The New Science

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 The New Science

Giambattista Vico

Translated and Edited by Jason Taylor and Robert Miner

with an Introduction by Giuseppe Mazzotta

New Haven and London

 Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

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 Contents

e d i t o r s ’ p r e fa c e   ix
ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s   xv
i n t ro d u c t i o n   xvii

An Explication of the Picture Put Forward as the Frontispiece,

to Serve as the Introduction to the Work  3
Chronological Table  34

Book One. On the Establishment of Principles  41

Annotations for the Chronological Table, in Which Is Made an
Arrangement of Materials  43
On the Elements  74
On the Principles  109
On Method  114

Book Two. On Poetic Wisdom  123

On Wisdom in General  126
An Exposition and Partitioning of Poetic Wisdom  128
On the Universal Flood and the Giants  129
On Poetic Metaphysics, in Which Are Given the Origins of Poetry,
Idolatry, Divination, and Sacrifices  132
Corollaries concerning the principal aspects of this science  139
 viContents

On Poetic Logic  145

Corollaries concerning poetic tropes, monstrosities, and
transformations 147
Corollaries concerning the earliest nations speaking through poetic
characters 151
Corollaries concerning the origins of languages and letters, and therein
the origins of hieroglyphics, of laws, of names, of insignia of noble
houses, of medallions, and of money; and, so, the origins of the
earliest language and literature of the natural law of the gentile
peoples 157
Corollaries concerning the origins of poetic locution, digression, inversion,
rhythm, song, and verse  175
The additional corollaries that were proposed above  182
Final corollaries concerning the logic of the learned  190
On Poetic Morals, and Therein on the Origins of the Commonplace
Virtues Taught by Religion Along with Marriage  193
On Poetic Economics, and Therein on the Earliest Families Comprised of
Children 203
On the families comprised of familial servants prior to cities,
without which it was completely impossible for cities to come into
being 222
Corollaries concerning contracts completed by consent alone  234
Mythological canon  235
On Poetic Politics, by Which the Earliest Republics in the World Came to
Be in the Strictest Aristocratic Form  236
All republics have come to be from certain eternal principles of
fealties 248
On the origins of the census and the treasury  258
On the origins of the Roman assemblies  261
Corollary: It is divine providence which is the institutor of the orders
of republics and, at the same time, of the natural law of the gentile
peoples 263
Heroic politics, continued  266
Corollaries concerning the ancient Roman things and, in particular, the
dreamed-up monarchical regime in Rome and the dreamed-up popular
liberty instituted by Junius Brutus  280
Corollaries concerning the heroism of the earliest peoples  282
Epitomes of poetic history  287
On Poetic Physics  290
On the poetic physics concerning man—that is, on heroic nature  292
Corollary on heroic sentences  297
S Corollary on heroic descriptions  297
N Corollary on heroic customs  298
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Contents vii

On Poetic Cosmography  300

On Poetic Astronomy  307
An astronomical physico-philological demonstration of the uniformity of
principles in all the ancient gentile nations  307
On Poetic Chronology  309
Chronological canon for giving the beginnings of universal history, which
must have begun its course prior to the monarchy of Ninus, from which
that universal history is presumed to start  312
On Poetic Geography  315
Corollary on Aeneas coming to Italy  323
On the naming and describing of heroic cities  325

Book Three. On the Discovery of the True Homer  329

On the Recondite Wisdom That Has Been Opined about Homer  331
On the Fatherland of Homer  335
On the Age of Homer  336
On the Unaccountable Faculty of Homer for Heroic Poetry  339
Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer  341
Philological Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer  346
Discovery of the True Homer  352
The lack of congruity and the lack of verisimilitude belonging to the
Homer believed in up until now becomes, with the Homer herein
discovered, agreeableness and necessity  352
The poems of Homer are found to be the two great treasure houses of the
natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece  356
A rational history of dramatic and lyric poetry  357

Book Four. On the Course That the Nations Make  363

Three Kinds of Natures  365
Three Kinds of Customs  366
Three Kinds of Natural Law  366
Three Kinds of Governance  367
Three Kinds of Languages  367
Three Kinds of Characters  368
Three Kinds of Jurisprudence  369
Three Kinds of Authority  371
Three Kinds of Reason  372
Corollary on the wisdom of the ancient Romans in matters of state  373
Corollary: Foundational history of Roman law  374
 viiiContents

Three Kinds of Judgments  376

Corollary on duels and reprisals  379
Three Sects of Times  385
Additional Proofs Treating the Properties of Heroic Aristocracies  386
On Guardianship Over Boundaries  386
On Guardianship Over Orders  388
On Guardianship Over Laws  396
Additional Proofs Taken from the Moderating Which Happens of the
Subsequent Constitutions of Republics Because of the Prior Ways of
Governing 399
On the eternal and natural royal law through which nations come to rest
under monarchies  400
Refutation of the principles of a political teaching based upon the system
of Jean Bodin  402
Final Proofs Which Confirm That This Is the Course of Nations  406
Corollary: Ancient Roman law was a serious poem, and ancient
jurisprudence was a severe poetry, within which are found the earliest
roughed-out features of a legal metaphysics; and how for the Greeks
philosophy came from the laws  409

Book Five. On the Recurrence of Human Things During the Resurgence

That the Nations Make  419
The Recurrence Nations Make in Accordance with the Eternal Nature of
Fealties; and, Consequently, the Recurrence of Ancient Roman Law in
Feudal Law  425
A Depiction of the World of Nations, Ancient and Modern, with
Observations Conforming to the Design of the Principles of This
Science 437

Conclusion of the Work—Concerning an Eternal Natural Republic, Best in

Each of the Kinds of Republic Ordered by Divine Providence  441

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 Editors’ Preface

I
“ f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” said
Isaac Newton, whom Vico praises in The New Science as one of the two
“foremost geniuses of our age.” This translation aims to become the stan-
dard English-language edition of Vico’s magnum opus. But should it attain
this goal, it will do so only because the translators have stood on the shoul-
ders of scholarly giants. All Anglophone readers of Vico owe a large debt to
Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch’s translation, The New Sci-
ence of Giambattista Vico, first published in 1948 by Cornell University Press.
We have also benefited from the recent translation of David Marsh, published
by Penguin in 1999. Why is another edition of Vico in English necessary?
Any translation is a compromise between literalness and readability, aim-
ing at the elusive goal of fidelity. Where Bergin and Fisch tend toward lit-
eralness, Marsh opts for superior readability and often achieves it. He does
so, however, at the price of fracturing the unity of the text’s distinctive vo-
cabulary—as, for example, by using six different English words to render the
key term ingegno. It may seem, then, that readers should stick with the older
translation, owing to its “reliability and readability,” as Donald Verene puts it.
Despite its genuine merits, the Bergin and Fisch edition is marred by some
defects. These suffice to warrant a new translation. In lieu of a tedious com-
prehensive listing, here is a small sample:
1. Omissions and mistakes. At the end of Book Two’s section on “Poetic
Logic,” Vico asserts that many things in human life were discovered in Greece
“prior to the arrival of the philosophers”—and adds that the grounds of his
assertion will not be made visible until Book 3, “when we reason upon the age
of Homer.” In their translation of §498, Bergin and Fisch omit this passage
entirely, and thus obscure a link between Books Two and Three that Vico
considers important. Near the end of the Book on Homer, Bergin and Fisch
have Vico claim twice that “the philosophers” have written obscurely and

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confusedly about dramatic and lyric poetry. The charge, however, is clearly
leveled at i filologi, “the philologists” (§905).
2. Misleading literalism. Bergin and Fisch render favoloso by “fabulous”;
their text speaks throughout of “fabulous beginnings” and “fabulous history.”
Given the connotations of “fabulous” in contemporary English, this transla-
tion is inevitably misleading. “Mythical beginnings” and “mythical history”
are closer to the sense Vico intends; “mythical” is more faithful, if less literal.
In a similar vein, Bergin and Fisch’s text speaks of “vulgar letters”—a trans-
lation that tends to evoke images of salacious correspondence. There is noth-
ing “vulgar” in our sense of the term about letteri volgari. (The present text
adopts “common alphabetic letters.”)
3. Simple inconsistencies in key terms. Often sapienza riposta is “esoteric
wisdom”; sometimes it appears as “hidden wisdom” or “recondite wisdom.”
Virtù is frequently “virtue,” but it becomes “valor” at §261, though Vico uses
the Italian valor shortly thereafter at §277. Guisa is variously “manner,” “pro-
cess,” “form,” “case,” “way,” and “fashion.”
Beyond repairing the faults of previous editions, the present translation
aims to capture an important feature of Vico’s style, well described by Gi-
useppe Mazzotta:
The prose of The New Science is ceaselessly marked by digressions that
slow down the rhythm of the narrative, by quick forward thrusts of the
discourse through dazzling intuitions, by repetitions and sinuous falling
back on formulas previously stated but which are now re-viewed from a
new angle. This convoluted narrative technique is occasionally cumbersome
but necessary. It conveys Vico’s sense of the complications within the order
of causality. The positive links between cause and effect never function by
a linear mechanism in this poetic-philosophical universe (The New Map of
the World, p. 141).
In the interest of remaining faithful to his “narrative technique,” we have gen-
erally refrained from breaking Vico’s longer sentences into a succession of
short, choppy sentences. And when his style moves from seemingly unending
chains of parataxis to Ciceronian periods, we attempt to carry this over into
the translation as well. We have also preserved Vico’s own system of para-
graphing, attested by the handwritten copy and preserved in the edition pub-
lished in 1744 by Stamperia Muziana. Accordingly, the present text indents
only where Vico indents—though it does use line spacing to give the modern
reader necessary relief from large grey blocks of text. Because scholars have
long been accustomed to cite The New Science by the paragraph numbers that
originate in the Italian edition of Fausto Nicolini and that later editions and
translations reproduce, these numbers appear in the margin of the text.
The present edition contains significantly more annotations than previ-
S ous translations. Vico’s erudition is breathtaking, and the intellectual terrain
N in which he situates himself is complex. Our aim is to enhance the reader’s
L awareness of the many voices with which he is in dialogue. Some of these
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voices are named explicitly. Many others are evoked by implicit allusions to
texts, ancient and modern. Though by no means exhaustive, our annotations
will give the Anglophone reader more help than she has had so far.
A distinctive feature of this edition is its reproduction of a range of at-
tributes that appear on the surface of the text printed in 1744. These are at-
tributes that remain invisible to the reader of modern editions, whether in
English or Italian. They include the following:
1. The practice of quoting passages from classical texts in Latin. Vico fre-
quently indents these passages, separating them from the main text in a man-
ner that interrupts it, breaking its flow. The effect is to give the quotations a
prominence that is lost when they are merged seamlessly into the main text.
Our text reproduces the Latin, followed by a parenthetical translation.
2. Using the Greek alphabet to reproduce Greek words and phrases.
Though Vico’s Greek was inferior to his Latin, he judged it vital to present
Greek terms in the original language. He rejected the option of transliterating
them into the Roman alphabet.
3. Preserving the emphasis on words designating components within Vico’s
“system,” particularly “Corollary” and (to a lesser extent) “Proof.” By re-
specting the 1744 edition’s typography—which closely tracks the handwritten
manuscript—our edition gives the reader a more vivid perception of Vico’s
desire to present the new science as a system, complete with axioms, postu-
lates, demonstrations, and corollaries.
4. The 1744 text’s manner of giving emphasis to particular words, phrases,
and even entire sentences by means of CAPITAL LETTERS. It seems that
Vico wanted some things to STAND OUT. This feature may strike today’s
reader as peculiar or excessive; it may initially be distracting. Nevertheless,
it is worth preserving because it invites the reader to attend to what the au-
thor wanted to stress on the textual surface, even as it reminds her of its ba-
roque otherness.
5. The custom of arranging selected lines of text in the shape of an in-
verted pyramid. This is often done to signal the beginning of a section. Many
other printed texts of the period follow the same convention.
6. The styling of the titles of the five Books. To give one example: the
words “DEL RICORSO” in the 1744 edition appear in type that is twice as
large as the other nine words contained in the title of Book Five. Other trans-
lations print every word in capital letters of the same size, giving each term
an equal value, as it were. Such a practice fits the streamlining conventions of
modern scholarly editions. But it is squarely at odds with Vico’s own inten-
tion. Accordingly, we have sought to preserve (some of) the jagged edges of
the 1744 printed text.
Acquaintance with these six attributes of the 1744 edition will bring to-
day’s reader closer to the experience possible for a reader of Vico’s time. Since
these features are largely typographical, one might object that it is unnec-
essary to preserve them: what matters is not the text’s surface appearance,
but its noetic reality. Against this objection, we can only mention the chasm
 xii Editors’ Preface

separating its premises from Vico’s own suspicion of “Cartesian” attempts to

move directly to intelligible content, as though the engagement of the senses
and the imagination were irrelevant.
A further improvement on previous English editions concerns the system
of cross-references within the text. The system pioneered by Bergin and Fisch
is at once helpful and misleading. Vico himself indicates a large number of
cross-references, directing the reader backwards (“as we have demonstrated
herein”) and forwards (“as we will see later”). Judging the repetition of these
signaling phrases to be tedious, Bergin and Fisch omit most of them, prefer-
ring simply to cite an appropriate text by paragraph number. There are other
passages where, though a cross-reference might be helpful, Vico does not ex-
plicitly indicate one. In passages of this second type, Bergin and Fisch supply
cross-references in exactly the same manner as they do with respect to the first
type. Their suppression of Vico’s signaling phrases leaves the reader no way to
distinguish between the two types of passage. Unless she consults an Italian
edition, she will not know whether Vico expressly intends the cross-reference.
The present translation restores these signaling phrases, even as it preserves
the system of referring to places in the text by paragraph number.
One last difference should be mentioned. The present translation refrains
from intruding some divisions into the text that modern editions introduce.
For example, Bergin and Fisch’s Book Two begins with “[Prolegomena],” fol-
lowed by an “Introduction.” The 1744 text, by contrast, simply dives into “On
Poetic Wisdom”—leaving everything unlabeled until it treats “On wisdom in
general.” Vico describes his largest textual divisions as “Books,” and subdi-
vides the Books into parts marked by their headings, but without the specific
cuttings implied by the terms “Section” and “Chapter.” The present edition,
by dint of its greater fidelity to the 1744 text, is in some ways less cluttered
than other modern editions. We have sought to be spare where Vico is spare,
and baroque where Vico is baroque.
In Book Three, the central book of The New Science, Vico contrasts two
kinds of poets who stand in the shadow of the epic poet Homer: the Cyclic
poets and the tragedians. At §856 he cites from Horace’s Ars Poetica three
pieces of advice for tragic poets who draw from Homer’s great storehouse
of inventive possibility, but do not thereby wish to create something that is
merely derivative. In following this advice, tragic poets would implicitly distin-
guish themselves from what Vico clearly regards as the inferior performance
of the Cyclic poets.
This section of The New Science certainly does not offer a full-blown the-
ory of translation. But it does offer useful advice for those who, like ourselves,
come after an epic performance—in this case, The New Science—and whose
work is necessarily shaped by that performance:
1. Do not confuse translation with interpretation. While this edition offers
S
a significant interpretative apparatus, we have tried to forbear from explaining
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Vico’s Italian in the act of rendering into English.
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Editors’ Preface xiii

2. Do not confuse fidelity with literalness. While we have wanted generally

to be scrupulous in following Vico’s diction and syntax, we have throughout
this translation tried to remain alive to the possibility that, at any given mo-
ment, the most exact rendering is not necessarily the most faithful one.
3. Do not confuse humility with servility. While a translator’s task is neces-
sarily not of the first rank, it is still work to be undertaken with spirit, gener-
osity, and high aspiration.
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 Acknowledgments

T
he editors wish to express their deep gratitude to Professor Andrea
Battistini for his permission to draw freely from his extensive footnotes
to the Scienza nuova, contained in volume two of Giambattista Vico:
Opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). His notes have been an invaluable help to
our attempts to trace Vico’s many references and allusions to classical and
modern texts. Readers of this translation who desire more annotation than
we have had space to provide will certainly want to consult his edition of
Vico’s works.
We are grateful to Sarah Miller and Ash Lago of Yale University Press,
who have been generous and patient with the editors throughout the long
process of bringing into being this translation of The New Science.
The frontispiece image on page 2 is from Giambattista Vico, Principj di
scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni, 1744, General Col-
lection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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 Introduction

T
he importance of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in the history of
modern thought has been generally acknowledged over the last cen-
tury. Occupying him from 1723 until the end of his life, the Scienza
nuova (The New Science) is widely vaunted for its originality. Yet to this day it
is unclear to what extent Vico’s master work broke new ground and played a
decisive role in modernity’s cultural debates.
Among the many scholars who pay lip service to Vico as an authoritative
thinker, there is little or no agreement over his central concern. Much less do
they seem to identify and account for a consistent, unified philosophical out-
look in the work. We frequently hear that Vico, in spite of the ever-fascinating
topics he raises throughout (for example, history and primitive mythology;
religion and poetry; and language, with crucial insights into metaphor, style,
etymology, rhetoric, and political discourse), has written a distinctly unsys-
tematic text. In view of widespread interpretive conflicts and contradictions,
it follows that readers do not end up grasping either the core purpose of The
New Science or the imaginative, rigorous coherence of the questions con-
tained within the apparent puzzle of this exceptional work, which offers a
radically new understanding and elaboration of poetic philosophy.
Scholars have raised a number of legitimate questions confronting The
New Science, and many remain unanswered or their answers are elusive. Does
Vico pick up and align himself with the central doctrines of the philosophy
of the Enlightenment? Or is he putting forward a critical reading of the En-
lightenment? Is he a modern or an antimodern thinker? Is he attached to or
detached from the achievements of classical culture? And—to mention a cli-
ché of current philosophical arguments—does he bemoan the technological
turn of modern times? Finally, how much does it matter that Vico also rejects
Cartesian themes, such as the ostensible supremacy of the abstractions of

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rationality, so that mathematics becomes the “science of sciences” (as Isaiah

Berlin, a distinguished scholar of Vico, puts it)?
The focus on these contradictory elements in scholars’ efforts to line up
Vico’s thought on one or the other side of current intellectual debates com-
pletely misses the fact that he presents his views as a distinct “new philosophy,”
one that would include all possible branches of higher learning. What is this
new philosophy? In practice, this is the question that lies at the heart of his
concerns, and with it is bound up his project to produce an original vision and
style of thought. To achieve this aim, he drew from the many sources he came
into contact with, and this implies that he was drawn both to disagree with
and to assimilate the ideas of many established schools of thought, ranging
from the Renaissance neo-Platonists and neo-Aristotelians to the Epicureans
and Stoics. He corrects them and is thereby is willing to borrow from them.
And so Vico rejects rationalist Cartesian claims, on the grounds that ra-
tionality is only a partial element of the complexities of the mind. However,
Vico goes on to juxtapose the values and abstractions of rationality, as well
as the mixture of skepticism and belief characteristic of the Enlightenment,
with one crucial, wide-ranging dimension of knowledge: history. His rigorous
introduction of history as the supreme principle, in the light of which a pos-
sible knowledge of reality could be reached, depends on his familiarity with
Roman and Greek traditions that converge in Augustine, a figure crucial to
Vico’s thought. In works such as The Confessions and The City of God, as well
as in his overtly biblical and theological texts, such as The Literal Reading of
Genesis and On the Trinity, Augustine elaborates an idea of history that in-
cludes moral directives, as well as reflections on knowledge, memory, political
philosophy, theology, and language.
In all these works Augustine confronts the classical Roman tradition of
thought and absorbs it into his understanding. Like Augustine, Vico thinks
of the mind through the realities of history, which for him is steadily marked
by the disordered activities engaging the mind, the will, the memory, and the
passions of human beings. In fact, more than Augustine, Vico exemplifies
his insights into the values of history by focusing on language and myth as
privileged sources for the knowledge of history and of our own minds. Also
like Augustine, Vico describes the possibility of discovering the knowledge of
one’s own mind over and against skeptical doubts. In his well-known formula
Si fallor sum, articulated at City of God 11.26, Augustine encapsulates his
plan to comprehend the mind through the lenses of religious traditions, which
both reflect and shape the inner life and the outer world of human culture.
The significance of Vico’s Augustianism, sadly neglected by recent scholar-
ship, is amplified by the fundamental importance that Vico attributes to the
institutions of law, as well as to the myths elaborated by human creativity.
It is within the framework of these concrete expressions of history’s move-
S ment in time—simultaneously real and symbolic—that Vico also opens up
N and explores wider issues: questions of piety and impiety; the impact of re-
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Introduction xix

ligion on philosophy; and the importance of the various schools of philoso-

phy (Stoic, Epicurean, Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, etc.). And yet in spite of—
or perhaps because of—these sundry intellectual issues, the overall unifying
purpose of The New Science remains to be carefully explored and defined.
To do so, we must turn to a careful reading of the many signs making up
and expressing the platform of Vico’s authorial intentions, which sustains
his masterpiece.
It is my sense that Vico wrote The New Science primarily to gauge, with
remarkable clarity, the depth of the intellectual, moral, and political crisis
of his time. He conducts a systematic critique of that crisis—as only a care-
ful analysis of the text will show in contrast to the conventional, generalized
abstractions of history on the part of some interpreters about a “philosophy
of history”—in order to find a way out of it. His consciousness of the crisis
emerges most powerfully in his consideration of the question of education—
that is to say, the productive nexus of philosophy and culture.
The centrality of this concern can be gathered from his prolific earlier
work, before he turned to writing The New Science. Vico’s conviction about
the vital necessity to rethink the foundations and purposes of education
emerges from his autobiography, from his voluminous discussion of the his-
tory and practice of the law, and from a number of essays and lectures that he
wrote on the contemporary state of universities, which Vico saw as inflicting
narrow limits on thought across Europe and beyond. Vico was, above all,
concerned to address both the decadence of the institutions and the staleness
of culture in general, caught in the throes of shallow learning and the cult of
commonplaces. Confronted with the intellectual decay and crisis of his time,
Vico calls for a renewal of the traditions of thinking, teaching, and learning
and for a retrieval of the intellectual life of the past, just as some of his much-
admired philosophical predecessors had done (particularly Plato, Augustine,
and Bacon). His discussion of these themes always turns on the question of a
necessary rethinking of the fundamental issue of education.
A question logically forces itself on us. What end does education serve?
Was it basically a personal concern that Vico mulled over, or did he propound
a theory of general social interest? It ought to be remarked that the education
theme does not explicitly appear in the 1744 edition, which is the one you
are reading. In fact, this edition conspicuously omits, by Vico’s own editorial
decision, one detail present in the 1725 edition: the dedication of The New
Science to the “Academies of Europe.” Vico shaped the 1744 edition of the
text in order to acknowledge their past achievements, and he focused on their
rigorous critical thinking and only hinted at their current disintegration.
To be sure, Vico’s profound interest in the problematic state of education
in his era was not by any means sudden. A glance at his autobiography, The
Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, shows that education was his
lifelong occupation; when he was no longer a student, he was a professor of
rhetoric at the University of Naples. His autobiography, which he wrote while
 xxIntroduction

revising The New Science, belongs by any generic definition to the genre of
novels of education, or bildungsroman. Moreover, it is based on the didactic
principle “I am what I will become.” More specifically, Vico’s autobiogra-
phy, like most of its kind, tells the story of a self-education. It begins with a
quick reference to Vico’s family origins and moves to an account of the child’s
educational failures in school as he sought in vain to grasp the difficulties in
the class lectures delivered by his philosophy teacher. Vico proceeds with the
fairly dramatic central story of his life, how he attempted to obtain a law
degree from the University of Naples, where he took an examination in the
hope that he might win a prestigious job as a law professor, only to suffer
a humiliating failure. And, finally, Vico’s autobiography culminates with his
becoming the author of The New Science.
His self-dramatization, as a sort of autodidact, suggests that Vico may
have wanted to inspire his followers to adopt or imitate his commitment and
imagination. Thus, throughout his text, Vico faithfully tells the story of his
steady reading of the classics and the texts of the Italian Renaissance. He de-
scribes his choice of four philosophers, namely, Plato, the Greek philosopher
who authored the Republic, with its brilliant mixture of the two related themes
of utopia and education; Tacitus, the Roman historian and political thinker
who came to be classified as the alternative to Machiavelli; Francis Bacon, the
English political philosopher and theorist of science; and Hugo Grotius, the
Dutch philosopher of law. Vico privileges them as steady points of reference,
appropriately referring to them throughout his life as his “four philosophers.”
Unsurprisingly, he selects his own major intellectual challenges—the question
of science in the modern age, issues of politics and utopian thinking, natural
law and larger issues of legal philosophizing through their works—and ob-
serves how these philosophers address such issues. Moreover, he engages these
philosophers to discern his own role as a thinker about, for example, the study
methods of his own time, articulated in overt contrast with Bacon’s ambi-
tious political/educational plans in England. Vico’s autobiography ends with
his choosing for himself a single intellectual model, a classical figure whom
Petrarch and other early Renaissance humanists admired through a mythical
aura: Socrates of Athens. For the humanists, Socrates understood and came
to define for his own time the essential role of the philosopher. Socrates char-
acterized philosophy as the path to acquire the virtues in all their complexi-
ties, and he taught his disciples the proper aim of philosophy: the inquiry into
the intellectual stages leading to the acquisition of self-knowledge. His whole
life was crowned, as is known, by a tragic and ironic event: he was killed by
his own city on charges that he had violated its laws.
An afterthought to the choice of Socrates as Vico’s model should be con-
sidered. Perhaps Vico, at the start of his own philosophical self-definition,
understood the myth of Socrates in existential terms, wanting to believe that
S he resembled Socrates in a peculiar way. Socrates came to be a mirror that
N revealed to Vico his own inner condition. Like Socrates, who was known as
L
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Introduction xxi

a “stray dog,” Vico saw himself as a thinker unsure about his proper role and
place within the political and intellectual economy of his city. Moreover, Vico
hints at what will eventually emerge dramatically in The New Science. He
was not yet aware of the tragic knot of politics and philosophy, which ends
Socrates’ life, and which gets thematized in the philosophical text you are now
reading: the systematic violence perpetrated by political powers against phi-
losophers, and the repeated murdering of philosophers throughout history
(for example, Seneca, the followers of Pythagoras, Giordano Bruno, etc.) by
the absolute hegemony of tyrants.
When we locate Vico’s volume within the intellectual context of his own
time, we can decide whether his New Science calls for what Thomas Kuhn,
in another context, means by a “scientific revolution.” This might imply that
Vico’s text shares in the postmodernism of contemporary French thought—
from Michelet to Levi-Strauss and Derrida—as if, like them, Vico espouses
the view that the modern age is a time of delusion to be deconstructed, the
delusion of a modernity that reduces history to a cult of the present, which he
calls the “barbarism of reflection.” This might be taken to suggest that Vico
endorses modern-day skepticism about the powers of human reason. In The
New Science, Vico does not in fact argue for the supreme value of philosophy
in relation to political power in modern discourse. Rather, Vico upholds the
radically new principle of the centrality of poetry (which includes myth, rhet-
oric, language, history, and the concerns of the earlier humanists). His aim is
to awaken the need to retrieve human creativity and freedom of imagination
as the values in the theory of education (and culture) he articulates.
A brief comment about the conspectus of senses of “poetry” may be help-
ful for placing in his ideas in context. In On the Study Methods of Our Time,
published in 1709, Vico develops an inaugural oration that he delivered the
year before at the University of Naples. The address purports to be a com-
parison of the educational method of the present and that of antiquity, for
the sake of drafting a modern program of studies. It is noteworthy that Vico
does not offer a sovereign method that can apply universally, everywhere, in
contrast to Descartes, whose mathematical method amounts to an ambitious
search for a rationally incontrovertible truth. Rather, Vico vindicates the in-
tellectual legitimacy and rigor of a program of studies centered on poetry.
Poetry for Vico comes to mean the spirit of memory, the language of the
imagination and passions. It encompasses wide-ranging questions about tra-
ditions, origins, visions of the future, and the wisdom hidden in the folds and
archives of language.
I have been recalling preparatory texts that Vico wrote in the course of
his intellectual maturation. These culminate in the awareness that an ideal
structure of the university must embrace ethics, science, and the meditations
on the bond, and possible rift, between politics and culture. In other words,
tracing the path of Vico’s earlier thinking allows for a reading of key aspects
of the encyclopedic New Science that demonstrate continuity further along
 xxiiIntroduction

that path. We must keep in mind at the outset the seemingly secondary, but
actually fundamental purposes of Vico’s procedure. One of these consists in
his teaching us how to read the subtleties in the language of texts, including
his own, in the conviction that apparently secondary details can bring unex-
pected illumination of a text’s hidden intentions.
For clarity’s sake, let me examine the text’s full title: The New Science: Prin-
ciples of the New Science about the Common Nature of Nations. The thrust of
almost every word in the title—“new,” “principles,” “nature,” and “nations”—
evokes and promises a deliberate quest for new beginnings. The implicit inten-
tion is to convey that this is a book about origins. The adjective “new” itself
suggests that beginnings and origins are not for Vico an end in themselves
and dispels the possibility that the work centers on antiquarianism. On the
contrary, the title makes clear that Vico’s project focuses on the question of
the future. He couples the adjective “new” with the term “principles” (which
suggests foundations) and with “nature” and “nations” (which implies the
events of birthing and evokes the future and its inherent possibilities).
The title, moreover, deploys a lexicon whose terms are easily identifiable
in philosophical and scientific texts by Vico’s predecessors from the Renais-
sance and baroque periods. “Principles” is suggestive of Descartes, who,
along with Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), wrote Principles of Phi-
losophy (1644), a text whose key term signifies foundation stones of the sci-
entific method—first causes of “all that is or can be in the world.” Similarly,
the phrase “new science” alludes to a text by Galileo about his astronomical
discoveries, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove science
(Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations about Two New Sciences), a
text that gives authoritatively modern principles and procedures of a new
scientific culture.
The linguistic and historical tangle of Vico’s title, as well as the seman-
tic proximity of “nations” and “nature,” suggests that in its initial impulse
and intellectual foundation, The New Science amounts to a plan to revive
the historic phenomenon of the Renaissance. That this is in fact Vico’s aim
is strongly suggested by the frontispiece introducing the text. The image was
conceived by Vico himself. He was, after all, a man who lived in the city of
Naples at a time when it was the home of painters who embody the quintes-
sence of baroque art: Caravaggio, José de Ribera (who was called “Lo Spag-
noletto,” “the little Spaniard”), and Luca Giordano, among others. About
Vico’s image, meant to be a synthesis of the content of The New Science and
how to view it, one can say what holds true of baroque art, an art that aims
at drawing the real world into the imaginary world. Vico’s vision of the world
of history—a world containing archaeological relics, ruins of monuments,
enigmatic inscriptions, and globes, as well as disclosing shifting perspectives
and the hybrid complexities of experiences—is best represented through the
S optics of baroque art. It is as though the aesthetics of the baroque confront
N and unveil the broken dreams of the Renaissance.
L
xxii
Introduction xxiii

Historically, “Renaissance”—the sense of which is “rebirth”—has meant

an age of extraordinary vitality and radical consciousness of modernity’s
emergence from the shadows of the Middle Ages. This most creative epoch
is said to have started in the 1300s and have come to an end around 1600.
Vico writes his text, or so scholars have argued, in order to establish grounds
for another rebirth of a historical period he sees as past. However, he mixes
his Renaissance ideals with the aesthetics and deep creativity of the baroque
epoch, a period that is neither as recognizably distinct from the Renaissance
nor as lifeless as influential scholars such as Benedetto Croce have thought. In
reality, the baroque is a truly new age characterized by unusually lofty creativ-
ity and by novelty in the sciences. It is an intellectual world identifiable with
the revolutionary roles of Alberti, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Columbus,
and their disciples, as well as the voices of great poets and musicians such as
Tasso, Marino, Cervantes, Milton, Juan de la Cruz, and Scarlatti. In brief,
both the Renaissance and the baroque, with their eclectic tastes, transgress the
boundaries of self-enclosed, fragmentary, partial, and narrow visions. Both
appear to Vico historically as times of inclusive culture, within which the di-
mensions of the sacred, seemingly pushed out of sight by secularizing forces
in the previous century, reappear and seek to reconstitute into wholeness the
seemingly contradictory aspects of knowledge, such as science and poetry.
Such culture has the power to reshape, at its depths, the modern sense of
education and knowledge.
In the classical tradition, as established by Plato and Aristotle, philosophy
and poetry are at odds with each other. In Book X of the Republic, Plato
expels the poets from his utopia. In his Poetics, Aristotle shares his master’s
view that philosophy is the privileged route to the pursuit of the significant
values of human life. Indeed, he subscribes to Plato’s idea of the state and
the role of the philosopher-king, and like him, he makes the necessity of a
rational form of poetry the keystone of any reliable knowledge. Consider how
Vico challenges the very premises of this tradition.
Vico’s frontispiece brings the readers into the center of his intellectual
and historical world and illuminates the purposes of his text. One sees Vico
the educator at work as he glosses the image, showing us how to look at the
painting. Accordingly, he reveals the use and importance of a revolutionary
geometric technique—that of “perspective,” introduced in Florence by Leon
Battista Alberti in his Della pittura (1435). Simultaneously an architect, a
theorist of art, and a writer, Alberti pioneers “perspective” as a revolutionary
transformation in the representation of what we see. Perspectival technique
transforms the notion of space, which now appears less as a stable, fixed entity
and more as that which can be manipulated into a variety of illusory, shifting
forms. In this way perspective marks the beginning of modern subjectivity,
vindicating the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every single point of view.
Vico’s deployment of “perspective” (a term he uses at §3) puts into relief
the power of images—their status in bringing into view the appearance of a
 xxivIntroduction

world. It reveals and opens up Vico’s conviction that all knowledge (or, as
the Greeks saw it, the link between the logos and the eide) is rooted in the
imagination. The image, however, does not replace language: the two exist in
a unified relationship. Focusing on the image and reading Vico’s explanation
of it, the reader comes to realize that Alberti (along with Nicholas of Cusa
and Augustine) are Vico’s phantom interlocutors, as much as Plato, Tacitus,
Bacon, and Grotius, his four authors. More than that, we come to realize that
“seeing” is the question that lies at the heart of the musings common to Vico
and the painters. The image brings into focus the power of the eye—the eye
of Providence up high; the reality of Homer, the blind but visionary poet of
ancient Greece. Here Homer signifies the poet capable of seeing the phan-
toms he carries within himself—the memory of ancient Greece as brought
to life in the Iliad and the Odyssey—rather than the mimesis of the natural
or historical world. Moreover, the frontispiece shows that the way for human
beings to see and grasp the mysteries of the world is to raise the human eye
by first practicing the inward sight of Homer and then observing how Lady
Philosophy refracts the divine light. Above all, we are taught to look up from
the bottom (from the ground littered with the chaos) to the statue of Homer,
from there to Philosophy, and finally to rest in God’s eye.
In short, Vico radically reverses the intellectual premises of the classical
world. For him poetry is an interlocutor with philosophy, with what Boethius
or medieval allegoresis presents as Lady Philosophy, from whom light radi-
ates, a provident light that is simultaneously outside and inside the unfolding
history. And philosophy and poetry together lead us to the contemplation of
a literally “pro-vidential” order—the all-seeing eye of God whom the blind
poet experiences as a refracted light on his back and can imaginatively see.
By means of the “new science,” we are able to go past Homer, glimpsing the
interaction of aesthetics and knowledge. This new science conceived by Vico
marks out the path to wisdom: scientia leads to sapientia—or, as the Greeks
had it, episteme leads to sophia.
Beyond its Introduction, the entire construction of The New Science evokes
a number of mutually complementary rhetorical genres. It is written, in fact,
as if it were an intellectual journey of discovery through distinct epochs of
history: it reads as an epic whose hero is Vico himself, traveling from Book
One to the end. His journey begins with speculations about the origins of the
world and with a synoptic tabulation of the blurred but visible traces of uni-
versal history in chronological succession, from the Universal Flood recorded
by the Hebrews, through the Chaldeans and Egyptians to the Greeks and
Romans. All shifts and resemblances across geographical and temporal stages
are duly stressed: silent about the story of the Garden of Eden, Vico prefers
an exploration of human history, because human beings, as Vico holds, can
only know what they themselves have made.
S The governing principle of this syntopicon of universal history is the con-
N cept of the three ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, the age of human-
L
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Introduction xxv

kind. We should take this emphasis on distinct ages of history as Vico’s way
of providing context for the importance of experience (a word which ety-
mologically means “journey”). This involves the learning of languages about
myths, institutions, and ideas, which are the alphabet of Vico’s project.
Besides having this novelistic structure, The New Science is also an “ency-
clopedia,” a word that means the “circle of knowledge.” From this viewpoint,
The New Science seeks to retrieve “a mental language common to all nations”
in the belief that “all the sciences, all the disciplines and arts are directed
to the perfection of the human faculties” (Scienza nuova prima 11). In this
way, the text can be read as a dictionary; a complete library; a museum; or
a summa and a baroque encyclopedia, in which law, history, politics, poetry,
mythology, and education are gathered.
The chief guides in this journey of discovery are Vico’s four authors—Plato,
Bacon, Tacitus, and Grotius—who have all written about paideia, the educa-
tion of the soul. The Platonic foundation of Vico’s encyclopedia is articulated
at the very beginning of Book Two on “Poetic Wisdom.” Taking the reflections
on wisdom in Book Two as a basis, Vico shifts to the volume’s central Book
Three, which deals with Homer. This shift is an overt acknowledgment of the
centrality of poetry in the journey of knowledge, as well as a way of legitimiz-
ing the principle that human beings know most precisely what they have made.
After discussing Homer, Vico devotes Book Four to “The Course That the
Nations Make”—that is, to social realities and to politics. Here Vico wants to
provide a global framework that gives coherence to the ideas of “natural law”
as put forward by Grotius. His aim is to counter the theories of political power
found in Machiavelli as well as in Hobbes’s De cive (On the Citizen), a work
inspired by Machiavelli. Book Five centers on political philosophy as a science
that considers the best regime for ordering the polis. A conclusion follows, tak-
ing Aristotle’s Politics as its point of departure. In the conclusion, Vico comes
full circle back to Plato and Cicero, opposing a long line of political scientists
that includes Zeno, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, as well as the
natural-law theorists Pufendorf, Selden, and Grotius.
Political philosophy is the telos, the aim or conclusion of the New Science.
Vico’s questions are unavoidable. Who are the virtuous citizens? What is the
value of particular regimes (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and their cor-
responding perversions (tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule)? Which is better, to
be ruled by the best laws or by the best men? Here is Vico’s conclusion:

Therefore, Epicurus, who is given to chance, is refuted by what men actu-

ally do, and with him his followers Hobbes and Machiavelli. Also refuted
by what men actually do is Zeno, and with him Spinoza. On the contrary,
what men actually do establishes favor for the political philosophers, whose
prince is the divine Plato, who establishes that the human things are ruled
by providence. Hence, Cicero was in the right when he was unable to reason
with Atticus about the laws, unless Atticus were to quit being an Epicurean
 xxviIntroduction

and concede from the first that providence rules the human things. Pufen-
dorf did not give recognition to providence among his hypotheses; Selden
merely assumed it; and Grotius set it aside. However, the Roman jurists es-
tablished it as the first principle of the natural law of the gentile peoples. . . .

