The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

HOMER AND PRIMITIVE POETRY

The poet of primitive society was Homer: and if such was his character, he could not have enjoyed the profound wisdom, the delicate and lofty sense of morality, and the supreme knowledge of all the sublimest arts and sciences which ancient philosophers and writers fancied him to possess, and the common opinion of literary men and critics still attributed to him in the seventeenth century.

What an extravagant philosopher Homer would have been, if he had indeed been a philosopher: how miserably, had he set out to do so, would he have organised Greek civilisation! His Jupiter indicates force, brute force, as the standard of the respect due to him; his Minerva despoils Venus, knocks Mars down with a stone, strikes Diana and is in turn insulted by Mars; and both Venus and Mars are wounded by Diomed, a mere mortal. The heroes Achilles and Agamemnon exchange insults such as would hardly be used by servants in a comedy to-day: they call each other "dogs" and quarrel in the most uncivil manner for the possession of Briseis and Chryseis. Ferocious in their customs, they leave the bodies of their enemies to dogs and crows: intemperate in their pleasures, they drink to excess. Lofty intelligence, kindness of heart, balance of mind may be sought in vain in all their actions and sentiments. The fact is, these heroes show themselves men of the scantiest understanding, the wildest imagination, the most violent passions; boorish, barbarous, intractable, fierce, arrogant, defiant and obstinate in their resolves and at the same time flighty in the extreme, at the mercy of any new object that presents itself to their eyes. Here again, the most striking parallel may be found in the psychology of the peasant, who as may be seen every day embraces any reasonable motive proposed to him but owing to the weakness of his intellect soon abandons the idea he has been persuaded to adopt and slips naturally back to his first intention. In the same way the Homeric heroes sometimes acquiesce in the first word of opposition offered to them; sometimes at a sudden mournful recollection they burst into bitter lamentation in the midst of their anger: or else, if while in the greatest misery they meet with something pleasant, like Ulysses at the feast of Alcinous, they lose all memory of their sorrows and become completely cheerful; or else, when in a calm and peaceful state of mind, they take offence at a harmless word and flying into a blind passion threaten the speaker with a cruel death. Even the virtues which they possess in an eminent degree, their frankness, vigour, magnanimity and generosity, are tinged with this same character of unreflective passion.

The hero of heroes, Achilles, who bears on his shoulders the destinies of Troy, owing to a private wrong he had received from Agamemnon—a grave wrong, but an insufficient motive for the ruin of his country and his whole nation—condemned all the Greeks to defeat and destruction at the hands of Hector; and he only determined to aid them in order to assuage the personal grief caused by Hector's slaying his friend Patroclus. If only this extreme aloofness had been due to passion and jealousy! But though when Agamemnon deprived him of Briseis he made enough noise to fill heaven and earth and supply the plot of the entire Iliad, yet he never in the whole course of the poem shows a spark of real love: just as Menelaus mustered the whole of Greece against Troy to avenge the rape of Helen but never suffers the least pang of jealousy against Paris who is enjoying her. So devoid is Achilles of common humanity, that when Hector wishes to arrange that the victor in the fight shall bury the vanquished, he forgets that they are equals in rank and that death levels all, and savagely answers: "When have men ever made a truce with lions, and when have wolves and lambs had the same wish?" and he adds, "If I slay thee, I will drag thee bound naked to my chariot round the walls of Troy three days" (as he actually did in the sequel) and finally, "I will give thee to my hounds to devour." And he would have carried out his threat, had not the unhappy father Priam come to him to ransom the corpse. But even in this deeply-moving interview, when he has received Priam in his tent after the latter has, escorted by Mercury, passed alone through the midst of the Greek camp, when he has welcomed him to his table, at a single involuntary word that falls from the lips of the unhappy old man as he bewails the loss of so valiant a son Achilles forgets the sacred law of hospitality; and, ignoring the full and complete trust which Priam had placed in him, untouched by the terrible misfortunes of such a king, by the respect due to a father and the veneration due to so old a man, without reflecting on the reversal of his fortunes, of all things the most apt to excite pity, flies into a bestial rage and shouts a threat that he "will cut off his head"! Death itself does not end his anger at the loss of Briseis, were it not that the beautiful and unhappy princess Polyxena, daughter of the once rich and powerful Priam and now a wretched slave, is sacrificed on his tomb, that the shade glutted with revenge may drink the last drop of her innocent blood; and in the lower world, when Ulysses asks him what state he prefers, Achilles answers that he "would rather be the commonest slave, but alive"! Such is the hero whom Homer adorns with the permanent epithet of "without reproach" (ἀμύμων) and celebrates in the hearing of Greece as a pattern of heroic virtue. Such a hero, whose reasoning powers are concentrated in his spear-point, can only be classed with those self-satisfied persons of whom we say nowadays that they are too fine to breathe the common air.

