Vico's progress in artistic appreciation of the Homeric poetry was no less marked. The recognition that a sound and rational philosophy was not to be found in the poet Homer would, in the mouth of any other critic of the time, have amounted to a slur on the poet: as expressed by Vico and as the consequence of his new aesthetic ideas it was a compliment. The errors which intellectualism and neo-classical criticism discovered in Homer led the critics to repeat freely the saying of Horace that "good Homer nods at times": whereas Vico on the contrary exclaims "if he had not nodded so often he would never have been good!" (nisi ita saepe dormitasset, nunquam bonus fuisset Homerus). Homer was a great poet precisely because he was not a philosopher. He had a retentive memory, a strong imagination and a sublime mind; and neither the philosophies nor the arts of poetry and criticism which came after him could ever produce a poet at all like him. He was the only poet who could conceive heroic characters: his comparisons are incomparable, his speeches sublime, expressive of the individuality of the speaker, and created by the power of a vivid imagination: his diction is clear and splendid, his language composed entirely of similes, images and comparisons, and has none of those ideas of genus and species by which things are intellectually defined. He is not delicate but grand, for delicacy is a small virtue and grandeur naturally despises small things: or even, just as a great and rushing torrent cannot help the turbidness of its water, and must perforce sweep rocks and trees with it in the violence of its course, so too in Homer we may find things of no value. But the torrent with all its impurities sweeps on its way superb and impetuous; and Homer in spite of and partly because of his ruggedness is for ever the father and prince of all sublime poets.
This new departure in Homeric criticism brought with it implicitly a complete revolution in the history of ancient literature. But on this subject Vico made only a few scattered remarks. He was no specialist: he did not write from a specialist's point of view, and too often when documentary evidence and thought were unable to solve a difficulty he solved it by means of his fancy, a faculty which was however in his case radiant with gleams of insight. Thus, the cyclic poets were not so called because of the circle of listeners in the centre of which they declaimed their poems, like the "Rinaldi" or ballad-singers whom Vico saw on the quay at Naples, and this circle had no connexion with the vilem patulumque orbem of Horace: but the observation that they differed little from these ballad-singers was sound. In the same way, we need not linger on his guesses at the dates of Homer and Hesiod, nor need we take literally his division of lyric poetry into three periods, namely those respectively of religious hymns, funeral chants for dead heroes and melic lyrics or "musical airs," the last including Pindar, and admired, flourishing as it did at the epoch of the "pompous virtue" of Greece, at the Olympic games where these poets sang. But still Vico has here put his finger on the difference between primitive and refined or cultured lyric poetry. The origin of tragedy he ascribes to the dithyramb or dramatic satire, of which no example has come down to us, and in rural customs compared by him to those which were still in evidence during his own lifetime in Campania at vintage season; and he notes the relation between tragedy and the epic. Tragedy had its rude beginnings at a time when the heroic spirit was already dead: it perfected itself by becoming subordinate to the Homeric poetry, deriving its inspiration from Homeric characters and avoiding original ones. The old comedy was closely related to tragedy. Like the latter it was derived from a chorus, and it preserved its archaic character in that it displayed living persons and real actions. The new comedy on the other hand was marked off by a profound change of spirit. Here the effects of philosophy were directly felt. Imaginative genera were superseded by intelligible and rational universals: and Menander and the other poets of the new comedy, living in the most humane period of Greek history, took their intelligible genera from human life and depicted them in their comedies, over which one feels that the breath of Socratic philosophy has passed. The persons of the new comedy were cast in a mould, and were not public but private characters: and as the chorus represents the public and argues about public affairs only, there is no room for it in the new comedy. About this time began the practice of inserting idealised heroes of perfect morals into poetry. Aristotle, remembering the strongly individualised characters of Homer, still maintained as a principle of poetic composition that the heroes of tragedy should be neither very good nor very bad, but rather a mixture of great virtues and great faults. But the poets of the late period, making use of the idea originated by philosophers, formed a "heroism of virtue": a heroism which may be called "gallant." Accordingly they either invented entirely new legends or else used old legends which had originally presented themselves to the founders of the nation in an appropriately stern and severe form, but softened them by adapting them to the softening of manners. Equally gallant is the "shepherd" of the Greek Bucolic poets, Bion and Moschus, "wasting away with the most delicate love," He makes the general observation on Greek and Latin literature, that the boundary between verse and prose was so strictly guarded on both sides that no ancient writer ever composed both orations and poems—a rule to which perhaps the only exception is the wretched verses (ridenda poemata) of Cicero: and Vico tried to explain this fact by the democratic habits which compelled orators studiously to avoid the cultivation of lofty and fanciful modes of expression, which would have puzzled the people and hindered their full and clear comprehension of the point at issue.