Consequently, let Bayle see if there can actually be nations in the world
without some knowledge of God! And let Polybius see how much truth
there may be in his statement that if there were philosophers in the world,
there would have been no need in the world for religions (§§1109–10).
Vico thus ends his New Science with the rejection of political-philosophical
atheism, crystallized by the doctrines of Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Spinoza, Bayle, and Polybius, against which Vico juxtaposes the political
philosophy of Plato and Cicero. In the dualistic, oppositional value system
that Vico constructs (appearing generally as the polarization of Plato and
Machiavelli), the synthesis of Plato and Machiavelli desired by Vico’s friend
Paolo Matteo Doria seems to be dismissed out of hand. Of more immediate
concern, Vico explicitly banishes the atheistic philosophers from the realm
of political philosophy, not because their science is wrong, but because their
unbelief threatens the foundation of the state.
Vico’s trenchant dismissal of atheological politics aligns him with the tra-
dition of the “anti-Machiavel,” the likes of which include Tommaso Cam-
panella, Innocent Gentillet, and Jean Bodin. All are thinkers who display
a revulsion from the frightening elements of Machiavelli’s vision: his ideas
about the nature of power and his belief that the words have no relationship
to the things they name—in short, “Machiavellianism” as a synonym for the
philosophical skepticism of the libertines. For Vico, language (or discourse)
is the real foundation of the political arena; mistrust of language undermines
the order of the city. That is why against Machiavellian politics, Vico juxta-
poses Plato and Cicero, owing to their shared doctrine that a moral, political
dialogic conversation is dependable.
Within this context, Vico draws attention to the link between rhetoric and
politics. His conclusion suggests the possibility of viewing materialist phi-
losophy as a blasphemous, divisive discourse that undermines the order of
the city and promotes distrust in language. As Socrates and Dante had taught
(compare Inferno 26), rhetoric is the discipline by which cities are constructed
and by which they are destroyed. And Vico knows too well that polemos,
“war,” is carved indelibly in the echo of the etymology of polis.
But the last line of The New Science says it all: se non siesi pio, non si può
daddovero esser saggio—which must be translated as “if one is not pious, one
cannot in truth be wise.”

Giuseppe F. Mazzotta
S Yale University
N Author, The New Map of the World: The Poetic
L Philosophy of Giambattista Vico
xxvi
The New Science
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S
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 PRINCIPLES

OF THE

NEW SCIENCE

OF

GIAMBATTISTA VICO

ABOUT THE COMMON NATURE

OF THE NATIONS

IN THIS THIRD EDITION

Corrected, clarified, and notably expanded

by the Author himself in a great number of places.
S
N
L
2
 An Explication

of the

Picture

Put Forward As the Frontispiece,

to Serve

as the Introduction to the Work

3
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S
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An Explication of the Frontispiece 5

Just as Cebes the Theban in his Table1 made a register of the moral 1
things, so we offer one to see the civil things. This serves for the reader to
conceive of THE IDEA OF THIS WORK before reading it and to bring
it back to one’s memory more easily, with such help as the imagination
affords, after reading it.
THE WOMAN WITH THE WINGED TEMPLES STANDING 2
SOVEREIGN UPON THE GLOBE OF THE WORLD—that is,
the world of nature—is metaphysics, just as the term “metaphysics”
itself implies.
And THE LUMINOUS TRIANGLE with an EYE WATCHING
FROM WITHIN, this is God in keeping with divine providence as an
aspect of God; with a view to this aspect, METAPHYSICS, IN AN
ATTITUDE OF ECSTASY, CONTEMPLATES GOD from above the
order of the natural things, whereas up until now philosophers have con-
templated God through this order. For in this work, metaphysics has
risen above that natural order and contemplates in God the world of
the human mind—that is, the metaphysical world—so as to demonstrate
providence in the world of the human spirit—that is, in the civil world,
or, rather, the world of nations—a world formed in its basic elements out
of all those things represented with the HIEROGLYPHS placed at the
bottom of the PICTURE.
Accordingly, the globe—that is, the physical, or rather, the natural
world—IS SUPPORTED ON ONLY ONE PART OF THE ALTAR,
for philosophers have up until now contemplated divine providence only
in terms of the natural order and so have demonstrated only one part
of it, namely, the part to which men give reverence with sacrifices and
other divine honors to a God who, as mind, is free and absolute lord
over nature insofar as it is with his eternal counsel that God has natu-
rally brought us into being and naturally preserves our being. However,
they have not yet contemplated God in terms of that part of providence
most proper to men, beings whose nature has as its principal property
that of being sociable; it is in providing for this sociability that God has
ordered and disposed the human things: one might suppose that men,
who have fallen away from integrity and justice through original sin, who
always intend different, and even conflicting, courses of action so as to
serve their own advantage,2 would live in solitude like wild beasts; on
the contrary, through those very courses of action, as different and as

1
  There is an extant work called the Table of Cebes, attributed by Diogenes
Laertius to Cebes the Theban (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
2.16), who is known primarily for appearing in Plato’s Phaedo. Cebes’s author-
ship of The Table is doubtful; it is likely by an anonymous author from the first
or second century CE.
2
  Utilità, a key term in the text. “Advantage” or “the advantageous” uniformly
translates utilità in the singular; “advantages” is used for utilità in the plural.
The adjective utile is translated by “advantageous” or “useful.”
 6 The New Science

conflicting as they are, men are drawn by that same advantage to live
as men in keeping with justice, to preserve themselves in society, and to
acknowledge their sociable nature; in this work, it will be demonstrated
that this is the truth of the civil nature of man and thus the natural
law. Guidance of divine providence of this sort is one of the things with
which this science is principally preoccupied in its reasoning. Hence, on
account of this aspect, this science comes to be a rational civil theology
of divine providence.
3 ON THE BELT OF THE ZODIAC WHICH GIRDS THE GLOBE
OF THE WORLD, ONLY TWO OF THE SIGNS APPEAR IN THEIR
MAJESTY, or (as they say) IN FULL RELIEF, THOSE OF LEO AND
OF VIRGO. In the first place, this is to signify that, for its principles,
this science contemplates Hercules, given, first, that one finds that every
ancient gentile nation tells of some Hercules as its founder. This science
contemplates him in the greatest of his Labors, the one with him killing
the lion which, in spewing flames, burned down the Nemean forest, and
it is a Hercules adorned with the skin of this lion who was raised to the
stars; and given, second, that one finds herein that this lion is the great
ancient forest of the Earth, the forest which Hercules (whom one finds
was a character standing for the political heroes, who must have come
before martial heroes) set on fire and brought under cultivation. In ad-
dition, this is to offer the beginning of historical times, which started
for the Greeks, from whom we have all that remains of gentile antiquity,
with the Olympiads connected with their Olympic games, games which
we have been told Hercules founded: these must have started with the
Nemean games, introduced so as to commemorate the victory recording
when Hercules slayed the Nemean lion; thus, historical times started for
the Greeks when they started cultivating the fields.
And, the sign of Virgo (whom astronomers, following the poets, depict
as crowned in ears of wheat) means that Greek history started with the
golden age, which the poets plainly tell us was the first age of their world;
during this age and over the course of many centuries, they counted
years in terms of the sowing of grain, which one finds was the earliest
gold of the world. The golden age in Greece corresponds exactly to the
Age of Saturn in Latium, so called from satis3—that is, from the Latin
word meaning “sown ground.” The poets describe this golden age as a
time when gods consorted on Earth with heroes, and their description is
trustworthy: on the one hand, it will be shown herein [§375] that the ear-
liest men of gentile antiquity, simple and rude and, because of the force
of an ingenuity belonging to a vigorous imagination, encumbered with
terrifying superstitions, truly believed that they saw gods on the Earth;
on the other hand, it will be found that, on account of the uniformity

3
  See also §§73, 549, 732. The origin of this etymology is possibly Augustine,
City of God 7.2. It appears in Gerhard Johann Voss (1577–1649), Etymologicon
S linguae latinae, in Opera, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1695), p. 520. Voss was a
N friend of Hugo Grotius and a primary source of Vico’s etymologies.
L
6
An Explication of the Frontispiece 7

of ideas, those in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Latium,

even though they lacked any knowledge of one another, raised gods and
heroes up from the Earth in the same way, the gods which were the plan-
ets in motion4 and the heroes which were the fixed constellations. And
so, the Age of Saturn—who is Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks, for
whom χρόνος [chronos] means “time”—will offer alternative principles
for chronology—that is, the study of time.
It should not seem incongruous that THE ALTAR IS UNDER AND 4
SUPPORTING THE GLOBE, for it will be found that the earliest al-
tars of the world were raised by the gentiles to the earliest heaven of the
poets; these poets, in their myths, are trustworthy in passing down to us
that heaven ruled on Earth over men and left great benefits to human-
kind at a time when these earliest men (those in the childhood of an
emerging humankind) believed that heaven was no higher than the tops
of the mountains, just as even now children believe it to be little higher
than the roofs of their houses; it will be found that later, as the Greek
mind developed a great deal more, heaven was raised to the tops of the
highest mountains like Olympus where, as Homer tells us, the gods were
in his time; and it will be found that, eventually, heaven was raised above
the spheres, as astronomy demonstrates for us, and Olympus was raised
above the starry heaven where the altar thus was transferred to heaven
to form its own constellation; as you can see, the passing of THE FIRE
UPON THE ALTAR INTO THE NEIGHBORING HOUSE OF LEO,
which, as was suggested above, was the Nemean forest Hercules set on
fire so as to bring the land under cultivation; and the hide of the lion was
raised to the stars as a monument to the victory of Hercules.
THE RAY OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE WHICH ILLUMINATES 5
A CONVEX JEWEL ADORNING THE BREAST OF METAPHYS-
ICS denotes the clean and pure heart which metaphysics must have, one
not befouled or polluted by pride of spirit or the baseness of bodily plea-
sures; because of the former, Zeno gave himself over to fate; because of
the latter, Epicurus gave himself over to chance; and both, therefore,
denied divine providence.
Furthermore, the ray denotes that knowledge of God is not limited to
that knowledge itself, for if it were the case that metaphysics offered
only private illumination about intellectual things, and only in this way
regulated its moral things (this is how philosophers have acted up until
now), this would have been signified with a flat jewel; but THE JEWEL
IS CONVEX SO THAT THE RAY IS REFLECTED AND RE-
FRACTED OUTWARD, for metaphysics knows of divine providence
in public moral things—that is, in the civil customs with which the na-
tions have come into the world and preserve themselves.

4
  Vico’s term is erranti, an Italian rendering of the Latin erraticae or errones,
terms used to describe the planets, as attested at Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
3.10.2 and 14.1.11.
 8 The New Science

6 THE SAME RAY IS REFRACTED FROM THE BREAST OF

METAPHYSICS ONTO THE STATUE OF HOMER, the earliest au-
thor of gentile antiquity to come down to us, for on the strength of a
metaphysics made chiefly from a history of human ideas and starting
from the point at which men began thinking in a human way, it is fi-
nally possible for us to descend into the bewildered minds of the earli-
est founders of the gentile nations, all of whom had the most vigorous
senses and the most capacious imaginations; through this—namely, the
fact that they could use nothing but faculties of the human mind and
reasoning which were in this condition, faculties which were completely
stunned and stupefied5—principles pertaining to poetry are found which
are not simply different from, but completely contrary to what they were
hitherto thought to be, and these are found within the principles pertain-
ing to poetic wisdom—that is, the knowledge [scienza] of the theological
poets6—principles which have hitherto been hidden as a result of the
same causes; this poetic wisdom was, without dispute, the earliest wis-
dom of the world for the gentiles.
AND THE STATUE OF HOMER UPON A CRACKED BASE means
the Discovery of the True Homer, which, in the first edition of The New
Science, we sensed but did not understand and which, in this edition,
has been reflected upon and fully demonstrated; the fact that this true
Homer has until now been unknown has kept hidden from us the truth
of things from the age of myth among the nations; and even more so the
truth of the things from the age of darkness (which all have previously
despaired of knowing); and, consequently, the truth about the earliest
origins of the age of history. These are the three ages of the world which
Marcus Terentius Varro, the most learned writer on Roman antiquity,
left for us in writing in his great, and now lost, work entitled Rerum divi-
narum et humanarum.7
7 Furthermore, the statue indicates that, in this work, there is a new art
of criticism8 which has hitherto been missing and which enters upon
research into the truth about those who were authors of the nations

5
  Storida e stupida. The phrase recurs at §§591, 809, 1106. As Battistini observes,
Vico often tends to crystallize his thinking into euphonic formulas.
6
  Throughout the text Vico will speak of the “theological poets”—a phrase that
Vico means to indicate the primal unity of poetry and religion. The theological
poets in Vico’s sense come much earlier than names that we tend to associate
with poets, e.g., Homer. (See both the Table and later passages, particularly
§901.)
7
  Vico takes the notion of three times—“dark” (oscuro), “mythical” (favoloso),
and “historical” (storico)—from Varro’s lost work Antiquitates rerum divinarum,
by way of Censorinus’s De die natali 21.1. Censorinus was a Roman grammar-
ian of the third century CE.
8
  The “new art of criticism” (nuova arte critica) is the outcome of Vico’s mar-
riage of philosophy and philology, a marriage which bears some comparison to
S that envisioned by in the fifth century CE by Martianus Capella’s On the Mar-
N riage of Philology and Mercury. As Battistini notes, Vico intends the new critical
L
8
An Explication of the Frontispiece 9

themselves,9 nations which had to run their course over many thousands
of years so as to be able to produce the sort of writers with whom the
art of criticism has hitherto been preoccupied. Herein, philosophy pro-
poses to examine philology—that is, the study of all the things depend-
ing upon human choice, namely, the histories of languages, of customs,
of deeds, and of peoples, in peace as well as in war—and so proposes to
examine things from which, on account of the deplorable darkness of
their causes and the almost infinite variety of their effects, philosophy
has, as it were, recoiled in horror from reasoning about; thus, philosophy
reduces philology to the form of a science by discovering therein the de-
sign of an ideal eternal history in accordance with which the histories of
all nations run their temporal course.10 As a result, in its second principal
aspect, this science comes to be a philosophy of authority.
This is because it is demonstrated—on the strength of alternative prin-
ciples of mythology discovered in this work, which themselves are a con-
sequence of the alternative principles of poetry found in this work—that
myths were, strictly speaking, true histories of the customs of the most
ancient gentile peoples of Greece; and, at first, these were myths about
the gods, histories of times when men of a most rude gentile humanity
believed that all things necessary or advantageous for humankind came
from the gods; the authors of this poetry were the earliest peoples, all of
whom are found to have been the theological poets, who indubitably tell
us that they founded the gentile nations with these myths about the gods.
And herein, with the principles of this new art of criticism, we will
meditate upon determinate times and particular occasions of human
necessities and advantages, to which the earliest men of gentile antiq-
uity attended and by which they imagined, in keeping with the terrifying
religions which they devised for themselves and in which they believed,
first one god, then another. This natural theogony—that is, this account
of a generation of the gods made naturally in the minds of the earliest
men—allows for a rational chronology for the poetic history of the gods.
And the myths about heroes are true histories of those heroes and their
heroic customs; they are found to have flourished in all the nations in
the age of their barbarism. Thus, the two poems of Homer are found to
be two great treasure houses of discoveries about the natural law of the
Greek gentile peoples while still in their barbarism. And this period of

art as an alternative to both “abstract and nebulous” metaphysical criticism and

“blind and diffuse” philological erudition.
9
  Vico speaks of “authors of the nations”—similar to “founders” but with a
different shade of meaning. For this usage, compare Virgil, Aeneid 8.134.
10
  Vico’s claim to discover an “ideal eternal history upon which the histories of
all nations run their temporal course” is among the most striking aspects of The
New Science. Judging the status of the ideal history (Is it necessary? A hypoth-
esis? An ideal type?), along with its relation to empirical history, is among the
many challenges Vico’s text poses to its interpreters. For more on the ideal
eternal history, see §§17, 29, 35, 114, 145, 245, 294, 349, 393, 915, 1004.
 10 The New Science

time is determined in this work to have lasted among the Greeks up until
the time of Herodotus, who is said to be the father of Greek history, but
whose books are, for the most part, filled with myths and whose style
retains, to a great extent, much that is Homeric; and all the historians
who came after him keep to this heritage, using expressions somewhere
between the poetic and the commonplace.
By contrast, Thucydides, the first historian in the strict sense and the
first serious historian of Greece, at the beginning of his account pro-
claims that up until the time of his father—which was the same as that
of Herodotus, who was an old man when Thucydides was a child—the
Greeks knew nothing whatsoever about their own antiquity, much less
about that of foreigners,11 all of whose antiquity, with the exception of
the Romans, we have from the Greeks; these antiquities are THE DENSE
SHADOWS WHICH THE PICTURE SHOWS IN THE  BACK-
GROUND AND OUT OF WHICH, IN THE LIGHT OF THE RAY
OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE REFRACTED FROM METAPHYSICS
ONTO HOMER, COME TO LIGHT ALL THE HIEROGLYPHS;
these signify the beginnings of this world of nations hitherto recognized
only through their effects.
8 AMONG THESE HIEROGLYPHS, THE LARGEST IN APPEAR-
ANCE IS AN ALTAR, for the civil world starts among all peoples with
religion, which was discussed somewhat before and will be discussed
more fully shortly hereafter.
9 ON THE ALTAR TO THE LEFT, THE FIRST THING TO AP-
PEAR IS THE LITUUS—that is, the divining staff with which augurs
took auguries and observed the auspices—which allows one to under-
stand that, among the gentiles, all of the earliest divine things took their
start from divination.
For just as the providence of the Hebrews was a true providence (for
they believed that God is an infinite mind and, consequently, that God
sees all of time in a single point of eternity, whence God, either him-
self or through angels who are minds or through prophets, warned his
people of things to come), so too the providence of the gentiles was
an imaginary providence, for they imagined that the gods were bodies
who, accordingly, warned the gentiles with sensible signs about things
to come. Therefore, it is on account of this attribute of God—namely,
his providence—that all of humankind universally gave the same name,
“divinity,” to the nature of God and did so on the basis of the same idea,
described in Latin as divinari, “to warn of what is to come.” However,
this was done in keeping with the fundamental distinction just stated,
and upon this distinction depends all the other essential differences dem-
onstrated in this science between the natural law of the Hebrews and

S 11
  See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2.
N
L
10
An Explication of the Frontispiece 11

the natural law of the gentile peoples,12 a law which the Roman jurists
defined as what divine providence orders and to which the customs of
human life conform.
Hence, from what was just said, a LITUUS of this sort indicates in a
single stroke the beginning of the universal gentile history. It is demon-
strated by proofs from physics and philology that this history started
with the Universal Flood; for two centuries after this flood, as mythical
history recounts, heaven reigned on Earth and made for many great ben-
efits to humankind. And through the uniformity of ideas among those
in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, in Latium, and in other gentile
nations, there arose, in the same way, many religions, and each religion
had its own Jove; for it is proven that, at the end of this time and after
this flood, heaven must have flashed lightning and thundered, and from
the lightning and thunder of each of their Joves, these nations started
to take the auspices; this multiplicity of Joves, which led the Egyptians
to say that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient of all, has hitherto
been a source of wonder for philologists. And with these same proofs,
it is demonstrated that the antiquity of the religion of the Hebrews sur-
passed that of all the religions that founded the gentile peoples and, con-
sequently, it is demonstrated that the truth of Christianity surpasses all
these religions.
ON THE SAME ALTAR BEFORE THE LITUUS IS SEEN WA- 10
TER AND FIRE, AND THE WATER IS CONTAINED IN A SMALL
URN, for sacrifices amongst the gentiles came from divination because
of a custom common to all of them, which in Latin is called procurare—
that is, making sacrifice in order to understand auguries with a view to
following divine warnings, that is, the commands of Jove. From these
divine things among the gentiles later came all the human things.
The first of the human things were marriages, signified by THE 11
TORCH LIT AT THE FIRE ON THE ALTAR AND RESTING
AGAINST THE SMALL URN; marriages, as all the political theorists
agree, are the seedbed from which families emerge, just as families are
the seedbed from which republics emerge. And, so as to denote this, the
TORCH, although it is a HIEROGLYPH representing the human things,
is assigned a place on the altar along with water and fire, which are hi-
eroglyphs representing divine ceremonies—exactly as was done in the
ancient Roman practice of observing weddings aqua et igni [“with water
and fire”]—for these two things which are shared in common—and a
perennial supply of water more so than fire because it is more ­necessary

12
  Throughout the text, Vico insists upon the difference between the Hebrews
and gentiles, along with the distinction between sacred and profane history.
The “natural law of the Hebrews,” as Battistini notes, is the law transmitted by
Moses, or what theological tradition knows more commonly as the “Old Law”
(lex vetus).
 12 The New Science

for life—these two things were later understood to be the things through
which divine counsel brought men to live together in society.
12 The second of the human things is burial (on account of this, in Latin,
the word humanitas, in its primary and proper sense, is derived from the
word humando, meaning “to bury”13), and burial is represented by A
FUNERAL URN PLACED OFF TO THE SIDE IN THE FORESTS,
which points to the fact that burial is found to have existed even back in
times when the human race was eating fruits in the summer, acorns in the
winter. And D.M., the letters which are inscribed ON THE URN, means
“to the good souls of the buried.”14 This expression shows the consensus
common to the whole of humankind about the tenet later demonstrated
to be true by Plato, namely, that the human soul does not die with its
body but is immortal.15
13 This URN indicates, furthermore, the origins among the division of the
fields among these same gentiles, from which will be found the origins
of distinctions among cities, among peoples, and, eventually, among
nations.
For it will be found that the races—first, the race of Ham, then, the race
of Japheth, and finally, the race of Shem—came to be without the reli-
gion of their father, Noah, a religion which they renounced and which
alone in what was then the state of nature was able to hold them with
marriage in the familial society; and they became lost because they went
astray—that is, from feral wandering throughout the great forest of the
Earth—driven through their pursuit of shy and reluctant women and
driven through their flight from wild animals, which the ancient forest
must have had in abundance; and they became scattered, driven through
their search for food and water; and on account of all this and at the end
of a long period of time, they had arrived at a bestial state; it is at that
point—on certain occasions ordered by divine providence upon which
this science meditates and which it discovers—that a few of these men
were struck and aroused by a terrible awe at the divinity of some heaven
or some Jove which they devised for themselves and in which they be-
lieved; eventually, these few stopped wandering and hid in certain places
where they settled with certain women and, through their fear of this ap-
parent divinity, practiced the custom of marriage in religious and chaste
carnal unions, conceived certain children,16 and so founded families. And
in connection with their being settled there for a long period of time and

13
 Traditionally, humanitas was derived from homo, “human being.” The deriva-
tion of humanitas from humando appears to be one of Vico’s more fanciful
etymologies, which he nonetheless insists upon throughout The New Science, as
Battistini notes.
14
  “D.M.” stands for Dis Manibus, “to the gods of the lower world.” On the
Manes, see Augustine, City of God 8.26 and 9.11.
15
  See, for example, Plato, Phaedo 107a.
S 16
  “Certain children”—that is, children recognized by fathers and mothers to be
N their offspring.
L
12
An Explication of the Frontispiece 13

in connection with the burials of ancestors, they are discovered to have

founded and divided up the first domains of the earth; as lords over these
domains, they were called giants, a word which in Greek means “sons of
the earth”—that is, descendants of the buried—and consequently, they
supposed themselves to be nobles because they deemed nobility itself, in
that earliest state of the human things and in keeping with correct ideas,
as belonging to those who have been begotten in a human way out of
fear of some divinity; and from this human way of begetting [generare
umanamente] and from nowhere else came the expression “the human
race” [l’umana generazione]. Hence, the noble households, which grew
out of families of this sort through such begetting, spoke of themselves
as the first gentile peoples. It is from this point of time of utmost antiq-
uity, since it is the starting point of the subject matter, that the doctrine
of the natural law of the gentile peoples starts. This must be regarded as
another principal aspect of this science.
Now, these giants, for reasons both physical and moral, to say nothing of
the authority of history, are found to have had unusual strength and size;
and since the causes of this strength and size do not obtain for those who
believe both in the true God, creator of the world, and in the prince of
the whole of humankind, Adam, the Hebrews were, from the beginning
of the world, of a correct bodily size.
So after, first, divine providence and, second, solemnized marriages,
the universal belief in the immortality of the soul, which starts with
burial, is the third of three principles upon which this science reasons
about the origins of all the countless things that it treats in their variety
and diversity.
OUT FROM THE FOREST WHERE THE URN IN PLACED, A 14
PLOUGH ADVANCES INTO THE OPEN. This shows that the Fa-
thers of the earliest gentile peoples were the first men of fortitude in
history, whence are found the Herculean founders of the earliest gentile
nations mentioned above [§3] (Varro counted some forty different ver-
sions, and among all of them the Egyptians said that their Hercules was
the most ancient), for these different Herculean founders had dominion
over the first lands of the world and brought them under cultivation.
Hence, the first Fathers of the gentile nations were men of justice on ac-
count of their believing piety, that of observing the auspices which they
believed were the divine commands of Jove (Ious, as Jove was called in
Latin, comes from the archaic word for law, ious, which later contracted
to ius17), whence justice among all the nations is naturally taught with
piety; and they were men of prudence because they made sacrifices so
as to procure—that is, in order to understand well—the auspices and

17
  For the derivation of ius from Ious, see Voss, Etymologicion, p. 318. This
particular etymology occurs throughout The New Science; Vico appeals to it
for his grounding of the origins of law and right in religion. See also §§398, 433,
489, 516.
 14 The New Science

to take good counsel through the commands of Jove about what they
ought to work at in life; and they were men of temperance because of
marriage. And they were, as has been indicated here, men of fortitude.
Consequently, they allow for alternative moral principles whereby the
recondite wisdom of philosophers might be reconciled with the com-
monplace wisdom of lawgivers.18 Through these principles, all the virtues
put down roots in piety and in religion: through these two things alone
are the virtues effectual in their work, and, as a consequence of these two
things, men must propose as the complete good that which God wills.
So too are given alternative principles for economic doctrine,19 so that
children still in the power of their fathers should be deemed still in the
familial state; consequently, they are to be formed and settled20 in all
their studies in nothing other than piety and religion. And since they do
not yet have the capacity to understand the republic and its laws, they in-
stead revere and fear their fathers as living images of God and, from this,
are found later to be naturally disposed to follow the religion of their
fathers, to defend the fatherland which preserves their families, and so to
obey laws ordered to the preservation of religion and the fatherland. It
is in this way that divine providence has ordered the human things by its
eternal counsel: first, families would be founded with religion and, from
them, republics would arise later with laws.
15 THE PLOUGH LEANS ITS HANDLE WITH A CERTAIN MAJ-
ESTY ON THE FACE OF THE ALTAR, so as to allow one to under-
stand that ploughed lands were the earliest altars of gentile antiquity
and so as to denote, furthermore, the natural superiority which the he-
roes believed they had over their socii [“associates”], whom, we will see a
bit hereafter, are signified by THE RUDDER IN AN ATTITUDE OF
OBEISANCE NEAR THE BASE OF THE ALTAR; it will be demon-
strated that it is upon this natural superiority that the heroes rested all
their claims to, their knowledge [scienza] about, and consequently their
administration of the divine things, namely, the divine auspices.
16 THE PLOUGH EXPOSES ONLY THE TIP OF THE PLOUGH-
SHARE AND HIDES THE MOLDBOARD (before men understood
the use of iron, this moldboard must have been curved wood hard

18
  Here and elsewhere, “commonplace wisdom” translates sapienza volgare.
“Vulgar” in modern English carries associations that are simply foreign to the
noun volgo, the adjective volgare and the adverb volgarmente; in each instance,
the meaning is closer to “common.” Accordingly, the present text employs
a small number of terms built from “common” to translate vulgo, volgare,
and volgarmente, even though “common” is also used to render the adjective
comune. The two exceptions to this policy are lingue volgari and parlari volgari,
translated as “vernacular languages” and “vernacular tongues,” and volgari
tradizioni, translated as “folk traditions.”
19
  See the note at §520 on dottrina iconomica.
S 20
  “Formed and settled” = formarsi e fermarsi, a play on words that Vico repeats
N (as Battistini notes) several times in the text, e.g., §679 and §708.
L
14
An Explication of the Frontispiece 15

enough to be able to turn the earth and plough it; the word for mold-
board in Latin was urbs, from which comes the archaic word urbum,
meaning “curved”21) so as to signify that the earliest cities, all of which
were founded in cultivated fields, arose with families which had, for a
long time, retired and hid in the midst of the horrors of woods made
sacred by religious observances; these woods are found to exist among
all the ancient gentile nations and conform with an idea common to all
the nations (the gentile peoples of Latium spoke of them as lucus, mean-
ing “burnt land within a wooded enclosure”). These are the woods con-
demned by Moses22 to be burned wherever the people of God extended
their conquests, and this was done on account of the counsel of divine
providence, lest those who had already come into their humanity would
be confounded anew with wanderers who remained in that unholy shar-
ing of things and women in common.
A RUDDER IS SEEN ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE SAME AL- 17
TAR: this signifies the origin of the migration of peoples by means of
seafaring.
And THE RUDDER SEEMS TO BOW AT THE FOOT OF THE AL-
TAR: this signifies the ancestors of those who later were the authors of
these same migrations. These ancestors were, in the first place, men of
impiety, recognizing no divinity whatsoever; in addition, they were un-
holy, being unable to distinguish parentage among themselves through
marriage, so that sons often would lie with their mothers, and daughters
with their fathers; and, finally, because they were like wild beasts without
any understanding of society in the midst of this infamous sharing of all
things in common, they were solitary, and so weak, and ultimately miser-
able and unhappy because they were in need of all the goods required to
preserve a secure life; and so, in their flight from the evils proper to this
experience of conflict produced by that feral sharing of all things in com-
mon, they had recourse, for their own escape and safety, to the cultivated
lands of men of piety, chastity, and fortitude, who were also men of
power since they had already united in familial society. It will be found
that, because of these lands, cities throughout all the world of the gentile
antiquity used to be called ARAE [“ALTARS”]; these must have been the
earliest altars of the gentile nations, and the first fire lit upon these altars
was the one which allowed for the clearing of the forests and the bringing
of them under cultivation, and the first water was that of the perennial
springs, needed so that those who were to found humanity would no
longer wander in feral error in search of water, but instead would settle
in one land with boundaries for a long period of time and thus become
unaccustomed to going about wandering. And because these altars are
found to have been the earliest asylums of the world (which Livy defines

21
  This etymology comes from Varro, De lingua latina 5.143, as transmitted
by Servius Honoratus, Festus, and Pomponius, but probably known to Vico
through Voss, Etymologicon, p. 657.
22
  See Deuteronomy 12:3 and Exodus 34:13.
 16 The New Science

in general terms as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old coun-

sel of founders of cities”],23 when he tells that it was within the asylum
which was opened in the lucus that Romulus founded Rome), and the
earliest cities, as a consequence, were almost all described as altars.
Add to this minor discovery another major one, namely, that among
the Greeks—from whom, as was stated above [§7], we have everything
that remains of gentile antiquity—the first Thrace or Scythia, the first
Asia and India, the first Maurentania or Libya, and the first Europe or
Hesperia—that is to say, respectively, the first North, the first East, the
first South, and the first West—and along with these, the first Ocean, all
these came into being within Greece itself; then, later, the Greeks, after
they went throughout the world, gave names of this sort to the four parts
of the world and to the ocean which surrounds it from their resemblance
to those places. These discoveries, we say, offer alternative principles for
geography, which, like the alternative principles for chronology previ-
ously indicated, are the two eyes of history needed so as to read the ideal
eternal history which was mentioned above.
18 To these altars, then, those who were impious, wandering, and weak had
recourse in order to protect their lives from those more vigorous, and
those men of piety and fortitude killed the violent and took into their
protection the weak who, because they brought nothing but their lives,
were received in the status of familial servants because of they were sup-
plied with the means of sustaining life. It was principally from familial
servants [famoli] of this sort that the word “families” [famiglie] was de-
rived; these familial servants are the precursors of those who, in later
times, became slaves by being captured in war.
Consequently, like many branches from one trunk come the origins of
many things: there is, as was seen [§17], the origins of the asylums; the or-
igins of those families from which cities later arose, as will be more fully
explained below [§25]; the origin of flocking to cities so as to live as men
secure from the unjust and violent; the origins of jurisdictions exercised
within their proper territories; the origins of extending power through
the use of justice, fortitude, and magnanimity, the most luminous vir-
tues of princes and states; the origin of coats of arms, which are found
to have had, for their display, those first sown fields as the first fields of
arms; the origins of fame [fama], from which the aforementioned term
“familial servants” [famoli], is derived, and the origins of glory, which
eternally rests upon the help given to humankind; the origin of true no-
bility, which naturally comes to be from the exercise of moral virtue;
the origins of true heroism, which comes from dominating the proud
and succoring those in danger, a heroism in which the Roman people
surpassed all others on the earth, thus becoming lords over the world;24

 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.

23

S   An allusion to Aeneid 6.853, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. See also

24

N Scienza nuova prima §1099.

L
16
An Explication of the Frontispiece 17

and, finally, the origins of war and peace in that war starts in the world
for self-defense, in which the true virtue of fortitude consists. And, in all
these origins, one discovers the design of the eternal basis for republics,
upon which even states acquired by violence and fraud must stand so as
to endure, just as those acquired by those virtuous origins later collapse
because of fraud and because of force.25
And this basis for republics is founded upon the two principles eternal to
this world of nations, the mind and the body of the men who compose
the nations.
This is because men consist of these two parts, one of which is noble
and, as such, must command and the other of which is base and must
serve; and because of corrupt human nature, without the help of phi-
losophy (this cannot succor but a very few), the generality of men cannot
act in their private lives in such a way that the mind of each one com-
mands rather than serves the body; because of this, divine providence
has ordered the human things to accord with that eternal order whereby
those in republics who use their minds command and those who use their
bodies obey.
THE RUDDER IS BOWING AT THE FOOT OF THE ALTAR. For 19
these familial servants, because they are men without God, have no com-
mon share in the divine things, and, consequently, have no share with
the nobles in the community constituted by the human things; and prin-
cipally they have no claim to observing the solemn nuptials which in
Latin are called connubium [“marriage”], whose solemnity rests, in large
part, upon the auspices; on account of the auspices, the nobles supposed
themselves to be of divine origin and considered their familial servants
to have the bestial origins of those who were begotten from unholy cou-
plings. This distinction between a more noble and a less noble nature is
found equally among those in Egypt, in Greece, and in Latium, and it
consists of a belief in that natural heroism about which we are told quite
explicitly in ancient Roman history.
Finally, THE RUDDER IS AT SOME DISTANCE FROM THE 20
PLOUGH, WHICH IS IN FRONT OF THE ALTAR AND SHOWS
HOSTILITY TOWARDS THE RUDDER, MENACING IT WITH
ITS TIP. For familial servants, who had no share in dominion over the
lands over which the nobles were lords, as has been discussed, and who
grew weary that they must always serve the nobles as lords, eventually,
after a long period of time, challenged this dominion over the lands and,
on account of this, rebelled and turned against the heroes in agrarian
disputes of this sort, which will be found [§583] to be more ancient than
and vastly different from those read about in later Roman history. And,
at that time, the many leaders of these companies of familial servants

  Vico knows the dyad “fraud and force” from Cicero, De officis 1.13.41. See
25

also Machiavelli, Prince 7; Discourses on Livy 2.13; Florentine Histories 3.13.

 18 The New Science

rose up and were defeated by the heroes (as the serfs of Egypt often were
by the priests, according to the observations of Peter van der Kuhn26 in
his De republica Hebraeorum), and afterwards, so as not to be oppressed
and to find refuge and safety along with those in their party, committed
their fortunes to the sea and went to find unoccupied lands on the shores
of the Mediterranean to the west, the coasts of which, at that time, were
uninhabited. This is the origin of the migration of peoples already hu-
manized by religion from the Near East, from Egypt, and, in the Near
East, especially from Phoenicia; this later came to pass in Greece as a
result of the same causes.
This is the fashion in which migration comes to be: not because of inva-
sions of other peoples27 (these are not possible by sea) and not because
of a jealous regard for preserving distant acquisitions by establishing
colonies (for we do not read of any nations from the Near East, from
Egypt, or from Greece extending their power to the West) and not be-
cause of trade (for we do not find coasts in the West which are inhabited
at this time). Instead, the law of the heroic age made it necessary for
bands of men of this sort from these nations to abandon their own lands,
which they naturally would not abandon but for some extreme necessity.
And it was with colonies of this sort—which accordingly will be named
“overseas colonies of the heroic age”—that humankind also spread
throughout the sea to the rest of our world, just as it had spread for a
long time previously throughout the earth by wandering in feral error.
21 STANDING FURTHER OUT IN FRONT OF THE PLOUGH IS
A TABLE INSCRIBED WITH THE ANCIENT LATIN ALPHABET
RESEMBLING (as Tacitus tells us28) THE ANCIENT GREEK AL-
PHABET and, A LITTLE BELOW THAT, THE MORE RECENT
ALPHABET WHICH REMAINS FOR US.
This is to denote the origins of the languages and letters that are called
vernacular, both of which are found to have come about at a stage long
after the founding of nations and, in the case of letters, at a stage long af-
ter that of languages. To signify this, THE TABLE LIES ON A FRAG-
MENT OF A COLUMN OF THE CORINTHIAN ORDER, the most
modern of the architectural orders.
22 THE TABLE LIES QUITE CLOSE TO THE PLOUGH AND FAR
FROM THE RUDDER so as to signify the origins of native languages,
each of which was first formed in its own land, the land where those
who were authors of the nations finally found, by lot, a settled life far
from their feral wandering, those who had been, as was said above [§13],

26
  Peter van der Kuhn (1568–1638), Dutch Hebraist and professor of ju-
risprudence at the University of Leiden. The reference is to De republica
Hebraeorum 1.5.
27
  “Invasions from other peoples”—a likely allusion to Bacon’s inundatio bar-
S barorum (Novum Organum 1.77).
N 28
 Tacitus, Annals 11.14.3.
L
18
An Explication of the Frontispiece 19

scattered and dispersed29 throughout the great forest of the Earth; these
native languages, after a long period of time, blended with languages
from the Near East, Egypt, and Greece because of those migrations of
peoples to the coasts of the Mediterranean and to the Ocean indicated
above [§20].
And this allows herein for the alternative principles of etymology so fre-
quently tested throughout this entire work, through which the origins
of native terms are distinguished from those which are undoubtedly of
foreign origin with the following important distinction. The etymologies
of native languages are histories of the things signified by words follow-
ing the natural order of ideas,30 an order in which, first, there were for-
ests; then, cultivated fields and huts; later, small houses and villages; sub-
sequently, cities; and finally, academies and philosophers: thus, things
must progress in accordance with this order from their earliest origins.
By contrast, the etymologies of foreign languages are merely the histo-
ries of the words which one language has received from another.
THE TABLE SHOWS ONLY THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE AL- 23
PHABETS AND LIES FACING THE STATUE OF HOMER. For
letters (as Greek tradition has it in the case of Greek letters) were not
discovered all at one time. And it is necessarily the case that at least some
of them had not been found at the time of Homer; this is demonstrated
by the fact that none of his poems were left in writing. However, the ori-
gins of native languages will be given a distinct treatment later [§§31–35].
Finally, IN THE PLANE MOST ILLUMINATED OF ALL (for 24
the hieroglyphs placed there signify the most recognizable of the hu-
man things) the ingenious illustrator31 displays, IN A CAPRICIOUS
ARRANGEMENT, a ROMAN FASCES, a SWORD, a PURSE
LEANING ON THE FASCES, a SCALE, and the CADUCEUS OF
MERCURY.
Of these HIEROGLYPHS, the first is a FASCES. For the earliest civil 25
power arose out of the union of the patriarchal power of the Fathers;
among the gentiles, these Fathers were men wise in the art of divining
from auspices; they were priests through their procuring the auspices—
that is, by their understanding—the auspices in keeping with sacrifices;

29
  “Scattered and dispersed” = sparsi e dispersi, another of Vico’s euphonic
crystallizations, as Battistini notes.
30
  Well before Heidegger, Vico proposes that etymologies, far from being of in-
terest merely to grammarians, are of potentially immense philosophical signifi-
cance. This does not mean for Vico that we grasp the essential being of things
by etymology. Rather, etymologies are a useful tool for helping us to understand
the mentalities of the first human beings, whose way of seeing the world “is
completely impossible for us to imagine and only with great toil permitted for
us to understand” (§34; see also §§338, 378, 700).
31
  The artist is Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1681–1745), Neapolitan architect,
sculptor, and painter.
 20 The New Science

and they were kings—most certainly monarchs—who commanded what

they believed was willed by the gods in keeping with the auspices and
who, consequently, were subject to no one other than God.
So, for this union of patriarchal power, there is the fasces, a bundle of
divining rods, which are found to be the earliest scepters of the world.
These Fathers, during the agrarian revolts of which we spoke above [§20],
were naturally moved, so as to resist the companies of familial servants
rising up against them, to unite and to close ranks in the earliest orders,
those of regnant senates—that is, senates composed of those who were
kings in their respective families—under the leadership of certain heads
of those orders, those found to be the first kings of the cities of the he-
roic age; ancient history also tells us, although far too darkly, that, in the
earliest world of peoples, these kings were created naturally, a creation
whose fashion is meditated upon and found herein.
Now, those regnant senates, so as to calm the companies of familial ser-
vants rising up and to reduce them to obedience, conceded to them an
agrarian law, which is found to have been the first of all laws to have
come into being in the world; and the familial servants who were reduced
to obedience by this law naturally composed the earliest plebs of the
cities.
What was conceded by the nobles to those plebeians was the natural do-
main over the fields, while civil domain remained among the nobles, who
were the only citizens of the cities of the heroic age; and from these arose
eminent domain in the midst of these orders; these were the first civil
powers—that is, the sovereign powers of peoples. All three kinds of do-
main were formed and distinguished from each other with the coming-
into-being of republics, which though expressed differently in different
forms of speech are found, by one idea for all nations, to have been called
Herculean republics, or republics of curetes—that is, republics of those
armed in public assembly. And, consequently, this clarifies the begin-
nings of the famous ius Quiritium [“law of the Quirites”].32 Later inter-
preters of the Roman legal code believed this law to apply properly only
to those who were citizens of Rome, since this was the case in later times.
However, it is found that what was law in ancient Roman times was the
natural law of all gentile peoples of the heroic age.
And, consequently, like many streams from a great source, surge up
many origins. There is the origin of cities, which arose from families
composed not only of children but also of familial servants. Hence,
it is discovered that cities are naturally founded upon two communi-
ties—one community of the nobles, who command, and another of the
plebs, who obey—and from these two parts is composed the whole of
the polity—that is, the system of civil governance. It is demonstrated

S 32
  For a fuller explanation of the ius Quiritium, see §595.
N
L
20
An Explication of the Frontispiece 21

that these earliest cities could not have come into being from families
composed only of children, neither these early cities nor any city what-
soever. There are the origins of the public power belonging to the pub-
lic realm, which came into being from the union of the private power
of sovereign Fathers in the familial state. There are the origins of war
and peace: hence, all republics first came into being from an impetus
in arms and were later composed by laws; the nature of these two hu-
man things rests upon the eternal property that wars are waged in order
that peoples may live securely in peace. There are the origins of fealties,
for by one kind—rustic fealties—plebeians were subject to the nobles,
and by another kind—noble, or military, fealties—nobles who otherwise
were sovereign in their families were subject to the greater sovereignty of
their heroic orders; and it is found that regimes during barbarian ages
have always arisen in the world from these fealties, and this clarifies the
history of the new regimes of Europe which arose in the more recent
barbarian age,33 but which is darker for us than the first barbarian age
of which Varro speaks.
For those first fields were given by the nobles to the plebeians in con-
nection with a burden imposed upon them, the burden of paying a tithe
(called the Tithe of Hercules among the Greeks) or that of the census
(an order found to have been instituted by Servius Tullius for the Ro-
mans) or that of a tribute; this burden also carried with it the obligation
for the plebs to serve the nobles in time of war at their own expense, as
one can plainly read in ancient Roman history.
And it is here that the origin of the census is discovered, which is later
the basis upon which popular republics rest: this has cost me more effort
than all of my other research on Roman things, namely, discovering the
fashion in which the census of Servius Tullius, found to be the basis of
aristocratic republics, changed and became the basis for popular repub-
lics, a change which has made everyone to fall into the error of believing
that Servius Tullius had instituted the census as an order belonging to
popular liberty. And from this same beginning came the origins of com- 26
merce, which, in the same fashion of which we have just spoken, started
with the exchange of lands in connection with the start of those cities;
it is called commerce [commerzi] because of the first payments [mercede]
that came into being in the world, namely, because of the fields that the
heroes granted to the familial servants, under the law of which we have
spoken, so that those servants would serve them. There are the origins of
the public treasuries which, in connection with the coming-into-being of
republics, were precursors of what were called public treasuries [aerari]
in the proper sense of the term, as derived from aes, aeris; in Latin, this
means “bronze,” but in the sense of “money”—that is, it is to be under-
stood in terms of the necessity to supply public money to the plebeians

  The “more recent barbarian age” corresponds to the period more familiarly
33

known as the “Middle Ages.”

