) and overcome and bound down to the earth, that is to say forced back to their servile labour. The birth of the tenth divinity, Minerva, expresses the weakening and diminution of the heroic power, since the plebeian Vulcan (the mutinied slaves) strikes the head of Jupiter with an axe, the tool of a servile art. Mercury represents the granting of bonitary rights to the plebs and the maintenance of quiritary rights by the fathers. The last of the twelve deities, Neptune, arose when the peoples descended to the sea-coast; and the legends of Minos, the Argonauts, the Trojan war, the return of Ulysses, Europa and the bull, the Minotaur, Perseus and Theseus refer to colonisation and piracy. The mythological interpretation of history does not cease with the foundation of states. The founders of civilisation, Zoroaster and Mercurius Trimegistus, Orpheus and Confucius, even if they are not strictly gods, are at least poetical characters. Aesop is typical of the "socii" or slaves of the heroes and hence is represented as ugly, that is, devoid of civilised beauty (honestas); and his fable of the lions' society shows to perfection the real relation of the heroes to their slaves, in which the latter share the toils, but not the spoils. Draco, of whom Greek historians tell us nothing but that he imposed a stern code of laws, symbolises the cruelty of the heroes to their slaves. Solon was either a party-leader of the Athenian plebs, or else a simple personification of the plebs itself, considered from the point of view of its vengeance. In the history of Rome we find poetical figures in Romulus, to whom were ascribed all the laws of the orders; in Numa, author of the laws dealing with sacred matters and religious ceremonies; in Tullus Hostilius, who organised and legislated for the military system; in Servius Tullius the author of the census (which has been imagined, contrary to all historical truth, the foundation of a popular republic, whereas it was really the foundation of an aristocratic); and in Tarquinius Priscus, who invented insignia of rank and military uniforms; lastly, the Decemvirs and the Twelve Tables are turned into poetical figures, since to these events and persons were ascribed a great number of laws favourable to liberty and really dating from a later period.
Thus, before philosophers began to elaborate the system of myths by creating new ones when they believed they were interpreting the old (Plato for instance introduced into the myth of Jupiter the idea of the omnipresent and all-pervading ether, his own invention, and other philosophers saw in the birth of Minerva from the head of Jupiter a description of the divine wisdom, or in Chaos and Orcus the confused mass of the universal seeds of nature and the primitive matter of the world), poet-theologians had expressed their ideas in mythology, ideas in which the metaphysical and physical elements were very small, but containing a large nucleus of human and political fact. The Chaos of these theologian-poets was the confusion of human seed during the period of brutal community of women; it was confused because devoid of human regulation, obscure because devoid of the light of civilisation. The misshapen monster Orcus devoured everything because men in this community had no human shape, and were absolved by the void, because through the impossibility of knowing their offspring they left no trace of themselves behind. The four elements of the world corresponded to the four elements of social life: the air where Jupiter lightened, the water of the perennial springs, the fire that burnt the forests, and the earth, the scene of man's labours. Being and subsisting were conceived the former as the act of eating (peasants still say of a sick man, meaning that he is not dead yet, that he is "still eating") and the latter as "standing upon one's feet." The composition of the body was analysed into solids and liquids, that of the soul into air: generation into the act of "concipere" or "concapere," that is, taking hold of neighbouring material bodies, overcoming their resistance and adapting and assimilating them to one's own nature: and all the internal functions of the soul were ascribed to the head, the breast or the heart.
Cosmographical ideas were narrow, confined as they were to the life of these societies. The first heaven was placed no farther off than the tops of the mountains, where the giants saw the lightning play: the lower world was no deeper than a ditch, and was only by degrees enlarged and sunk into the valleys as opposed to the sky, that is to say to the mountain-tops; the earth was identified with the limits of the cultivated fields. In the course of time the sky, the object of contemplation from which auguries were drawn, was lifted to a greater height, and with it the gods and heroes who were attached to the planets and constellations; and thus arose poetical astronomy. Geographical knowledge extended no farther than the country inhabited by each nation; and this is the reason why peoples travelling into foreign and distant lands gave to the new cities and to the mountains, hills, passes, islands and promontories the same names which were borne by those of their native land. Asia or India was at first for the Greeks the eastern part of Greece itself, Europe or Hesperia its western, and Thrace or Scythia its northern district.
But we will not enter into further details; indeed we have omitted much already. It is not the detail that gives its value to Vico's picture of the heroic age. His etymologies, his mythical interpretations, the genesis and chronological succession of his gods, the genesis and succession of his phonetic, metrical and stylistic forms—each, taken by itself, may be contested; but taken as a whole they are rich with a truth which transcends the single propositions. This truth is the mighty effort to recall a form of humanity and society still doubtless living in surviving records and monuments, still recognisable here and there in a fragmentary form in various parts of the modern world; but for centuries, even in Vico's days, buried beneath a mass of irrelevant fancies, conventional types, and prejudices of every kind, which prevented its true characteristics from appearing.