Vico does not treat Roman literature so fully as Greek, which provided him with much more primitive documents. But he detected certain analogies between the origins of Latin and Greek literature. The first poets and authors in the Latin language were the Salii, sacred poets; and this was natural in the beginning of a nation's culture; for in the primitive religious period the gods are the only object of praise. And just as the earliest fragments of Latin known to us, the remains of the hymns of the Salii, give an impression of hexameter verse, so the same metre is felt in the records of Romans who celebrated triumphs, such as the "duello magno dirimendo, regibus subiugandis" of Lucius Aemilius Regillus and the "fudit fugat prosternit maximas legiones" of Acilius Glabrio. The first Roman poets, too, sang true stories: this was the case with Livius Andronicus and his Romanid containing the annals of early Rome, and with Naevius, and later Ennius, who described the Punic wars. Satire also was levelled against real and for the most part notorious persons. The Romans however differed from the Greeks in advancing with a more measured step and not making the swift and abrupt transition from barbarism to effeminacy: so that they entirely lost the history of their gods (which Varro called the "obscure period" of Rome) and preserved their heroic history, extending down to the Publilian and Petelian laws, in common speech only. In its greatest manifestations the literature of Rome is the work of cultivated poets like Virgil, whom Vico admires for his profound knowledge of heroic antiquity, but says of him that so far as poetical power is concerned he is not to be compared with Homer; a verdict agreeing with that of Plutarch and Longinus, but in opposition to the view of neo-classical criticism. Another example of cultivated and reflective poetry is to be found in Horace, who like Pindar in the pompous period of Greece composed his odes at the most "ostentatious" epoch of Roman history, the Augustan age.
The Biblical literature would have given Vico materials of great value for the study of primitive poetry; and he actually did move a few steps towards it when he observed that poetry was the primitive language of all nations "including the Hebrews"; and that Moses made no use of the esoteric wisdom of the Egyptian priests and wrote his history "in a style which has much in common with that of Homer and often surpasses him in sublimity of expression." But Vico drops the subject at once, as if he instinctively guessed what might come of treating the Pentateuch as he had done the Iliad, and Moses like Homer. So he prefers to wax enthusiastic over the phrase in which God describes himself to Moses "Ego sum qui sum," to which he ascribes a metaphysical profundity only attained by the Greeks when Plato conceived God as to on, and unknown to the Latins down to the latest period, for the word ens is not pure Latin but belongs to debased Latin. Or he contents himself with emphatically pointing out that at a time when Greece was under the sway of a superstitious and natural law, God gave to his people a code "so full of weight as regards the dogmas of divinity and so full of humanity as regards the practice of justice, that not even in the humanest period of Greek history could a Plato have conceived or an Aristides executed it"; a code "whose ten chief enactments contain an eternal and universal justice founded upon the excellent conception of a purified human nature, and are capable of forming by habituation a character such as the maxims of the greatest philosophers could only with great difficulty form by ratiocination; whence Theophrastus called the Hebrews philosophers by nature." The success that attended the "will to believe" was all the more striking if as we suspect Vico had read the abhorred Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-politicus, where the Hebrew prophets, while their "piety" is recognised, are said to be entirely devoid of "sublime thoughts." Spinoza maintains that they only taught "very simple things which any one could easily discover, and adorned these with a style and supported them by reasons most calculated to move the mind of the multitude to devotion towards God"; and that the laws revealed by God to Moses were "nothing but the laws of the particular government of the Jews": and he sets out to examine the text of the Bible and the problem of the authenticity of the Pentateuch and the respective authors of its various books. We might almost venture to say that it was Spinoza's Biblical criticism that suggested to Vico his criticism of the composition and spirit of the Homeric poems; but that the latter, after passing in this way from sacred to profane history, from Moses to Homer, set his face stubbornly against the opposite transition from Homer to Moses, from profane history to sacred.