 22 The New Science

during war. There are the origins of colonies, which are found to be, at
first, companies of rustics who served the heroes in exchange for sus-
taining their lives; later, they were companies of vassals who cultivated
the fields for themselves but under the weight of the real and personal
burdens already discussed above; these are what will be called the “in-
land colonies” of the heroic age in order to distinguish them from the
“overseas colonies” of which we have spoken above [§20]. And, finally,
there are the origins of republics, which came into being in the world in
a strictly aristocratic form, under which the plebeians had no share in
civil law. And, consequently, it is found that the Roman regime had once
been aristocratic, but that the regime fell during the tyranny of Tarquin-
ius Superbus, who governed the nobles so poorly and who so nearly de-
stroyed almost the entire Senate that Junius Brutus took what had been
done to Lucretia as an occasion to arouse the plebs against Tarquinius;
and after he had freed Rome from a tyrant, he reestablished the Senate
and returned the republic to the orders of its earliest beginnings; and
by replacing one king for life with two annual consuls, he did not intro-
duce liberty for the people, but reaffirmed the liberty of those who were
lords.34 This liberty is found to have lasted until the Publilian law, with
which the dictator, Publilius Philo, declared that the Roman republic had
come to have a popular constitution, for which he was called the People’s
Dictator;35 aristocratic liberty finally expired with the Petelian law, which
completely freed the plebs from the law of rustic fealty which gave nobles
the right of private incarceration held over plebeians who were debtors.36
In these two laws are contained the two major turning points of Roman
history, but no one—not among the political theorists or the jurists or
the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code—has reflected upon
them because of the myth that the Law of the Twelve Tables came from a
free Athens so as to institute the orders of popular liberty in Rome; these
two laws declare that these orders were instituted internally in keeping
with the natural customs of Rome (this myth about the Twelve Tables
was discovered in a work of mine published many years ago, Principles
of Universal Law37).
Hence, because laws must be interpreted in a way congruent with the
order of constitutions of republics, principles of this sort derived
from Roman governance allow for alternative principles for Roman
jurisprudence.

34
  As Battistini notes, Vico’s conclusion here is identical to that drawn by Ma-
chiavelli at Discourses on Livy 1.2.
35
  The Publilian law advanced the cause of the plebs by giving them the right
to make laws in assembly, thereby binding the nobles to the decisions of the
Comitia Populi Tributa. For Publilius as the “People’s Dictator,” see Livy, Ab
urbe condita 8.12.14.
36
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.28.
S 37
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).
N
L
22
An Explication of the Frontispiece 23

THE SWORD WHICH IS LEANING ON THE FASCES denotes 27

that the law of the heroic age was a law of force, but a force checked by
religion, which is the only thing that can hold force and arms to duty
when judicial laws have not yet been invented or when they have been
invented, but are no longer binding; this heroic law is exactly the same as
that of Achilles, the hero of whom Homer sings to the peoples of Greece
as a model of heroic virtue, which rests all claims upon the force of arms.
And here is discovered the origin of duels which, just as they certainly
had wide currency in the more recent barbarian age, are also found to
have had currency in the earliest barbarian age. In such times, the power-
ful were not yet domesticated enough to vindicate offences and wrongs
against them by recourse to judicial laws, and so they would try these
offences in the courts of certain divine judgments; there, they invoked
God as witness and appealed to God as judge of the offense, and they
deferred with such reverence to the verdict given by the fortune of the one
struck down (whichever of the two it was) that, even if the one originally
wronged was vanquished, he was considered the guilty party. Such is the
lofty counsel of divine providence that in barbarous and savage times,
when there was no understanding of legal right, they might approximate
such legal right by looking instead to the favor or disfavor of God, so that
these private wars would not sow the seeds of wars that would eventually
culminate in the extinction of humankind. This sensibility, so natural
to a barbaric age, cannot be founded on anything other than an innate
concept which men have of divine providence itself, to which they ought
to conform when they see the good oppressed and the wicked prospering.
These were the causes of their believing that the duel was a kind of divine
cleansing. Hence, as much as duels are forbidden in our present human-
ity, which has instituted with laws the orders of criminal and civil courts,
to the same extent they were believed necessary in barbarous times.
In this, the fashion in which duels, or private wars, came to be, is found
the origin of public wars waged by civil powers, subject to no one but
God because God delivers a verdict by means of the fortune of the vic-
tors so that humankind may rest upon the certainty of civil states, which
is the principle behind what is called the “external justice” of wars.38
THE PURSE, WHICH IS ALSO LEANING ON THE FASCES, 28
demonstrates that commerce of the sort practiced through the use of
money did not start until long after civil power was founded. As a result,
one does not read about any use of coinage in either of the two poems
of Homer.
This same HIEROGLYPH indicates the origin of this coinage. It is found
to come from the origins of coats of arms which—as was ­indicated above

  “External justice” as mentioned here may be compared to the “inner justice”

38

discussed at §350.
 24 The New Science

in connection with first fields of arms—are discovered to have signified

the rights and claims of nobility pertaining to one family more than an-
other. From here later come into being the origins of public insignia, or
insignia of peoples, insignia which later were still raised as military insig-
nia and served as mute words in military training; and, eventually, they
were imprinted by all peoples on money. And this allows for alternative
principles for the science of medallions and, consequently, alternative
principles for what is called the science of blazonry (this is one of three
places which we have found satisfactory in the first edition of The New
Science).39
29 THE SCALE AFTER THE PURSE allows one to see that after aris-
tocratic governance—that is, governance during the heroic age—came
governance belonging to the human age: of these, the first kind is popular
government, in which peoples eventually understood that our rational na-
ture—that is, our true human nature—is equally in all human beings; natu-
ral equality of this sort (through causes meditated upon in the ideal eternal
history and encountered point for point in Roman history) drew the heroes
step by step into the civil equality of popular republics, which is signified
by the BALANCE because in popular republics, as the Greeks used to say,
the course of everything is determined by lot, or put in the balance.
However, eventually, since free peoples are not able to maintain them-
selves in civil equality with laws both on account of factions among the
powerful and because they tend to destroy themselves by civil wars, they
naturally arrive, so that they might be safe, at the royal natural law which
is found to be common to all peoples at all times when a popular consti-
tution becomes corrupt (for the royal civil law, which the Roman people
are said to have demanded so as to legitimate the Roman monarchy in
the person of Augustus, was demonstrated in my Principles of Universal
Law40 to be a myth; this and the demonstration about the myth of the
Twelve Tables coming from Athens are the two places for which we con-
sider that work not to have been uselessly written); and arriving at this
royal natural law, which is the natural custom of human gentile peoples,
they seek shelter under the monarchy, the second kind of human govern-
ment. As a result, these final two forms of government, which are both
human, change back and forth between each other in our present hu-
manity, but neither of the two naturally returns to the aristocratic state,
in which only the nobles command and all others obey (hence, there
remain in the world today only a few aristocratic republics: Nuremberg
in Germany; Ragusa in Dalmatia; Venice, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy).
For these are the three kinds of state which divine providence, in keeping
with these natural customs of nations, has made come into the world,
and it is in keeping with this natural order that one follows after the
other. For the other types of state—those which are mixtures of these

S 39
 See Scienza nuova prima §§329–341.
N 40
  See Vico, De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno 160 (Cristofolini 221[1]).
L
24
An Explication of the Frontispiece 25

three—these a human providence makes emerge because the nature of

nations does not support them; for this, Tacitus—who saw only the ef-
fects of the causes indicated above and reasoned about more fully below
[§1004]—characterized them “as more worthy of being praised than ca-
pable of being achieved and, even if by chance they do remain for a time,
they are not long-lasting.”41
By this discovery, alternative principles are given to political doctrine,
principles not only different from, but completely contrary to those
which have been imagined up until now.
THE CADUCEUS IS THE LAST OF THE HIEROGLYPHS so 30
as to suggest that the earliest peoples, in heroic times when the natural
law of force ruled, regarded one another as perpetual enemies because
of continuous robbery and piracy. And, just as in the earliest barba-
rous times, heroes considered it a title of honor to be called a thief, so
too, in the recent return to barbarous times, the powerful thought it an
honor to be spoken of as pirates: for since there were eternal wars among
them, there was no need to declare war. However, later with the arrival
of the human governments, both popular and monarchical, because of
the law of human gentile peoples, heralds were introduced for declaring
war, and governments started to limit periods of hostility with peace.
And this too is on account of the lofty counsel of divine providence,
for in the times of their barbarism when nations new to the world must
mature, they were confined to their own borders lest, ferocious and un-
conquerable, they might cross those borders to be exterminated by each
other in wars. However, after that, during this same age, the nations grew
and found themselves altogether domesticated and, as a result, tolerant
of the customs of one another: hence, it became easy for a conquering
people to spare the lives of the conquered in keeping with the just laws
of the victors.
So, this NEW SCIENCE—A METAPHYSICS MEDITATING, IN 31
THE LIGHT OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE, UPON THE NATURE
COMMON TO THE NATIONS—has discovered THE ORIGINS OF
THINGS DIVINE AND HUMAN among the gentile nations, and so
has established A SYSTEM OF NATURAL LAW OF THE GENTILE
PEOPLES which proceeds with the greatest uniformity and consistency
through the three ages which the Egyptians left to us and on account
of which they said their world had already fully and previously run its
course: namely, the age of the gods, in which gentile men believed that
they lived under divine governance and that all things had been com-
manded to them by auspices and by oracles, the oldest things of profane
history; the age of heroes, in which heroes reigned everywhere in aristo-
cratic republics through a certain difference in human nature by which
they supposed themselves superior to their plebeians; and, finally, the

41
 Tacitus, Annals 4.33.1. This passage, as Battistini notes, is often cited by crit-
ics of “mixed” forms of government, such as Bodin and Hobbes.
 26 The New Science

age of men, in which all acknowledged that they were equal with respect
to human nature and, on account of this, gave currency, first, to popular
republics and, eventually, to monarchies, both of which are forms of hu-
man government, as has been said just above [§29].
32 In agreement with these three sorts of nature and government, three
kinds of language are spoken, of which the dictionary of this science
is composed. The first is language in the time of families, when gen-
tile men were newly arrived to their humanity: this is found to have
been a mute language of signs and objects which have a natural cor-
respondence to the ideas which they are meant to signify. The second
was spoken through heroic devices—that is, the similes, analogies, im-
ages, metaphors, and natural descriptions which made up the bulk of
the heroic language found to have been spoken in the time when heroes
reigned. The third was human language through words agreed upon by
peoples, over which the people are absolute lords, a language proper to
popular republics and monarchical states because the people determine
what sense the laws must have for the plebs as well as for the nobles.
Hence, among all the nations, once the laws had been translated into
the vernacular languages,42 the science of the laws was no longer only in
the hands of the nobles—it is found that the nobles previously among
all the nations had a secret language for these laws, as if they belonged
to sacred things, and it is also found that the nobles throughout the na-
tions were priests. This is the natural reason for the arcana with which
the Roman patricians surrounded the laws up until the rise of popular
liberty.
These are exactly the same three languages which the Egyptians de-
scribed as previously spoken in their world, corresponding, in number
as well as order, to the three ages through the course of which their
world had previously passed: there was hieroglyphic language—that is,
the sacred, or secret, language—expressed through mute actions and
well suited to religions for which their observance is more important
than speech about them; symbolic language—or language expressed
through likenesses—which we have just seen is the language in the
heroic state; and, finally, epistolary language—that is, the vernacular
[volgare] language—which served Egyptians in the common [volgari] us-
ages of life. These three languages are found among the Chaldeans, the
Scythians, the Egyptians, the Germans, and all the other ancient gentile
nations, although hieroglyphic writing was preserved longest among
the Egyptians because they were closed off from foreign nations for a
longer period of time than others; it is on account of this same cause
that hieroglyphics are found to persist among the Chinese to this day.
And consequently, this use of hieroglyphics among other nations dem-

  “Vernacular languages” translates lingue volgari. For the appropriateness

42

of rendering volgare by “vernacular” in the context of languages, see §443 and

S §556.
N
L
26
An Explication of the Frontispiece 27

onstrates the vanity of the Egyptians imagining themselves to be of the

greatest antiquity.
Therefore, here are given clear principles for both language and let- 33
ters, which philology has despaired of finding. And I will put to the test
the extravagant and monstrous opinions that philologists have had about
these beginnings up until now.
I will examine the unfortunate cause of which their opinions are the ef-
fect, namely, that the philologists have believed that spoken languages
came into being first among nations, followed later by written letters
whereas—as has been briefly indicated and will be proven fully in this
book [§§428–472]—they were born as twins, and letters proceeded at the
same pace as language through its three kinds.
And these principles are encountered point for point in the causes of
the Latin language reasoned about and discovered in the first edition of
The New Science (this is the second of three places for which we do not
regret the publication of that book43). It is though reasoning about these
causes that you, dear reader, will be able to examine the many discoveries
about ancient Roman history, government, and law in a thousand proofs
in this book. With this as a model, those who have erudition in Near
Eastern languages, in Greek, and, particularly, in German from among
the languages currently spoken (for it too is a parent language) will be
able to make discoveries about antiquity beyond any of their own and
our expectations.
A principle pertaining to these origins of both language and letters 34
is found to have been that the earliest peoples of gentile antiquity, on
account of a demonstrated necessity, were by nature poets who spoke
through poetic characters. This discovery of poetic characters, which is
the master key of this science,44 has cost us the stubborn research of al-
most an entire lifetime devoted to letters insofar as the poetic nature of
those earliest men is for our gentle nature completely impossible to imag-
ine, and it is only with great toil that we are permitted to understand it.
These poetic characters are found to have been certain imaginative
g­ enera—that is, images of either gods or heroes drawn, for the most part,

43
 See Scienza nuova prima §§368–379.
44
  Vico’s conception of “poetic characters” ranks among the most distinctive
proposals of The New Science. Poetic characters are types rather than individu-
als, even if they are spoken of as individuals. So, for example, “Achilles” does
not denote a particular man, but rather a certain fusion of strength and anger.
The poetic character represents imaginatively (compare §381 on the “imagina-
tive universal”) what later humanity tends to represent intellectually, by means
of the generic concept. Vico’s claim is not merely that the first humans use
poetic characters in their expression. More fundamentally, they think in poetic
characters (see §§416, 532, 1001).
 28 The New Science

from living substances and formed by their imagination—and, under

such genera, they placed all the species, or particulars, belonging to it;
it is exactly the same with the myths told in human times—that is, those
told in New Comedy:45 in this case, there are intelligible genera—that is,
genera formed by the reasoning of moral philosophy—from which the
comic poets form imaginative genera, which are nothing other than the
best ideas about each genus of men—that is, one of the stock personae
of comedy.
Consequently, divine or heroic characters of this sort are found to have
been myths [favole]—that is, true speeches [favelle vere]—and in them are
discovered allegories containing a sense—not yet analogical but still uni-
vocal, not yet philosophical but still historical—which belongs to that
age of the Greek peoples.
Moreover, because such genera—for myths are, in their essence, ­genera—
were formed by the most vigorous imaginations, as well as by men with
the weakest powers of reasoning, in them is discovered the true poetic
sentences, which must consist of sentiments clothed in the greatest pas-
sions and, accordingly, filled with sublimity and awakening wonder.
Furthermore, it is found that there are two sources for all poetic expres-
sion, namely, the poverty of speech and the necessity of explaining and
making oneself understood; from these comes the vividness of heroic
speech, which immediately followed the mute speech used in the divine
times, those gestures and objects that had a natural correspondence with
the ideas they are meant to signify.
Finally, it is found that languages in Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt,
Greece, and Latium, on account of the natural and necessary course of
human things, started with heroic verse and, from there, passed over to
iambics and, eventually, settled in prose; and this gives certainty to the
history of the ancient poets and provides reasons to explain why, in Ger-
man, particularly in Silesia, a province made up entirely of rustics, versi-
fiers naturally come into being and why, in Spanish, French, and Italian,
the first authors wrote in verse.
35 From three languages of this sort is composed a mental dictionary,
which gives the proper significance of words expressed differently in all
the different languages; it has been used herein [§§145, 161–162] every-
where it is needed, and, in the first edition of The New Science, a full
test of it was made in a particular case where we proposed the following
idea:46 meditating upon the eternal properties of the Fathers—properties
which, on the strength of this science, the Fathers had to have had in
the familial state and during the time of the earliest heroic cities, when
languages were formed—the proper significance of words in fifteen dif-

45
  That is, the comedy of Menander, about which Vico comments further in
S Book Three (§§806, 808, 906, 911).
N 46
 See Scienza nuova prima §§387–389.
L
28
An Explication of the Frontispiece 29

ferent languages, dead as well as living, were found in cases where a word
was used differently, depending on one property or another (this is the
third place for which we are pleased the first edition of this book was
published).
Such a lexicon is found to be necessary for knowing how to speak the
language of the ideal eternal history upon which the histories of all na-
tions run their temporal course and for being able to draw upon au-
thority scientifically in order to confirm our reasoning on the natural
law of the gentile peoples and, consequently, on each specific kind of
jurisprudence.
Along with these three languages—the languages proper to the three 36
ages in which the three kinds of governance acquired currency, in confor-
mity with three types of civil nature, governance which changed during
the course which the nations make—a jurisprudence is found congruent
with each age, proceeding in the same order as the three ages.
The first of these is found to have been a mystical theology, which ac- 37
quired currency at a time when the gods commanded the gentiles. The
men wise in this jurisprudence were the theological poets said to have
founded gentile humanity; they interpreted the mysteries of oracles,
whose responses, throughout all the nations, were in verse.
Subsequently, the mysteries of the commonplace wisdom of this sort
were found to have been hidden in myths. And while we meditate upon
what caused the philosophers of later times to have such a strong desire
to pursue the wisdom of the ancients, we also meditate upon what in
these myths occasioned these philosophers to meditate on the most lofty
things of philosophy and upon the impropriety of their imposing their
own recondite wisdom upon these myths.
The second kind is found to have been a heroic jurisprudence, all 38
about scrupulousness with words (the scrupulousness is found to belong
to the prudent Ulysses) and this jurisprudence has regard for what the
Roman jurists called civil equity and for what we call “reason of state”;47
because their jurisprudence conformed to their narrow ideas, they natu-
rally deemed their law to be one whose existence, scope, and character is
connected with the explication of words; similarly, even today, one can
observe rustics and other rude men, in their disputes over words and the
sense of words, stubbornly insisting that their case rests upon the words
themselves. And this is because of the counsel of divine providence, so
that gentile men, who did not yet have the capacity for the universals,
which are what good laws must be, would instead be drawn to observe
the laws universally from the particularity of their words. And if, on ac-
count of such civil equity, it turned out, in some cases, that the laws were
not only inflexible but also even cruel, they naturally bore this because
they deemed their laws naturally to be this way. Furthermore, a supreme

47
  See the note at §320 on “reason of state.”
 30 The New Science

private interest drew them to observe the laws; this interest is found to
be the same for the heroes as their interest in the fatherland since they
alone were its citizens. Hence, they did not hesitate for the safety of their
fatherlands to consecrate themselves and their families to the will of the
laws. These laws, along with the safety of the fatherland which they held
in common, kept safe the certain and private monarchical reign the he-
roes had over their families.
By the same token, such great private interest, combined with a supreme
arrogance proper to barbarous times, formed their heroic nature, and
from this nature came those heroic actions on behalf of the safety of
their fatherlands. These heroic actions are inseparable from the insuf-
ferable pride, the deep avarice, and the pitiless cruelty with which the
Roman patricians treated the unfortunate plebeians, as we plainly read
in Roman history at a time which Livy himself says was the age of Ro-
man virtue and of the greatest flourishing of popular liberty yet dreamed
of in Rome; and it will be found that this public virtue is nothing other
than the good use which providence made of grievous, foul, wild private
vices48 so that cities might be preserved during times when the minds of
men attended to particulars, since they were naturally not able to under-
stand a common good.
This allows for alternative principles to demonstrate the argument
treated by St. Augustine in his De virtute Romanorum,49 and these prin-
ciples dispel the opinions that the learned have held up until now about
the heroism of the earliest peoples.
Civil equity of this sort is found to have naturally had currency among
heroic nations both in peace and in war, and the clearest examples of it
are drawn from the history of both the earlier and the more recent age
of barbarism; and the Romans practiced this civil equity in their private
affairs as long as there was an aristocratic republic, which is found to
have been the case up until the time of the Publilian and Petelian laws,
before which civil equity was practiced entirely in keeping with the Law
of the Twelve Tables.
39 The last kind of jurisprudence is that of the natural equity, which
reigns naturally in free republics, where the people look out for a par-
ticular good which is the same for everyone and, without intending it, are
brought to decree universal laws; accordingly, they naturally desire these

48
  The juxtaposition of “private vices” and “public virtue” recalls Bernard
Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, though it is not clear that Vico (who did not
read English) would have been able to read Mandeville. Other comparable no-
tions include Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” and
Wilhelm Wundt’s “heterogenesis of ends.” None of these necessarily exhaust
what Vico means by “providence.”
49
  There is no work by Augustine which bears this title. Vico may be alluding to
S City of God 5.12, a chapter about the mores Romanorum.
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An Explication of the Frontispiece 31

laws to be liberally adaptable to the ultimate circumstances of deeds,

which demand equal advantage, the aequum bonum (this is the subject
of the last stage of Roman jurisprudence and, in the time of Cicero, was
starting to be shaped by the edicts of the Roman praetors).
And this jurisprudence is also connatural to monarchies, perhaps even
more so in that monarchs have accustomed their subjects to attend to
their own private advantages while the monarchs busy themselves with
a concern for all the public things; and in that they intend for all nations
subject to them to be equal to each other relative to the laws so that all
these nations will have an equal interest in the state. Hence, the emperor
Hadrian reformed the entire heroic natural law of Rome to accord with
the human natural law of the provinces and decreed that jurisprudence
be practiced in terms of the Perpetual Edict, which Salvius Julianus
composed almost entirely from provincial edicts.50
Now (so as to gather together all the primary elements of this world of 40
nations from the HIEROGLYPHS which signify them) THE LITUUS,
THE WATER, AND FIRE ON THE ALTAR, THE FUNERAL URN
WITHIN THE FOREST, THE PLOUGH LEANING ON THE AL-
TAR, THE RUDDER PROSTRATE AT THE FOOT OF THE ALTAR
signify: divination; sacrifices; the earliest families formed by children;
burials; the cultivation of fields; the division of these same fields; asy-
lums; the later families formed from the oppression of familial servants;
the earliest agrarian disputes and, as a consequence, the earliest inland
colonies; and, when these were done, the earliest overseas colonies, which
came with the migration of peoples; all of these events came to pass dur-
ing what the Egyptians called the age of the gods, which Varro (either
because he did not know of this or because he overlooked it) called the
dark age, as was suggested above [§§6, 25]. The FASCES signifies the
first heroic republics; the distinctions made among the three domains—
namely, the natural, civil, and sovereign domains—the first civil powers;
and the first, unequal alliances following from the first agrarian laws,
through which these earliest cities were composed upon the rustic fealty
of plebeians subject to the noble fealty of heroes who, although them-
selves sovereign, became subjects of the greater sovereignty of regnant
orders of the heroic age. The SWORD LEANING ON THE FASCES
signifies the public wars these cities made, which started because of theft
and piracy, for duels—or private wars—must have come into being much
earlier—as will be demonstrated [§§959–964]—during the familial state;
the PURSE signifies the devices of the gentry—or the insignia of the
noble households—which passed over to medallions—the first insignia
of peoples—which, consequently, passed over to military insignia and,
eventually, to money (the use of money assumes the exchange of m ­ ovable

50
 The Edictum perpetuum, a revision of the Edictum praetoris, was composed
and decreed under the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). See Eutropius, Brevia-
rium ab Urbe condita 8.17.
 32 The New Science

goods because the exchange of real estate in connection with natural

payments in produce and toil started earlier in the age of the gods with
the first agrarian laws, upon which the republics came into being). The
SCALES signify laws of equality—that is, laws in the proper sense of the
term. And, finally, the CADUCEUS signifies wars publically declared
and brought to an end with peace. All these HIEROGLYPHS are at a
DISTANCE from the ALTAR. For they are all civil things from times
when the false religions were in the gradual process of fading away, a
process starting with the heroic agrarian disputes which gave their name
to the age of heroes of the Egyptians and which Varro called the age
of myth. THE TABLE WITH THE TWO ALPHABETS IS PLACED
BETWEEN THE DIVINE AND HUMAN HIEROGLYPHS, for the
false religions started to fade away with the advent of letters, which is
the beginning of philosophy; this is different for true religion—that is,
our Christian religion—which is, instead, confirmed humanly for us by
the most sublime philosophies, namely, by the Platonic and by the Peri-
patetic to the extent that it conforms to the Platonic.
41 Hence, the whole idea of this work can be captured in the following
summary:
THE SHADOWS IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE PICTURE are
the subject matter of this science (material which is uncertain, unformed,
dark), presented in the Chronological Table and in the annotations on it.
THE RAY OF LIGHT BY WHICH DIVINE PROVIDENCE ILLU-
MINATES THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS is the axioms, defi-
nitions, and postulates which this science takes as the Elements of its
reasoning, first, about the Principles upon which it is established and,
second, about the Method by which it is guided: all of these things are
contained in Book One.
THE RAY WHICH THE BREAST OF METAPHYSICS REFLECTS
ONTO THE STATUE OF HOMER is the light proper to the poetic wis-
dom of Book Two, by which the true Homer is clarified in Book Three.
From the Discovery of the True Homer, all the things which compose the
world of nations come to be placed in a clear light.
The progression from their origins according to the order in which THE
HIEROGLYPHS COME TO LIGHT FROM THE TRUE HOMER:
this is the Course of Nations about which Book Four reasons. And hav-
ing arrived finally AT THE FOOT OF THE STATUE OF HOMER,
they start again and run through the course again following the same
order, about which the final Book Five reasons.
42 And (so as to conclude by restricting the idea of the work to the brief-
est of summaries) THE ENTIRE FIGURE represents three worlds,
following the order by which the human mind of gentile antiquity was
­elevated from Earth to heaven.
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An Explication of the Frontispiece 33

ALL THE HIEROGLYPHS SEEN ON THE EARTH denote the world

of nations, to which men applied themselves prior to anything else.
THE GLOBE IN THE MIDDLE represents the natural world, which
the physicists examined later. THE HIEROGLYPHS WHICH ARE
ABOVE THIS signify the world of minds and of God, which the meta-
physicians contemplated last of all.
 Chronological Table
A description based on the three epochs of the Egyptians, who said the whole world had previously r

HebrewsB ChaldeansC ScythiansD PhoeniciansE EgyptiansF

Universal Flood.
Zoroaster, or
the rule of the
Chaldeans.G
Nimrod, or
the confusion
of languages.I
Dynasties
in Egypt.
The calling of Hermes
Abraham. Trismegistus
the Elder,
or the age
of gods in
Egypt.M

God gives written

laws to Moses.

Hermes
Trismegistus
the Younger,
or the age
of heroes in
Egypt. S

Ninus rules
with the
Assyrians.
Dido of Tyre
leaves to found
S
Carthage.X
N
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34
previously run its course through three ages: the age of gods, of heroes, and of human beings.A

The Year
of the The Year
Greeks Romans World in Rome
1656
1756

Iapetus, from whom come the giants.H 1856

One of these giants, Prometheus, steals
fire from the sun. K
Deucalion.L

The golden age—that is, the age of

gods in Greece.N

Hellenus—son of Deucalion, grandson 2082

of Prometheus, great grandson of
­Iapetus—through his sons spreads
three dialects in Greece.O
Cecrops the Egyptian brings twelve
colonies into Attica, out of which
Theseus later composes Athens.P
Cadmus the Phoenician founds Thebes 2448
in Boetia and introduces common
alphabetic letters into Greece.Q
Saturn, or the age 2491
of the gods in
­Latium. R
Danaus the Egyptian expels the 2553
­Inachids from their rule in Argos.T
Pelops the Phrygian rules in the
Peloponnesus.

The Heraclids spread throughout the Aboriginal peoples. 2682

whole of Greece and make there the
age of heroes.V
The Curetes in Crete, in Saturnia—that
is, in Italy—and in Asia establish the
rule of priests.V
2737
 Chronological Table (continued)

HebrewsB ChaldeansC ScythiansD PhoeniciansE EgyptiansF

Tyre is
renowned
for its skill in
sailing and for
its colonies.

Sancuniates
writes histories
in common
alphabetic
letters.Aa

The rule of Saul.

Seostris rules
in Thebes.Cc

Psammeticus
opens Egypt
only to Greeks
from Ionia
and Caria.Hh

Cyrus rules in
Assyria with
the Persians.
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 The Year
of the The Year
Greeks Romans World in Rome
Minos, the first legislator among the 2752
gentile peoples and first pirate of the
Aegean.

Orpheus, and with him the age of the The Arcadians.

theological poets.Y
Hercules, with whom the heroic times
in Greece culminate.Z
Jason begins naval warfare with the Hercules with 2800
war in Pontus. Evander in ­Latium,
Theseus founds Athens, and establishes or the age of heroes
the orders of the Areopagus. in Italy.

The Trojan War.Bb 2820

The wandering of heroes, especially of
Odysseus and Aeneas.
Rule in Alba. 2830
2909
Greek colonies in Asia, Sicily, and 2949
Italy.Dd
Lycurgus gives laws to the 3120
Lacedaemonians.
The Olympic games, first instituted 3223
as an order by Hercules, then, after
being inter­rupted, reestablished by
Isiphilus.Ee
The founding of 1
Rome.Ff
Homer, who came at a time when com­ Numa is king. 3290 37
mon alphabetic letters had not yet been
found and who did not see Egypt.Gg
Aesop, vulgar ethical philosopher.Ii 3334

The Seven Sages of Greece, one of 3406

whom, Solon, institutes orders of
popular liberty in Athens; another
of whom, Thales the Milesian, starts
philosophy with physics.Kk
Pythagoras, about whom, while he was Servius Tullius is 3468 225
living, Livy says not even his name king.Mm
would have been in known in Rome. Ll

The Peisistratid tyrants are expelled 3491

from Athens.
 Chronological Table (continued)

HebrewsB ChaldeansC ScythiansD PhoeniciansE EgyptiansF

Idanthyrsus
is king of
Scythia.Pp

Note: In the 1744 edition, Vico marks the first twenty-three sections of the notes on the


Chronological Table with a letter, from A to Z (omitting J, U, and W), and the remaining
twenty-two sections with two letters, Aa to Yy (again, omitting Jj, Uu, and Ww). Nicolini
S
substituted Roman numerals for Vico’s letters.
N
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 The Year
of the The Year
Greeks Romans World in Rome
The Tarquin tyrants 3499 245
are expelled from
Rome.
Hesiod.Nn Herodotus. 3500
Hippocrates.Oo
The Peloponnesian War. 3530
Thucydides, who writes that up until
his father, the Greeks knew nothing
of their own antiquities, and hence he
proposed to writing about this war.Qq
Socrates begins rational moral Law of the Twelve 3553 303
philosophy. Tables.
Plato flourishes in the field of
metaphysics.
Athens shines in all the arts of
cultivated humanity.Rr
Xenophon brings Greek arms into the 3583 333
heart of Persia and is the first to know
with any certainty about things of the
Persians.Ss
The Publilian law.Tt 3658 416
Alexander the Great in Macedonia 3660
overthrows the Persian monarchy,
and Aristotle conducts himself to the
Near East to observe in person what
the Greeks had previously said about
things were myths.
The Petelian law.Vv 3661 419
The war at 3708 489
Tarentum, where
the Latins started
to become familiar
with the Greeks. Xx
The second 3849 552
Carthaginian War,
from which Livy
starts a Roman his­
tory which is certain,
although he con­
fesses not knowing
about three major
circumstances.Yy
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 Book One

On

the Establishment of Principles1

1
  Vico’s use of the word princìpi recalls the Latin principia generally and invites a com-
parison to works by Descartes (Principia philosophiae, 1644) and Newton (Philosophiae
naturalis principia mathematica, 1687). But Vico’s princìpi should not be construed simply
as abstract formulae, as suggested by his own words much later in the text: “For this is the
nature of principles, that they give the first things their start and bring the last things to
their end” (§1093).

41
 This page intentionally left blank

S
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Book One 43

Annotations
for the Chronological Table,
in Which is Made an Arrangement
of Materials

A.2 This Chronological Table puts on display the world of ancient na- 43
tions, which winds its way down from the Universal Flood of the He-
brews through to the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Phoenicians, the
Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans up until their second Carthag-
inian war. And on the table appear greatly renowned men or deeds de-
termined to have been at certain times or in certain places by the com-
munity of learned: in fact, either these men or deeds did not exist at
the times or in the places in which they were commonly determined to
have been or they never existed in the world at all. And out of the deep,
dense shadows where they have lain buried emerge significant men and
the most important deeds from whom and by which have come to pass
the greatest moments of human affairs. All this is demonstrated in these
ANNOTATIONS so as to allow for an understanding of how much the
humanity of the nations has beginnings that are uncertain or misplaced
or faulty or foolish.
Moreover, this table proposes something entirely contrary to the 44
Canon of Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek Chronology by John Marsham:3
there, he wishes to prove that the Egyptians preceded all the nations of
the world in their polity and their religion and that the sacred rites and
civil orders which they passed on to other peoples were received with
some few emendations by the Hebrews.
In this opinion, Marsham is followed by Spencer4 in his treatise, On the
Urim and Thummim: there he opines that the Israelites had learned from
the Egyptians the whole of their science of divine things by means of the
sacred kabbalah.
Finally, Van Heurn5 praises Marsham in his Antiquities of Barbarian
Philosophy: there, in the book entitled On Chaldea, he writes that Moses,
learned in the science of divine things because of the Egyptians, passed
on this learning to the Hebrews in his laws.