If Homer's greatest characters are so discordant with our civilised nature, the similes which he uses are drawn from savage beasts and wild nature generally. If the life which he represents—a life of children in its intellectual futility, of women in its imaginative vigour, and of headstrong youths in the violence of its passion—and the tales of which the Odyssey is full, tales worthy of an old woman engaged in amusing children, prevent our attributing any esoteric wisdom to Homer, the striking success of these wild similes is certainly not characteristic of a mind tamed and civilised by philosophy of any sort. Nor could that truculent and savage style in which he describes the various sanguinary battles, the diverse and extravagantly bloodthirsty species of butchery which especially go to make the sublimity of the Iliad, have originated in a mind humanised and softened by philosophy.

But who was Homer? What opinions as to him can we find in ancient writers, and what facts can we draw from his poems? An unprejudiced reader of the Iliad and Odyssey is at every step aware of and baffled by extravagant and inconsistent statements. The life portrayed is inconsistent: it takes us now here, now there, over a long period of time; on the one hand we find Achilles the hero of force, on the other Ulysses the hero of wisdom: on the one hand, cruelty, barbarism, ferocity and brutality, on the other the luxury of Alcinous, the delights of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens and the pastimes of suitors who tempt and even win over the chaste Penelope. On the one hand we are shown boorish and uncivilised manners, on the other jewels, magnificent clothing, exquisite foods and the arts of sculpture in bas-relief and metal-founding; on the one hand a strictly heroic society, on the other some signs of popular liberty. This delicate life fits ill with the savage and cruel life which especially in the Iliad is ascribed to the same heroes at the same time. To regard them thus as contemporaneous is an impossibility. From the customs of the Trojan period we have leapt abruptly into those of the time of Numa, to such an extent that "ne placidis coeant inmitia" we are compelled to suppose that the two poems were the work of many hands extending over many ages. The geographical allusions are equally inconsistent. These, no less, bring us into varied and distant physical surroundings. The scene of the Iliad lies to the east of Greece, inclining to the northward: that of the Odyssey in the west, inclining to the southward. The language, again, is inconsistent. The confusion of dialects persists in spite of the revision of Aristarchus, and has been explained by the most extraordinary hypotheses, such as the theory that Homer drew the elements of his vocabulary from all the various Greek nationalities.

Passing from the poems to the traditions of their author, the lives of Homer by Herodotus (if Herodotus really wrote it) and Plutarch are valueless. The most elementary facts about Homer are unknown: it is precisely concerning the man whom they considered the greatest luminary of Greece that the ancients leave us most completely in the dark. We know neither Homer's date nor his birthplace: each one of the Greek peoples claimed him as their citizen. It is said indeed that he was poor and blind, but it is just these details which excite our suspicion, as our laughter is aroused by the argument of Longinus which makes the Iliad the work of his youth and the Odyssey that of his old age. It would be indeed remarkable if such knowledge were current concerning a man in whose case the two trifling details of time and place were unknown! Above all, criticism must ask how a single man could ever have composed two poems of such a length at a time when writing was not in existence: since the three inscriptions of heroic age, one of Amphitryon, another of Hippocoön and a third of Laomedon mentioned with an excess of good faith by Vossius are mere forgeries like those made by the strikers of false coins.

