NEW PRINCIPLES FOR THE HISTORY OF OBSCURE AND LEGENDARY PERIODS
The period of historical research which preceded the life of Vico
was, as we have said, by no means credulous or uncritical. The day
was past when "chronicles of the world" were compiled, when any fable
and any falsification however gross was accepted as history: and the
seed sown by a few humanists had borne fruit in the Italian men of
learning, the French juridical school, the school of Scaliger mentioned
above, and all the great chronologists, epigraphists, archaeologists,
topographers and geographers who in the seventeenth century formed
the first immense critical collections of sources for ancient
history. While the philologists were thus improving and perfecting
their methods, detecting impostures and bridging lacunae, Bayle,
Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond and many others were engaged in spreading a
scepticism or historical Pyrrhonism as it was also called, due to the
intellectualistic philosophy; and thus anticipating the polemic against
the truth and utility of history which was to arise with immense vigour
in the following century.
This latter tendency was hypercritical rather than critical, its end
being the destruction of history in general: and since historical
scepticism was very apt to assume the character of a paradox adapted
to the needs of elegant society and the wits, its influence on the
progress of research was very small, or at most it succeeded in
producing strong reactions, one of which is represented by Vico, in
favour of tradition and authority. It is on the other hand only proper
to observe the failings of the first seriously scientific efforts
of philologists and antiquaries. They rehabilitated witnesses, laid
bare falsifications, reconstructed lists of rulers and magistrates,
connected chronology and contradicted certain legends: but, whether
owing to the tendencies of thought usual among pure scholars and
philologists or because of the general atmosphere of their century's
culture, they neither had nor conveyed a feeling for the antique and
the primitive. Strong in detail, they were weak in essentials. When
one of the most brilliant grasped, for instance, the importance of
ballad-literature as a means of transmitting history at a period when
the use of writing was unknown or uncommon, he did not receive from
this observation and others like it such a shock as might stimulate him
to recast from top to bottom his intuition and conception of primitive
life, as was the case with Vico, who almost in a flash grasped the
philosophical form of certitude and the two periods of mental and
social life corresponding to it in actual history: the periods of
obscurity and of legend.
Vico himself started from a kind of scepticism, a scepticism as
regards the prejudices of scholars and nations generally about the
character and facts of antiquity: and in combating these prejudices
he drew up a series of principles or "aphorisms," inspired apparently
by Bacon's "idola," to which they present an analogy in the field
of historical research. Vico puts the student on his guard first
against the "magnificent opinions" which have been held up to his own
day "concerning the most remote and least known antiquity": a naïve
illusion whose origin he traces to the fact that man when in a state of
entire ignorance erects himself into a rule for the universe. Here is
the closest analogy with Bacon: for this statement is precisely like
the class of "_idola tribus,_" in which thought makes itself the rule
of things "on the analogy of man, not of the universe" (_ex analogia
hominis, non ex analogia universi_). On the same observation is founded
the remark that "rumour grows in its course," _fama crescit eundo,_ and
Tacitus's _omne ignotum pro magnifico est,_ everything unknown is taken
for something great. Hence arises the habit of interpreting ancient
customs in the expectation of finding them similar or superior to those
of modern civilised life. Thus Cicero admired the humanity of the early
Romans in calling enemies in war "guests": not realising that the fact
was precisely the opposite of this, and that guests were _hostes,_
strangers and enemies. In the same way Seneca, by way of proving the
duty of kindness to slaves, recalled that masters were anciently called
"fathers of the family"; as if _"patres familias"_ might not have been
the very reverse of kind not only to slaves and servants but to their
own children, regarded as on the level of slaves. The same prejudice
led Grotius, in his desire to show the gentleness of the ancient
Germans, to collect a great number of barbaric laws in which homicide
was punished by a fine of a few pence: which is on the contrary really
a proof of the cheapness of the blood of poor rustic vassals, who are
precisely the "_homines_" mentioned by these laws.
In the second place, he warns us not to trust to the "conceit of
nations," all of which, Greek or barbarian, Chaldean, Scythian,
Egyptian, or Chinese, claimed, as Diodorus Siculus observes, to have
founded humanity, discovered the amenities of life, and preserved their
memory intact from the beginning of the world. Each of them, having
for several thousand years had no communication with the others which
might have led to the sharing of ideas, resembled in the obscurity of
its chronology a man who sleeping in a very small chamber is misled by
the darkness into believing it much too large ever to touch it with
his hand. He who accepts these dreamer's boasts for certain knowledge
finds himself in the difficulty of having to choose between the various
memories of various nations, all of which with equal justification
claim to be original.