2
  See the note on the Chronological Table for an explanation of the letter cod-
ing presented in Book One.
3
  John Marsham (1602–1683), English chronologist and politician. The refer-
ence is to his 1672 work Canon chronicus aegyptiacus, hebraicus graecus.
4
  John Spencer (1630–1695), English cleric and author of Dissertatio de Urim et
Thummim, published in Cambridge in 1670.
5
  Otto van Heurn (1577–1648), Dutch theologian and author of Barbaricae
philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo, published in 1600. What Vico calls the
“Chaldaicus” is the first part of the work.
 44 The New Science

Standing in contrast to this is Hermann Wits,6 in a work entitled Ae-

gyptiaca, sive de Aegyptiacorum Sacrorum cum Hebraicis Collatione. He
deems the first gentile author to give the first certain observations about
the Egyptians to have been Dio Cassius,7 who flourished under the phi-
losopher Marcus Antonius.8 In this, he can be confuted by the Annals of
Tacitus9: there, Tacitus tells us that Germanicus went to the Near East
and, after that, to Egypt so as to see the famous antiquities of Thebes;
once there, he made one of their priests explain the hieroglyphs written
on some monuments, which the priest foolishly related to him, foolishly
in that he related that these characters preserved a recorded memory of
the limitless power which their king, Ramses, had in Africa, in the Near
East, and in Asia Minor, a power equal to that of the Romans, which at
that time was very great. On this passage (perhaps because it runs con-
trary to his argument) Wits is silent.
45 But, certainly, the fruit of such limitless antiquity was not much re-
condite wisdom among the inland Egyptians.
We say this because at the time of Clement of Alexandria,10 as he tells
us in his Stromata, were circulating what were called their priestly books
(some forty-two in number), and these contained the greatest of errors
in philosophy and astronomy; because of these myths, Chaeremon, the
teacher of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, is often exposed by Strabo.11
The things pertaining to Egyptian medicine are found by Galen, in his
book On Hermetic Medicine, to be obvious prattle and pure imposture.12
Their morals were dissolute: they not only tolerated—that is, permit-
ted—harlots, but even made them honorable. Their theology was full of
superstition, trickery, and witchcraft.
And even the magnificence of their monuments and pyramids could well
have been a function of their barbarousness, which comports well with
greatness; indeed, Egyptian sculpting and casting is even today accused
of being quite unpolished. For refinement is the fruit of philosophy;
hence, Greece, a nation of philosophers, is alone in shining forth in all
the fine arts which human ingenuity has ever found: painting, sculpture,

6
  Hermann Wits (1636–1708), Dutch theologian and author of Aegyptiaca,
published in 1683.
7
  Dio Cassius (155–235 CE), Roman administrator and historian, author of an
eighty-volume history of Rome.
8
  Here Vico’s pen has slipped—he means Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), Ro-
man emperor whose reign began in 161 and lasted until his death.
9
 Tacitus, Annals 2.60.
10
  Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 CE), Christian theologian.
11
  Strabo (64 BCE–23 CE), Greek historian and geographer whose Geographica
is an important text for Vico. The reference to Dionysius the Areopagite is
incorrect; Chaeremon was in fact the teacher of another Dionysius, perhaps a
first-century grammarian from Alexandria.
S 12
  Galen of Pergamon (129–201 CE), Greek physician in the Roman Empire.
N
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Book One 45

casting, and the art of engraving (the most refined of all the arts because
it must abstract from the surfaces of the objects it imitates).
On the coast, however, this ancient wisdom of the Egyptians was 46
raised to the stars by Alexander the Great by the founding of Alexan-
dria: this city united African acuity with Greek refinement and produced
philosophers who were brilliant about divinity; from this, Alexandria
became so famous for the splendor of lofty divine wisdom that the
Museum of Alexandria was more celebrated than previously were the
Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the Cynosarges combined,13 and
it was called the mother of sciences. On account of such excellence, it
was named by the Greeks πόλις [polis], just as Athens was named ῎Αστυ
[Astu] and Rome urbs.
As a consequence of this came Manetho—that is, Manethone14—the
high priest of Egypt, who translated all of Egyptian history into a
sublime natural theology, in exactly the same way that Greek philoso-
phers had previously done with their myths, which will be found herein
to have been their most ancient histories. Hence, one can understand
that what came to pass for Greek myths also came to pass for Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
In addition to such ostentation concerning its lofty wisdom, grant also 47
that this was a nation which, because of its own natural vanity, was
taunted with being gloriae animalia [“animals for glory”]; and grant that
it was in a city which was the great emporium of the Mediterranean and,
via the Red Sea, of the Ocean and the Indies; grant also that among their
disgraceful customs was (as Tacitus tells us in a golden passage) novarum
religionum avida [“an avidity for new religious practices”];15 and grant
that this was on account of their prejudiced opinion about, first, their
boundless antiquity, of which they vainly boasted over all other nations
of the world and about, consequently, their having had ancient mastery
over a greater portion of the world. Granting all this, and that they did
not know of the fashion in which uniform ideas about the gods and
heroes came into being in different places among the gentiles without
one people having any knowledge of another—this will be fully demon-
strated below [§§196–198])—when such a nation heard from the nations
who came to them for coastal trade about all the false divinities spread
through the rest of the world, they believed, first, that those divinities
arose in their own Egypt and that their own Jove Ammon was the most
ancient of all (even though every gentile nation had one) and, second,

13
  The Cynosarges was a public gymnasium and sanctuary of Hercules, just
outside Athens. Antisthenes, disciple of Socrates and reputed founder of Cyni-
cism, lectured there.
14
  Manetho, reputed Egyptian priest who lived in the third century BCE, author
of Aegyptiaca.
15
  The phrase does not seem to appear in Tacitus.
 46 The New Science

that the different versions of Hercules in all the other nations (Varro
counts forty of them16) took the name from their Egyptian Hercules (so
Tacitus tells us of both the first and the second belief17).
And with all the favorable judgments with which Diodorus Siculus,18
who lived in the times of Augustus, showers the Egyptians, even he does
not allow them more than two thousand years of antiquity, and all those
judgments have been overturned by Jacques Cappel19 in his Sacred and
Foreign History: Cappel deems them similar to those which Xenophon
had previously connected with Cyrus and which (we would add) Plato20
often devised about the Persians.
Finally, this foolishness concerning the most profound wisdom of the
Egyptians is confirmed by the imposture of that Poimandres, passed off
as part of the Corpus Hermeticum, but discovered by Casaubon21 to con-
tain learning which was no more ancient than that of the Platonists and
was articulated in the same idiom used by the Platonists; and this rem-
nant was judged by Saumaise to be a disordered and badly composed
collection of things.
48 What made for this false opinion of Egyptians—that they were of
such great antiquity—is a property of the human mind—namely, its be-
ing indefinite—and on account of this, it often believes without bounds,
concerning the things which it does not know, that they are greater than
things as they actually are.
On account of this, the Egyptians were similar in this respect to the Chi-
nese, who grew to be such a great nation while they were closed off from
all foreign nations, just as the Egyptians, up until Psammeticus,22 had
been closed off and just as the Scythians, up until Idanthyrus,23 had been:
concerning those Scythians, there is a folk tradition that they bested the
Egyptians in the prize of greatest antiquity.
And such a folk tradition is necessary, and must have had its impe-
tus at the point where universal profane history starts; according to

16
  The reference to forty Herculeses appears not in Varro but in Marcus Servius
Honoratus’s commentary on Aeneid 8.564.
17
 Tacitus, Annals 2.60.2. In the passage Tacitus speaks only of Hercules, not
of Jove Ammon. Compare Scienza nuova prima §458, which speaks only of
Hercules.
18
  Diodorus Siculus (80 BCE–20 BCE), Greek historian and author of Histori-
cal Library.
19
  Jacques Cappel (1570–1624), French theologian and student of the relations
between Homer and Hebraic culture. Cappel was the author of Historia sacra et
exotica ab Adamo usque ad Augustum, printed in 1613.
20
  See Plato, Alcibiades I, 120e–122c, and Laws 3, 694e–695e.
21
  Isaac Causabon (1559–1614), French philologist and author of De rebus
sacris et ecclesiasticis.
S 22
  An Egyptian pharaoh.
N 23
  Scythian king mentioned by Strabo and Herodotus.
L
46
Book One 47

Justin,24 this tradition proposes, as a rival beginning prior to the mon-

archy of the Assyrians, two powerful kings—King Tanaus the Scythian
and King Sesostris the Egyptian—who up until now have made the
world appear much more ancient that it actually is. The tradition has
it that, first, Tanaus went through the Near East with a great army to
subjugate Egypt, a country which, by its nature, is not easily prone to
armed invasion; and then, Sesostris with forces correspondingly great
went to subjugate Scythia, a country which lived unknown to the Per-
sians (they had extended their monarchy to the Medes on the Scythian
border) up until the times of the one called Darius the Great, who
declared war on King Idanthyrsus (this Idanthyrsus is found to have
been so barbarous that, in an age when Persia was at its most humane,
he responded to Darius with the five real words of five objects, since he
did not even know how to write with hieroglyphics).
And these two kings, in all their power, traversed Asia with the two great
armies and did not make a province of either Scythia or Egypt, but in-
stead left Asia in such liberty that later there arose there the first of the
four most famous monarchies in the world, that of Assyria.
It is on account of this, perhaps, that the Chaldeans did not fail to en- 49
ter into the midst of this dispute over the greatest antiquity, also an in-
land nation and, as we will demonstrate [§55], more ancient than the
other two; the Chaldeans foolishly boasted about their preserving as-
tronomical observations going back well over twenty thousand years.
This perhaps was the impetus for Flavius Josephus the Jew25 believing
erroneously that the observations described on two columns (one made
of marble, the other of brick) were antediluvian and erected against two
floods and for his having seen the one in Syria made of marble. Such was
the great importance for ancient nations of preserving memories of as-
tronomical observations, the meaning of which was completely dead to
the nations that came after them! Hence, this column has been consigned
to the museum of credulity.
However, it has been found that the Chinese write with hieroglyphs just 50
as anciently the Egyptians did and just as, even more than the Egyp-
tians, the Scythians did, who did not even know how to write. And, since
they did not have an exchange with other nations for many thousands of
years by which they could have been informed about the true antiquity
of the world, just like a man who, while sleeping, is closed up in a small,
dark room and, in horror at the darkness, believes with certainty that
the room is much larger than what he can touch with his hands, so the
Chinese (and the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans too) did the same in the
darkness of their chronology.

24
  Marcus Iunianius Iustinus, second-century Latin historian who lived in the
Roman Empire, author of Historiarum Philippicarum libri XLIV.
25
  Titus Flavius Josephus (37–c. 100 CE), Roman-Jewish scholar and author of
Jewish Antiquities.
 48 The New Science

Moreover, grant that the Jesuit father Michele Ruggieri26 declares that
he himself has read books printed in China before the coming of Jesus
Christ and grant too that Father Martini,27 also a Jesuit, in his History
of the Chinese, confers a very great antiquity upon Confucius, which
has induced in many the atheism related by Marten Schoock28 in his
treatise The Universal Flood (on account of which, perhaps, Isaac de La
Peyrère,29 author of History before Adam, abandoned the Catholic faith
and subsequently wrote that the flood spread only over the lands of the
Hebrews). Nevertheless, Nicolas Trigault,30 who is better informed than
Ruggieri and Martini, writes in his Christiana expeditione apud Sinas
that printing among the Chinese was discovered not more than two cen-
turies before it was in Europe and that Confucius flourished not more
than five hundred years before Christ. And the Confucian philosophy is
consistent with the priestly books of the Egyptians in that its few points
on things of nature are rude and gullish, and also it completely revolves
around a commonplace morality—that is, a morality which commands
a people by the laws.
51 It is from reasoning of this sort concerning the empty opinion which
these gentile nations had about their antiquity (and the Egyptians, above
all, had this opinion) that we must start investigations into all that is
knowable about gentile nations. It is, first, so as to know with science that
all-important beginning—namely, where and when the gentile nations
had their start in the world—and, second, so as to assist with reasoning
which is still human all that is believable in Christianity. So, it starts from
the fact that the Hebrew people were the earliest in the world, a people
whose prince, Adam,31 was created by the true God at the creation of the
world. And so, the first science that ought to be learned is ­mythology32—
that is, the interpretation of myths—because, as we will see, all of the
gentile histories have mythical beginnings and because myths were the
earliest histories of the gentile nations. And it is with a method of this

26
  Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), Jesuit from Naples and author of Nuovi avisi
del Giapone con altri della Cina del LXXXIII e del LXXXIV, printed in 1586.
27
  Martino Martini (1614–1661), author of Sinicae historiae decas prima,
printed in 1658.
28
  Marten Schoock (1614–1659), Dutch author of Diluvium Noachi universale.
29
  Isaac de La Peyrère (1596–1676), French author of Systema theologicum ex
Preadamitarum hypothesi (1655). Known for claiming that there were humans
before Adam, and thereby doubting the antiquity of the Jews, La Peyrère is an
important figure for Spinoza and modern biblical criticism.
30
  Nicholas Trigualt of Douay (1577–1628), Jesuit missionary and author of De
christiana expeditione, printed in 1615.
31
  The description of Adam as principe may be an allusion to Machiavelli’s
striking description of Moses as a prince (The Prince 6).
32
  As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Vico defines mythology in the way that
traditional discussions of the liberal arts define grammar, The New Map of
S the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton
N University Press, 1999), 114–115.
L
48
Book One 49

sort that we must recover the beginnings of both the nations and the
sciences which emerged from these nations and from nowhere else, as
will be demonstrated throughout this entire work [§§239–245]; it is in
the public necessities or advantages of peoples that the sciences had to
have their starting points, and it is only later, by particular men of acuity
applying reflection to them, that the sciences were perfected. And from
here must start the universal history which all the learned say is lacking
in its proper beginnings.
And, in doing this, the antiquity of the Egyptians will be a great help 52
to us in that they have saved two great fragments no less wondrous than
their pyramids—that is, two great philological truths. The first (told by
Herodotus33) is that the Egyptians reduced the whole of time that previ-
ously ran its course to THREE AGES: first, the age of GODS; second,
the age of HEROES; and, third, the age of MEN. The second of these
truths is that, throughout this whole time, there were THREE LAN-
GUAGES spoken, corresponding in number and order to these three
ages: first, HIEROGLYPHIC, or speaking through sacred characters;
second, SYMBOLIC, or speaking through heroic characters; and, third,
EPISTOLARY, or speaking through characters of popular convention
(as reported by Scheffer34 in De Philosophia Italica).
Concerning this division of times, about Marcus Terentius Varro (be-
cause of his limitless erudition, he is deserving of the title by which he
was called, “most learned of the Romans,”35 and was called this at the
time when the Romans were most enlightened—that is, in the time of
Cicero) it is necessary to say not that he did not know to follow this
division, but that he did not wish to follow it: perhaps this is because
he understood about Rome what will be found through these principles
to be true for all ancient nations—namely, that all the things divine and
human were native to Latium—and hence he inquired into the Latin
origins of all these things in his great work, Rerum Divinarum et Hu-
manarum, of which the injustice of time has deprived us (this shows how
much Varro believed in the myth of the Law of the Twelve Tables having
come from Athens to Rome!36). And Varro himself divided the whole
time of the world into three periods, namely, dark times, which is the
age of gods of which the Egyptians spoke; next, mythical times, which
is the Egyptians’ age of heroes; and, finally, historic times, which is the
Egyptians’ age of men.

33
 Herodotus, Histories 2.36.
34
  Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), Swedish humanist born in Strasbourg,
professor of eloquence and government at Uppsala University. The text to
which Vico refers (full title De natura et constitutione philosophica Italica) was
published in Uppsala in 1664.
35
  For this title, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.95 and Augustine, City
of God 6.2.
36
  As Battistini observes, the exclamation mark consistently signals an “ironic
utterance” about a position that Vico takes himself to have overthrown.
 50 The New Science

53 Furthermore, the antiquity of the Egyptians will help us with those

two vain memories, memories themselves derived from the vanity of
nations observed by Diodorus Siculus37—namely, that every nation,
whether they were barbarian or human, considered itself to be the most
ancient of all and preserved memories of their antiquity back to the
beginning of the world (this, we will see, was the privilege only of the
Hebrews). The first of these two memories, as we observed [§47], is that
the Egyptian Jove Ammon was the oldest of all the other Joves of the
world; the second is that all the other versions of Hercules of the other
nations had taken their name from their Egyptian Hercules: this says
that all nations, first, passed through an AGE OF THE GODS whose
king was believed by all nations to be Jove and, later, passed through an
AGE OF HEROES who considered themselves the children of gods, the
greatest of whom was believed to be Hercules.

54 B. The first column in the Chronological Table is erected for the Hebrews
who (through the very weighty authority of Flavius Josephus the Jew38
and Lactantius Firmianus,39 which they will reach later [§94]) lived un-
known to all the gentile nations and yet reckoned correctly an account
of the times through which the world runs, an account which today is
accepted as true by the strictest textual critics in keeping with the cal-
culation of Philo the Jew;40 if it varies from that of Eusebius,41 the dif-
ference is not more than one thousand, five hundred years (a very small
period of time compared to the great differences among the Chaldeans,
the Scythians, the Egyptians and, in our own day, the Chinese). This
ought to be an unassailable argument for the Hebrews being the earliest
people of our world and for their having preserved, in sacred history,
truthful memories of their antiquity back to the beginning of the world.

55 C. The second column is planted for the Chaldeans. This is both because
geography shows that the most inland monarchy in all the habitable
world was in Assyria; and because this work demonstrates that inland
nations are populated first and, later, maritime nations.
And, certainly, the Chaldeans were the wise men of gentile antiquity,
whose prince is accepted by the community of philologists to be Zoro-
aster the Chaldean. And we have no scruples about saying that univer-
sal history takes its beginning from the monarchy of the Assyrians: the
Assyrians must have started in forming themselves from the Chaldean

37
  Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 1.9.
38
  On Flavius Josephus, see the note to §49.
39
  Lactantius Firmianus (c. 250–c. 325), Christian author of Institutiones
Divinae and advisor to Constantine I, the Roman emperor who converted to
Christianity.
40
  Philo the Jew (c. 25 BCE–50 CE), Hellenistic Jewish philosopher from
Alexandria.
S 41
  Eusebius of Caesarea (265–339), Roman historian and so-called father of
N Church history. Eusebius places the date of the world’s creation at 5202 BCE.
L
50
Book One 51

people and, from there, must have grown into a very large body and be-
come the Assyrians under Ninus, who must have founded that monarchy
not from a people led in from the outside, but from one which came into
being within Chaldea itself; with this, Ninus dispensed with the name
Chaldea and put forward Assyria instead; it must have been the plebs
of that nation on whose strength Ninus rose to monarch (this will be
demonstrated in this work that this custom is the same in the civil life of
all nations, as it certainly was in Rome).
This universal history, moreover, recounts for us that Zoroaster was
killed by Ninus:42 it will be found [§737] that, in saying this, heroic lan-
guage means that a Chaldean regime, which had been aristocratic and
for which Zoroaster was the heroic character, was overturned by means
of the popular liberty of the plebs of a people; we will see that, in heroic
times, the plebs were a nation different from that of the nobles, and it is
with the favor of this nation that Ninus established himself as monarch.
Otherwise, if these things were not thus, the following monstrosity of
chronology in Assyrian history would emerge: within the lifetime of a
single man, Zoroaster, Chaldea would have risen from lawless vagabonds
to become an empire so great that Ninus would found upon it the great-
est monarchy. Without these beginnings, to grant that Ninus was the one
who started universal history made it seem as if the monarchy of Assyria
came into being all at once, like a frog in a summer rain shower.

D. The third column is founded for the Scythians, who defeated the 56
Egyptians in the dispute over the greatest antiquity, as the witness of a
folk tradition tells us [§48].

E. The fourth column is established for the Phoenicians, prior to that of 57

the Egyptians, to whom the Phoenicians brought from Chaldea experi-
ence with the quadrant and science concerning the movements of the
pole star, about which there is a folk tradition; and it will be demon-
strated later [§§66, 83, 440] that they also brought with them common
alphabetic characters.

F. On account of all the things upon which we reasoned above, the Egyp- 58
tians (whom Marsham in his Canon wants to say were the most ancient
of all nations) deserve to be the fifth column in this Chronological Table.

G. Zoroaster is found in this work to have been a poetic character for the 59
founders of the peoples in the Near East. Hence, there are discovered as
many of these founders scattered throughout that great portion of the
world as there are versions of Hercules in the corresponding Western
portion; and perhaps those versions of Hercules which Varro observed
in Asia as having a Western aspect (such as the Tyrian or Phoenician

42
  See Augustine, City of God 21.14.
 52 The New Science

Hercules) were versions of Zoroaster in the Near East. But the vanity
of the learned, who want what they know to be as ancient as the world,
makes one particular man filled with the most profound, recondite wis-
dom and attaches to him the oracles of philosophy—that is, to teaching
of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists—giving the veneer of old age to
teaching which is quite new.
But the vanity of the learned did not settle here: it also swelled with
pride from devising a succession of schools of wisdom representing
each of the nations. So, Zoroaster was teacher to Berosus (standing for
Chaldea); Berosus to Hermes Trismegistus (standing for Egypt); Hermes
Trismegistus to Atlas (standing for Ethiopia); Atlas to Orpheus (stand-
ing for Thrace); and, finally, Orpheus settled with his school in Greece.
But a little hereafter [§93], it will be seen just how easy these long jour-
neys were for the earliest nations, nations which, on account of their still
recent wild origins, lived everywhere unknown even to those on their
own borders and would not have known each other except as war oc-
casioned or trade caused contact.
60 But concerning the Chaldeans, these same philologists, bewildered by
the various folk traditions that they collected, do not know whether they
are particular men, or whole families, or an entire people or a nation.
These doubts are all resolved by the following principles. First, there
were particular men; then, whole families; later, an entire people; and,
finally, a great nation upon which was founded the monarchy of Assyria.
And their wisdom was, first, that of commonplace divination, by which
they divined what was to come from the trajectory of the movements of
the stars at night; later, their wisdom was that of judicial astrology, such
that among the Latins a judicial astrologer was still called a Chaldean.43

61 H. These giants, in keeping with both the natural histories found in

Greek myths and the natural and moral proofs drawn from civil histo-
ries, will be demonstrated [§§369–373] to have existed naturally among all
the earliest gentile nations.

62 I. This confusion of languages came to pass in a miraculous manner,

whence it was that in an instant so many different tongues were formed; and
it was on account of this confusion of languages that the Fathers wished
for the purity of a sacred, antediluvian language that gradually came to be
lost. This must be understood as pertaining only to the languages of the
peoples of the Near East, among whom Shem propagated humankind.
But, as for the nations in all the rest of the world, the need must have
proceeded differently insofar as the races of Ham and Japheth must have
been dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth in feral wander-
ing for two hundred years and, roaming forlorn and in solitude, they
S
N 43
  See, for example, Cicero, De divinatione 2.42.88 and 2.47.98.
L
52
Book One 53

must have produced children with a feral education stripped of any hu-
man custom and deprived of any human speech; as such, they were in
a state of brute animals. And this is exactly the amount of time which
needed to run its course so that the earth, after it had dried out from the
dampness of the Universal Flood, could send into the air the dry evapo-
ration which can generate the lightning; as a result, these men, stunned
and terrified, would be abandoned to the false religions of so many Joves
that Varro counted some forty different versions, out of which the Egyp-
tians said that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient of all; and, as a
result, they would strike upon a kind of divination by which they divined
what was to come from thunder and lightning and the flight of eagles,
which they believed to be the birds of Jove.
But among those in the Near East, there came into being a more re-
fined kind of divination, that of observing the motions of the planets
and the aspects of the stars; hence, Bochart44 wishes to call Zoroaster—­
renowned as the first wise man of gentile antiquity—a contemplator of
the stars; and, just as the first commonplace wisdom came into being
among those in the Near East, so too the first monarchy arose among
them, which was that of Assyria.
It is through reasoning of this sort that we ultimately come to over- 63
turn all those recent etymologists who wish to trace all languages in the
world back to origins in the Near East whereas all those nations which
came from Ham and Japheth, first, founded their native languages in-
land and, later, when they came down to the sea, started to have some
experience with the Phoenicians renowned on the shores of the Mediter-
ranean and the ocean for their skill at sailing and for their colonies (so
we demonstrated in the first edition of The New Science45 that this was
the case for the origins of the Latin language and, on the model of Latin,
must be understood to be the case for all other languages).

K. In this myth is perceived the former rule of heaven rule on earth, a 64

time when heaven was believed to be as high as the peaks of mountains,
as held in a folk tradition which also relates that this rule left many great
benefits to humankind.

L. In Deucalion’s time, Themis—that is, divine justice—had a temple upon 65

Mount Parnassus, and she judged on earth the things pertaining to men.

M. This is the Hermes whom Cicero relates in his De natura deorum46 66

was called Thoth by the Egyptians, from which the Greeks derived θεός
[theos]; this Theuth found the letters and laws of the Egyptians; and

44
  Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), Protestant theologian, teacher of Pierre Daniel
Huet, and author of Geographia sacra seu Phaleg et Chanaan (1646).
45
 See Scienza nuova prima §§368–373.
46
 Cicero, De natura deorum 3.22. “Thot” appears in Cicero’s text; “Theuth” is
found at Plato, Philebus 18b and Phaedrus 274c.
 54 The New Science

these, according to Marsham, were taught to the other nations of the

world.
And yet, the Greeks did not use hieroglyphs to write their laws, but used
common alphabetic letters, letters which opinion up until now has said
Cadmus brought to the Greeks from Phoenicia47 even though (as we will
see [§679]) letters were not employed for more than seven hundred years
after Cadmus; it is within this time period that Homer arrives, who in
none of his poems uses the term νόμος [nomos] as Feith48 observed in
his Homeric Antiquities) and who entrusted his poems to the memory
of his rhapsodes because in his time common alphabetic letters had not
yet been found (as Flavius Josephus the Jew resolutely maintains against
Apion the Greek grammarian49) and, indeed, after Homer, the Greek let-
ters that developed were quite different from Phoenician letters.
67 But these difficulties are minor in comparison with the following. How
can one discover a nation which has no laws but which has already been
founded? And how, within Egypt itself, were there dynasties already
founded prior to this Hermes?
As if letters were essential for laws, and as if the laws in Sparta were not
really laws, a place where, because of the laws of that famous Lycur-
gus, knowledge of letters was prohibited! As if such civil orders were by
nature impossible, orders conceiving laws in speech and, indeed, mak-
ing them public in speech; as if we did not actually find just these two
sorts of assembly in Homer,50 one called the βουλή [boulē]—a secret as-
sembly where the heroes assembled in order to consult in speech about
the laws—and the other called the ἀγορά [agora]—a public assembly in
which, moreover, they made public the laws in speech! As if, finally, prov-
idence had not provided for this human necessity so that, on account
of the lack of letters, all nations in their barbarity would be founded,
first, upon what is customary and, later, becoming more gentle, would
be governed by laws, just as in the return to barbarism in Europe, the
first laws of the new nations came into being from what is customary, of
which the feudal customs were the most ancient of all. This should be
remembered for what we will say later [§§599–602], that fealties were the
earliest springs for all the laws which came later among all nations, both
ancient and modern; consequently, the natural law of the gentile peoples
has been established not yet by laws, but by these same human customs.
68 Now, so as to attain to something which has great moment for the
Christian religion—that Moses would not have learned from the Egyp-
tians the sublime theology of the Hebrews—this seems to be opposed

47
  For such “opinion,” see Herodotus, Histories 5.58.
48
  Everhard Feith (c. 1585–c. 1625), Dutch humanist and author of Antiquita-
tum homericarum libri IV.
S 49
  See Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12.
N 50
  See Homer, Iliad 2.53 and 2.207.
L
54
Book One 55

by a chronology which alleges that Moses comes after this Hermes

Trismegistus.
However, this difficulty—putting to one side the other reasons above
[§§44–45] which militate against it—is completely defeated by the prin-
ciples confirmed in that truly golden passage in De mysteriis Aegypti-
orum of Iamblichus,51 where he says that the Egyptians attributed all
the discoveries necessary or advantageous for human civil life to their
Hermes. As a result, he must have been not some particular man, rich in
recondite wisdom, who was later consecrated as a god; instead, he was a
poetic character representing the earliest men of Egypt wise in this com-
monplace wisdom, those who founded, first, the families and, later, the
peoples of which that great nation was composed.
And with a view to that same passage from Iamblichus just drawn upon,
because the Egyptians stand by their division of the ages into three—the
ages of gods, heroes, and men—and because Trismegistus was their god,
accordingly, the life of this Hermes must have run the course of the en-
tire age of the gods of the Egyptians.

N. One particularity that mythical history tells us about the golden age is 69
that the gods consorted on earth with men. And, so as to give certainty
to principles of chronology, we meditate in this work upon a natural
theogony—that is, the generations of the god—made naturally in the
imaginations of the Greeks on certain occasions of human necessities
or advantages, which suggested to them that they had received succor or
were assisted in the time of the early childhood of a world startled by
the most terrifying religions (in that world, no matter what men saw, or
imagined, or even themselves did, they apprehended in these the divin-
ity). And, by making twelve smaller ages from the famous twelve gods
of the those who are called the Greater Gentes—that is, from those gods
consecrated by men in the time of families—it is determined with a ratio-
nal chronology of poetic history that the divine age lasted nine hundred
years, from which are given the beginnings of universal profane history.

O. From this Hellenus,52 the native Greeks were called Hellenes. But the 70
Greeks in Italy were called Graii and their land Γραικία [Graikia], from
which they came to be called Graeci by those in Latium. This shows
how much the Greeks of Italy knew of the name of the original Greek
nation across the sea, from which they themselves had come as colonists
to Italy! For the term Γραικία is not found in later Greek writing (as was
observed by Jacques Le Paulmier53 in his Description of Greece).

51
  Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325 CE), Syrian Neoplatonist. The reference is to On
the Mysteries of the Egyptians 1.1.
52
  Hellenus, father of the Greeks, on whom see Pausanias, Description of Greece
10.38.1 and Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.2–3.
53
  Jacques Le Paulmier de Grentmesnil (1583–1670), French philologist. The
reference is to Greciae antiquae descriptio 1.2.
 56 The New Science

71 P. However, Strabo54 deems Attica unable, on account of the harshness

of its land, to accommodate foreigners who might otherwise have come
to inhabit it so as to prove that Attic is first among the dialects native to
Greece.

72 Q. And Cadmus brought there Phoenician letters, from which Boeotia,

because of its literate founding, ought to have had greater ingenuity than
all the other nations of Greece. Instead, it produced men of such be-
wildered minds that “Boeotian” became proverbial for a man who was
obtuse in his ingenuity.

73 R. This is the age of the gods, whose start for the nation of Latium
corresponds in its properties to the golden age of the Greeks, for whom
the earliest gold is discovered by our mythology [§544–548] to have
been the harvest, by whose reckonings the earliest nations counted
years over the course of many centuries; and the Saturn of Latium
is so called from satis—that is, from the Latin word meaning “sown
ground”55—and Saturn is called Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks,
for whom χρόνος [chronos] means “time,” from which comes what we
are calling chronology.

74 S. This Hermes the Younger must have been the poetic character for the
age of heroes among the Egyptians, an age which for the Greeks did not
come until after the nine hundred years it took for the age of gods in
Greece to come to an end. However, for the Egyptians, this ran its course
in the time of just a father, a son, and a grandson. We observed in As-
syrian history, in the person of Zoroaster, something analogous to this
anachronism in Egyptian history.

75 T. These royal successions are the great canons of chronology: if Da-

naus56 held the rule in Argos (a rule during which nine kings from the
house of Inachus were lords) and if that rule ran its course over three
hundred years (following the rule of the chronologists), then it must have
been over the course of almost five hundred years that the fourteen Latin
kings ruled in Alba.
76 However, Thucydides says that during heroic times kings expelled
one another from the throne every day: Amulius expels Numitor from
the rule in Alba, and then Romulus expels Amulius and restores Nu-
mitor. This came about on account of the ferocity of those times and
because heroic cities were without walls and fortresses were not yet in
use, as we will encounter again herein [§§645, 1014] in the return to bar-
barous times.

54
 Strabo, Geographia 9.1.8.
55
  On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3.
S 56
  See Hyginus, Fables 168; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.1.5; Strabo, Geography 8.6.9.
N
L
56
Book One 57

V. These two great fragments of antiquity were observed by Denis Pé- 77

tau57 to be cast within a period of Greek history prior to the heroic times
of Greece. And the Heraclids—that is, the sons of Hercules—spread
throughout the whole of Greece more than a hundred years before the
arrival of Hercules, their father, who would have had to have been born
many centuries prior to that so as to propagate so many generations.

X. We put Dido at the end of the heroic times of the Phoenicians, as 78

someone expelled from Tyre because she was defeated in a heroic dis-
pute, as she herself admits in her leaving Tyre because of the hatred of
her brother-in-law.58 This great multitude of Tyrian men is spoken of as
a woman in the heroic idiom because they were weak and defeated men.

Y. This Orpheus—he who reduced the wild beasts of Greece to h

­ umanity— 79
is found to be a vast den of a thousand monstrosities.
He came from Thrace, the fatherland of savage devotees of Mars, not of
humane philosophers (for the Thracians were, for all later times, so barba-
rous that Androtion59 the philosopher removes Orpheus from the number
of sages simply because he was born in Thrace). And it is from these begin-
nings that he arrives so learned in the Greek language that he composes in
verses of wondrous poetry; with these, he domesticates through their ears
barbarians so barbarous that, although already composed into nations,
were not restrained by their eyes from setting fire to a city full of wonders.
And the Greeks he found there, still wild beasts, are the same people whom
Deucalion, one thousand years before, had taught piety by his reverence
and his fear of divine justice; in keeping with this fear, in front of the temple
to divine justice upon Mount Parnassus (this later was the dwelling of the
Muses and Apollo, the arts and the god of humanity) Deucalion together
with his wife, Pyrrha, and both with their heads covered—signifying mar-
riage, the chastity of a human way of coupling—threw over their shoulders
the stones which were at their feet—that is, peoples rendered stupid by their
formerly feral life—and, by doing this, made these stones become men60—
that is, by the orders of household discipline in the familial state. These are
the same Greeks whom Hellenus seven hundred years before had brought
into association with language and among whom had spread, through his
three sons, the three Greek dialects; and the house of Inachus, we dem-
onstrated, had founded its rule three hundred years before and continued

57
  Denis Pétau (1583–1652), French Jesuit theologian from Orléans who taught
in many places, including La Flèche. His work on chronography may have
inspired Vico to include the Chronological Table in the Scienza nuova.
58
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.341. Virgil, however, portrays Pygmalion as Dido’s brother,
not her brother-in-law.
59
  Androtion, Greek rhetorician, disciple of Isocrates, contemporary of Demos-
thenes in the fourth century BCE. Androtion is known as the possible author of
an important historical work on Attica.
60
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.381–415.
 58 The New Science

through a succession of kings. To these Greeks, at last, comes Orpheus to

teach them humanity, and he brought Greece away from a time found to be
so wild toward such national splendor that he is the companion of Jason
on the naval expedition for the golden fleece (naval expeditions and naviga-
tion are the last discoveries of peoples), and he is accompanied by Castor
and Pollux, the brothers of Helen, for whom that famous Trojan War was
waged. So, in the life of a single man, so many civil things are done that the
course of two thousand years would hardly be enough!
This great monstrosity of chronology in Greek history in the person of
Orpheus is analogous to the other two observed above [§§55, 68], the
first in Assyrian history in the person of Zoroaster and the second in
Egyptian history in the two persons of Hermes. It is on account of this,
perhaps, that Cicero in De natura deorum61 suspects that there never was
any such Orpheus in the world.
80 To these quite great chronological difficulties are added other moral
and political difficulties which are not minor. Orpheus founds the hu-
manity of Greece upon the following examples: an adulterous Jove; a
Juno who is the enemy unto death of the virtue of Hercules; a chaste
Diana who propositions the sleeping Endymion at night; an Apollo who
responds in oracles and vexes unto death the virtuous maiden, Daphne;
a Mars who (as if it were not enough for the gods to commit adultery on
earth) carries it out into the sea with Venus. Nor does such unbridled lust
among the gods content itself with forbidden couplings with women: Jove
burned with a profane love for Ganymede. Nor does it even stop here: it
continues all the way to bestiality, and Jove transforms into a swan in
order to lie with Leda. It is this very lust, exercised upon men and beasts,
which absolutely makes for the infamous profanity of a lawless world.
The many gods and goddesses in heaven do not contract marriages, and
the one marriage did come about—that of Jove to Juno—is barren, and
not only barren, but also filled with cruel conflicts (such that Jove hangs
his virtuous and jealous wife in the air and himself delivers Minerva
from his head); and, finally, Saturn devours any children he makes.
Such examples, powerful because they are examples by the gods (let
these myths contain all the recondite wisdom desired from Plato up to
Bacon of Verulam in our own time in his De sapientia veterum62) taken as
they are would corrupt people of the most well-established customs and
incite them to become as bestial as those wild beasts of Orpheus: this is
how congruent such examples are, how well suited they are to lead men
away from being wild beasts to humanity!
This is of a piece with that reproach which St. Augustine makes of the
gods of gentile antiquity in his City of God,63 a reproach instigated by the

61
 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.38.107.
S 62
 Bacon’s De sapientia veterum was published in 1609.
N 63
 Augustine, City of God 2.7. See also Confessions 1.16.26.
L
58
Book One 59

Eunuch64 of Terence: Chaerea, scandalized by a painting of Jove who lies

with Danae in a shower of gold, adopts an ardor he did not have before
to violate a slave girl for whom he was impassioned because of a most
violent love.
But these hard rocks of mythology are avoided by principles of this 81
science, which will demonstrate that such myths, at their beginnings,
were all true and strict and worthy of founders of nations; and they will
demonstrate that later (in part, because the passing of many years ob-
scured their significance and, in part, because of the changing of cus-
toms which, once strict, became dissolute because men, so as to console
their consciences, wished to sin with the authority of the gods) such
myths took on the befouled significance which they came to have for us.
And the harsh storms of chronology will be cleared up by the discov-
ery of poetic characters,65 one of which was Orpheus, who, regarded
in his aspect as a theological poet, used these myths in their primary
significance, first, to found and, later, to reaffirm humanity in Greece.
This character is most conspicuous in the contests of the heroes with
the plebs of Greek cities; hence, that age is distinguished by theologi-
cal poets such as Orpheus himself, Linus, Musaeus, and the Amphion
who by means of self-moving stones—that is, by means of bewildered
plebs—raised the walls of Thebes which Cadmus had founded three
hundred years previously. In exactly the same way Appius,66 grandson
of the decemvir, at about as much time after the founding of Rome,
stabilized the heroic constitution for the Romans by singing to the plebs
about the strength of gods in the auspices—auspices whose science the
patricians kept for themselves. It is from these heroic contests that the
heroic age had its name.

Z. The same difficulties recur with Hercules if he is taken as a true man, 82

a companion of Jason on the expedition to Colchis, and is not taken, as
he will be found to be [§514], a heroic character representing the founders
of peoples in the aspect of his labors.

Aa. Also named Sanchuniathon and called the “historian of truth” (as 83
Clement of Alexandria refers to him in his Stromata67), Sancuniates
wrote Phoenician history in common alphabetic characters at a time
when the Egyptians and the Scythians, as we saw above, were writing in
hieroglyphs, just as the Chinese even today are found to write; and the
Chinese, no less than the Scythians and the Egyptians, boast of their
prodigious antiquity because in the darkness of their self-enclosure and
of their not consorting with other nations, they did not see the true light

64
  See Terence, Eunuch 584–591.
65
  See the note at §34 on poetic characters.
66
  That is, Appius Claudius Caecus (“the blind,” 340–273 BCE), censor who
oversaw the first aqueduct in Rome. See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.40–41.
67
  In fact, Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparatio Evangelica 1.10.
 60 The New Science

of historical time. And Sancuniates wrote in common Phoenician char-

acters at a time when common alphabetic letters had not yet been found
among the Greeks, as was said above [§66].

84 Bb. The war, as it is told by Homer, is judged by perceptive critics never

to have been waged in the world. And Dictys of Crete and Dares of Ph-
rygia (who wrote about the war in prose as historians of their own time)
are sent by these same critics to be kept in the library of imposture.68

85 Cc. This king brought under his power the three other dynasties of
Egypt and is found to be the king Ramses of whom the Egyptian priest
tells Germanicus in Tacitus.69

86 Dd. These colonies are one of the very small number of things in which
we do not follow the authority of chronology, on the strength of a more
powerful reason; hence, we put the colonies of Greece sent to Italy and
Sicily two hundred years after the Trojan War and so three hundred years
before the time in which they have been put by the chronologists—that
is, near the time in which the chronologists put the wanderings of heroes
such as Menelaus, Aeneas, Antenor, Diomedes, and Ulysses. This should
evoke no wonder when the chronologists themselves vary as much as
four hundred and sixty years concerning the date of Homer, the author
who is closest to things of this sort in Greece.
The reason for not following the chronologists is that the magnificence
and refinement of Syracuse at the time of the Carthaginian Wars did not
have anything to envy of Athens, even though delicacy and splendor of
customs are introduced much later on islands than on the mainland; and
in Livy’s time, Croton induces compassion in him70 because of the small
number of its inhabitants, a place once inhabited by many millions.

87 Ee. For it is found that Hercules counted years by the number of har-
vests, Isiphilus by the number of circuits of the sun through the signs
of the zodiac. Hence, with these two starts comes the certainty of the
historic times of the Greeks.

88 Ff. But just as the sun clears away the clouds, so too a golden pas-
sage by Varro in St. Augustine in the City of God 71 clears away all the
magnificent opinions which have been held until now about the begin-
nings of Rome (and about the beginnings of all the other cities which

68
  A library housed, presumably, within the “museum of credulity” that Vico
mentions at §49.
69
 Tacitus, Annals 2.60.3.
70
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 23.30 and 24.3.
71
  Augustine mentions the small size of old Rome at City of God 3.15, but the
S passage does not mention Varro. Vico mentions Sallust in this connection at
N Scienza nuova prima §3.
L
60
Book One 61

have been capitals of the most famous nations): Rome, under kings
who ruled there for two hundred and fifty years, gave manumission to
more than twenty peoples and did not extend their power more than
twenty miles.