[CHAPTER XVII]
THE HISTORY OF ROME AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY
Heroic society in the period of youthful vigour above described contains within itself, rigorously repressed, and in fact made into a support, the element of opposition; the slaves, clients or vassals, that is to say the plebs. But this element little by little succeeds in detaching itself from and opposing itself to the society, engaging it in a continual and undisguised conflict, so as by degrees to overthrow this old society and give life and form to a new society of which it is itself the material: a democratic society, the popular republic. Vico believes this process to be uniform in all peoples; but since references to histories other than that of Rome are either absent or very vague (he hardly mentions the origin of the Athenian democracy) the description of this process appears in the pages of the New Science as a fragment of Roman history, or as we should nowadays call it the social history of Rome.
Vico's guesses about the population and primitive culture of Italy are of no great importance. The subject belongs rather to archaeology and ethnography than to history, and Vico did not make a special study of it. In the De antiquissima sapientia Italorum he had provided the origins of Rome with a basis in an Italian civilisation of high antiquity, earlier than the Greek and derived from Egypt, which the Romans absorbed in a manner agreeing with their character; by rejecting, that is to say, its theoretical hypotheses while taking over their practical results, just as they adopted from the Etruscans their tragic religion and their art of tactics, and as they later adopted laws from Athens and Sparta. In this way their ignorance and savagery remained unchanged, and hence they spoke the language of philosophers without being philosophical. In his later writings Vico still for a time maintained the priority and independence of the earliest Italian civilisation as regards that of Greece, and considered Pythagoras less as the founder than as the student of Italian wisdom. Finally, however, he seems to have given up this view, just as he definitely abandoned that which explained the origins of Roman religion, language, customs and law by the imitation of foreign peoples and "frankly confessed that he had been in error here" owing to the example of Plato's Cratylus. What conditions brought about the rise of Rome Vico does not precisely say. He is certain that if Rome and the world did not begin together, at least the foundation of Rome was a new beginning. The point of departure which he assumes is the asylum of Romulus, consisting of the "families" of fathers who gave their hospitality to wanderers and made them into famuli. There was no Trojan colonisation; Vico knows Bochart's treatise (1663) criticising the legend of Aeneas's arrival in Italy and accepts its conclusions, which only confirm the doubts already entertained by certain ancient historians. For Vico, the Trojan origin of Rome is a legend sprung from the union of two different examples of national arrogance: that of the Greeks, who made such a noise about the Trojan war and forced their Aeneas into the history of Rome, and that of the Romans, who accepted him in order to boast of a distinguished foreign origin. The legend moreover could not have arisen much before the time of the war with Pyrrhus, when Rome began to acquire a taste for things Greek. In order to explain the infusion of Greek names and myths into the story of primitive Rome and the similarity of the Roman alphabet to the ancient Greek, Vico would incline rather to the hypothesis that early in their history the Romans conquered and destroyed some Greek colony on the Latin coast, of which all trace has since been lost in the mists of antiquity; and that through receiving its inhabitants in Rome as refugees and allies, they came under the influence of several Hellenic traditions and customs.