One powerful method of investigation in Vico's hands is the comparative method, consisting in the comparison of better-known processes of development with those known imperfectly or in parts only, and the consequent reconstruction of the latter on the basis of the former. So for instance the principle of heroism, revealed by evidence found in Roman history, helps to explain the legendary history of the Greeks, to supply the deficiencies of that of Egypt and to shed light on the unknown history of all other nations of antiquity. Without denying the fact of transmission from one nation to another, Vico poured scorn upon the abuse of this conception, and minimised its value in the case of primitive societies: using in its place the idea of spontaneous development and endeavouring to reconstruct the process by the comparative method. But he took this method in a very broad sense, and made use in it of materials drawn from the most widely varying countries and periods. To explain for example how the thundering sky suggested to primitive man the idea of a god, he mentions the fact that the natives of America, when first they heard the noise and recognised the deadly effects of firearms in the hands of the Spaniards, believed them to be gods: the rhapsodists of the Homeric poems reminded him of the singers on the quay at Naples with their ballads of Roland and the paladins: the transformations or metamorphoses described by the ancient poets resembled the tales of goblins and fairies still told by mothers to amuse little children, or the widely-scattered mediaeval legends of the magician Merlin: he traces the mythology of the hearth down to the custom of the log which in Boccaccio's time at Florence the head of the family used to light upon the hearth at the new year, sprinkling incense and wine on it, and the Christmas-eve log among the lower classes at Naples; not to mention the custom in the Neapolitan kingdom of counting families by "hearths." He brought the serpent Python and all other mythical serpents into relation with the viper of the Visconti "che i milanesi accampa" ("which calls to arms the Milanese") and the hieroglyphic script with the "rébus de Picardie" used in the north of France.
It would be useless to look in earlier or contemporary philology for clear general precedents for these principles, negative and positive, established by Vico for the history of obscure and legendary periods. They are too closely bound up with and essential to his whole philosophical thought ever to have originated apart from this thought itself. The rude fragments of ancient Roman laws, customs and formulae, the Homeric poems, the words of the Latin language, when examined with unprejudiced eyes—the power which enables a man of genius to see things without distortion—and worked over by a mind ready to accept them in their true nature, were bound to excite in Vico, compared with the learned but colourless or falsely-coloured historical research of his day, a rebellion and upheaval like that which took place a century later in the mind of Augustin Thierry when he saw, depicted in the pages of Chateaubriand's poetical prose, Pharamond and his Franks, with their unrestrained movements, their rude and savage arms, their terrible war-cries and their barbaric songs.
[CHAPTER XV]
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.