All these considerations led Vico to suspect that Homer himself was not a real person but one of those poetic characters to whom the ancient world ascribed long series of actions, works and events. If we try to conceive the Homeric poems not as the work of an individual but as two great storehouses of the manners and customs of earliest Greece, containing the history of its natural law and heroic period; if instead of a single poet we imagine a whole nation of poets, and instead of a single act of creation, a national poetry developing in the course of centuries, everything falls into its place and finds an explanation. The extravagance of the legends is explained by the fact that the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey falls in the third period of their existence. In the hands of the theological poets they were true and severe, by the heroic poets they were altered and corrupted, and in this corrupt state they were incorporated in the two poems. The variety of customs is explained if we consider the various periods of composition, and so also the "young Homer" and "old Homer," which are symbolic of the earlier and later periods of primitive Greece. The diversity of sites assigned to his birth and death and the variety of his dialects are accounted for by the fact that different peoples produced the lays. Finally, it is explained why every Greek people claimed him as a citizen, just because these peoples were themselves Homer; and why he was called blind and a beggar, because such were as a rule the singers who went about from fair to fair reciting their tales. Thus in order to be rightly understood Homer must lose himself in the crowd of Greek peoples and be considered an idea or heroic character; a type of the Greeks in so far as they narrated tales in ballad form. Thus facts which had only caused confusion and lacked plausibility in Homer as then understood became natural and necessary elements of the Homer now rediscovered. Above all, this latter Homer deserves the high praise of being the first of all historians of Greece known to us. In Homer we have a proof of the original identity of history and poetry, and a confirmation of Strabo's assertion that before Herodotus, before even Hecataeus of Miletus, the history of the Greek peoples was written by their poets. In two golden passages of the Odyssey a man is praised for having told a story well and said to have "told it as a musician and a singer."

Vico did not undertake a detailed investigation into the way in which the Homeric poems were elaborated. He seems however to incline towards two chief poet-authors, one, a native of the east of Greece, towards the north, for the Iliad, the other for the Odyssey, a native of the west towards the south: and by the title "Homer" he understands a composer and compiler of legends. But on the other hand, owing to the purely ideal meaning which this name has for him, we must not rule out the interpretation that the two Homers in their turn may be two streams of poetry and two groups of peoples or of popular singers. The historic figures whom Vico finds before him are the rhapsodes, men of the people who wandered independently about the fairs and festivals of the Greek cities reciting the songs of Homer. From the time of their primitive composition long ages elapsed before the Pisistratidae had them divided and arranged into two groups, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a fact which shows clearly that in their time only a confused mass of material was to be found, and decreed that they should henceforth be sung by the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea.

It is however certainly not in the resolution, materially understood, of the individual Homer into a myth or poetic character that the importance of Vico's theory lies: and the same is perhaps the case with its truth. From the inconsistencies observed by him, and not always accurately observed (which are moreover unimportant, since the inaccuracies he notes might easily be balanced by the correct statements he omits), there was no strictly logical passage to the denial of the existence of an individual Homer, the principal author of one or both poems. These inconsistencies might serve to demonstrate that the poet or poets were working upon a rich fund of traditional material, of origin very various both as to time and place, and not regularly stratified according to origin, but having its strata confused and contorted. One or more poets, or even many poets and an able compiler of their lays, or a society of able compilers: these and similar hypotheses might equally well have been suggested, as happened later, and supported, as was later the case, by arguments neither more nor less cogent, because incapable of documentary proof. But underlying this resolution of Homer into a poetic character, as it underlay other resolutions made or attempted by Vico, lay the discovery of the long and laborious historical genesis through which the matter of these poems had passed, so that in this sense they might really be called a product of collaboration on the part of the whole Greek people. The substitution of a nation of Homers for a single Homer was only another case of mythology constructed according to the principles discovered by Vico himself: mythology which must be retranslated into scientific prose. In the same way Vico's analysis of the customs described in the Homeric poems may be, and is, not only here and there adulterated with a few inaccuracies, but is on the whole exaggerated and one-sided. Still, this analysis taken as a whole was a great advance and opened new paths to Homeric criticism. How could the stubborn illusion of the noble Homeric hero, a great lord and a good ruler, a shining example of all civil, military and domestic virtues, be dispelled except by setting against it the picture of a boorish Achilles, full of elemental passions, violent, stubborn, unreasoning, quick to a generous impulse but no less quick to outbursts of brutal wrath?