Gg. About this first light of Greece, we have been left in the dark by 89
Greek history in its two principal parts—namely, geography and chro-
nology—given that nothing of certainty has reached us about either his
country or his dates. In Book Three, Homer will be found to be alto-
gether different from what he has been believed to be up until now.
But whoever he might have been, he certainly was not someone who saw
Egypt: this is someone who tells us in the Odyssey72 that the island where
the Pharos of Alexandria is now was no further away from the mainland
than an unloaded ship with a tailwind from the north could sail in a
whole day. Nor did he see Phoenicia: there, he tells us,73 the island of
Calypso called Ogygia74 was so far away that Mercury, not just a god, but
a winged god, reached it only with the greatest difficulty, as if it were the
same distance from Greece (where on Mount Olympus, as he sings in the
Iliad,75 the gods resided) as America is from our world. So, if the Greeks
in the time of Homer had traded with Phoenicia and Egypt, all trust in
both of his poems would have been lost.

Hh. Hence, it is because of Psammeticus that Herodotus starts to give 90

an account of things of greater certainty about the Egyptians.76 And
this confirms that Homer did not see Egypt. And such notions Homer
does have about Egypt and other countries in the world, from what he
tells us, either come from things and deeds within Greece itself, as will
be demonstrated in our poetic geography [§§741–769], or come from the
traditions of Phoenicians, Egyptians, Phrygians who brought their colo-
nies to Greece, traditions which altered over a long period of time, or
come from the stories of Phoenician travelers who were merchants on
the coasts of Greece long before the time of Homer.

Ii. In our Poetic Logic, it will be found [§§424–425] that Aesop was not 91
a particular man in nature, but rather an imaginative genus—that is, a
poetic character representing the socii, or familial servants of the heroes,
who certainly existed prior to the seven sages of Greece.

Kk. And Thales starts with a principle that is too simple, the principle of 92
water, perhaps because he had observed gourds grow with water.

72
 Homer, Odyssey 4.355–57. The Pharos of Alexandria is a lighthouse built
during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphius (280–247 BCE).
73
 Homer, Odyssey 5.46 and 5.55.
74
  That is, the island of Perejil, near the Strait of Gibraltar.
75
  Iliad 1.18.
76
 Herodotus, Histories 2.154.
 62 The New Science

93 Ll. Livy77 himself puts Pythagoras in the time of Servius Tullius: this is
how little Livy held as true that Pythagoras had been Numa’s teacher
about divinity! And in the time of this same Servius Tullius, which was
almost two hundred years after Numa, Livy says that they were times of
such barbarism in inland Italy that it would have been impossible for the
name of Pythagoras, much less Pythagoras himself, to have been able to
travel through so many peoples of such diverse languages and customs
and to reach Rome from Croton.
Hence, one understands just how quick and easy78 the long travels of
Pythagoras himself must have been, travels in Thrace to the disciples of
Orpheus, to the mages in Persia, to the Chaldean diviners in Babylonia,
to the gymnosophists in India; and then, upon his return, travels to the
priests in Egypt and, having traversed Africa at its widest, to the disciples
of Atlas in Mauretania and, from there, having crossed the sea, those to
the druids in Gaul; and it is from these travels that he returned to his own
fatherland rich, as Van Heurn79 says, in a barbarian wisdom brought
from those same barbarous nations for which Hercules of Thebes had
killed monsters and tyrants in order to spread humanity in the world, na-
tions to which in an equally distant age later those same Greeks boasted
that they had taught humanity, although evidently not to such profit that
they did not still remain barbarous.
This is how much seriousness and weight there is in the succession of
schools of barbarian philosophy of which Van Heurn speaks, the same
Van Heurn to whom we alluded just above! [§59]
94 Who can say if the authority of Lactantius80 is necessary here, who reso-
lutely denies that Pythagoras was a disciple of Isaiah, especially when
such authority is rendered all the weightier by a passage from Josephus
the Jew in his Jewish Antiquities81 which proves that the Hebrews in the
times of Homer and of Pythagoras lived just as unknown to their inland
neighbors as they did to those nations far across the sea? For to Ptolemy
Philadelphus, who wondered at the fact that no poet or historian ever
made any mention of the Mosaic laws, Demetrius the Jew responded
that those who attempted to speak of them to the gentiles had been
somehow miraculously punished by God, as was Theopompus (who lost
his senses) and Theodectes (who lost his sight).
Consequently, the same Josephus generously confesses the obscurity of
the Hebrews and offers the following reason: “We,” he says, “do not in-
habit the coasts, nor do we delight in trading and in consorting with
foreigners because of trade”; reflecting on this custom, Lactantius says

77
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.18.2–3.
78
  “Quick and easy”—one of several instances of antiphrasis in The New Sci-
ence. Vico’s meaning is that the journeys were slow and difficult.
79
  See the note on Van Heurn at §44.
S 80
 Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 4.2.
N 81
  In fact, Contra Apionem 1.12.
L
62
Book One 63

that such was the counsel of divine providence that the religion of the
true God would not be profaned by commerce with gentiles (and, in say-
ing this, Lactantius is followed by Peter van der Huhn in his De republica
hebraeorum82).
All this is confirmed by a public confession in the life of the Hebrews
themselves, who every year made a solemn fast on the eighth day in
­Tebet—that is, in December—on account of the Septuagint translation:
when the translation was published, there were three days of darkness
throughout the entire world (according to the rabbinical books exam-
ined by Casaubon83 in his Notes on the Annals of Baronius, by Buxtorf84
in his Jewish Synagogue, and by Hottinger85 in his Philological Thesau-
rus). As for the Greek Jews—those called the Hellenists, among whom
was Aristeas,86 who was said to be the head of the translation—because
they attributed the divine authority to the translation, the Jews in Jeru-
salem conceived a mortal hatred for them.
However, by the nature of these civil things, it is impossible that 95
the prophets would cross over boundaries forbidden to them even by
the most humane Egyptians (they were so inhospitable that, long after
they opened Egypt to Greeks, they were still forbidden from using a
pot, a spit, or a knife that was Greek, or even meat cut with a knife that
was Greek); it is impossible that the prophets would travel over harsh
and dangerous paths having no common language with the Hebrews
(they were already wont to be mocked by gentiles for not pointing out
a well even to a foreigner who was dying of thirst); it is impossible
that the prophets would profane before foreigners, men new and un-
known to them, their sacred teachings when priests from all nations of
the world guarded such teachings as arcana to be kept even from the
common run of their own plebs (hence, among all peoples such teach-
ings had the name “sacred” [sagra] in the sense that they were “secret”
[segreta]).
And the result of this is a most luminous proof of the truth of the
Christian religion: that Pythagoras and Plato, on the strength of a most
sublime human science, raised themselves to some recognition of divine
truths which these Hebrews learned from the true God. And, in turn,
there comes to be a weighty refutation of the errors of the recent my-
thologists who believe that myths are sacred history corrupted by the
gentile nations and, above all, by the Greeks.

82
 See De republica hebraeorum 1.4.
83
  On Casaubon, see the note at §47.
84
  Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629), German Hebraist and author of Synagoga
Iudaica.
85
  Johannes Henrich Hottinger (1620–1667), professor of Old Testament theol-
ogy in Holland and Switzerland, and an expert on Eastern languages, including
Arabic.
86
 See Contra Apionem 2.4.46.
 64 The New Science

Granted, the Egyptians consorted with the Hebrews during their captiv-
ity; nevertheless, in keeping with a custom common to all first peoples
which we will demonstrate herein [§§676, 958, 1050]—namely, that of
considering the defeated to be men without gods—the Egyptians made
a mockery rather than took account of Hebraic religion and history; as
the sacred book of Genesis tells us,87 they were wont to ask the Hebrews
in derision why the God to whom they gave adoration would not come
to free them from Egyptian hands.

96 Mm. This is the king who, by a common error, was believed until now to
have instituted the order of the census in Rome as a basis of liberty for
the people, whereas it will be found herein [§§619–623] that the census
was the basis for liberty for those who were lords. This error accords
with that other error, the result of which is that it was also believed until
now that, during times when a sick debtor was required to appear on
an ass or in a cart before the praetor, Tarquinius Priscus instituted as
orders the insignia, the togas, the devices, the thrones of ivory (ivory that
came from the tusks of elephants, which the Romans called Lucanian
oxen because they had seen them for the first time in Lucania during
the war with Pyrrhus) and, finally, the thrones of gold. The majesty of
Rome shown in this kind of splendid display came during times when the
popular republic was at its most luminous.

97 Nn. By proofs that we will make [§§440–445] concerning the time in

which writing, as commonly regarded, was found among the Greeks,
we put Hesiod at about the time of Herodotus or somewhat before, al-
though chronologists (too resolute in their boldness) place him thirty
years before Homer,88 on whose dates authors vary by four hundred and
sixty years.
Besides the chronologists, Porphyry89 (according to Suidas90) and Vel-
leius Paterculus91 want Homer to have preceded Hesiod by a great
amount of time.
As for the tripod which Hesiod consecrated on Helicon to Apollo with
the inscription92 that he had defeated Homer in song: even though Varro,

87
  No such passage occurs in Genesis. It is not clear what Vico has in mind
here.
88
  In making Homer older than Hesiod, Vico reverses his earlier stance, for
which see Scienza nuova prima §§310, 443, and De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1
(Cristofolini 389[4], BV 48).
89
  Porphyry (234–305 CE), Neoplatonic philosopher and editor of the Enneads
of Plotinus.
90
  Suidas, alleged author of the Lexicon, compiled between 976 and 1025.
91
  Velleius Paterculus, Historiae 1.7.
92
  For the inscription, see Antologia palatina 7.53. The Antologia palatina is
S a collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palatine
N Library in Heidelberg.
L
64
Book One 65

according to Aulus Gellius,93 recognizes it, it should be kept in the mu-

seum of imposture because it is of a piece with the impostures which
forgers frequently make in our time so as to elicit profit by means of
fraud.

Oo. This is the Hippocrates put by the chronologists in the time of the 98
seven sages of Greece.
However, partly because his biography is too colored by much that is
myth (he is reckoned to be the son94 of Asclepius and the grandson of
Apollo) and partly because it is certain that he is the author of works
written in prose in common alphabetic characters, he is accordingly put
here around the time of Herodotus, who similarly wrote in prose in com-
mon alphabetic characters and composed his history almost entirely out
of myths.

Pp. This is the Idanthyrsus who responded to Darius the Great (Darius 99
had threatened him with war) with five real words95; these words, as will
be demonstrated herein [§§401, 431, 434], the earliest peoples must have
used prior to using spoken words and, eventually, written words. These
real words were a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow of an
archer.
Herein, with perfect naturalness and propriety, the significance of these
words will be explained [§435]; and so, it is tedious to report what St.
Cyril of Alexandria96 relates about the council which Darius held con-
cerning this response (he himself exposes how ridiculous the interpreta-
tions were which Darius’s counselors gave to the words). This is the king
of those Scythians who defeated the Egyptians in the contest for the
greatest antiquity, and, at this late date, he did not even know how to
write with hieroglyphs!
As a result, Idanthyrus must have been like one of the Chinese kings
who, up until a few centuries ago, were shut off from all the rest of the
world and foolishly boasted of an antiquity greater than the world itself;
who, after such a long period of time, are still found to write with hiero-
glyphs. And although, on account of the great mildness of the climate,
they have a most refined ingenuity with which they make works which
are wondrously refined, nevertheless, they do not yet do the shading in
painting against which highlights can stand out (and, on account of this,
their paintings lack in depth and sharp relief and so are quite clumsy);

93
  Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 3.11.3. Vico may draw the citation of Aulus
Gellius from Marsham, Canon chronicus, pp. 433–436.
94
  In fact, a descendant (and not a direct one).
95
  See Herodotus, Histories 4.131. On “real words,” compare Bacon, De aug-
mentis scientarum 6.1 (Works, ed. J. Spedding and R. L. Ellis, 14 vols. [London:
Longman, 1857–1874], 1:651).
96
  A lapse on Vico’s part; he means Clement, Stromata 5.8.
 66 The New Science

and the porcelain statuettes which come from there reveal the skill of
the Chinese in foundry to be as rude as that of the Egyptians; from this,
the skill of Egyptians in painting must be deemed as rude as that of the
Chinese today.
100 Among these Scythians there is that Anacharsis97 who is the author
of Scythian oracles, just as Zoroaster was the author of Chaldean ora-
cles (these must have originally been the oracles of diviners which later,
on account of the vanity of the learned, were turned into the oracles of
philosophers).
If it is the case that from the Hyperboreans—either those from Scythia or
the other, more ancient ones who came into being in Greece itself—came
the two most famous oracles of gentile antiquity, the oracles at Delphi
and Dodona98 (this is what Herodotus believed and, after him, Pindar99
and Pherenicus,100 followed by Cicero in his De natura deorum101), then it
is perhaps on account of this that Anacharsis was proclaimed a famous
author of oracles and was counted among the most ancient soothsaying
gods, as we will see in the Poetic Geography [§745].
Let it suffice for understanding how learned Scythia had been in recon-
dite wisdom that the Scythians used to stick a knife in the earth and give
adoration to it as a god,102 for by doing this, they could justify the killings
which they were about perform; and that it is from this savage religion
came those virtues, moral and civil, of which we are told by Diodorus
Siculus,103 Justin,104 and Pliny,105 and which are raised to the heavens by
Horace!106 Hence, Abaris, intending to institute orders in Scythia con-
forming with the laws of Greece, was killed by Caduidas, his brother.
So greatly did Abaris107 profit from the barbarian philosophy of Van
Heurn108 that he did not even understand on his own the laws suited to
domesticating a barbarian people into a humane civility, but instead had
to learn them from the Greeks! And it is exactly the same for the Greeks
in relation to the Scythians, as was said a little before [§§89–90] of the
Scythians in relation to the Egyptians: on account of the emptiness of
giving their wisdom-rumored origins in the antiquity of foreigners, they

97
  Anacharsis, disciple of Solon, mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, Lives and
Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 1.8.
98
  Near Dodona, a city of Epirus, in northwestern Greece.
99
 Pindar, Olympians 3.28–29; Pythians 10.30.
100
  Pherenicus of Heraclea Pontica, an epic poet of uncertain epoch.
101
 Cicero, De natura deorum 3.23.57.
102
  That is, as to Mars, the god of war; see Herodotus, Histories 4.62.
103
  Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.43–44.
104
  Marcus Iunianius Iustinus, Historiae philippiacae 3.5–7 and 3.9–15.
105
 Pliny, Natural History 4.13.
106
 Horace, Carmina 3.24.9–24.
S 107
  In fact, Anacharsis; see Herodotus, Histories 4.76.
N 108
  On Van Heurn, see the note at §44.
L
66
Book One 67

deserved, in truth, the reproach which they themselves dreamed up an

Egyptian priest making of Solon (related by Critias according to Plato
in his first or second Alcibiades109), that the Greeks were always children.
Hence, we can say that, on account of such vanity by the Greeks in rela-
tion to the Scythians and the Egyptians, they lost as much true merit as
they gained in vainglory.

Qq. He was a young man at a time when Herodotus was an old man 101
(old enough to be his father) and he lived in the most luminous time of
Greece, that of the Peloponnesian War, of which he was a contemporary
and of which, accordingly, he wrote the history so as to write things
which were true. It was said by him that the Greeks, up until the time of
his father—that is, until the time of Herodotus—knew nothing about
their own antiquity: what, then, is our estimate of what they tell us about
foreign things, especially given that what the Greeks tell us about the
gentile antiquity of barbarian peoples is the full extent of our knowledge
about it? What is our estimate of the ancient Roman things up until the
time of the Carthaginian Wars, Romans who, up until that time, gave
their attention to nothing but farming and the exercise of arms, espe-
cially when Thucydides establishes the above truth about his Greeks,
who so quickly became philosophers? Unless, perhaps, we wish to say
that these Romans had some specific privilege from God.

Rr. At this time is brought from Athens to Rome110 the Law of the Twelve 102
Tables, which is just as uncivil, rude, inhumane, cruel, and savage as my
Principles of Universal Law111 demonstrated it to be.

Ss. This is just as St. Jerome observes in his On the Book of Daniel.112 103
And it was on account of the advantages of commerce that the Greeks
started under Psammeticus to have some knowledge of things in Egypt,
whence at this time Herodotus starts to write things of greater certainty
about the Egyptians; it was after Xenophon that for the first time, on
account of the necessity of war, the Greeks started to have some knowl-
edge of things of greater certainty about the Persians, about whom Ar-
istotle (brought there by Alexander the Great) writes113 that before him
the Greeks spoke only in myths, as is indicated in this Chronological
Table [§47].
It is in this fashion that the Greeks started to have a certain reckoning
for foreign things.

109
  In fact, Timaeus 22b.
110
  As Battistini notes, Vico’s assertion that an embassy to Athens brought laws
back to Rome is clearly ironic, since he rejects the claim that civilized Athens
could possibly serve as the origin of such crude and inhumane laws.
111
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).
112
  See Jerome, Commentary on the Prophet Daniel V (PL 25:518).
113
  No such passage appears in an extant Aristotelian text.
 68 The New Science

104 Tt. This law was decreed in Year 416 of Rome and contains the most
important turning point in Roman history, the point at which, by means
of this law, the Roman republic declared its constitution changed from
aristocratic to popular, whence Publilius Philo, who was its author, was
called the People’s Dictator.114 This has not been pointed out because it
was not known how to understand the language of the law.
Later, it will clearly be demonstrated by us [§§619–623, 662–665, 945]
that this was actual; it is enough, here, that we see it as an idea serving
as a hypothesis.
105 This law has lain unrecognized, and so has the subsequent Petelian
law115 (equal in importance to the Publilian law) because the following
three words have not been defined: “people,” “regime,” and “liberty.”
With a view to these words, it has been believed because of a common
error that the Roman people up until the time of Romulus were consti-
tuted by citizens who were both nobles and plebeians, that the Roman re-
gime was monarchical, and that the orders instituted by Brutus were for
the liberty of the people. These three undefined terms made everyone—
critics, historians, political theorists, jurists—fall into error because none
of the present republics can give us an idea of heroic republics, which
were of the strictest aristocratic form and, therefore, completely different
from those in our time.
106 Romulus, within the asylum opened in the lucus, founded Rome upon
those with the status of clients—that is, those under the protection of
others—in which each paterfamilias held those who fled to this asylum
in the condition of day-laboring rustics who did not have the privilege
of citizenship, and so had no share in civil liberty; and because they had
fled so as to save their lives, the Fathers protected their natural liberty by
partitioning them up to cultivate the different fields of the Fathers. The
public foundation for the territory of Rome must have been composed
of those fields, just as the Senate was composed by Romulus of these
Fathers.
107 Later, Servius Tullius instituted the order of the census by permitting
to the day laborers bonitary domain116 over fields, which were the prop-
erty of the Fathers; they were to cultivate them for themselves under the
burden of the census, with the obligation to serve the Fathers at their
own expense during war (this conforms with how the plebeians actually
served the patricians in the context of what was up until now dreamed
to be popular liberty). This law of Servius Tullius was the first agrarian
law of the world, instituting the census as an order which was the basis

114
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.12.14. On the Publilian law, see the note at §26.
115
  On the Petelian law, see §26 and §115.
116
  Bonitary domain is maintained only by “continuous physical possession”
of the fields (see §984); it can be revoked any time, at the whim of the Fathers.
S On the difference between “natural” bonitary domain and its “civil” forms, see
N §266.
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68
Book One 69

of heroic republics—that is to say, the most ancient aristocracies of all

the nations.
After this, Junius Brutus, by expelling the Tarquin tyrants, restored the 108
Roman republic to its beginnings, and by instituting the order of the
consuls (two, as it were, aristocratic kings, as Cicero calls them in his
Laws,117 elected annually instead of one king for life), he reinstituted or-
ders for the liberty of those who were lords from their tyrants, but not
yet liberty of the people from those who were their lords.
However, when the nobles poorly kept the agrarian law of Servius for the
plebeians, the plebeians created the tribunes and made the nobility swear
to their legitimacy; these tribunes defended for the plebs their share of
the natural liberty of bonitary domain over the fields.
Thus, on account of this, when the plebeians desired to take back the
civil domain from the nobles, the tribunes of the plebs expelled Marcius
Coriolanus from Rome for having said that the plebeians should go and
work in the dirt—that is to say, given that they were not content with
the agrarian law of Servius Tullius and wished for a fuller agrarian law,
they should be reduced to being the day laborers of Romulus. Otherwise,
would it not be stupid haughtiness for the plebeians to despise agricul-
ture (we certainly know the nobles themselves considered it an honor to
practice agriculture) and for so slight a cause to agree to a war so cruel
that Marcius, so as to avenge his exile, had come to ruin Rome, were it
not for the pious tears of a mother and wife which held him back from
this impious enterprise?
On account of all this, when the nobles sought to take back the fields 109
from the plebeians after the plebeians had cultivated them and had no
civil course of action for vindicating their claim to the lands, at that point
the tribunes of the plebs made an appeal to the Law of the Twelve Tables
(by it no affairs other than these are disposed, as was demonstrated in
my Principles of Natural Law118), and by this law, the nobles permitted a
quiritary domain over the fields to the plebs, a civil domain which, by the
natural law of the gentile peoples, is permitted to foreigners.
And this is the second agrarian law of the nations of antiquity.
Consequently, the plebeians became aware that they still were not able to 110
pass on the fields intestate to their relatives because they did not have fa-
milial relations in the forms of direct, paternal, or tribal kinship—which,
at the time, were the ways through which legitimate succession passed—
because they did not celebrate solemn marriages; they also became aware
that none of them were able to dispose of the fields by testament because
they did not have the privilege of citizens; therefore, they made an ap-
peal for the connubium of the nobles—that is, a legal claim to contract

 Cicero, De legibus 3.3.8.

117

  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 717–727).

118
 70 The New Science

solemn nuptials, which is what connubium means—the most solemn part

of which were the auspices, which were the property of the nobles.119 The
auspices were the great source of all Roman rights, both private and pub-
lic, and so, when the Fathers shared in common with the plebeians, their
legal claim to nuptials (this, in the definition of the jurist Modestinus,
is omnis divini et humani iuris communicatio120 [“the sharing in all rights
divine and human”], which is nothing other than citizenship itself), the
Fathers granted to the plebeians the privilege of citizens.
Consequently, following the progression of human desires, the plebeians
took from the Fathers for themselves a common share in all that de-
pends upon the auspices with respect to legal claims in the private realm,
such as claims to paternal power, to direct kinship, to paternal kinship,
to tribal kinship and, through these rights, claims to legitimate succes-
sion, to disposing by testament, and to guardianship. After this, they
appealed for what depends upon the auspices with respect to legal claims
in the public realm, and they took a common share in the imperium—the
power—first, of the consulship and, eventually, of the priesthood and
the pontificate and, with these, of the science of the laws.
111 In this fashion, the tribunes of the plebs, on the basis of that for which
they had been created—of protecting the natural liberty of the plebs—
were gradually led to make pursuit of the whole of civil liberty. And
the census was instituted as an order by Servius Tullius, when it, subse-
quently, put in place the provision that the plebeians would no longer
make payments privately to the nobles, but to the treasury so that the
treasury would tend to the expenses of the plebeians in war, went natu-
rally from being the basis of liberty for the lords to form the census that
was the basis of liberty for the people—the fashion of this transforma-
tion will be found herein [§§619–623].
112 By taking similar steps, these same tribunes advanced the power of the
plebeians to decree laws.
For the Horatian and Hortensian laws were not able to accord to the
plebs that their plebiscites would be obligatory for the whole people ex-
cept in particular emergencies. During the first of these, the plebs had
withdrawn to the Aventine in Year 304 of Rome, at a time when—as is

119
  This is Vico’s novel reinterpretation of the lex Canuleia, passed in 445 BCE
and claimed by Livy to give plebs the right to marry nobles (Ab urbe condita
4.1.2). Vico’s counterclaim, elaborated at §598, is that what the plebs actually
sought was not the ability to marry nobles, but to enjoy iustae nuptiae among
themselves—that is, to marry with the same rights as possessed by the nobles.
(See Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 267.)
More substantive gains by the plebs, on Vico’s account, would have to wait for
the Publilian law and the Petelian law (see note at §26).
120
  Herennius Modestinus, student of Ulpian, flourished around 250 CE. The
S reference is to Digest 23.2.1.
N
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Book One 71

stated here as a hypothesis but herein will be shown to be actual [§§104,

582–598]—the plebs were not yet citizens. During the second emergency,
they withdrew to the Janiculum in Year 367 of Rome when the plebe-
ians were still contending with the nobles for a common share in the
consulate.
However, it was on the basis of the two aforementioned laws that the
plebs eventually advanced towards decreeing laws that were universally
binding. It must have been on account of incidents of great unrest and
revolt in Rome that there was a need to elect Publilius Philo as dicta-
tor (dictators were not elected except in cases of extreme danger to the
republic). In this case, Rome had fallen into so great a disorder as to
nurture within the body politic two supreme legislative powers without
there being any distinction between them in terms of when, where, and
on what each would legislate, by means of which Rome must have been
quickly coming to certain ruin.
Consequently, Philo, so as to remedy so great a civil illness, instituted
orders such that, with respect to whatever the plebs decreed by plebiscite
in the Comitia Tributi [“the tribal assemblies”] was OMNES QUIRITES
TENERET [“held for all the quirites”], was obligatory for all the people
in the Comitia Centuriati [“centuriate assemblies”]—that is, in those as-
semblies where omnes quirites [“all the quirites”] gathered—for the Ro-
mans never used this designation, quirites, except for public gatherings,
nor is the singular form of the noun ever used in common Latin speech.
With this formula, Philo intended to say that it would not be possible to
order laws which were contrary to the plebiscites.
Because of everything to which the nobles had already agreed, the plebs
were by the law completely equal in every respect to the nobles; and by a
final effort, which the nobles were not able to resist without bringing ruin
upon the republic, the plebs became superior to the nobles in that they
could decree, without the authority of the Senate, laws general for the
entire people; and that the Roman republic had naturally become one of
popular liberty, Philo declared to such with this law, and for this he was
called the People’s Dictator.
In conformity with this change in the nature of the Roman constitution, 113
he gave the two ordinances contained, in the other two headings of the
Publilian law. The first concerned the authority of the Senate, which pre-
viously had been the authority of those who were lords. It was by such
authority that, for whatever the people first proposed, DEINDE PA-
TRES FIERENT AUCTORES [“the Fathers would subsequently have
authority”]; as a result, the election of consuls by the people prior to
the Senate was simply public testimony to the merits of the candidates,
and the ordering of laws by the people prior to the Senate was simply a
public demand about legal rights. However, this dictator ordered that,
henceforth, the Fathers would give authority to the people, which was
now sovereign and free IN INCERTUM COMITIORUM EVENTUM
 72 The New Science

[“while the vote of the assembly was undetermined”]; as such, the Fa-
thers were guardians to a people which was now lord over Roman power;
he ordered that if the people wished to decree laws, it would decree them
in keeping with the formulations conveyed to it by the Senate, but if it
wished otherwise, it would exercise its sovereign will and “antiquate”—
that is, would declare that it did not wish anything new. As a result of all
this, whatever henceforth the Senate ordered concerning public affairs
would be either directions they gave to the people or commissions the
people gave to them.
Finally, what remains is the ordinance concerning the census: for the
whole time previous to this ordinance, since the public treasury belonged
to the nobles, only the nobles were elected as censors, but later, because
of this law, the treasury became the patrimony of the whole people, and
Philo ordered in the third heading of the law that the plebs would have
a common share in the office of censor; this was the only magistracy
remaining in which the plebs did not have a share.
114 If, consequently, one reads previous Roman history in keeping with this
hypothesis, one will find a thousand proofs for it sustaining all the things
about which that history tells us, things which because of the three afore-
mentioned terms121 have had neither any common foundation nor any
apt correspondence to one another as particulars. Because of this alone,
the hypothesis accordingly ought to be accepted as true.
However, if one considers it well, it is not so much a hypothesis as it is
a truth meditated upon in idea which will later be found by authority
to be actual. And, given what Livy says in general terms—that asylums
were the VETUS URBES CONDENTIUM CONSILIUM [“the age-old
counsel of founders of cities”]—when he tells that it was within the asy-
lum opened in the lucus that Romulus founded Rome, this hypothesis
gives the history of all the other cities of the world, which up until now
we have despaired of knowing. Rome is a test for an ideal eternal history
upon which we have herein meditated [§349] and upon which we have
discovered the histories of all nations run their temporal course.

115 Vv. This second law—the so-called De nexu [On Debt]—was issued in
Year 419 of Rome (and so three years after the Publilian law) by the
consuls, Caius Poetelius and Lucius Papirius Muggillanus; and it con-
tains the second major point in the Roman things. After this law, the
plebeians were released from the claim of fealty, of being liege vassals
for the nobles because of debts; through this, the nobles held the plebe-
ians, often for their entire lives, to labor for them in their private prisons.
However, the Senate retained the sovereign domain that it had over the
grounds subject to Roman power, power which had already passed to the
people; and, as long as Rome was a free republic, they held on to these
S
N   The three terms mentioned at §105: “people,” “regime,” “liberty.”
121

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Book One 73

grounds by force of arms through what they called senato consulto ul-
timo [“the senatorial decree of last resort”]. Hence, whenever the people
intended to distribute these grounds by means of the agrarian laws of
the Gracchi, the Senate armed the consuls, who declared as rebels, and
killed, the tribunes of the plebs who had been the authors of these laws.
This kind of great effect is sustained only by a legal system of sovereign
fealties that are subject to a greater sovereignty. This system is confirmed
by a passage of Cicero122 in one of his Against Catiline speeches, where
he affirms that Tiberius Gracchus, by means of his agrarian law, was
damaging the constitution of the republic and that, with legal justifica-
tion, he was executed by Publius Scipio Nasica through the law by which
the consul armed the people against the authors of such a law, expressed
in the legal formula, QUI REMPUBLICAM SALVAM VELIT CON-
SULEM SEQUATUR [“he who wants the republic safe should follow
the consul”].

Xx. The cause of this war was that the Tarentines had badly treated, 116
first, Roman sailors who had landed on their shores and, then, Roman
ambassadors, for the Tarentines gave the excuse that (as Florus said it123)
qui essent, aut unde venirent ignorabant [“they did not know who the Ro-
mans were or whence they came”].
This is how well known the earliest peoples were to each other, even
those confined to the same narrow strip of land!

Yy. About this war, even Livy, the same Livy who professed that from 117
the second Carthaginian War he would write about Roman history with
somewhat more certainty, promising to write of a war more memorable
than any waged by the Romans (and as a consequence of such unprec-
edented greatness, the memory he leaves in his writing ought to have the
greater certainty of all things of greater repute), even this Livy did not
know (and openly says that he did not know) about three of the most
weighty circumstances. First,124 he did not know under whose consulship
Hannibal marched from Spain against Italy after having fought at Sagun-
tum. Second,125 he did not know by which Alps Hannibal reached Italy:
the Cottian or the Pennine. Third,126 he did not know with how great a
force he came; on this, one finds in the ancient annals such variation that
some have written six thousand cavalry and twenty thousand infantry,
others twenty thousand of the former, eighty thousand of the latter.
By all the reasoning in these Annotations, one sees that everything 118
that has reached us from the nations of gentile antiquity up until the

122
 Cicero, In Catilinam 1.1.3.
123
 Florus, Epitoma 1.13.5.
124
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.15.3–4.
125
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.38.6.
126
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.38.2.
 74 The New Science

times determined by this Table is altogether most uncertain. Hence, we

enter upon all this as we would upon things called nullius [“belonging to
no one”], for which the rule for a legitimate claim is occupanti conceden-
tur [“it goes to the first occupant”]. And, given this, we believe that we
are violating the rights of no one if we reason in a way which is different
from, and at times entirely contrary to, the opinions which have been
held up until now about the BEGINNINGS OF THE HUMANITY
OF THE NATIONS, and, in doing so, we reduce them to principles of
science; through these principles, the deeds of certain history are traced
to their earliest origins, origins by which these deeds are sustained and
through which they are brought into agreement with one another; these
deeds up until now have seemed to have no common foundation nor any
continuity of sequence—that is, no coherence among themselves.

On the Elements

119 So as to give form, then, to the materials previously arranged herein in

the Chronological Table, we now propose here the following Axioms,127
both philosophical and philological, and some few reasonable and dis-
crete postulates along with some clarificatory definitions: these, like
blood in a living body, must course through and animate those materials
in all the reasoning which this science does about the common nature of
the nations.

120 1. Man, on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, when-
ever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure
of all things.128
121 This Axiom is the cause for two common human customs: first, that
fama crescit eundo [“fame increases as it goes along”]; and, second, that
minuit praesentia famam [“the presence of something decreases the fame
it has”].129 Fame has, indeed, made quite a long journey since the begin-
ning of the world and is the perennial spring of all the grandiose opin-
ions that have been held up until now about a most distant antiquity, un-
known to us on account of that property of the human mind noticed by

127
  Since Vico identifies the procedure of The New Science with geometry at
§349, it is appropriate to take Spinoza’s Ethics as a textual model for Vico’s
axioms. Noting this does not settle, but merely opens, a host of interpretive
questions about Vico’s relation to both geometry and Spinoza.
128
  This first Axiom is unique to the text published in 1744; it does not appear
in the 1730 edition. Here Vico alludes to the homo mensura doctrine, attributed
to Protagoras at Plato, Theaetetus 152a. Later texts also suggest themselves for
comparison, e.g., Hobbes’s Leviathan: “For men measure, not only other men,
but all other things, by themselves” (chapter 2).
S 129
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.174–75 and Lucretius, De rerum natura 6.341.
N
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Tacitus in his Life of Agricola in the phrase omne ignotum pro magnifico
est [“everything unknown is taken for something great”].130

2. It is a second property of the human mind that, whenever men are un- 122
able to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they
evaluate them relative to things that are known and present.131
This Axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors taken 123
up by whole nations and all the learned concerning the beginnings of
humanity, insofar as it is during their own enlightened, cultivated, and
grand times, when the nations started to notice and the learned started to
reason about these beginnings, that they evaluated the origins of human-
ity, which must have been modest, rude, and most obscure.132
Within the genus of vanity are the two species indicated above [§§53, 124
59], first, the vanity of the nations, and, second, the vanity of the learned.

3. Concerning the vanity of the nations, we have learned that golden say- 125
ing of Diodorus Siculus,133 that every nation, whether Greek or barbar-
ian, has had the vanity to consider itself earlier than all other nations in
discovering the conveniences of human life and of preserving a memory
of the things of their own back to the beginning of the world.134
This Axiom dispels, by fiat, the vainglory of the Chaldeans, the Scyth- 126
ians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, that they were the founders of human-
ity in the ancient world.
However, Flavius Josephus the Jew cleanses his own nation of this with
that magnanimous confession we heard above [§94], that the Hebrews
had lived hidden from all the gentiles. And sacred history renders certain
that the world is, as it were, a youth in comparison with the old age it is

130
 Tacitus, Agricola 30.3.
131
  Compare to Bacon’s “Idols of the Cave” (see Novum Organum 1.42).
132
  The 1730 edition adds: “This same Axiom demonstrates that vanity is the
daughter of ignorance and self-love; it swells us insofar as we are so possessed
by the ideas we have of our own selves and of our things and, because of them,
we regard, like madmen, things that we do not understand.” Given its origins in
self-love and ignorance, boria is aptly translated (here and throughout) by “van-
ity,” a term used in English by Bacon, with similar resonances.
133
  See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 1.9.
134
  Vico’s polemic against the “vanity of nations” should be understood as a
rejection of two claims: (1) Cultural institutions must have originated with a
single nation, older than the others and (2) Later nations must have acquired
their institutions from the older nation by a process of diffusion. Against dif-
fusion theories, Vico will argue that nations develop independently, though in
parallel fashion, thanks to the “common nature of the nations.” Vico’s idea
of autonomous parallel development suggests that two nations will exhibit a
similar succession of customs, without requiring the assumption that one nation
must have “borrowed” from the other.
 76 The New Science

believed to have by the Chaldeans, by the Egyptians, and, even to this

day, by the Chinese; this is a great proof of the truth of sacred history.

127 4. To this vanity of the nations is here joined the vanity of the learned,
who want what they know to be as ancient as the world.
128 This Axiom dispels all the opinions of the learned concerning the
unaccountable wisdom of the ancients.135 It convicts of imposture the
oracles of Zoroaster the Chaldean and Anacharsis the Scythian which
have not come down to us; and also the Poimander of Hermes Tris-
megistus, the Orphics—that is, the poems of Orpheus—and the Golden
Hymns of Pythagoras, as all the more discerning textual critics agree.
And it rebukes as impertinent all the mystical meanings given by the
learned to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the philosophical allegories given
to Greek myths.

129 5. Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and sup-

port fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his
corruption.136
130 This Axiom dismisses from the school of this science the Stoics, who
wished to deaden the senses, and the Epicureans, who make the senses
the rule of judgment; and both deny providence, the former making it
so that they are drawn along by fate, the latter abandoning themselves
to chance; and the latter hold the opinion that the human soul dies with
the body; both ought to be called monastic—or solitary—­philosophers.
And this Axiom admits to the school of this science the political
philosophers,137 and principally the Platonists, who agree with all the
lawgivers on three principal points: that there is divine providence; that
the human passions should be moderated and made into human virtues;
and that the human soul is immortal. As a consequence, this Axiom will
give the three principles of this science.

131 6. Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and so cannot be fruitful

except to the very few, who wish to live in the republic of Plato and not
to return to the dregs of Romulus.138

132 7. Lawgiving considers man as he is so as to make good use of him in

human society, as from ferocity, avarice, ambition—the three vices which
carry across the whole of humankind—it makes the military, the mar-
ket, and the court and so the strength, the wealth, and the wisdom of

135
  Here Vico rejects a position associated with the prisca theologia tradition,
found both in Bacon’s On the Wisdom of the Ancients (see §328) and his own On
the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians.
136
  Axioms 5 through 15 treat philosophy, as is clear from §163.
137
  Here Vico speaks of i filosofi politici (“the political philosophers”), and not
S simply i politici (“the political theorists”), as he so often does elsewhere.
N 138
  See Cicero, Ad Atticum 2.1.8.
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Book One 77

republics. And out of three great vices that would lay waste to the entire
human race upon the earth, it makes civil felicity.
This Axiom proves that there is divine providence, and that it is a 133
divine, lawgiving mind which from the passions of men (all of whom
are intent upon their own private advantages, through which they would
live like wild beasts in their separate solitudes) makes the civil orders, by
which they live in human society.

8. Things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there. 134
This Axiom alone, given that humankind has lived, since all recorded 135
memory, of the world, and continues to live tolerably well in society, puts
an end to the great dispute in which the best philosophers and moral
theologians have contended with the skeptic Carneades and with Epi-
curus, a dispute which even Grotius did not settle, namely, whether law
exists in nature, or whether human nature is sociable, which mean the
same thing.139
This same Axiom, combined with Axiom 7 and its corollary, proves 136
that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues out of the pas-
sions. However, God aided man, naturally, with divine providence and,
supernaturally, with divine grace.

9. Men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the 137
certain, for if the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge [scienza],
the will, at least, can repose in consciousness [coscienza].140

10. Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes science about the 138
true. Philology observes authority in human choice, whence comes con-
sciousness of the certain.
This Axiom, by its second part, defines as philologists all the grammar- 139
ians, historians, textual critics who are occupied with knowledge of the
languages and deeds of peoples, both internally, in their customs and laws,
and externally, in their wars, peace treaties, alliances, travels, commerce.
This same Axiom demonstrates that just as the philosophers, who 140
did not give certainty to their reasoning with the authority of the

139
  It may appear that in the quarrel of Hobbes and Aristotle on natural
sociability (compare Leviathan 17 with Politics 1.1, 1253a), Vico simply takes
Aristotle’s side. But such a judgment needs to be complicated by considering the
possibility that for Vico, human origins are nonsocial, even as humans appear
necessarily, without any conscious calculation, to become social. In that case,
Vico’s position would be that of neither Aristotle nor Hobbes.
140
 At De antiquissima 1.3, Vico contrasts scientia with conscientia. Scientia
involves a grasp of the genus or form by which a thing is made; conscientia
belongs to things whose genus or form we cannot demonstrate, and so is less
certain. In the present text, coscienza may be translated by either “conscience”
or “consciousness.”
 78 The New Science

­ hilologists, have fallen short by half, so too have the philologists, who
p
did not care to give truth to their authority with the reason of the phi-
losophers. If they had done this, they would have been more advanta-
geous to republics and would have preceded us in meditating upon this
science.