By the side of national conceit Vico placed the "conceit of the
learned," who desire their own knowledge to be as old as the world,
and consequently delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom
among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed
by each one of themselves, which they dress in the garb of antiquity
in order to enforce their acceptance. Such was the mistake not only
of Plato, especially in the researches of the _Cratylus,_ but of all
historians, ancient and modern: Vico himself had fallen into it, and
was therefore able to study it closely in his own case, when in the _De
antiquissima_ he believed himself to have found in the etymologies of
Latin words the proof of an Italian metaphysic exactly agreeing with
his own doctrines of the conversion of the _veruni_ with the _factum_
and of metaphysical points.
From these three prejudices, especially from the conceit of the
learned, follows the fourth, here called that of the "sources" or
"channels of culture," ironically called by Vico the theory of
"scholastic succession among nations." Upon this theory Zoroaster for
instance instructed Berosus for Chaldaea, Berosus in his turn Mercurius
Trimegistus for Egypt, Mercurius taught Atlas the Ethiopian lawgiver,
Atlas Orpheus the Thracian missionary, and finally Orpheus established
his school in Greece. Long journeys these, and easy forsooth to those
primitive nations which, scarcely out of the state of savagery, lived
perched on mountains in almost inaccessible situations, unknown even
to their neighbours! And these long journeys were undertaken with
the object of spreading discoveries, which any nation could make
for itself. If, when nations came to know each other through wars
and treaties, they were found to agree, that was because they all
contained some motive of truth and sprang from the same needs of man.
Was it necessary to suppose the Athenian or Mosaic law to have affected
that of the Romans, as did these "comparers" or delivers of laws, in
order to explain the origin of the right recognised in Palestine,
Athens and Rome to kill the thief by night? Was it necessary for
Pythagoras to travel spreading the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls, which we find as far afield as India?
There remained the prejudice of considering the ancient historians
as best informed about primitive times: whereas in the history of
origins they knew as little as, or less than, ourselves. As for Greek
history, Vico found, or rather imagined that he found, in Thucydides,
a confession that the Greeks up to the generation preceding that
historian knew nothing of their own antiquity: and he also observed
that it was only in the time of Xenophon that Greek historians began
to have any precise information upon Persian affairs. Roman historians
commonly began with the foundation of Rome: but the beginning of Rome
was certainly not the beginning of the world. Rome was a new city
founded in the midst of a large number of small and more ancient
peoples in Latium: and even in the case of Rome Livy refuses to
guarantee the truth of the facts of the earlier centuries of its
history up to the Punic wars, which he is in a position to describe
more accurately. He even confesses frankly that he does not know at
what point Hannibal made his great and memorable entry into Italy,
whether by the Cottian Alps or the Apennines. So well informed were the
ancient historians!
Owing to these and similar sceptical principles, the whole of Greek
history to the time of Herodotus and of Roman down to the second Punic
war seemed to Vico quite uncertain, an unclaimed territory, so to
speak, where one might enter and take possession by squatter's right.
He entered armed with positive principles directly issuing from the
negative ones we have enumerated. For if Vico denied the credibility
of historians distant in time from the facts they described, if
he discounted national pride, if he laid bare the illusions and
charlatanism of the learned, he nevertheless did not rest content with
this work of destruction. In place of the old untrustworthy method
he had banished, he endeavoured to supply a new, of better qualities
and greater tenacity; a system of methods by which it was possible to
acquire new historical documents and also to improve the study of those
already known. No advance in historical knowledge is in fact ever made
except by thus turning from the received narrative to the document
underlying it, which alone has the power of confirming, correcting and
enriching the narrative.
The first of Vico's contributions to historical method, the first
source for the knowledge of the earliest civilisations which he
exposed, is the etymology of language. The usual methods of this study
in his time were purely arbitrary: it proceeded by considering the
sound of each syllable or letter and looking for other superficial
resemblances, and inferring from these facts the derivation of a word
from this or that language, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. But etymology
becomes a fruitful study only when it is remembered that language is
the best evidence for the ancient life of a people, the life lived
by them while the language was in the making: and when the student
accordingly never ceases to explain language by customs and customs
by language. Thus the etymology of abstract words leads us into the
heart of a purely rustic society; for _intellegere,_ to understand,
for example, recalls _legere,_ to collect the produce of the fields
(hence _legumina,_ vegetables); _disserere,_ to discuss, refers to
scattering seed; and the majority of words for inanimate things reveal
relations with the human body and its members, and the sensations
and passions of man; thus "mouth" means any aperture, "lip" the edge
of a pot, "forehead" and "back" are used for before and behind; and
so on. Vico aimed at one science of etymology common to all native
languages, composed of monosyllabic, and largely onomatopoeic roots:
another of foreign loan-words, introduced after nations became mutually
acquainted: a third, of universal application, for the science of
international law, from which it should appear how the same men, facts
or objects, looked at from the different points of view of different
nations, received different names; and finally a dictionary of mental
words, common to all nations, which should explain the uniform ideas of
substances and the different modifications of them in national thought
concerning the human needs and utilities common to all, according to
the differences of their situation, climate, character and customs, and
should thus narrate the origins of the various vocal languages, all
converging in an ideal common language.
