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.