141 11. Human choice, which by its nature is most uncertain, is given cer-
tainty and made determinate by the common sense of men concerning
human necessities or advantages, which are the two sources of the natu-
ral law of the gentile peoples.141

142 12. The common sense is a judgment without reflection sensed in com-
mon by a whole order, a whole people, a whole nation, or the whole of
humankind.
143 This Axiom together with the following definition will give a new art
of criticism, concerning the authors of nations; these nations must have
had to run a course of more than a thousand years so as to bring forth
the writers with whom criticism up until now has been occupied.

144 13. Uniform ideas, coming into being among entire peoples unknown to
one another, must have some common impetus for what is true.
145 This Axiom is a great principle which establishes the common sense
of humankind as the criterion of judgment taught to nations by divine
providence so as to define what is certain concerning the natural law of
the gentile peoples; the nations give certainty to this law by understand-
ing the underlying unities in this law, upon which they all agree even with
the different variations. Hence comes a mental dictionary for giving the
origins of all the differently articulated languages; by it is conceived the
ideal eternal history, which gives the temporal histories of all the nations.
The axioms proper to this dictionary and to this history are proposed
below [§§161–162, 239–245].
146 This same Axiom overturns all the ideas that have been held up until
now concerning the natural law of the gentile peoples, which was be-
lieved to have emerged from some first nation, from which the others re-
ceived it. Of this error, the Egyptian and the Greeks offer their own bad
example, emptily boasting that they disseminated humanity throughout

141
  “The natural law of the gentile peoples” consistently translates Vico’s phrase
il diritto natural delle genti. As the reader encounters Vico’s “natural law of the
gentile peoples,” she will want to keep three things in mind: (1) It bears the clos-
est of relations to custom; “it amounts to orders instituted by means of what
is customary” (§309); (2) Though customary, it is neither “mere custom” nor
“positive law” in contrast to “natural law.” Vico means to subvert traditional
distinctions between ius naturale and ius gentium; (3) It is not the same as, and
S sometimes contrasted with, both “the natural law of the Hebrews” (§9 and §313)
N and the “natural law of the philosophers, or of the moral theologians” (§1084).
L
78
Book One 79

the world. This error certainly must have made for the coming of the
Law of the Twelve Tables to Rome from Greece.142
However, in this fashion, it would have been a civil law shared with other
peoples through a human provision and not a law which, by means of
those customs of human life, was ordered naturally by divine providence
in all nations.
This will be the first of the continuous labors to be made in these books:
to demonstrate that the natural law of the gentile peoples came into be-
ing privately for each people without one knowing anything of the other;
and that later, by the occasions of wars, embassies, alliances, and com-
merce, it was recognized as common to all of humankind.

14. The nature [natura] of things is nothing other than their coming-into- 147
being [nascimento] at certain times and in certain fashions; these times
and fashions always being of such a kind, it follows that the things will
come to be in such a way and not otherwise.143

15. The intrinsic properties of subjects must be produced by the modifi- 148
cations or fashions by which the things come into being; it is through this
that we are able to establish as true that the nature—or the coming-into-
being—of those things is of such a kind and not otherwise.

16. Folk traditions must have a public impetus for what is true, whence 149
these traditions came into being and are preserved by entire peoples over
long periods of time.144
This will be the second great labor of this science: to find this impetus 150
for the true, which, with the passing of years and the changing of lan-
guages and customs, becomes covered over by the false.

17. Common ways of speaking should be thought to offer the weightiest 151
of testimony about the ancient customs of peoples, which had currency
at the time when their languages were formed.

18. The language of an ancient nation that preserves itself as regnant 152
until it arrives at its perfection should be a great testimony about the
customs of the earliest times of the world.

142
  Vico’s claim that the Law of the Twelve Tables is purely of Roman origin,
rather than having been imported to Rome from Athens, is one instance of his
general aim to provide an alternative to “diffusion” theories (on which see the
note at §125).
143
  Vico makes a strong connection between a thing’s “nature” (natura) and its
“coming-to-be” (nascimento). It may be useful to compare Vico’s claim to a
statement of Aristotle: “He who thus considers things in their first growth and
origin, whether a city or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them”
(Politics 1.2, 1252a24–25).
144
  Axioms 16 through 22 treat philology, as is clear from §163.
 80 The New Science

153 This Axiom assures us that with regard to the natural law of the gen-
tile peoples (a law at which, without contention, there were none wiser of
all the nations in the world than the Romans), philological proofs drawn
from ways of speaking Latin are the weightiest. For the same reason,
those learned in the German language are able to do the same since Ger-
man retains the same property as the ancient Roman language.

154 19. If the Law of the Twelve Tables were the customs of the gentiles of
Latium (which started to gain currency in the age of Saturn and which,
although they changed elsewhere, were inscribed in bronze by the Ro-
mans and guarded religiously by the Roman jurists), then this law offers
a great testimony about the ancient natural law of the gentiles of Latium.
155 That this is so, we demonstrated to be actually true many years ago
in my Principles of Universal Law;145 it will be seen with even greater il-
lumination in these books.

156 20. If the poems of Homer are civil histories of the ancient Greek cus-
toms, then they will be the two great treasuries of the natural law of the
gentile peoples of Greece.
157 This Axiom is for now assumed; herein146 it will be demonstrated by
what is actual.

158 21. The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation
must make, a nation that was still crudely barbaric when the philoso-
phers arrived; because of this arrival, the nation passed immediately to
the peak of refinement and kept safe and intact their mythical history,
both divine and heroic. Whereas the Romans, who in their customs ad-
vanced at the correct pace, completely lost sight of the history of their
gods (hence, what the Egyptians speak of as the age of gods, Varro calls
the dark times for the Romans), and the Romans preserved in common-
place speech their heroic history, extending from Romulus up to the Pub-
lilian and Petelian laws, which will be found to be a mythological history
in continuity with the age of heroes in Greece.
159 That this is the nature of the human civil things is confirmed by the
French nation, for, in the midst of the barbarism of the twelfth century,
there opened the famous Parisian school, where the celebrated teacher
of the Sentences, Peter Lombard,147 offered teachings on the most subtle
scholastic theology; and there remains, like a Homeric poem, the his-
tory by Turpin, Bishop of Paris, abounding in all the myths about those
heroes of France called paladins, who filled those later romances and

145
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).
146
  In Book Three, “Discovery of the True Homer.”
147
  Peter Lombard (1096–1150), author of the Sentences, a four-volume
S compilation of theology commented upon by later masters, including Thomas
N Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham.
L
80
Book One 81

poems; and, through this premature passage from barbarism to the most
subtle science, French remains a most refined language, so refined that
of all the living languages, it seems to have restored in our times the At-
ticism of the Greeks and, moreover, is better than any other language at
the reasoning of science, just as Greek was. And both Greek and French
retain those diphthongs proper to a barbarian language, still rigid and
unable to combine consonants with vowels.148
As confirmation of all that we have said about both languages, we would
add an observation which I am able to make all the time about the young
(who are at the age when memory is vigorous, imagination is lively, and
ingenuity is on fire, faculties fruitfully exercised by the study of languages
and plane geometry without dominating, by such exercises, the acerbity
of minds connected to the body, which one can say is the barbarism of
the intellect): if the young, at this crude stage, pass on to the too-subtle
study of a metaphysical art of criticism and algebra, they become too
attenuated in their manner of thinking for the full scope of life and are
rendered incapable of great labor.149
However, by meditating further on this work, we discovered another 160
cause for this effect, one that is perhaps is more proper to it. Romulus
founded Rome in the midst of other more ancient cities in Latium and
founded it by opening the asylum, which Livy defines in general terms
as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders
of cities”];150 for while violence still persisted, he naturally ordered the
Roman city on the same basis on which the earliest cities of the world
were founded.
Hence, since Roman customs developed from these same beginnings in
times when the vernacular languages of Latium had become quite ad-
vanced, it must have come to pass that Roman civil things (the likes of
which Greek peoples articulated in heroic language) were articulated in
vernacular language. Hence, Roman history has been found to be a my-
thology in continuity with the heroic history of the Greeks.
And this must be the cause of the above effect, for the Romans were
the heroes of the world insofar as Rome subdued the cities of Latium,
then Italy, and lastly the world (heroism being forever young among
the Romans) whereas, among the other peoples of Latium from whose

148
  Vico’s claims about Greek and French here recalls a discussion in chapter 7
of his early work De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), contrasting the
subtlety of the French language in ratiocination with the power of the Italian
language to arouse images (Battistini 138–143).
149
  Similar reflections, inviting comparison to what we would now call “devel-
opmental psychology,” may be found in the earlier writings. See particularly De
ratione 3–5 (Battistini 104–125) and De antiquissima 7.4 (Taylor 112–125), as
well as the pedagogical digression found within the first part of his autobiogra-
phy, published in 1725 (Battistini 16–18).
150
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
 82 The New Science

c­ onquest came the greatness of Rome, that heroism must have started to
grow old.

161 22. It is necessary that there be, in the nature of human things, a mental
language common to all the nations which uniformly attends to the sub-
stance of the things achievable within the sociability of human life and
articulates that substance with as many different modifications as these
things are able to have throughout their many different aspects. This is
what we experience as true in proverbs—that is, with the maxims of com-
monplace wisdom—which are understood to be the same in substance
even though they have as many different aspects as there are nations,
ancient and modern.
162 This language is proper to this science, by whose light, if they attend
to it, those learned in languages will be able to form a mental dictionary
common to all the differently expressed languages, living and dead. We
offered a test of this dictionary in a particular case in the first edition of
The New Science151 where we proved that the names of the earliest pa-
terfamilias in a great number of languages, dead and living, were given
to him on account of the different properties that he had in the familial
state and the first republics, at a time when languages were formed. We
will, to the extent our spare erudition permits, make use herein of this
dictionary in all the things upon which we reason.
163 Of the propositions stated above, Axioms 1, 2, 3, and 4 offer the foun-
dations for refutations of all the opinions held up until now concern-
ing the beginnings of humanity. These refutations depend upon the lack
of verisimilitude, absurdity, contradiction, and impossibility in these
opinions.
The next propositions, from Axiom 5 to 15, offer foundations for the
true, and serve to meditate upon that world of nations in its eternal
idea through that property, noted by Aristotle, of any kind of science—
namely, that science must be concerned with what is universal and what
is eternal.152
The last propositions, from Axiom 15 to 22, offer the foundations for
the certain and do the work of seeing actualized in deeds this world of
nations upon which we have meditated in idea, the correct method of
philosophizing made certain by Francis Bacon and transferred to hu-
man civil things from the natural things upon which he labored in his
book Cogitata visa.153
164 The propositions proposed until now are general and establish this
science as a whole; those which follow are particular and establish this
science in the parts which, in its different materials, it treats.

151
 See Scienza nuova prima §389.
S 152
  See Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.6, 1003a12.
N 153
  The full title of Bacon’s text is Cogitata et visa de interpretatione naturae,
L composed from 1607 to 1609.
82
Book One 83

23. Sacred history is more ancient than all of the most ancient profane 165
history which comes down to us, for it tells, most articulately and over a
long period of more than eight hundred years, of the state of nature un-
der the Patriarchs—that is, in the familial state—upon which, it is agreed
by all the political theorists, peoples and cities arose later. Of this state,
profane history has little or nothing to tell, and much of that is confused.
This Axiom proves the truth of sacred history, contrary to the vanity 166
of the nations of which Diodorus Siculus speaks above [§125]. This is
insofar as the Hebrews have preserved so articulately their memory back
to the beginning of the world.

24. The Hebraic religion was founded by the true God upon a prohibition 167
against divination, the divination upon which arose all the gentile nations.
This Axiom is one of the principal causes for dividing the entire world 168
of ancient nations into the Hebrews and the gentiles.154

25. The Universal Flood is demonstrated not through the philological 169
proofs of Marten Schoock (for these are too slight) nor through the as-
trological proofs of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who is followed by Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola (these are too uncertain, or rather false, since they
are derived from the Alphonsine Tables,155 refuted by the Hebrews and
now by Christians, who have disproved the calculations of Eusebius and
Bede and who today follow the calculations of Philo the Jew). Instead,
the Universal Flood is demonstrated by means of physical proofs ob-
served in the myths, as will be perceived herein in later Axioms.156

26. The giants had, by nature, huge bodies (those whom travelers at the 170
foot of America in the country of the so-called Patagonians have found
to be gullish and most savage). Leaving to one side, as empty or inap-
propriate or false, the reasons for these bodies which the philosophers
adduced (collected and followed by Jean Chassagnon157 in his De gigan-
tibus), we, instead, adduce causes, partly physical and partly moral, ob-
served by Julius Caesar and by Cornelius Tacitus158 where they tell of the
gigantic stature of the ancient Germans; and we connect those causes to
the feral education of their children.

27. Greek history, from which we have everything that we do have of the 171
rest of gentile antiquity except for that of Rome, takes its beginnings
from the flood and from the giants.

154
  The distinction between the Hebrews and the gentiles runs through The New
Science. Assessing Vico’s handling of the distinction is a primary challenge for
his readers.
155
  Astronomical tables compiled under Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284).
156
  Axioms 41–42.
157
  Jean Chassagnon (1531–1598), Protestant writer and author of De giganti-
bus eorumque reliquiis, published in 1580.
158
 Caesar, De bello gallico 4.1; Tacitus, Germania 20.1.
 84 The New Science

172 These two Axioms display that all of earliest humankind was divided
into two species, first, that of the giants and, second, that of men of
correct bodily stature; the former were the gentiles, the latter the He-
brews. This distinction cannot have arisen from anything other than the
feral education of the former and the human education of the latter;
­consequently, the Hebrews had an origin different from the one all the
gentiles had.

173 28. Two great fragments from Egyptian antiquity, which were observed
above [§53], have reached us. The first of these is that the Egyptians re-
duced the whole of time prior to them to three ages: namely, the age of
gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. The second is that through-
out these three ages, there arose three spoken languages corresponding
to the aforementioned three ages: hieroglyphic—or sacred, language;
symbolic language—or language using likenesses—which is the heroic
language; and epistolary language—or the vernacular [volgare] language
of men using conventional signs for sharing the common [volgari] needs
of their life.

174 29. Homer, in five passages from his two poems which will be cited herein
[§437], mentions a language more ancient than his own, which was cer-
tainly heroic language; and he calls this “the language of the gods.”

175 30. Varro had the diligence to gather up thirty thousand names of gods159
(this is, indeed, how many the Greeks counted); these names correspond
to the many different needs of life—whether natural or moral or eco-
nomic or, eventually, civil—from those earliest times.
176 These three Axioms establish that the world of peoples everywhere
started from religions, which will be the first of the three principles of
this science.

177 31. Whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that hu-
man laws no longer have a place among them, the only means powerful
enough to reduce them is religion.160
178 This Axiom establishes that, in a state of lawlessness, divine provi-
dence offered a beginning from which the savage and violent might be
led to humanity and the nations might be ordered among them by awak-
ening in them a confused idea of divinity which, in their ignorance, they
attributed to something with which it did not fit; and so, by means of
terror at this imagined divinity, they started to put themselves back into
some order.

159
  The source of this claim (made also at Scienza prima nuova §303) appears
to be Augustine, City of God 3.12 and 7.6, though Augustine does not men-
tion “thirty thousand.” The source of the claim that the Greeks counted thirty
S thousand gods is likely Hesiod, Works and Days 253.
N 160
  Compare Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.11.
L
84
Book One 85

Such a beginning of things among his own savage and violent men is 179
something Thomas Hobbes did not know how to see, for he went look-
ing to find such beginnings, going astray into the chance of his Epicu-
rus. Hence, with an effort as magnanimous as its result was unhappy, he
believed he would augment Greek philosophy with that great portion
which it certainly was missing (as George Pasch161 reports in his De eru-
ditis huius saeculi inventis), that of considering men from the perspective
of whole society of humankind.
And while it is the case that Hobbes would not have thought of this un-
less the Christian religion had given him the impetus, what that religion
decrees for the whole of humankind is not only justice, but also charity.
And, consequently, here begins the refutation of that false statement of
Polybius,162 that had philosophers arisen in the world, there would have
been no need for religions: for if republics had not arisen in the world
(republics which could not have coming into being without religion),
there would not have been philosophers in the world.

32. Men ignorant about the natural causes that produce things, when 180
they cannot explain them, even by similar things, give those things their
own nature. So, for example, the common run163 [il volgo] say that the
magnet is in love with the iron.
This Axiom is a small part of Axiom 1: that the human mind, on 181
account of its indefinite nature, whenever it is overthrown by ignorance,
makes itself the measure of all of which it is ignorant.

33. The physics of the ignorant is a commonplace metaphysics, by which 182

they render the causes of things of which they are ignorant unto the
will of God without considering the means by which the divine will is
served.164

34. A true property of human nature is that one noticed by Tacitus,165 183
where he says mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes [“minds

161
  Georg Pasch (1661–1707), native of Danzig and teacher of ethics at Kiel.
162
  See Polybius, Histories 6.56.10–11. What Polybius actually says in this
passage is more complicated. The founders of the Roman republic, he claims,
wisely introduced religion into every aspect of life for the sake of the multitude,
which is “fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger”
and so must be restrained by “invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry.” Though
Polybius does allow that such a course would “perhaps have not been necessary
had it been possible to form a city of wise men,” he does not actually claim that
a state of philosophers would eliminate the need for religion as such.
163
  “Common run” translates il volgo. See the note at §14 on volgo and volgare.
164
  This Axiom invites comparison to Spinoza’s claim (in the Appendix of Part
1 of the Ethics) about those who “will not stop asking for the causes of causes
until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance”
(trans. Curley, A Spinoza Reader, pp. 112–113).
165
 Tacitus, Annals 1.28.2.
 86 The New Science

once struck by fear are prone to superstition”]: so once men have been
startled by some terrifying superstition, they invoke it in everything that
they imagine, see, and even do.

184 35. Wonder is the daughter of ignorance, and the greater the effect ad-
mired, the more the wonder grows in proportion.166

185 36. The more vigorous the imagination, the weaker reasoning is.167

186 37. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passions to
things without sense; and it is a property of children to take inanimate
things in their hands and, playing with them, to talk with them as if they
were living persons.
187 This philological-philosophical Axiom proves that men in the child-
hood of the world were by their nature sublime poets.

188 38. There is a golden passage in Lactantius Firmianus168 where, in rea-

soning about the origins of idolatry, he says rudes initio homines Deos
appellarunt sive ob miraculum virtutis (hoc vero putabant rudes adhuc et
simplices), sive, ut fieri solet, in admirationem praesentis potentiae, sive
ob benficia quibus errant ad humanitatem compositi [“human beings, in
their crude beginnings, called someone a god either on account of the
wondrousness at his virtue (primitive and simple human beings truly
thought virtue to be wondrous) or, as is wont to happen, out of admi-
ration for the power of the one present, or on account of the benefits
which brought them together in their humanity”].

189 39. Curiosity is a property connatural to man, the daughter of ignorance

who begets knowledge [scienza], and whenever wonder makes our minds
open, curiosity takes as its custom to ask straightaway, whenever it ob-
serves an extraordinary effect in nature (like a comet, a parhelion or a
midday star), what such a thing means or signifies.

190 40. Witches are at the one and the same time replete with terrifying su-
perstitions and exceedingly savage and brutal; as a result, if need be, so
as to solemnize their witchcraft, they will commit impious murders and
dismember the loveliest of innocent infants.
191 All the propositions starting from 28 up until 38 uncover the begin-
nings of divine poetry—that is, poetic theology—and those from 31 on
give the beginnings of idolatry, and those from 39 on give the beginnings

166
  See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2, 982b.
167
  Compare Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 2 (“De prophetis”):
“Those especially strong in imagination are less suited for purely understanding
things, whereas those who are strong in intellect and especially cultivate it, keep
S their power of imagining under greater control.”
N 168
  See Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 1.15.
L
86
Book One 87

of divination; and, finally, Axiom 40 gives the beginnings of sacrifice in

bloody religions, which started from the earliest crude and most savage
men with oaths and human victims who, as we have in Plautus,169 con-
tinued to be commonly called saturni hostiae [“victims of Saturn”]. And
there were sacrifices to Moloch among the Phoenicians, who cast into
the midst of flames infants consecrated to the false divinity. Some of
these consecrations are preserved in the Law of the Twelve Tables.
These are the things which give the correct sense to the phrase:
primos in orbe deos fecit timor170
[“fear has made the earliest gods on Earth”]

For false religions did not come into being from the imposture of some-
one else, but from the credulity of oneself; this is so with the unfortunate
oath and the sacrifice which Agamemnon made of his pious daughter,
Iphigenia, about which Lucretius impiously exclaims:
tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!171
[“such are the evils religion enjoins!”]

The oath and sacrifice revolve towards the counsel of providence, which
thus intends to domesticate the sons of Polyphemus and reduce them to
the humanity of Aristides, Socrates, Laelius, and Scipio Africanus.

41. It is postulated (and it is a discrete postulate) that for many hundreds 192
of years, the earth was saturated with the dampness of the Universal
Flood and could not emit dry exhalations—that is, the materials igniting
in the air to generate lightning.172

42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants, and every 193
gentile nation has a Jove.
This Axiom contains the physical history, preserved in myths, that 194
there was a Universal Flood over the entire earth.
This same Axiom, together with the preceding postulate, must make 195
determinate that within the course of so many years, the impious races
of the sons of Noah had arrived at a feral state; and by a feral wander-
ing, they were scattered and dispersed throughout the great forest of the
earth; and by a feral education, giants came and were found among them
at a time when heaven first flashed lightning after the flood.

169
  The phrase Saturni hostiae does not appear in modern editions of Plau-
tus. It is likely, as Battistini suggests, that Vico took it from a 1684 edition of
Plautus that included the commentary of German philologist Johann Gronow
(1611–1678).
170
 Statius, Thebaid 3.661; Voss, Etymologicon, p. 209.
171
 Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.101.
172
  See Aristotle, Meteorology 2.9, 369b and Seneca, Natural Questions 2 and De
Ventis 12.2.
 88 The New Science

196 43. Every gentile nation has its own Hercules, who was the son of Jove.
And Varro, most learned in antiquities, in counting them arrives at forty.
197 This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the heroism of the earliest
peoples, a heroism born of the false opinion that the heroes come from
a divine origin.
198 This same Axiom together with the preceding one (the first Axiom
gives so many versions of Jove, the second so many versions of Hercu-
les among the gentile nations) in addition demonstrates that they could
not be founders without religion nor become great without virtue. Grant
that when they were starting out, these nations were wild and closed off
from one another and, accordingly, they knew nothing of one another.
Therefore, with a view to the Axiom173 that “uniform ideas, coming into
being among peoples unknown to one another, must have a common im-
petus for what is true,” these Axioms give us another great principle: that
the first myths must have contained truths of civil life and, accordingly,
must have been histories of these earliest peoples.

199 44. The first wise men of the Greek world were the theological poets,
who undoubtedly flourished prior to the heroic poets, just as Jove was
the father of Hercules.
200 This Axiom, together with the two preceding ones, establishes that
the gentile nations, given that they all had their own versions of Jove,
their own versions of Hercules, were all poetic in their beginnings; and it
establishes that among them, first a divine poetry came to be and, later,
a heroic poetry.

201 45. Men naturally tend to preserve memories of the laws and of the or-
ders which hold them within their own society.

202 46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings.

203 All the axioms from Axiom 42 on give the principle pertaining to our
historical mythology.

204 47. The human mind naturally tends to take delight in uniformity.174
205 This Axiom, when proposed for myths, is confirmed by the custom
of the common run: in devising myths suited to men who are famous
for something or other and who are situated in such and such circum-
stances, they devise these myths so as to fit the condition of those human
beings.175 These myths are ideal truths conforming to the merit of those
for whom the common run devises such myths, and these ideal truths are

173
  Axiom 13.
174
  Compare Bacon, New Organon 1.45.
S 175
  See Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451a and Bacon, Cogitata et visa 13.
N
L
88
Book One 89

false to what is actually the case only to the extent that they do not give
those men as much as they fully merit. As a result, if one reflects well
on this, poetic truth is metaphysical truth and, in comparison with this,
physical truth that does not conform with it should be considered false.
From this comes the following important consideration on poetic rea-
soning: the true captain of war is, for example, the Godfrey whom Tor-
quato Tasso devises, and all the captains who do not in every respect
conform with Godfrey are not true captains of war.

48. It is the nature of children that it is by the ideas and names of men, 206
women, and things which they have known first that they later appre-
hend and name all the men, women, and things which have some similar-
ity or relationship to the first ones.

49. There is a golden passage (the one drawn upon above [§68] from Iam- 207
blichus in his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum) which says that the Egyptians
declared all discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life to
come from Hermes Trismegistus.
This statement, assisted by the preceding Axiom, will return, back to 208
the divine philosopher, Iamblichus, that whole sense of sublime natural
theology which he gave to the mysteries of the Egyptians.
And these three Axioms give the principles pertaining to poetic char- 209
acters, which constitute the essence of myths. The first demonstrates the
natural inclination of the common run to devise them, and to devise
them with decorum. The second demonstrates that the earliest men—as
the children of humankind who were not capable of forming intelligible
genera of things—had by natural necessity to devise poetic characters—
which are imaginative genera, or universals—to which they could reduce
the particular species resembling each genus; on account of this resem-
blance, the ancient myths could not devise anything except with deco-
rum. Exactly in this way did the Egyptians reduce all their discoveries
advantageous or necessary for human life—that is, the particular effects
of civil wisdom—to the genus of the “civil wise man” which they imag-
ined as Hermes Trismegistus; for they did not know how to abstract the
intelligible genus, “civil wise man,” much less how to abstract the form,
“civil wisdom,” in which these Egyptians were wise.
This is how much the Egyptians at that time, who had so enriched the
world by their discovering what is necessary or advantageous for human-
kind, were philosophers, and how much they understood of universals—
that is, of intelligible genera!
This last Axiom, in following the preceding ones, is the principle per- 210
taining to true poetic allegories, which, for myths, gives a univocal, not
analogical, significance to the different particulars comprehended under
their poetic genera. Accordingly, these allegories are called diversiloquia—
 90 The New Science

namely, speech which comprehends, in a general concept, different species

of men or deeds or things.

211 50. In children, memory is most vivacious; consequently, their imagi-

nation is exceedingly lively, since the imagination is nothing other than
memory extended or composed.
212 This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the vividness of the poetic
images, which the earliest world in its childhood must have formed.

213 51. For every faculty that men do not have by nature, they can succeed
by the persistent study of an art. However, in poetry, success by means
of art is completely denied to someone who does not already have the
faculty by nature.
214 This Axiom demonstrates that, since poetry founds the gentile hu-
manity from which, and from nowhere else, come all the arts, the earliest
poets were poets by nature.

215 52. Children avail themselves of imitation quite capably, for we ob-
serve that they mostly play at mimicking whatever they are capable of
apprehending.
216 This Axiom demonstrates that the world in its childhood was one of
poetic nations since poetry is nothing other than imitation.
217 This Axiom gives the principle for the following: that all the arts—
concerning the necessary, the advantageous, the convenient, and even,
in good part, the humanly pleasant—were discovered in the poetic cen-
turies prior to the coming of the philosophers. For the arts are nothing
other than imitations of nature and, in a certain way, real poems.

218 53. At first, men sense without noticing; then, they notice with a troubled
and agitated spirit; finally, they reflect with a clear mind.
219 This Axiom is the principle pertaining to poetic sentiments, which
are formed by passionate and affective sensation; these are different
from philosophic sentiments, which are formed by the rational reflec-
tion. Hence, the more the latter rise to the level of universals, the more
they apprehend the true; the more the former appropriate particulars,
the more certain they are.

220 54. Men, confronted by things which are doubtful or obscure, but perti-
nent to them, naturally interpret them in keeping with their own natures
and, consequently, in keeping with the resultant passions and customs.
221 This Axiom is the great canon for our mythology: with it, the myths
of the earliest wild and crude human beings are found completely strict,
a quality well suited to the founding of nations emerging out of a savage
S
bestial liberty; afterwards, with the passage of many years and changes
N
L
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Book One 91

to customs, these myths were distorted from their proper meaning or

form,176 were altered or were darkened during times that were dissolute
and corrupt, even prior to Homer. For although religion was, in those
times, still important to men in Greece, they were afraid of having gods
as opposed to their prayers as they were to their customs, and so they
attached their customs to the gods and gave a sense to those myths that
was incongruous, befouled, and most obscene.

55. There is a golden passage in Eusebius177—particular to the wisdom 222

of the Egyptians, but rising to a level of generality applicable to the wis-
dom of all the other gentiles—where he says primam Aegyptiorum theo-
logiam mere historiam fuisse fabulis interpolatum; quarum quum postea
puderet posteros, sensim coeperunt mysticos iis significatus affingere [“the
first theology of the Egyptians was simply a history dressed up with
myths, for which later generations, subsequently becoming ashamed of
them, gradually started to devise a mystical significance”]; this is what
was done by Manetho—that is, Manethon—the high priest of Egypt,
who translated all of Egyptian history into a sublime natural theology,
as was said above [§46].
These two Axioms are the two great proofs pertaining to our his- 223
torical mythology; while they are the two great whirlwinds for refuting
opinions about the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,178 they are, at
the same time, the two great foundations for the truth of the Christian
religion, which in its sacred history tells us nothing about which to be
ashamed.

56. The first authors among the peoples in the Near East, in Egypt, in 224
Greece, and in Latium and, in the return to barbarism, the first writers in
the new languages of Europe are found to have been poets.

57. Those who are mute explain themselves through gestures and objects 225
which have a natural correspondence to the ideas they wish to signify.
This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the hieroglyphs, with which 226
all the nations in their earliest barbarism are found to have spoken.
This same Axiom is the principle pertaining to the natural speech, 227
which Plato in his Cratylus,179 and after him Iamblichus180 in his De mys-
teriis Aegyptiorum, conjectured was spoken at one time in the world;
and with them, the Stoics and Origen181 in his Contra Celsum are in

176
 Translating impropriate as “distorted from their proper meaning or form,” as
suggested by Elio Gianturco’s 1950 review of Bergin and Fisch’s translation.
177
  See Eusebius, Preparatio evangelica 1.2.
178
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128.
179
  See Plato, Cratylus 423c–e.
180
 Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians 7.4.
181
 Origen, Contra Celso 1.24 (PG 11:702–706), 5.4 (PG 11:1186).
 92 The New Science

a­ greement. And because they are speaking like diviners, they were op-
posed by Aristotle in his Periermenia182 and by Galen183 in his De decretis
Hippocratis et Platonis, and this dispute is discussed by Publius Nigidius
in Aulus Gellius.184
This natural speech must have been succeeded by poetic locutions: im-
ages, similes, metaphors, and natural properties.

228 58. Those who are mute issue unformed sounds while singing. And those
who stutter, also while singing, loosen their tongues enough to enunciate.

229 59. Men vent great passions by expressing them in song such as we expe-
rience in the depths of sorrow and the peaks of joy.
230 These two Axioms allow for the supposition that the authors of the
gentile nations—since they had come to the feral state of mute beasts
and, as a consequence of that same bewilderment, only returned to their
senses under the spur of the most violent passions—must have formed
their earliest languages in singing.

231 60. Languages must have started with monosyllabic words since, in the
present abundance of articulate tongues into which they today are born,
children still start with monosyllabic words, even though the tissues of
the organ necessary for articulating speech is quite supple in children.

232 61. Heroic verse is the most ancient of all, and spondaic verse is the slow-
est; and it will be found herein [§449] that when heroic verse came into
being, it was spondaic.

233 62. Iambic verse is the one most similar to prose, and the iamb is the
“swift foot,” as it comes to be defined by Horace.185
234 These two last Axioms allow one to conjecture that ideas and lan-
guages went along, quickening at the same pace.
235 All these Axioms—starting from Axiom 47, together with those pro-
posed as principles for all the others186—complete the account of poetic
reason in all its parts: myth; custom and the decorum belonging to it;
sentiments; expression and the vividness belonging to it; allegory; song;
and, lastly, verse. And the last seven Axioms, in addition, persuade us
that speech was first in verse and that later speech was in prose for all
the nations.

182
 Aristotle, On Interpretation 2, 16a. Vico’s orthography is a departure from
the more usual Peri Hermeneias.
183
 Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis libri noveni 1.
184
  Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.4. Publius Nigidius (98–45 BCE), author of
the Commentarii grammatici, was a friend of Cicero, as well as a Pythagorean.
S 185
 Horace, Ars poetica 252.
N 186
  Axioms 1–22.
L
92
Book One 93

63. The human mind is naturally inclined to see itself with the senses, 236
from without and embodied; only with great difficulty, and by means of
reflection, does it come to understand itself in itself.
This Axiom gives the universal principle pertaining to etymology in 237
all languages: names are taken from physical objects and the properties
of physical objects in order to signify things pertaining to the mind and
the spirit.

64. The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of 238
things.187

65. The order of human things proceeds so that, first, there are forests; 239
later, lodges; thereafter, villages; then, cities; and finally, academies.
This Axiom is a great principle pertaining to etymology: it is in ac- 240
cordance with this series of human things that the history of words in
native languages must be told. So, we observe in the Latin language that
almost the entire corpus of its terms has origins pertaining to forest life
or rustic life. So, for example, the word lex [“law”] must at first have been
a gathering together of acorns, from which we believe is derived the word
ilex—that is to say illex, meaning “an oak tree” in Latin—for just as it
is certain that an aquilex is “someone gathering together water,” the oak
tree produces the acorns for which the swine come together. Later, lex
was a gathering together of vegetables, from which these vegetables were
called legumina. Then, at a time when the common alphabetic letters with
which one would write down laws had not yet been found, the necessity
of civil nature dictates that lex must have been a gathering together of
citizens—that is, the public assembly in which the presence of people was
the law which solemnized the testamenti [“the last testaments”] which
were made calatis comitiis [“when the assembly was convened”]. Finally,
the gathering together of letters and making with each word, as it were,
a sheaf of letters was called legere [“reading”].188

66. Men, at first, sense what is necessary; later, they tarry with what is ad- 241
vantageous; then, they notice what is convenient; later still, they d ­ elight

187
  Compare Spinoza, Ethics 2.7: “The order and connection of ideas is the
same as the order and connection of things.” For an earlier (and perhaps
clearer) statement of the claim, one may consider the following passage from
the Diritto Universale: “Philology is the study of speech and concerns itself with
whatever deals with words while recounting their history and narrating their
origin and progress. It classifies them according to the various stages of the lan-
guage, so as to grasp their proper and figurative meanings and their usage. But
since the ideas of things are depicted in words, philology must first look to grasp
the history of things. Thus, philologists justly write commentaries on republics,
the customs of nations and peoples, the laws, institutions, branches of learning,
and artifacts” (De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1 [Cristofolini 387, BV 46]).
188
  See Vico’s extension of this etymology to intelligere at §363.
 94 The New Science

in what is pleasurable; subsequently, they become dissolute in what is

luxurious, and finally they go mad wasting their substance.

242 67. The nature of peoples, at first, is crude; later, strict; subsequently,
benign; then, refined; finally, dissolute.

243 68. Within humankind, the first to arise are the huge and gullish (those
like Polyphemus); later arise the magnanimous and haughty (those like
Achilles); thereafter arise either the valorous and just (those like Aris-
tides and Scipio Africanus) or, closer to ourselves, those who make an
appearance with a great show of virtue accompanied by great vices and
who make a reputation among the common run for true glory (those like
Alexander and Caesar); later still arise the morose, the reflective (those
like Tiberius); and finally arise the mad, the dissolute, the impudent
(those like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian).
244 This Axiom demonstrates that those first to arise were needed for
man to obey man in the familial state and for disposing him to obey the
laws in the state to come, the civil state; the second ones, who naturally
did not cede to their equals, were needed for establishing, upon those
families, republics in their aristocratic form; the third ones were needed
for opening the path to popular liberty; the fourth ones were needed for
introducing monarchy; the fifth were needed for establishing it; the sixth
ones were needed for overturning it.
245 This Axiom, with the preceding ones,189 gives the first part of the prin-
ciples pertaining to the ideal eternal history upon which all nations run
their temporal course in their springing forth, progress, maturity, deca-
dence, and end.

246 69. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.
247 This Axiom demonstrates that, by the nature of human civil things,
the public school of princes is the morality of peoples.

248 70. Let us concede something which is not repugnant to nature and
which herein later [§§520–521, 553] will be found to be true in actuality:
in the profane state of a lawless world, only a very few at first—those
who were more vigorous—retreated to form the families by which and
for which the fields were brought under cultivation. And many others, in
a much later age, afterwards retreated, taking refuge in the lands culti-
vated by these Fathers.

249 71. Native custom (and, above all, the custom of natural liberty) does
not change all at once, but in stages and over a long period of time.

250 72. If, as has been posited, all nations started from the worship of some
S divinity, then the Fathers in the familial state must have been wise men in
N
L 189
  Axioms 25–27.
94
Book One 95

the art of divining from auspices; and priests who made sacrifices in or-
der to procure the auspices—that is, to understand them well; and kings
who brought the divine laws to their families.

3. There is a folk tradition that the first ones to govern the world were 251
kings.

74. There is another folk tradition that those worthiest by nature were 252
created as the first kings.

75. There is still another folk tradition that the first kings were wise men. 253
Hence, Plato, in an empty prayer, had a desire for those most ancient
times when philosophers ruled or when kings philosophized.190
All these Axioms demonstrate that united in the persons of the first 254
Fathers were wisdom, priesthood, and ruling, and that ruling and priest-
hood were dependent on wisdom, although not the recondite wisdom of
philosophers but the commonplace wisdom of lawgivers.191 And, there-
fore, later the priests in all nations were crowned.

76. There is a folk tradition that the first form of government in the 255
world was monarchy.

77. However, Axiom 67, along with the others that follow, particularly 256
the corollary to Axiom 64, allows that the Fathers in the familial state
must have exercised a monarchical power subject only to God, not only
over the persons but also the possessions of their children, and even more
so over the familial servants who had sought refuge in their lands; and
so, they were the first monarchs of the world, which sacred history al-
lows us to understand were called patriarchs—that is to say, fathers who
were princes. This monarchical law was preserved for them by the Law
of the Twelve Tables for the entire time of the Roman republic. They say:
PATRIFAMILIAS IUS VITAE ET NECIS IN LIBEROS ESTOS [“the
paterfamilias had the right of life and death over his children”]. As a
consequence of this, quicquid filius acquirit, patri acquirit [“whatever the
son acquires, he acquires for his father”].

78. The families could not have been so-called, with the proper mean- 257
ing of their origin, except as derived from those familial servants of the
Fathers in what was then the state of nature.

  See Plato, Republic 5, 473c–d.

190

  The distinction between “recondite wisdom” (sapienza riposta) and “com-

191

monplace wisdom” (sapienza volgare), along with the challenge of attaining

a truthful reconciliation of the two, is a major theme of The New Science.
Particularly relevant to the theme are §§14, 37, 360, 779, as well the whole of
Book Three—an extended attempt to deny that the Homeric poems contain
recondite wisdom, contrary to the assumptions of many readers (then and
now).
 96 The New Science

258 79. The earliest socii—associates who, in the proper sense of the word,
are companions whose goal was the sharing of advantage among
­themselves—cannot be imagined nor understood prior to those who, so
as to have a safe life, sought refuge from the earliest Fathers and who,
having received life by taking refuge, were obliged to sustain it by culti-
vating the fields of those Fathers.
259 These are found to be the true associates of the heroes, those who,
later, were the plebeians of heroic cities and, eventually, were the prov-
inces of sovereign [principi] peoples.

260 80. Men come naturally to a system of benefits whenever they discern
that through it, they might either maintain or gain a good and great part
of their advantage—that is, of the benefits which they can hope for in
civil life.

261 81. It is a property of men of fortitude not to relinquish through idleness

what they have gained by virtue. Rather, they yield because of either ne-
cessity or advantage, but little by little, and as little as possible.
262 From these two Axioms are perceived the perennial springs of feal-
ties, which are called, with Roman elegance, beneficia [“benefices”].