The second source revealed by Vico is the interpretation of myths or
fables, which agreeably to his doctrine were not allegories, fictions
or impostures, but the science of primitive man. In the _Diritto
universale_ Vico distinguished four different and successive characters
of the gods. At first they represented natural facts, Jupiter the sky,
Diana the flowing water, Dis or Pluto the lower earth, Neptune the sea,
and so on; secondly, natural human affairs, for instance, Vulcan fire,
Ceres corn, Saturn the seed; thirdly, social facts; and finally they
rose to heaven and were translated to the stars, and terrestrial and
human things were distinguished from divine. But in the two _Scienze
Nuove_ he emphasised almost exclusively the third or social meaning,
which became in his eyes the original; since, he appears to have
thought, the earliest nations were too much intent upon themselves,
too much immersed in their hard and difficult life, to speculate in
abstraction from social matters. Hence he found reflected in mythology
the institutions, inventions, social cleavages, class-struggles,
travels and warfare of primitive nations. Even in considerably advanced
periods Vico was hostile to naturalistic or philosophical explanations.
The saying "know thyself" attributed to the ancient sage seemed to him
merely a piece of advice to the Athenian democracy, to know its own
strength, later transferred to a metaphysical and moral sense. Beside
this principle of social interpretation he established another of great
importance: namely, that indecent meanings were inserted in myths at a
late and corrupt period when men interpreted early customs in the light
of their own, or tried to justify their own lusts by fancying that the
gods had set them the example. Hence arose the adulterous Jupiter,
Juno as the implacable enemy of Hercules' virtue, the chaste Diana
soliciting the embraces of the sleeping Endymion, Apollo persecuting
modest maidens even to their death, Mars, not content with committing
adultery with Venus by land, but pursuing her even into the sea, and,
worst of all, the love of Jupiter for Ganymede and of Jupiter again,
transformed into a swan, for Leda. Such representations can only result
in unrestrained vice, as happened in the case of the young Chaereas in
Terence's comedy. But in their original shape and meaning all myths
were serious and austere, worthy of the founders of nations. The
pursuit of Daphne by Apollo for instance referred to the magicians or
diviners who arranged weddings and followed women through the woods
where they were still liable to promiscuous ravishing; Venus, covering
her nakedness with the cestus, was a modest symbol of solemn matrimony;
the heroes, sons of Jupiter, were not the offspring of adultery, but
born of permanent and solemn marriages celebrated according to the will
of Jupiter as revealed by the diviners. To the pure all things are
pure, and impure to the impure: the forests and mountain-tops could
never beget the fancies of the closet and the brothel.
Beside these two rich sources, language and mythology, Vico names and
employs a third, which he calls the "great fragments of the ancient
world," that is to say, the memories preserved by historians and poets,
such as the Egyptian tradition of the three ages of gods, heroes
and men; the language of the gods mentioned in Homer; the thirty
thousand names of the gods collected by Varro and referring to a like
number of needs in the natural, moral, economic and civil life of the
earliest times; the grove of Romulus, which Livy calls "the ancient
plan of founding cities," and a few other golden sayings of ancient
historians. Till now these fragments had been useless for the purposes
of science, lying as they did in dirt, confusion and incompleteness:
but when cleaned, restored and fitted together they conveyed valuable
information. Nor did he overlook the monuments of architecture and
sculpture, though the use he made of them was slight, and he saw that
they were in the long run of little practical value. He declared that
as for the historic period the most certain documents are the public
coins, so for the legendary and obscure period their place is taken by
"certain traces remaining in marble," as proofs of ancient customs,
like the Egyptian pyramids with their hieroglyphic inscriptions and
other fragments of the ancient world found in every region and bearing
similar pictographic characters. It is also worthy of remark that he
gives examples of arguments founded on technical observations and
leading to conclusions in the sphere of prehistoric archaeology: as
for instance when he says that one early period of human life is
distinguished by the eating of roasted flesh, the simplest and least
elaborate kind of food, because it requires nothing except the fire: a
later period by boiled flesh, which also requires water, caldron and
tripod.
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.