263 82. Scattered throughout all the ancient nations are found clienti [“cli-
ents”] and clientele [“clientships”], which we understand with terms no
more congruent than “vassals” and “fealties”; nor do those who are eru-
dite about fealties find more congruent terms for explaining these than
the Roman ones, clienti and clientelae.
264 These last three Axioms along with the preceding twelve starting
from Axiom 70192 uncover the principles pertaining to republics coming
into being out of some great necessity, determined herein [§§582–598] to
be the necessity that the familial servants made for each paterfamilias;
and on account of this, those same republics naturally came to take
their aristocratic form. Insofar as the Fathers united in order so as to
resist those familial servants revolting against them, and insofar as they
remained united so as to contain those servants and to reduce them to
obedience, they conceded to the familial servants a kind of rustic fealty
and themselves found the sovereign power they had within the family
(this cannot be understood except in terms of a system of noble feal-
ties) subject to the sovereign power they had in civil life from their very
ruling orders; the heads of these orders were called kings, and the most
spirited must have been made heads during the revolts of the familial
servants.
Such an origin for cities, even if it were offered only as a hypothesis—it
is herein [§§553–569] discovered to be actual—must, of necessity, be ac-

S
N 192
  In fact, from Axiom 68.
L
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Book One 97

cepted as true on account of its naturalness and simplicity, and on ac-

count of the infinite number of effects in civil life which are supported
by it as their proper cause. For in no other fashion can one understand,
in the world, how from powers in families was formed civil power; or
how from private patrimonies was formed the public patrimony; or how
is it is found that the materials for republics are arranged into orders—
first, the order of the few, who command, second, the order of the many
plebeians, who obey—the two parts which, together, comprise the sub-
ject of politics. The generation of the civil state from families contain-
ing only children will be demonstrated herein [§§553–569] to have been
impossible.

83. That law concerning the fields establishes the first agrarian law of the 265
world, and it is not possible to imagine or understand another law which
could have been more restricted by nature.
This agrarian law distinguishes the three domains which can exist in 266
the nature of civil life for three kinds of persons: the bonitary domain
for the plebeians; the quiritary domain—preserved by arms and conse-
quently noble—for the Fathers; and eminent domain for the order which
is lord—that is, sovereign power in aristocratic republics.

84. There is a golden passage in Aristotle193 in his Politics where he 267

counts as one of the different republics the heroic regime, the regimen in
which kings administered the laws at home, administered wars abroad,
and were the heads of religion.
This Axiom squares completely with two heroic regimes of Theseus 268
and of Romulus (as one can observe, of the former, in Plutarch’s194 bi-
ography of Theseus and, of the latter, in Roman history) if one sup-
plements Greek history with the point in Roman history when Tullus
Hostilius administers the law in his accusation against Horatius.195 And
the Roman kings were also kings of the sacred things, the so-called re-
ges sacrorum [“kings of sacred things”]; hence, once the kings were ex-
pelled from Rome, for the sake of certainty in the divine ceremonies,
they created someone also called rex sacrorum, who was the head of the
­fetiales—that is, “the heralds.”

85. There is a golden passage in Aristotle in the same book196 which re- 269
ports that ancient republics did not have laws for punishing offences or
for correcting private damages. And he says such were the customs of
barbarian peoples, for peoples have their start in barbarism because they
have not yet been domesticated by laws.

193
 Aristotle, Politics 3.14, 1285a.
194
  See Plutarch, Life of Theseus 24.
195
  Horatius was accused of treason by Tullus, the third king of Rome, but
acquitted by the people. For the episode, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5.
196
 Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.
 98 The New Science

270 This Axiom demonstrates the necessity of duels and reprisals in bar-
barian times, for in such times judicial laws are lacking.

271 86. Also golden is that passage in the same book of Aristotle where he
says that in ancient republics the nobles swore to be the eternal enemies
of the plebs.197
272 This Axiom makes explicit the cause of the proud, avaricious, and
cruel customs of the nobles towards the plebeians, about which we
plainly read in ancient Roman history: during that long period (up until
now dreamed of as a time of popular liberty) the nobles imposed taxes
on the plebeians who served the nobles at their own expense in wars. The
nobles taxed them into a sea of usury, and when the plebeians, in this
condition of abject drudgery, were no longer able to satisfy them, the
nobles held them shut up for their entire lives in private prisons so as to
pay back the nobles with labor and toil. And in those prisons the nobles
beat them in tyrannical manner with rods on their bare shoulders like
the lowliest of slaves.

273 87. Aristocratic republics are extremely temperate about going to war so
as not to make warriors of the multitude of plebeians.
274 This Axiom is the principle pertaining to justice in Roman arms up
until the time of the Carthaginian Wars.

275 88. Aristocratic republics keep wealth within the order of the nobles, for
wealth contributes to the power of this order.
276 This Axiom is the principle pertaining to Roman clemency in victory:
in victory, they took only the arms of the defeated and, subject to a toler-
able tribute, left the defeated in their bonitary domain over everything.
This is the cause of the Fathers always resisting the agrarian laws of the
Gracchi, for they did not wish to enrich the plebs.

277 89. Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.

278 90. Peoples will necessarily conduct themselves heroically in war if they
train themselves by sparring over honors among themselves in peace,
some through keeping those honors for themselves and others through
making themselves worthy of their pursuit.
279 This Axiom is one principle pertaining to the heroism of the Romans
from the expulsion of tyrants up until the Carthaginian Wars; during
this time, the nobles naturally consecrated themselves to the safety of
their country, by which they held all the honors of civil life safely within
their order, and the plebeians engaged in the most signal enterprises so
as to prove themselves worthy of the honors of the nobles.

S
N 197
 Aristotle, Politics 5.9, 1310a9.
L
98
Book One 99

91. Sparring for equality with respect to justice, which trains the orders 280
of the city, is the most powerful means for aggrandizing the republics.
This Axiom is the other principle pertaining to the heroism of the Ro- 281
mans, a heroism assisted by three public virtues: the magnanimity of the
plebs in wanting to have a share in the civil rights for themselves by means
of the laws of the Fathers; the strength of the Fathers in guarding those
laws within their own order; and the wisdom of the jurists in interpreting
those laws and directing them, thread by thread, toward the advantageous
in new cases which asked for legal reasoning. These are the three causes
proper to the distinction which Roman jurisprudence has had in the world.
All those Axioms starting from Axiom 84 put forward a Roman his- 282
tory in its correct aspect. The following three Axioms, for their part, also
work towards this end.

92. The weak want laws; the powerful withhold them; the ambitious, so 283
as to create a following, promote them; princes, so as to make the power-
ful equal to the weak, protect them.
This Axiom, in its first and second parts, is the spark for the heroic 284
contests of aristocratic republics, in which the nobles wish for all the laws
to be arcana within their order so that the laws depend on their decision
and are administered with a royal hand. These are the three causes Pom-
ponius the jurist draws out, when he tells us that the Roman plebs desired
the Law of the Twelve Tables at a time when they were weighed down, in
their phrase, by ius latens, incertum et manus regia [“a hidden, arbitrary
law and a royal hand”];198 and this is the cause of the reluctance of the
Fathers in giving them this law, when they say mores patrios servandos,
leges ferri non oportere [“the customs of the Fathers must be preserved,
the law should not be enacted”], as Dionysius of Halicarnassus199 relates
it (he is better informed than Titus Livy about Roman things because
he was instructed by the publications of Marcus Terentius Varro, who
was acclaimed “the most learned of the Romans”; and someone, in this
circumstance, diametrically opposed to Livy, who tells us concerning the
nobles that, in his words, desideria plebis non aspernari200 [“there was a
desire not to reject the plebs”]). Hence, on account of these, and other
bigger, contradictions observed in my Principles of Universal Law,201
since there is such great opposition on this matter among authors who
first wrote about it five hundred years later, it will be better not to be-
lieve either of the two. Even more so since, during the same time pe-
riod, it was not believed by Varro (in his great work, Rerum divinarum et
humanarum,202 Varro offered origins native to Latium for all the Roman

198
  Digest 1.2.2.3 and 6.
199
  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 10.3.
200
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.31.
201
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).
202
  Drawn from Augustine, City of God 6.3–4.
 100 The New Science

things, divine and human) nor was it believed by Cicero (in his On the
Orator,203 Cicero makes Marcus Crassus204 say in the presence of Quintus
Mucius Scaevola,205 prince of the jurists of his age, that the wisdom of
the decemvirs greatly surpassed that of Draco and Solon, who gave laws
to the Athenians, and that of Lycurgus, who gave laws to the Spartans:
this is tantamount to saying that the Law of the Twelve Tables did not
come from either Sparta or Athens).
And we believe we are hitting what is truth in nothing but the fact that
Cicero made Mucius be among those present at the conversation for only
the first day. In Cicero’s time, this myth about the Law of the Twelve Ta-
bles was so widely received among men of letters and born of the vanity
of the learned, who designate wisest those origins whose wisdom is what
they profess (Cicero intends to show this when he makes Crassus say the
words, fremant omnes, dicam quod sentio206 [“although they grumble, I
will say what I feel”]). And if Crassus had said anything false concern-
ing the history of Roman law (there could be no objection to an orator
speaking about the history of Roman law, something which was part of
the wisdom of the jurists since, at that time, orators and jurists were two
different professions), Mucius would have certainly reproached him, just
as, according to Pomponius,207 he had reproached Servius Sulpicius, who
was among those present at the conversation, saying turpe esse patricio
viro ius in quo versaretur ignorare [“it was a disgrace for a patrician to be
ignorant about the law in which he was trained”].
285 But more than Cicero and Varro, Polybius gives us an unassailable argu-
ment for not believing either Dionynius or Livy, who indisputably knew
more about politics than those two and was some two hundred years
closer to the decemvirs than those two.
In Book Six, Chapter 4, and many places following in the edition of Jakob
Gronov,208 he puts aside his steady advance to contemplate the constitu-
tions of the most famous free republics of his times. And he observes that
the Roman constitution was different from that of Athens and Sparta,
and more different from the constitution of Athens than from that of
Sparta, even though those who compare Attic with Roman law would
suggest that the laws for instituting the orders of popular liberty already
previously founded by Brutus came from Athens rather than Sparta. And
yet Polybius, by contrast, observes that there are similarities between the
Roman and Carthaginian constitutions, even though no one has ever

203
 Cicero, De oratore 1.44.197.
204
  In fact, Lucius Licinius Crassus (140–91 BCE), teacher of Cicero, and also
known as “Crassus Orator.”
205
  Quintus Mucius Scaevola Augur (c. 159–88 BCE), teacher of Cicero and
Atticus.
206
  See Cicero, De oratore 1.44.195.
S 207
  Digest 1.2.2.43.
N 208
  Jakob Gronov (1645–1716), Dutch philologist.
L
100
Book One 101

dreamed that the Carthaginian constitution had free orders because of

Greek laws. This is so far from the truth that in Carthage there was a law
expressly forbidding Carthaginians from knowing Greek letters.
So how is it that one of the wisest writers about republics does not engage
in such natural and obvious reflection, and how does he not investigate the
explanation for this difference? How are the Roman and Athenian republics
different if their orders were instituted by the same laws, and how were the
Roman and Carthaginian republics similar if their orders were instituted
by different laws? Hence, so as to absolve him of such gross negligence, the
one thing necessary to say is that, in the age of Polybius, this myth—that
Greek laws had come from Athens for the purpose of instituting orders for
the governance of free peoples—had not yet come to be in Rome.
This same Axiom, by its third part, opens the way for the ambitious 286
in popular republics to bring in monarchy by echoing that natural desire
of the plebs who, not understanding universals, want a law for every
particular circumstance.
Hence, when Sulla, head of the nobles, defeated Marius, head of the
plebs, and reinstituted orders in the popular constitution for aristocratic
governance, his remedy for the multitude of laws was the quaestiones
perpetuae [“permanent tribunals”].209
This same Axiom, in its fourth and last part, is the secret reason that 287
Roman princes, starting with Augustus, made countless laws in private
cases. And it is the secret reason the sovereigns and powers of Europe
everywhere, in kingdoms and in free republics, accepted the corpus of
Roman civil law and the corpus of canon law.

93. Given that the door to honors in popular republics is so completely 288
opened by the laws to an avaricious multitude which gives decrees, noth-
ing remains in peacetime except to contend for power, no longer with
laws but with arms. And they contend for the power to decree laws so as
to enrich themselves (in Rome, these were the agrarian laws of the Grac-
chi). Hence there come to pass, at the same time, civil wars at home and
unjust wars abroad.
This Axiom confirms, by way of contrast, the heroism of the Romans 289
during the whole period prior to the Gracchi.

94. Natural liberty is fiercer inasmuch as its goods are more properly 290
connected to one’s own body, and civil servitude binds with goods of
fortune that are not necessary for life.
This Axiom, in its first part, is another principle pertaining to the 291
natural heroism of the earliest peoples; in its second part, it is the natural
principle pertaining to monarchies.

209
  See Cicero, Brutus 27.106.
 102 The New Science

292 95. Men, at first, love to escape from subjection and desire equality: be-
hold the plebs in the aristocratic republics which eventually change to
popular republics. Later, they are forced to surpass their equals: behold
the plebs in the popular republics corrupted into republics of the pow-
erful. Finally, they wish to put themselves above the laws: behold an-
archy—that is, popular republics unrestrained—a tyranny than which
there is no worse because there are as many tyrants as there are auda-
cious and dissolute citizens. And it is at this point that the plebs, having
been made aware that they own the evils they suffer, so as to find a rem-
edy, move towards safety under a monarchy: this is the natural royal law
by which Tacitus210 legitimates the Roman monarchy under Augustus,
saying qui cuncta bellis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium AC-
CEPIT [“who with the title of prince subjected an entire world worn out
by civil wars to his power”].

293 96. Because of the native lawless liberty of the nobles, when the first
cities were composed from families, those nobles were reluctant about
both restraints and burdens: behold the aristocratic republics in which
the nobles are the masters. Later, because the plebs have grown greatly
in number and have had been made into warriors, they are induced to
suffer both laws and burdens equal to those of their plebs: behold the
nobles of popular republics. Finally, so as to keep safe their life of conve-
nience, they naturally incline towards subjection under one man: behold
the nobles under the monarchies.
294 These two Axioms, along with the other previous ones starting from
Axiom 66, are the principles pertaining to the ideal eternal history of
which we spoken above [§245].

295 97. One can concede that it does not offend reason to postulate that, af-
ter the flood, the earliest men first resided in the mountains; at some later
time, they came down to the plains; and, after a long time, they eventu-
ally felt secure enough to conduct themselves to the shores of the sea.

296 98. According to Strabo,211 there is a golden passage in Plato212 where

he says that after the particular floods of Ogyges and Deucalion, men
resided in caves in the mountains, and he identifies them as the sons of
Polyphemus213 whom elsewhere he recognizes as the earliest paterfamil-
ias in the world; later, they resided at the foot of mountains, and they are
suggested by the figure of Dardanus, who built Pergamum, which later
became the fortress of Troy; eventually, they resided on the plains and
are discerned in the figure of Ilus, by whom Troy was taken to the plains
near the sea and for whom it was called Ilium.214

210
 Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.
211
 Strabo, Geography 13.1.25.
S 212
  See Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e.
N 213
  See Homer, Odyssey 9.112–114.
L 214
  See Homer, Iliad 4.508; 5.460; 6.512; 24.700.
102
Book One 103

99. There is also an ancient tradition that Tyre was, at first, founded 297
inland and, later, was conveyed to the shore of the Phoenician sea. Simi-
larly, it is certain history that it was transported from the shore to an
island close to it, and that, subsequently, Alexander the Great reattached
it to the mainland.
The preceding postulate and the two Axioms which come after215 un- 298
cover the fact that first inland nations were founded and later maritime
nations.
And the postulate and Axioms allow for a great argument for dem-
onstrating the antiquity of the Hebrew people, namely, that this people
was founded by Noah in Mesopotamia, the most inland country of the
early habitable world and so was the most ancient of all the nations.
This is confirmed by the fact that the earliest monarchy was founded in
Mesopotamia, the one which the Assyrians founded upon the Chaldean
gentiles; from the Chaldeans came the first wise men of the world, whose
prince was Zoroaster.

100. Men cannot be induced to abandon their own lands, which are 299
naturally dear to their natives, except by what is ultimately necessary
for life; nor can they be induced to leave them for a time except by greed
to enrich themselves through trade or by covetousness to preserve what
they have acquired.
This Axiom is the principle pertaining to the migration of peoples 300
made by the heroic maritime colonies; made by the inundations of bar-
barians about which only Wolfgang Latius216 has written; made by the
last known Roman colonies; and made by the European colonies in the
Indies.
This same Axiom demonstrates for us that the lost races of the three 301
sons of Noah must have come to a bestial wandering, for they fled from
wild beasts which the ancient forest must have had in abundance; and
they pursued shy and reluctant women who, in that wild state, must have
been especially reluctant and shy; and, later, they went in search of pas-
ture and water. By all this, they are discovered dispersed over the entire
earth at the time when the heavens first flashed lightning after the flood,
whence each gentile nation started from its own Jove. For if they had re-
mained in their humanity, like the people of God remained, they would,
like the people of God, have stayed in Asia, which, on account of both
the vastness of that part of the world and the scarcity of men, they had
no necessary reason to abandon, since it is not a natural custom to aban-
don one’s native country on a whim.

101. The Phoenicians were the first sailors of the ancient world. 302

215
  Axioms 97 and 98.
216
  Wolfgang Latius (1514–1565), physician and historiographer of Ferdinand
I, and author of De aliquot gentium migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, lin-
guarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis (first edition 1557).
 104 The New Science

303 102. The nations in their barbarism were impenetrable, and they must
have been broken into from without by war, or spontaneously opened
themselves up from within to foreigners because of the advantages of
commerce (so did Psammeticus open up Egypt to the Ionian and Carian
Greeks, who must have been second only to the Phoenicians in renown
for maritime business, whence from their great riches was founded in
Ionia the temple to the Samian Juno and in Caria was erected the mau-
soleum of Artemis, two of the seven wonders of the world; the glory
resulting from such business rested, in later times, with those in Rhodes,
in the mouth of whose port was raised the great Colossus of the Sun,
counted among the aforesaid wonders of the world).
So too the Chinese, with a view to the advantages of commerce, have
recently opened up China to us Europeans.
304 These three Axioms give the principle pertaining to a second etymo-
logical method, that for words whose origin is certainly foreign, a method
different from the one of which we spoke above [§162] for native words.
In addition, one can, with these Axioms, give the history of nations
subsequent to other nations bringing colonies into foreign lands. For
example, Naples was originally called Sirena, a Syrian word, which is an
argument for Syrians—that is, Phoenicians—having established prior to
others a colony there for reasons of trade. Later, it was called Parthe-
nope, a heroic Greek word; eventually, it was called Naples in the vernac-
ular Greek language. These words are proof that the Greeks had come
there later so as to open up associations for business. This must mark the
arrival of that language which mixes Phoenician and Greek, a language
said to have delighted the emperor Tiberius more than pure Greek. In ex-
actly the same way, on the shores of Tarentum, there was a colony called
Siris, whose inhabitants were called Sirites; later, it was called Polieion by
the Greeks, named for Minerva Polias, who had a temple there.
305 This Axiom, in addition, gives principles pertaining to the science
supporting the argument written by Giambullari,217 namely, that the
Tuscan language is Syrian in origin: this language can only have come
from the most ancient Phoenicians—the earliest sailors in the ancient
world, as the Axiom just above has proposed—for, in later times, this
glory belonged to the Carian and Ionian Greeks and, eventually, came
to rest with the Rhodians.

306 103. One can postulate that it is necessary to concede that some Greek
colony was brought to the shore of Latium which, subsequently defeated
and destroyed by the Romans, is buried in the shadows of antiquity.
307 If this is not conceded, then anyone who engages in reflection and
combination concerning antiquity will be bewildered about why Roman

S   Pierfrancesco Giambullari (1495–1555), one of the founders of the Floren-

217

N tine Academy and author of Origine della lingua fiorentina, altrimenti il Gello
L (1549).
104
Book One 105

history tells of Hercules, Evander,218 Arcadians, and Phrygians being

inside of Latium; of Servius Tullius as a Greek; of Tarquinius Priscus
as the son of Demaratus the Corinthian; of Aeneas as the founder of
the Roman people. Certainly, Tacitus observes the resemblance of Latin
letters to Greek: this resemblance is from the times of Servius Tullius,
when the Romans, in the judgment of Livy, would not have heard the
name of even someone as famous as Pythagoras, who was teaching at his
celebrated school in Croton; the same Romans who did not start their
acquaintance with the Greeks of Italy prior to the occasion of the war
with Tarentum, which led to the later war with Pyrrhus and the Greeks
across the sea.

104. It is worth considering the statement of Dio Cassius,219 that what is 308
customary is like a king, but the law is like a tyrant; this must be under-
stood in terms of what is customary being reasonable, and of the law not
being animated by natural reason.
This Axiom in its effects puts an end to that otherwise great dispute, 309
namely, whether law exists in nature or in the opinions of men; this is
the same as the dispute put forward in the corollary of Axiom 8, namely,
whether human nature is sociable.
For grant that the natural law of the gentile peoples amounts to orders
instituted by means of what is customary (which Dio says gives decrees
like a king, through what is pleasing) and not orders instituted by laws
(which Dio says gives decrees like a tyrant, through force). Grant that
this is, first, because the natural law coming to be from those human cus-
toms comes from THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS—a
subject to which this science is equal—and, second, because that law
preserves human society—for there is not one thing more natural, be-
cause there is not one thing more pleasing, than giving observance to
natural customs. Granting all this, human nature, from which such cus-
toms come, is sociable.
This same Axiom, along with Axiom 8 and its corollary, demonstrates 310
that man is not unjust by nature in an absolute sense, but by nature is
fallen and weak: consequently, it demonstrates the first principle of the
Christian religion—that is, an uncorrupted Adam, who was ideally and
perfectly good as he was created by God—and, consequently, it demon-
strates the Catholic principles of grace, a grace which works in man as
one for whom there is a privation, not negation, of good works; and so,
as one for whom there is a potency which is ineffectual; accordingly, there
is an efficacious grace which, accordingly, cannot do its work w
­ ithout the

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.5.2.

218

  Vico seems to have confused Dio Cassius (on whom see the note at §44) with
219

Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–115 CE), Greek orator, writer, philosopher, and histo-
rian of the Roman Empire. The passage Vico cites is from Discourse 76, “On
Custom,” though its direct source (as Battistini notes) is almost certainly Jean
Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.10.
 106 The New Science

principle of free choice; that choice is aided naturally by God by means

of his divine providence, as was said above [§136] in the second corol-
lary to Axiom 8; with respect to divine providence, the Christian religion
agrees with all the other religions. It was upon this, rather than upon any
other thing, that Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf220 ought to have founded
their systems and so been in agreement with the Roman jurists, who de-
fined the natural law of the gentile peoples as having been instituted by
divine providence.

311 105. The natural law of the gentile peoples comes from the customs of
nations, nations which conform with one another in a human common
sense, without any reflection and without any one nation taking another
as its example.
312 This Axiom, along with the statement by Dio to which we referred
in the preceding Axiom, establishes that providence is the institutor
[l’ordinatrice] of the natural law of the gentile peoples, because she is the
queen of the affairs of men.
313 This same Axiom establishes the differences among the natural law of
the Hebrews, the natural law of the gentile peoples, and the natural law
of the philosophers. For the gentiles have only the ordinary aid of provi-
dence, whereas the Hebrews also have the extraordinary aid of the true
God, on account of which the whole world of nations is divided by them
into Hebrews and gentiles. And the philosophers reason more perfectly
on this natural law than the gentiles practice it with their customs; phi-
losophers, however, did not arrive until more than two thousand years
after the gentiles founded that law.
On account of not observing these three differences, the three systems of
Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf must fall.

314 106. Doctrines must start from when the matters which they treat start.
315 This Axiom, placed here with the view to the particular subject mat-
ter of the natural law of the gentile peoples, is used universally for all the
subject matter treated herein—hence, it could have been proposed with
the other general axioms221. However, it is put here because the natural
law, more than any other particular subject, makes one able to see its
truth and the importance of making use of it.

220
  Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), author of De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and one
of Vico’s “four authors,” as named in his Autobiography. John Selden (1584–
1654), English jurist and scholar of Jewish law, and author of De iure naturali et
gentium iuxta disciplinam Hebraeorum (1640). Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694),
German jurist, economist, and statesman, and author of De iure naturae et
gentium (1672). Vico refers to the trio as the “three princes” of the teaching of
the natural law of the gentile peoples (see §§329, 350, 493).
S 221
  That is, the first twenty-two Axioms, as §164 makes clear.
N
L
106
Book One 107

107. There are gentiles who had a start earlier than the cities. In Latin, 316
they are called the gentes maiores—that is, the ancient noble households
like those of the Fathers from whom Romulus composed the Senate, the
Senate by which he composed the city. By contrast, those, in Latin, called
gentes minores are the later noble households founded after the city, like
those of the Fathers from whom Junius Brutus, after the expulsion of
the kings, replenished the Senate, nearly depleted by the deaths of the
senators killed by Tarquinius Superbus.222

108. There was such distinction among the gods. On the one hand, there 317
were the gods of the greater gentiles—that is, the gods consecrated by the
families existing prior to cities—of which were certainly twelve among
the Greeks and Latins, and it will be proved [§§489–634] that there were
twelve among the Assyrians—that is, the Chaldeans—and among the
Phoenicians and Egyptians. That number of gods was so famous among
the Greeks that they were understood with a single word, δώδεκα [dōdeka]
and were gathered together in a confused manner in a Latin distich to
which we referred in our Principles of Universal Law.223 Therefore, herein,
in Book Two, in keeping with a natural theogony—that is, an account of
generation of the gods made naturally in the minds of the Greeks—the
gods issue forth in the following order: JOVE, JUNO, DIANA, APOLLO,
VULCAN, SATURN, VESTA, MARS, VENUS, MINERVA, MER-
CURY, NEPTUNE. On the other hand, there are the gods of the lesser
gentiles—that is, the gods consecrated by later peoples, such as Romulus,
whom after his death the people of Rome named the god Quirinus.
Through these three Axioms, the three systems of Grotius, Selden, 318
and Pufendorf are found wanting in their principles, which start from
nations that regard one another a part of that society of all of human-
kind. The principle among all the earliest nations, as we will demonstrate
herein [§§520–552], starts from the time of the families under the gods of
the gentiles called “greater.”

109. Men with limited ideas deem the law to be only as much as what is 319
said expressly by its words.

110. Golden is the definition that Ulpian assigns to civil equity: probablis 320
quaedam ratio non omnibus hominibus naturaliter cognita [this is natural
equity] sed paucis tantum qui prudentia usu doctrina praediti didicerunt
quae ad societatis humanae conservationem sunt necessaria [“a kind of
probable reasoning not naturally familiar to all human beings . . . but
to those few who, preeminent in practical wisdom, practice, or learning,

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.10.

222

  In fact, the Diritto universale quotes three lines (rather than a distich) from
223

Lucilius, the earliest known Roman satirist. See De constantia iurisprudentis 2.20
(Cristofolini 515[1]).
 108 The New Science

teach what is necessary for the preservation of human society”]. This is

what is called in fine Italian “reason of state.”224

321 111. The certain, as it pertains to laws, is an obscurity of reason sustained

solely by an authority, which we experience in their practical applica-
tion as harsh, but whose practical application is necessary so that the
laws are certain—this word signifies “particularized” in good Latin or, as
the Schools say, “individuated”; in this sense, certum [“the certain”] and
commune [“the common”] are opposite terms in a more elegant Latin.
322 This Axiom, along with the two definitions following it, constitutes
the principle pertaining to narrow reason, whose rule is civil equity: men,
in the barbarism of particular ideas, naturally acquiesce to the certainty
of civil equity—that is, to the determinate particularity of its words—
and deem that such a law must belong to them.225 Hence, what Ulpian
says in such cases, that lex dura est sed scripta est [“the law is harsh, but it
is written”],226 you could say in Latin, with greater beauty and more legal
elegance, as lex dura est sed certa est [“the law is harsh, but it is certain”].

323 112. Men of intelligence deem the law to include the whole of what is
called “equal advantage in cases.”

324 113. The true, as it pertains to laws, is a certain light and splendor by
which natural reason illuminates them, whence, the same jurists used to
say verum est [“it is true”] for aequum est [“it is equal”].227
325 This definition and Axiom 111 are particular propositions to make
particular proofs in the matter of the natural law of the gentile peoples;
they come from the general Axioms 9 and 10, which treat the true and
the certain228 in a general way to draw conclusions in all of the materials
that are treated herein.

326 114. The natural equity of a human reason, fully expressed, is a practice
of wisdom for the doing of what is advantageous [faccende dell’utilità].

224
  The expression “ragion di Stato,” though often referring to a cluster of ideas
associated with Machiavelli, occurs nowhere in Machiavelli’s texts. It is the key
term of the title of the Jesuit Giovanni Botero’s book Della ragion di Stato,
published in Venice in 1589, as well as the topic of Scipione Ammirato’s 1594
Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Book 12, Discourse 1, “Della ragione di Stato”).
225
  For a particular example, see §191 on child sacrifice.
226
  Ulpian (c. 170–223 CE), Roman jurist of the first importance for Vico. The
citation is an inexact reference to Digest 40.9.12.1. The formulation that appears
in the text reads durum est, sed ita lex scripta est.
227
  Vico makes a similar claim about the verum and the aequum at Scienza nuova
prima §242, and much earlier at De antiquissima 2; see On the Most Ancient Wis-
dom of the Italians, trans. Jason Taylor (Yale University Press, 2010), 46[47].
228
  On the relation between the true and the certain, compare to Vico’s more
S elaborate treatment at De uno Proloquium (Cristofolini 35[30–31]; BV 39–40)
N and De uno 82–83 (Cristofolini 101; BV 40–42).
L
108
Book One 109

Given this, wisdom, in its full amplitude, is nothing other than the sci-
ence of making use of things, the use which they have in nature.
This Axiom, along with the other two definitions following it, consti- 327
tutes the principle pertaining to benign reason, ruled by natural equity,
which is connatural to gentile nations. From this public school, it will be
demonstrated, come the philosophers.
These last six propositions together confirm that providence was the 328
institutor [l’ordinatrice] of the natural law of the gentile peoples; it is
providence that permits that because the nations, during the course of
many centuries, had to live without any capacity for the true and for nat-
ural equity (philosophers later gave greater clarity to this), they instead
attended to the certain and to civil equity, which scrupulously guards
the words of the orders and the laws, and by these words would be led
to observe the orders and laws in a general way, even in cases where they
seem harsh, for nations are thus preserved.
And these same six propositions, unknown to the three princes229 of 329
the doctrine of the natural law of the gentile peoples, made that all three
err together when establishing their systems. For they believed that natu-
ral equity in its ideal perfection had been understood by the gentile na-
tions from their earliest starting points, and they believed this without
reflecting that it took two thousand years for philosophers to arrive in
any of these nations and without granting one people the privilege of the
particular assistance of the true God.

On the Principles

Now, so as to make an experiment testing whether the propositions enu- 330

merated so far as ELEMENTS of this science should give form to the
MATERIALS arranged at the beginning in the Chronological Table,
we beseech the reader to reflect upon all that has been written concern-
ing the principles pertaining to any subject matter whatsoever from the
whole of what may be known about things divine and human in gentile
antiquity; and, in combining all this, to reflect whether it makes for any
incongruity with these propositions, either in the whole of them, or in a
majority, or even in a single proposition (for if so much as one proposi-
tion is incongruent, then all of them are, for each is congruous with all
the others). It is certain that the reader who makes such a comparison
will perceive that the things written up until now are, all and all, the
commonplaces of a confused memory, the fancies of a poorly regulated
imagination having no share in the intellect, which itself has been made
idle by the two kinds of vanity enumerated in the Axioms above.230

229
  That is, Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf.
230
  Axioms 3 and 4.
 110 The New Science

For, on the one hand, the vanity of the nations (each of them thinks that
it was the earliest in the world) makes us dispirited about discovering
the principles of this science among the philologists. On the other hand,
the vanity of the learned (who want their wisdom to have been fully
understood since the beginning of the world) puts us in despair about
discovering these principles among the philosophers. Consequently, for
this inquiry we must reckon as if there were no books in the world.
331 However, in this dense night of shadows, which cover over the earliest
antiquity so distant from ourselves, there appears an eternal light which
cannot be extinguished because of a truth which cannot, in any way, be
called into doubt: that this civil world has certainly been made by men.
Hence, these principles can be discovered, because they must be discov-
ered, within the modifications of our own human mind.231
The following must induce wonder in anyone who reflects upon it: all
the philosophers have so studiously pursued science of the natural world
(since God made it, only God has science of the natural world) and have
given no care to meditating upon this world of nations—that is, the civil
world—about which, since men have made it, men can pursue science.232
This extravagance is the effect of the wretchedness we noticed in the Ax-
iom233 concerning the human mind, that this mind, immersed and buried
in a body, is naturally inclined towards sensing bodily things and must
employ great strength and toil so as to understand itself as itself, in the
same way that the bodily eye, which sees all the objects outside of itself,
has need of a mirror so as to see itself.
332 Now, given that this world of nations has been made by men, let us
see upon what things men from perpetuity have agreed and always do
agree. For such things can give us the universal and eternal principles
that must belong to every science, upon which everything arises, and
which preserves everything in nations.
333 We observe that all the nations—whether barbarous or humane, and
in spite of being founded in vastly different ways on account of immense

231
  Because human beings have made the civil world, they can know its prin-
ciples, discovering them within the modifications “of our own human mind.”
This claim by Vico is recognizably an application of the verum/-factum principle
that he announces in his 1710 metaphysical book: “the true and the made are
convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). (See De antiquissima 1.1; On the
Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 16[14].) In the 1710 work, Vico deploys
the verum-factum principle to elaborate a hierarchy of sciences, ordered from
“most constructed” to “least constructed”—but stops short of applying the
principle directly to the civil world.
232
  Here and throughout, the key term scienza is translated by “science,” reserv-
ing “knowledge” for cognizione. Readers will want to look for both genuine
continuities and deep differences between Vico’s use of the term scienza and the
S connotations of present-day “science.”
N 233
  Axiom 63.
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110
Book One 111

distances from one another in place and time—are guardians of three

human customs. They all have some religion, they all contract solemn
marriages, and they all bury their dead. Nor among the nations—no
matter how wild and crude—are any human actions observed with more
searching ceremonies or with more sacred solemnities than religions,
marriages, and burials. With a view to the Axiom234 that uniform ideas
coming into being among peoples unknown to one another must have
some common beginning in the true, it must have been stated to all of
them that in these three things is the start of all humanity and that they,
accordingly, must guard over them in the most sacred way lest the world
become savage and return anew to wilderness.
Accordingly, we have taken these three eternal and universal customs as
the three first principles of this science.
And do not let modern travelers accuse the first of our three prin- 334
ciples of being false, those who tell us of the peoples of Brazil, of the
Kaffir of Africa, and other nations of the New World (and Antoine Ar-
nauld235 believes the same of those who inhabit the island called Antil-
les) that they live in society without any knowledge of God. Persuaded,
perhaps, by them, Bayle236 affirms in his treatise, On Comets, that it is
possible for peoples to live in keeping with justice without the light of
God, which is more than Polybius affirmed in that statement for which
he is praised, that had philosophers arisen in the world who lived by the
strength of reason and not that of laws, there would have been no need
for religion.237
These are the tales of travelers promoting their books with prodigious
accounts.
Certainly, in the case of Andreas Rüdiger238 (in his pompously entitled
Divine Physics, which intends to find that one middle way between athe-
ism and superstition), it was suggested by the censors at the University of
Geneva (a quite weighty suggestion in that it comes from a place where,
because it is a popular free republic, there must have been somewhat
greater freedom in writing) that in expressing such sentiments Rüdiger
spoke with too great an assurance, which is to say, with no small audacity.

234
  Axiom 13, inexactly quoted.
235
  Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Jansenist theologian and mathematician,
member of Port-Royal.
236
  Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), author of Pensées Diverses sur l’Occasion de la
Comète (1681), as well as the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697).
237
  On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179.
238
  Johannes Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731), German philosopher and physi-
cist. Author of Philosophica synthetica (1707), De sensu veri et falsi (1709), and
Physica divina (1716), among other works. Vico’s description of the book’s
intention is a paraphrase of the book’s full title: Physica divina: recta via,
eademque inter superstitionem et atheismum media, ad utramque hominis felicita-
tem ducens.
 112 The New Science

For all nations believe in a providential divinity; hence, one can find no
more than four primary religions throughout the entire course of the
time and throughout the breadth of this civil world. The first of these is
that of the Hebrews and, consequently, the second is that of the Chris-
tians, both of whom believe in a divinity who is an infinite free mind. The
third is that of the gentiles, who believe in many gods, each of whom is
imagined to be composed of a body and a free mind; hence, when they
intend to signify the divinity which rules over and conserves the world
they say deos immortales [“the immortal gods”]. The fourth and last is
that of the Mohammedans, who believe in a God who is an infinite free
mind in an infinite body, for they look forward to the pleasures of the
senses as rewards in the next life.
335 No nation has believed in a god who is all body, or in a god who is all
mind, but which is not free.
Consequently, neither the Epicureans (who allowed for a god who is only
body and, along with this body, allowed for chance) nor the Stoics (who
allowed for a god who is an infinite mind subject to fate in an infinite
body and, in this respect, would have been followers of Spinoza) are able
to reason about republics and their laws (Spinoza himself talks about the
republic as if it were a society of merchants).239
On account of this, Cicero was right, in speaking to Atticus as an Epicu-
rean, when he told him that he could not reason with Atticus about the
laws unless he conceded that there is divine providence.240
This shows how poorly these two sects, the Stoics and Epicureans,
comport with Roman jurisprudence, which puts divine providence first
among its first principles.
336 Next, there is the opinion that the actual, certain couplings of free
men with free women outside of the solemnity of marriages do not con-
tain any natural harm: this has been reproved by all nations in the cus-
toms by which they religiously celebrate marriages and in the customs
of defining couplings outside of marriage as a bestial sin, albeit one of
a lesser rank.
Insofar as such parents are not held in kinship by the necessary bond of
law, they come to forsake their natural children. These children, whose
parents can separate at any time, are abandoned by both and lie exposed
to be devoured by dogs. And unless either a public or private humanity
raises them up, they must grow without having anyone to teach them re-
ligion or language or any other human custom. Hence, inasmuch as this
is what becomes of these children, they make this world of nations—one

239
  This might be a general allusion to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670). It may also be a more specific reference to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus
S 7.8, published posthumously in 1677.
N 240
  Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21.
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112
Book One 113

enriched and adorned with the fine arts of humanity—into the great for-
est of antiquity, the one through which the savage brutes of Orpheus
wandered in profane, feral error when sons exercised a bestial lust upon
their mothers and fathers upon their daughters; this is the infamy of
a profane, lawless world which Socrates tried to prove is forbidden by
human nature (but with reasoning from natural causes hardly proper
to such proofs, for such couplings are naturally abhorrent to all nations
and are not practiced by any save those, like the ancient Persians, in their
final stage of corruption).
Finally, as for the great principle of humanity which is burial, imagine 337
a feral state in which human cadavers lie unburied upon the earth as food
for crows or dogs: it is certain that, together with such bestial customs,
there must come to be fields which are uncultivated, to say nothing of cit-
ies which are uninhabited; men would live in the fashion of pigs, coming
to eat acorns gathered from the midst of the rotting of their own dead
kin. Hence and with great reason, burials were defined with that sublime
expression FOEDERA GENERIS HUMANI241 [“the covenants of hu-
mankind”], and, with less grandeur, were described to us by Tacitus242 as
HUMANITATIS COMMERCIA [“the transactions of our humanity”].
Furthermore, the following is a tenet with which all gentile nations cer-
tainly agree, that souls will remain upon the earth restless and come to
wander around their unburied bodies; consequently, souls do not die
with their bodies, but are immortal (we are persuaded that such was once
the consensus of the peoples of barbarian antiquity by the peoples of
Guinea, as Hugo von Linschooten243 attests; by the peoples of Peru and
Mexico, as Acosta244 attests in his De indicis; by the peoples who inhabit
Virginia, as Thomas Harriot245 attests; by the peoples who inhabit New
England, as Richard Whitbourne246 attests; by the peoples who inhabit
the kingdom of Siam, as Joost Schouten247 attests).
Hence, Seneca concludes quum de immortalitate loquimur non leve mo-
mentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos aut co-
lentium; hac persuasione publica utor248 [“when we are speaking about
immortality, it is of great weight for us that this immortality is the

241
  See Florus, Epitome 1.41.1; Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.19.3.
242
  See Tacitus, Annals 6.19.3.
243
  Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611), Dutch merchant, trader, and
historian.
244
  José de Acosta (c. 1539–1600), Spanish Jesuit and author of The Natural and
Moral History of the Indies (1590). Vico’s reference is to p. 107 of a 1596 edition
of the text published in Venice.
245
  Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), English astronomer and physicist, sometimes
credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles.
246
  Richard Whitbourne (1579–1626), discoverer of Newfoundland.
247
  Joost Schouten (c. 1600–1644), Dutch administrator in present-day Indone-
sia, burned at the stake for alleged homosexual activity.
248
  An inexact rendering of Seneca, Moral Letters 117.6.
 114 The New Science

c­ onsensus of human beings, who either fear or worship those under the
earth; I myself employ this public conviction”].

On Method

338 In order for the ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES that have been

taken up by this science to be complete, it remains for us in Book One to
reason about the METHOD this science must use.
For grant that this science must start where the subject matter starts,
just as was proposed in the Axiom above:249 we have thus sought for this
starting point, following the philologists, among the stones of Deucalion
and Pyrrha, among the rocks of Amphion,250 among men born from the
furrows of Cadmus251 or the hard oak of Virgil;252 and we have sought
for it, following the philosophers, among the frogs of Epicurus, among
the cicadas of Hobbes, among the simpletons of Grotius,253 among those
of Pufendorf254 who are cast into the world without care or aid from
God, as gullish and savage as the giants called Patagonians who they
say have been discovered on the strait of Magellan—that is to say, we
sought for it among the sons of Polyphemus of Homer, in whom Plato255
recognizes the first Fathers in the familial state. Such are the beginnings
of humanity that the philologists and philosophers have offered this sci-
ence! And grant that we must take our starting point in reasoning from
the place where these men started to think in a human way and where, in
their brutal savagery and unrestrained bestial liberty, there was no other
means for domesticating the former and restraining the latter than some
terrifying thought of some divinity, the fear of which, as was said in the
Axiom above,256 is the only means powerful enough to reduce a ferocious
liberty to duty. Granted all this, so as to retrieve the fashion in which
this earliest of human thinking came into being in the world of gentile
antiquity, we have encountered difficulties so harsh that it has cost us
well over twenty years of research257 to descend from this gentle human
nature of ours to a human nature so completely savage and brutal that

249
  Axiom 16.
250
  See §81.
251
  For the legend of Cadmus as founder of Thebes, see Ovid, Metamorphoses
3.1–130.
252
  See Virgil, Aeneid 8.315.
253
  See Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis 2.2.
254
  See Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2.
255
 Plato, Laws 678c–681e.
256
  Axiom 31.
257
  This passage, which first appears in the 1730 New Science, is likely an allu-
sion to Vico’s On the Most Ancient of Wisdom of the Italians, published twenty
years earlier. Though this text resists any simple summary, part of its explicit
S intention is to discover recondite wisdom in the origins of the Latin language.
N
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Book One 115

we are completely forbidden from imagining it and only with great toil
are we permitted to understand it.258
It is because of all this that we have to begin from the sort of knowl- 339
edge of God of which no men are deprived, no matter how wild, savage,
and brutal. Such knowledge, we will demonstrate, is the following: fallen
man, in despair of all succor from nature, desires for a thing superior to
nature which will save him. But this thing which is superior to nature is
God. And this is the light which God has cast over all men.
This is confirmed by the following common human custom: aging liber-
tine men, because they sense the loss of their natural strength, naturally
return to religion.259
But these earliest men, who were later the princes of the gentile na- 340
tions, must have engaged in thinking driven by the strong spurs of the
most violent passions, which is the thinking of beasts.
Consequently, we must proceed from a commonplace metaphysics—the
one noted in the Axioms above260—and we will find that it was the the-
ology of the poets. From this, we will seek that terrified thinking about
some divinity which put some mode and measure upon the bestial pas-
sions of these forlorn men and rendered those passions human.
From such thinking must have come into being the conatus261 proper to
the human will, that of keeping under restraint the motions which the
body imposes on the mind, either by completely quieting these motions,
as a wise man does, or by at least directing them to better uses, as a civil
man does.
This restraint of the motion of bodies is certainly the effect of the free-
dom of human choice, and so of the free will, which is the house and
home of all the virtues and, above all, of justice; when informed by jus-
tice, the will is subject to all that is just and to all the laws dictated by the
just. For to give conatus to bodies would be tantamount to giving them

258
  Here Vico rejects the claim (sometimes attributed to him) that the historian’s
task is to empathetically “imagine” her way into the mentality of earlier times
and nations. On the contrary, gentile antiquity cannot be imagined, even if it
can be understood (but only with much difficulty). Vico repeats the claim at
§378 and §700, calling it an “important observation” in the latter passage.
259
  Compare to what the aged Cephalus tells Socrates, near the beginning of
Plato’s Republic. The mythoi told about Hades, once laughed at, “now make his
soul twist and turn because he fears they might be true” (330d–e).
260
  Axiom 33.
261
  Vico would certainly know the doctrine of conatus from Spinoza’s Ethics,
Part 3, Proposition 6: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to
persevere (conatur) in its being.” It is possible that he also knows the doctrine
from the Latin writings of Hobbes; see, e.g., De corpore 15.2. Also relevant are
the occurrences of “endeavor” throughout Leviathan, particularly chapter 6.
 116 The New Science

freedom to regulate their own motions, whereas it is the case that all bod-
ies are agents of necessity in nature. And the things which the mechanists
call “power,” “force,” and “conatus” are the insensate motions of bodies,
by which they approach their center of gravity (as ancient mechanics
would say) or by which they depart from their center of motion (as mod-
ern mechanics would say).
341 However, men, on account of their corrupted nature, are tyrannized
by self-love, on account of which they pursue principally their own ad-
vantage. Hence, when they intend to keep everything advantageous for
themselves and no share for companionship, it is not possible for them to
place their passions under conatus so as to direct them towards justice.
Consequently, we establish that man in the bestial state loves only his
own safety; when he takes on a spouse and has children, he loves his own
safety along with the safety of families; when he arrives at civil life, he
loves his own safety along with the safety of the city; when he extends
power over people other than his own, he loves his own safety along with
the safety of those nations; and when nations unite in war, peace, alli-
ances, or commerce, he loves his own safety along with the safety of the
whole of humankind. In all these circumstances, man principally loves
his own advantage. Therefore, it must be by nothing except divine provi-
dence that he is held within these orders to pay homage, in keeping with
justice, to the orders of familial, civil, and finally human society. When,
with a view to these orders, man cannot pursue what he wills, he wills, at
least, to pursue that portion of the advantageous which is his due, that
which is what is called “the just.”
Hence, the rule for everything just among men is divine justice, which is
administered by divine providence so as to preserve human society.
342 Therefore, this science, in one of its principal aspects, must be a ratio-
nal civil theology of divine providence, which seems to have been lacking
up until now. For either philosophers have completely failed to recognize
divine providence (as is the case with the Stoics and the Epicureans, the
latter of whom say that it is the blind concurrence of roiling atoms, the
former of whom say that it is a deaf chain of cause and effect dragging
along everything that men do) or philosophers have considered divine
providence only in the order of natural things (from here comes the nat-
ural theology they call metaphysics, in which they contemplate this attri-
bute of God and confirm it in the physical order in which is observed the
motions of bodies, such as the motion of the spheres and the elements,
and in the final cause beyond the other lesser natural things observed).
And philosophers also ought to have reasoned about divine providence
in the economy of the civil things and by means of the term which prop-
erly specifies providence, “divine,” derived from divinari [“to divine”]—
that is, to understand either “what is hidden to men” (hidden in the sense
S of “what is to come”) or “what is hidden within men” (in the sense of
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the conscience [coscienza]262). This—the divine things—is what properly

occupies the first part of the subject of jurisprudence, upon which the
other, accompanying part—the human things—depends.
Hence, this science must be a demonstration, so to speak, of the history
of providence in what is actual, for it must be a history of the orders
which providence has given (without any human discernment or counsel,
and often contrary to what human beings have proposed) to this great
city of humankind; the orders which providence has posited, although
this world was created in time and is particular, are nevertheless univer-
sal and eternal.
Because of all this, within the contemplation of that infinite and eter- 343
nal providence, this science discovers certain divine proofs by which it is
confirmed and demonstrated.
Insofar as divine providence has omnipotence as its minister, it ought to
articulate its orders in ways as easy as natural human customs. Insofar
as it has infinite wisdom as its counselor, whatever it disposes ought to
be perfectly ordered. Insofar as it has its own immeasurable goodness as
its end, whatever it orders ought to be directed towards a good which is
always superior to any good proposed by men.
Because of all this, in the deplorable obscurity of the beginnings of na- 344
tions and in the countless variety of their customs and on the basis of a
divine argument which contains all the human things, no more sublime
proofs are possible than these, which give us the naturalness, the order,
and the end that are the preservation of humankind. These proofs turn
out to be luminous and distinct263 when we reflect upon how great is the
facility by which these things come into being and upon the occasions
(often quite far apart and sometimes completely contrary to what men
propose) from which these things come and harmonize among them-
selves: such are the proofs to which omnipotence ministers. In combina-
tion with this reflection, look upon the order in which the things which
ought to come into being now do come into being at their proper times
and in their proper places and by other things defer their coming into
being until their time and place, in which consists, as Horace264 revealed,
the beauty of order: such are the proofs which eternal wisdom arranges.
And, finally, consider whether we are capable of understanding whether
by those occasions, places, and times, it would have been possible for dif-
ferent divine benefits to have come into being by which, the needs and in-
firmities of men such as they are, it would have been possible to ­conduct

262
  See the note at §137 on coscienza. In the present context, “conscience” is
more appropriate than “consciousness.”
263
  Luminose e distinte—an echo of Descartes’s “clear and distinct.” Similar
echoes can be heard at §§367, 390, 444, 502, 905.
264
 Horace, Ars poetica 42–45.
 118 The New Science

human society in a better way toward the good and to preserve it: such
are the proofs which the eternal goodness of God will give.
345 Hence the proof proper to this work will be the one made continuously
herein by combining such considerations and reflecting upon whether
the human mind, within the series of possibilities which it is permitted
to understand and to the extent that it is permitted to understand, can
think of a greater or lesser or alternative number of causes than that
from which issue the effects of this civil world. Doing this will prove for
the reader to be a divine pleasure265 in this mortal body, that of contem-
plating, in the divine ideas, this world of nations throughout the whole
extent of its places, times, and varieties. And the reader will find the
Epicureans convinced by what is actual that their chance cannot wander
about madly and always find a way out; and the Stoics convinced that
the eternal chain of causes with which they want to bind the world itself
hangs from the omnipotence, wisdom, and benevolence of a good and
great God.
346 These sublime natural theological proofs will be confirmed for us by
the subsequent kinds of logical proofs which, in reasoning about the
origins of things divine and human in gentile antiquity, will reach those
earliest origins beyond which it is foolish curiosity to ask after ones
which are earlier. This is the characteristic proper to principles. These
proofs articulate the particular fashions of their coming-into-being [il
nascimento], what is called “nature” [natura], which is the most proper
mark of science. Finally, these proofs are confirmed by the eternal prop-
erties which preserve things that could not have come to be [nate] except
by such and not other comings-into-being [nascimenti], at such times and
places and in such fashions—that is, by such natures, as was proposed in
the two Axioms above.266
347 So as to come to find such natures for human things, this science pro-
ceeds by a strict analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities
or advantages of social life, which are the two perennial sources of the
natural law of the gentile peoples, as also noted in an Axiom above.267
Hence, for its second principal aspect, this science is a history of human
ideas, upon which, it seems, must proceed the metaphysics of the hu-
man mind. This metaphysics, queen of the sciences, on account of the
Axiom268 stating that the sciences must take their starting points from
the place where the subject matter starts, takes its starting point, then,
from the place where these earliest men started to think in a human way,
not yet from the place when philosophers started to reflect on human
ideas, as was recently brought to light in an erudite and learned little

265
  On the “divine pleasure,” see Longinus, On the Sublime 36.1; Lucretius, De
rerum natura 3.28; Dante, Paradiso 33.33.
266
  Axioms 14 and 15.
S 267
  Axiom 11.
N 268
  Axiom 106.
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Book One 119

book entitled Historia de ideis,269 which proceeds all the way up to the
recent controversies between Leibniz and Newton, the two foremost ge-
niuses of our age.
And so as to make determinate the times and places of a history of 348
this sort, namely, when and where those human thoughts came into be-
ing, and so to give certainty to them by means of a chronology and a
geography which are, so to speak, metaphysical, this science uses an art
of criticism which is also metaphysical, applied to the authors of these
same nations, nations which must have had to run a course of more than
a thousand years so as to be able to bring forth the writers with whom
philological criticism has up until now been occupied.
And the criterion which serves this art of criticism, as was proposed in
the Axiom above,270 is what is taught by divine providence in common to
all nations—that is, the common sense of humankind itself, made deter-
minate by their necessary agreement about these same human things, an
agreement which makes for all the beauty in this civil world.
Consequently, the following kind of proof rules in this science: the
things of the nations that are reasoned about by this science are such
that they HAD TO BE, HAVE TO BE, AND WILL HAVE TO BE,
posited as such orders by divine providence, even if from one time to
the next, infinite worlds came to be from eternity (in actuality, this is
certainly false).271
Hence, this science, at the same time, comes to describe an ideal eter- 349
nal history upon which the histories of all the nations run their temporal
course in their emergence, progress, maturity, decadence, and end.
Indeed, we would hasten to affirm that the one who meditates upon this
science tells himself this entire eternal history: since this world of na-
tions has certainly been made by men—that indubitable first principle
proposed above [§331]—and since, accordingly, the fashion in which this
world comes into being must be discovered within the modifications of
our own human mind, therefore, in the proof that it HAD TO BE, HAS
TO BE, AND WILL HAVE TO BE, he makes this world himself; for
when the one who makes the things is also the one who tells their history,
there can be no history more certain.
So, this science proceeds exactly in the way that geometry, in construct-
ing a world upon its elements and contemplating it, makes that world of
quantity; however, this science makes a world all the more real inasmuch
as the orders concerning the deeds of men have more reality than do

269
  That is, the 1723 book by Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), Historia philosophica
doctrinae de ideis, qua tum veterum imprimis graecorum tum recentiorum philos-
ophorum placita enarrantur.
270
  Axiom 12.
271
  An allusion to Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De l’infinito universo et mondi,
published in Venice in 1584.
 120 The New Science

points, lines, planes, and figures.272 And this itself is an argument that
such proofs are of a divine kind and should, O reader, bring about a
divine pleasure, since, in God, the knowing and the making are one and
the same thing.
350 Furthermore, through the definitions of the true and the certain pro-
posed above,273 there was a long period of time when men could not be
capable of the true or of reason—that is, of the source of inner justice
by which they satisfy the intellect. This inner justice was practiced by the
Hebrews who, illuminated by the true God, were prohibited by divine
laws from even having thoughts that were less than just, about which
no mortal lawgiver ever troubled himself. For the Hebrews believed in a
God who is all mind, searching the hearts of men, whereas the gentiles
believed in gods composed of body and mind who could not do this.
Later, this inner justice was reasoned upon by philosophers, but these
philosophers did not arrive until two thousand years after their nations
were founded. Therefore, throughout this long period of time, men were
governed by what is certain in authority, namely, by that same criterion
which the metaphysical art of criticism uses—that is, the common sense
of humankind itself—the source of the definition proposed above in the
Elements,274 upon which rests the consciences of all the nations.
As a result, from another principal perspective, this science comes to be
a philosophy of authority, which is the source of the “external justice”
of which the moral theologians speak.
It is about this authority that the three princes of the doctrine of natural
law of the gentile peoples ought to have had some account, not about
an authority drawn from the commonplaces of writers who could have
no reckoning of it: such authority ruled among nations for more than a
thousand years before writers arrived.
Hence, Grotius (more learned and more erudite than the other two)
fights with the Roman jurists on almost every particular subject of his
teaching on natural law,275 but all his blows fall short because the jurists
establish their principles concerning the just upon what is certain from
the authority of humankind, not upon the authority of the learned.

272
  Here Vico’s claim is that human beings can know the civil world, precisely
because they make it. In this way, The New Science seems to endow history with
the same intelligibility that his 1710 On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians
attributes to geometry. One may compare Vico’s conception to Hobbes: “Ge-
ometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason
are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable,
because we make the commonwealth” (Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of
the Mathematics, in W. Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes,
vol. 7 [London, 1845], 184).
273
  Axiom 10.
S 274
  Axiom 12.
N 275
  See Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena §53.
L
120
Book One 121

These are the philosophical proofs that this science will use and, con- 351
sequently, the ones absolutely necessary so as to pursue this science.
The philological proofs ought to have the last place. They can all be
traced back to the following kinds.
First, the things upon which we meditate agree with our account of vari- 352
ous myths, an agreement which is not forced or contorted, but straight-
forward, easily obtained, and natural; these myths will be seen to be the
civil histories of the earliest peoples, who are found everywhere to have
naturally been poets.
Second, these things also agree with the heroic turns of phrase, which 353
are explained by the full truth of their sentiments and the full propriety
of their expression.
Third, these things also agree with the etymologies of native languages, 354
which tell the histories of the things which terms signify, starting with the
properties they had at their origins and following from there the natural
progress of their movement according to the order of ideas, upon which
the history of languages must proceed, as was premised in the Axioms.276
Fourth, a mental dictionary of the human things pertaining to our socia- 355
bility is articulated, things sensed as the same in substance by all nations
and articulated by as many different modifications as there are different
languages, as discussed in the Axiom above.277
Fifth, the true is sifted from the false in everything that has been guarded 356
over the period of many centuries by folk traditions; these folk tradi-
tions, insofar as they themselves have been guarded over a long age and
by entire peoples, must have had some public foundation in the true, as
the Axiom above278 proposes.
Sixth, the great fragments of antiquity—useless to science up until now 357
because they lay squalid, broken, and out of place—draw out a great
light when polished, put together, and put back in place.
Seventh and last, upon all these things, as upon their necessary causes, 358
rest all of the effects which are told to us by certain history.
These philological proofs serve to make us able to see, in what is actual, 359
the things meditated upon in idea concerning this world of nations; this
is in accordance with the method of philosophizing of Lord Verulam—
that is, the method of cogitare videre [“to think, to see”].279 Hence, it is
through the philosophical proofs which were previously made that the
philological proofs which come after are, at the same time, confirmed by
the authority of reason and confirm reason by an authority of their own.

276
  Axioms 17, 18, 64, and 65.
277
  Axiom 22.
278
  Axiom 16.
279
  On Bacon’s Cogitata et visa, see the note at §163.
 122 The New Science

360 Let us conclude, from all that has been discussed concerning the
­ STABLISHMENT OF THE PRINCIPLES of this science, that given
E
that its principles are divine providence, the moderation of the passions
in connection with marriage, and the immortality of the human soul in
connection with burial; and given that it uses the criterion of judgment
that what is sensed to be just by all, or the greater part, of men ought
to be the rule of sociable life; and given that, on such principles and cri-
terion, there is agreement between the commonplace wisdom of all the
lawgivers and the recondite wisdom of the best-reputed philosophers,
then these ought to be the boundaries of human reason: let anyone who
should wish to pass beyond them see to it that he does not pass beyond
all humanity.

S
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 Book Two

On

Poetic Wisdom

123
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S
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ii
Book Two 125

Through that which was stated above in the Axioms1—namely, that all 361
the histories of the gentile nations have had mythical beginnings, and
that among the Greeks, from whom we have all that we have concerning
gentile antiquity, the earliest wise men were theological poets,2 and the
nature of things that have ever come to be or been made points towards
the rudeness of their origins3—it is in such terms and not otherwise that
we must deem the origins of poetic wisdom.
And what is deemed high and sovereign in this wisdom has reached us,
this has come to be because of the two kinds of vanity discussed in the
Axioms above:4 first, the vanity of the nations and, second, the vanity of
the learned; and more so from vanity of the learned than from the vanity
of the nations. Through the vanity of the learned, just as Manetho,5 the
Egyptian high priest, translated all of Egyptian history into a sublime
natural theology, as we state in the Axioms,6 so too the Greek philoso-
phers translated their history into philosophy. And they did so not only
through what as we also saw above in the Axioms7—namely, that both
those histories had become befouled—but also through the following
five causes.
The first cause was reverence for religion, for it was by myths that 362
the gentile nations everywhere were founded upon religion. The sec-
ond cause was the grand effect following thereupon, namely, this civil
world, so wisely ordered that it could not have been effected except by
a superhuman wisdom. The third cause was occasions, as we will see
herein [§515], which these myths offer to the philosophers (assisted by
the veneration of religion and by belief in such wisdom) for conducting
inquiry into and for meditating upon the highest things in philosophy.
The fourth cause was conveniences, which we make known herein, al-
lowing them to explain the sublime matters of the things upon which
they meditated in philosophy by means of the expressions that the poets
happened to leave for them. The fifth and last cause, worth all of them
together, was the proof those philosophers found for the things upon
which they meditated in connection with the authority of religion and
the wisdom of the poets.
Of these five causes, the first two contain the praises of divine wisdom
offered by the philosophers, and the last contains the testimony which,
in their very errors, they offer to the divine wisdom which ordered this
world of nations. The third and fourth causes are the deceptions per-
mitted by divine providence from which would arrive philosophers to

1
  Axiom 46.
2
  Axiom 44.
3
  Axioms 65–68.
4
  Axioms 3–4.
5
  On Manetho, see the note at §46.
6
  Axiom 55.
7
  Axiom 54.
 126 The New Science

understand and to recognize providence as it truly is, as an attribute of

the true God.
363 And throughout Book Two, it will be shown that as much as the po-
ets first had sensed concerning commonplace wisdom, the philosophers
later understood concerning recondite wisdom. As a result, the former
can be said to be the sense, and the latter the intellect, of humankind.
Because of this, it is generally true for humankind what Aristotle8 said
particularly about each man: nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in
sensu [“there is nothing in the intellect except what was previously in the
senses”]—that is, the human mind does not understand a thing for which
there is not some impetus from the senses, what metaphysicians today
call the “occasion.”9 And so, the mind uses the intellect when, from a
thing that it senses, it gathers some other thing that is not contained
under the senses. This is the proper meaning in Latin of intelligere [“to
understand”].10

On Wisdom in General

364 Now, prior to reasoning about POETIC WISDOM, it is necessary for us

to see in general what kind of thing this wisdom is.
Wisdom is the faculty that commands all the disciplines; by these, all the
sciences and arts that complete our humanity are apprehended.
Plato11 defines wisdom as that which is the perfecter of man.
Man, in the being proper to him as a man, is nothing other than mind
and spirit, or, I mean to say, intellect and will. Wisdom must complete
the human in both of these two parts, and the completion of the second
follows from the completion of the first, such that, because of a mind
illuminated by knowledge of the things that are highest, the spirit is led
to the choice of the things which are best. The highest things in this
universe are those that come from attending to and reasoning about
God. The best things are those that look to the good of the whole of
humankind. The former are called the “divine things,” and the latter,
the “human things.” Therefore, true wisdom must teach knowledge
of the divine things so as to conduct the human things towards the
highest good.

8
  See Aristotle, De anima 3.8, 432a.
9
  The reference is to Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) and his followers.
10
  Vico makes a similar claim about the interchangeability of intelligere with
perfecte legere (“to gather fully”) at De antiquissima 1.1; see On the Most An-
cient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 16[14].
11
  See Plato, Alcibiades I, 124b–130e. Vico also refers to this passage in his 1732
S oration De mente heroica (Battistini, p. 378).
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Book Two 127

We believe that Marcus Terentius Varro (who deserved the title “most
learned of the Romans”12) erected, on this basis, his great work, Rerum
divinarum et humanarum, for which the injustice of time has made us feel
a great loss. In this book, we will treat these things to the extent allowed
by the weakness of our learning and the sparseness of our erudition.
Wisdom among the gentiles starts with the Muse, who is defined by 365
Homer13 in a golden passage in his Odyssey as “science of good and evil,”
which was later called “divination”; it is upon the natural prohibition of
this (because it is a thing naturally denied to men) that God founded the
true religion of the Hebrews, from which comes our Christian religion,
as was proposed in the Axioms above.14
Thus, this Muse must have originally been, in its proper sense, the science
of divining the auspices, which—as was said in an Axiom15 above and
will be stated below [§381]—was the commonplace wisdom of all nations
for contemplating God by the attribute of his providence, through which
divinari God is named in his essence “divinity” [divinità]. And because of
such wisdom, we will see below that wise men were the theological poets
who certainly founded the humanity of Greece—hence, in Latin, judicial
astrologers are called “professors of wisdom.”16
Subsequently, “wisdom” was later used of men noted for the advanta-
geous counsels they gave to humankind, such as those who were called
the seven wise men of Greece.
Later, “wisdom” came to be used of men who, for the good of peoples
and nations, wisely ordered republics and governed them.
After this, the term “wisdom” came in addition to signify the science
of natural divine things—that is, metaphysics—which, accordingly, was
called divine knowledge: this science comes to know the mind of man
in God, and because of the fact that it knows God to be the source of
whatever is true, it knows him as the ruler of whatever is good. As a re-
sult, metaphysics must essentially work towards the good of humankind,
whose preservation rests upon the universal sense that divine providence
exists; hence, perhaps Plato deserved the title, “divine,” because he dem-
onstrated this and, accordingly, science which denies such a God and
such an attribute should be called “folly” rather than “wisdom.”
Finally, wisdom among the Hebrews, and subsequently among us Chris-
tians, was called the science of eternal things revealed by God. The

12
 Drawn from Augustine, City of God 6.4.2.
13
 Homer, Odyssey 8.63.
14
  Axiom 24.
15
  Here Vico misremembers his own text. The reference is actually to the section
on Method, §342.
16
  The title “professor of wisdom” was attributed by Celso (in De medicina) to
Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus.
 128 The New Science

­ riginal term for this knowledge among the Etruscans, perhaps on ac-
o
count of its aspect as the science of what is truly good and truly evil, was
“science in divinity.”
366 Consequently, we must make out three kinds of theology, with more
truth than those kinds that Varro made out.17 First, there is poetic theol-
ogy, that of the theological poets—which was the civil theology of all
the gentile nations. Second, there is natural theology—which is that of
the metaphysician. And, in place of the third kind proposed by Varro—
which is the poetic theology that among the gentiles was the same as civil
theology, but which Varro distinguished from both civil and natural the-
ology because, led astray by the common folk error that within the myths
are contained the high mysteries of sublime philosophy, he believed it to
be a mixture of civil and natural theology—we instead propose, as the
third kind, our Christian theology, a mixture of civil, natural, and the
highest revealed theology, all three of which are conjoined in the con-
templation of divine providence. This divine providence has conducted
the human things in such a way that starting from a poetic theology (this
regulated the human things by certain sensible signs believed to be divine
indications sent to men from the gods) and passing through the medium
of a natural theology (this demonstrates providence through eternal rea-
sons which do not fall under the senses), the nations were disposed to
receive a revealed theology on the strength of a supernatural faith, supe-
rior not only to the senses, but also to human reason itself.

An Exposition and Partitioning

of Poetic Wisdom

367 However, because metaphysics is a sublime science which partitions, into

their certain subjects, all the sciences which are called “subaltern,” and
because the wisdom of the ancients was that of theological poets—who
unarguably were the first wise men of gentile antiquity, as was established
in the Axioms18—and because the origins of all things must by nature be
rude, we must, on account of all this, allow that POETIC WISDOM
started from a rude metaphysics; that from this metaphysics, as from
a trunk, spread, through one branch, a logic, a morals, an economics,
and a politics—all of which were poetic—and, through a second branch,
likewise poetic, spread a physics, which was the mother of a cosmogra-
phy and, consequently, an astronomy, rendered more certain by its two
children, chronology and geography.
And we will make it possible to see, in each of these clear and dis-
tinct fashions, how the founders of gentile humanity by their natural
­theology—that is, their metaphysics—imagined the gods; how by their

S 17
  Compare Augustine, City of God 6.5–7.
N 18
  Axiom 44.
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Book Two 129

logic they discovered languages; how by their morality they generated

the heroes; how by their economics they founded families, by their poli-
tics, cities. We will show how by their physics, they established principles
for all the divine things; how by a physics particular to man, they, in
a certain mode, generated their very selves; how by their cosmography,
they devised an entire universe of gods; how by their astronomy they
brought the planets and the constellations from Earth to the heavens;
how by their chronology they offered a beginning to historical times; and
by with their geography, the Greeks, for the sake of example, described
the world within Greece itself.
In such a manner, this science comes to be, in one breath, a history of 368
the ideas, customs, and deeds of humankind; and from all three histories
will come the principles of the history of human nature, these being the
principles of a universal history, which seems to have been lacking its
own principles.

On the Universal Flood

and the Giants

The authors of gentile humanity must have been men from the races 369
of Ham, Japheth, and Shem, who one after another—almost immedi-
ately in the case of Ham, somewhat later for Japheth, and last of all for
Shem—gradually renounced the true religion of their common father,
Noah, which alone in the familial state was able to hold them in human
society by the society of marriage and, therefore, in those same families.
And, accordingly, they must have dissolved those marriages and dis-
persed those families because of uncertain couplings; and, by a feral er-
ror, wandered throughout the great forest of the Earth (the race of Ham
wandering throughout southern Asia, Egypt, and the rest of Africa; the
race of Japheth throughout northern Asia—that is, Scythia—and Eu-
rope; the race of Shem throughout middle Asia up to the Near East)
and through their flight from wild beasts, which the ancient forest must
have had in abundance, and through their pursuit of women who in that
state must have been wild, shy, and reluctant; and, scattered thus through
their search for food and water, mothers abandoned their children, who
must have gradually grown up without hearing a human voice, much less
apprehending human customs. Hence, they came to a state completely
bestial and feral. In this state, mothers, like beasts, only nursed their ba-
bies and otherwise left them to wallow in their own filth and, as soon as
they were weaned, abandoned them forever; these children must have
wallowed in a filth which wondrously enriched the fields in nitrous salts
and made efforts to penetrate into the great forest which, from the recent
flood, must have been very dense; through these efforts, their muscles
must have, first, contracted, then extended, whence those nitrous salts
were absorbed in greater amounts into their bodies; and, without the
 130 The New Science

fear of God, parents, or teachers which cools that surliness of child-

hood, they must have become disproportionately great in flesh and bone
and grown so vigorous and robust that they became giants.19 This is a
feral education, at a level more savage than that which—as was noted
in the Axiom20 above—Caesar and Tacitus found to be the cause of the
gigantic stature of the ancient Germans, and from which comes the stat-
ure of the Goths of which Procopius21 spoke and the stature of the Pa-
tagonians today who are believed to exist near the Strait of Magellan,
concerning which philosophers in physics have said so much foolishness,
collected by Chassanion, who wrote De gigantibus.22 The huge skulls and
oversized bones belonging to these giants have been found and are all the
time being found, for the most part in the mountains—a particular detail
quite relevant to things which we have to say below [§377]—and their size
was further exaggerated by folk traditions, on account of something that
we will discuss in its proper place [§387].
370 Giants of this sort were spread over the Earth after the flood. Given
this, just as we have seen them [§193] in the mythical history of the
Greeks, so too the Latin philologists, without seeing it, have told us
about them in the ancient history of Italy when they say that the most
ancient peoples of Italy—called the aborigini—claimed that they were
αυτόχθονες [autochthones], which is to say that they were “sons of the
Earth,” which meant, in Greek and in Latin, “nobles.” And with com-
plete propriety, these sons of the Earth were called “giants” by the
Greeks, whence myths tell us that Earth was the mother of the giants.
And αυτόχθονες in Greek must be rendered indigenae in Latin, who,
in the proper sense, are those born of some land, just as gods born of
some people or nation are claimed to be dii indigetes,23 a contracted
form of inde geniti which we would write even more concisely as in-
geniti24 (this is insofar as the syllable, de, is one of the redundancies
of the earliest languages of peoples about which we will reason herein
[§462]; so, for example, in early Latin, they wrote induperator25 for im-
perator, and in the Laws of the Twelve Tables, there is ENDOIACTIO
for iniictio; hence, perhaps they spoke of induciae, “armistices,” as if
they were iniiciae, for they would have called them this in the sense of
icere foedus, “peace pacts made”); so, for the present case about which
we are reasoning, that of indigeni, from it was derived ingenui, which
in its primary and proper sense signifies nobili, whence are derived the
artes ingenuae, “the noble arts,” which eventually came to signify liberi,
but even the artes liberales derived their significance from the artes no-
bili, for the earliest cities, as we will demonstrate below [§586], were

19
  Compare Tacitus, Germania 20.1 and Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.925–932.
20
  Axiom 26.
21
  Procopius of Caesarea (c. 500–554), noted Byzantine historian.
22
  Jean Chassanion (1531–1598), author of De gigantibus eorum reliquiis (1580).
23
  See Virgil, Georgics 1.498; Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.2.6.
S 24
  See G. J. Voss, Etymologicon, p. 308.
N 25
  See Cicero, De divinatione 1.48; Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.967 and 5.1227.
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Book Two 131

composed only of nobles, of whom the plebeians were slaves or the

precursors of slaves.
These same Latin philologists26 observe that all ancient peoples were 371
called aborigini, and sacred history tells us of whole peoples who were
called the Enim and the Zamzummim; and those who are learned in the
sacred language explain that they were giants, one of whom was Nim-
rod. And this same sacred history defines the giants as the strong, fa-
mous, powerful men of their age,27 for the Hebrews, by their education
in cleanliness and by their fear of God and their Fathers, remained the
correct stature in which God had created Adam and in which Noah had
procreated his three sons. Hence, it is perhaps because they considered
the giants an abomination that the Hebrews had so many ceremonial
laws which pertained to the cleanliness of their bodies.
And the Romans preserved a great vestige of this in the public sacrifice
by which they believed the city was purged of all the sins of citizens, a
sacrifice which they made with water and fire, the same two things with
which they also celebrated solemn nuptials; and, moreover, citizenship
rested upon being part of the community sharing these two things, and
accordingly to be deprived of citizenship was said to be interdictum aqua
et igni28 [“prohibited from taking part in water and fire”]. And this sacri-
fice was called the lustrum,29 which signified a period of five years (just as
the Olympiad signified a period of four years for the Greeks) because it
was within this amount of time that they made the sacrifice again. And
lustrum among the Romans signified a “den of wild beasts,” whence the
verb lustrari signifies both “to frequent” such dens and “to purge” such
dens; it must have originally signified the frequenting of dens of this sort
for the purpose of purging them of the wild beasts there within. And
aqua lustrates continued to name the water needed for the sacrifices.
And the Romans were perhaps more discerning than the Greeks, who
counted the start of years from the fire by which Hercules burned down
the Nemean forest so as to plant grain. Hence, Hercules—as was indi-
cated in the “Idea of the Work” [§3] and will be seen more fully later
[§733]—founded the Olympiads upon this, and we say the Romans, in
counting the start of historical times from the water of their sacred
cleansings for the lustrum, were more discerning insofar as they held the
start of humanity to be with water, the necessity of which was under-
stood before fire, just as in the expressions for nuptials and for the pro-
hibition from citizenship they say, first, “water” and, then “fire.” And
this is the origin of those sacred cleansings that must precede sacrifices,
which were a custom of, and are common to, all the nations.

26
  See Pliny, Natural History 3.56.
27
  On the description of prelapsarian men as giants, see Augustine, City of
God 16.4.
28
  See Cicero, De domo sua 30.78.
29
  See Virgil, Aeneid 3.279.
 132 The New Science

By such cleanliness of the body and by fear of the gods and of the
­fathers—which will be found, in both cases, to have been in the earli-
est times because of the greatest terror—it came to pass that the giants
decreased to our correct stature; it is perhaps because of this that from
πολιτεία [politeia], by which the Greeks mean “civil governance,” the Lat-
ins came to use the term politus, meaning “polished” and “neat.”30
372 Their decrease in stature must have continued to happen down to
the human times of nations, as is demonstrated by the excessively large
arms of the old heroes, which, as Suetonius31 relates, Augustus preserved
along with the bones and skulls of ancient giants in his museum.
Consequently, as was discussed in the Axioms,32 the whole of the earli-
est world must have been made up of two kinds of men: first, the men
of the correct stature who, in that early world, were only the Hebrews;
and, second, the giants, who were the authors of the gentile nations.
And the giants were made up of two kinds. First, there were the sons
of the earth—that is, the nobles—who gave their name to the age of
giants, in the full and proper sense of this term, as was stated [§370];
and sacred history has defined them for us as “the strong, famous,
powerful men of their age.” Second, there were those who were less
properly called giants, those giants ruled by the sons of the earth who
were their lords.
373 The time marking the arrival of authors of this sort, authors of the
gentile nations, is determined to be one hundred years after the flood
for the race of Shem, and two hundred years for the races of Japheth
and Ham, as was held in a postulate above;33 and, shortly hereafter
[§387], we will draw out the physical history which, although Greek
myths tell of it, has not been noticed up until now, and we will give, for
this same time period, an alternative physical history of the Universal
Flood [§380].

On Poetic Metaphysics,
in which are given the origins
of poetry, idolatry,
divination, and sacrifices

374 It is from earliest men of this sort—stupid, insensate, horrific beasts—

that all the philosophers and philologists should have started in reason-
ing about the wisdom of gentile antiquity. That is, they should have

30
  For the derivation of politus from politeia, see Voss, Etymologicon, p. 461.
31
  See Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Augustus 72.
32
  Axiom 27.
S 33
  Axiom 42, and see §62.
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started from giants taken, as they just were, in proper significance of the
term (concerning this, Father Boulduc,34 in his De ecclesia ante legem,
says that the term “giant” in the sacred books signifies “pious, vener-
able, brilliant men,” but one can only understand the noble giants to be
as such, those who, by divination, founded religions for the gentiles and
gave their name to the age of giants). And those philosophers and phi-
lologists should have started from a metaphysics such as this, one which
takes its proof not from without, but from within the modifications of
the mind of the one who meditates upon it; and because, as we said
above [§331], this world of nations has certainly been made by men, it is
within these modifications that one must look to find the beginnings of
that world. And human nature, to the extent that it is a nature shared in
common with beasts, takes on the following property: the senses are the
only way in which that nature knows things.
Therefore, the poetic wisdom which was the earliest wisdom of gentile 375
antiquity should start from a metaphysics not reasoned out and ab-
stracted like that of the learned today, but sensed and imagined, as it
must have been for those earliest men, like those who have no share in
ratiocination and are all robust senses and the most vigorous imagina-
tions, as was established in the Axioms.35
This metaphysics was the poetry proper to them, the poetry which, in
them, was a faculty connatural to them, for they were naturally fur-
nished with senses and imaginations of this sort, and it was a poetry that
came to be from the ignorance of causes, which is the mother of wonder
at all things—that is, those who are ignorant of all things have a strong
sense of wonder at them, as was indicated in the Axioms.36
Such poetry takes its start in them as a divine poetry, for, at that time,
they imagined that the causes of the things which they sensed and at
which they wondered were gods—as we saw with Lactantius in the Axi-
oms37; and as we confirm now with the Americans who call gods all the
things which surpass their small capacity, to whom we connect the an-
cient Germans living near the Arctic Sea, of whom Tacitus38 tells us that
they said that they heard the sun at night as it passed from west to east
under the sea. And in affirming that they saw gods, the nations, most
rude and simple, allow us to understand better those authors of gentile
antiquity upon whom we now reason herein: at that same time, we would
say, those authors gave the things at which they wondered the being of
substances drawn from their own ideas, which is exactly the nature of

34
  Jacques Boulduc (1575–c. 1646), French theologian and Capuchin monk,
author of De ecclesia ante Legem (1626).
35
  Axiom 36.
36
  Axioms 35 and 39.
37
  Axiom 38.
38
 Tacitus, Germania 45.1.
 134 The New Science

children—who, as was proposed in an Axiom,39 take inanimate things

in their hands, play with them, and pretend to talk with them as if they
376 were living persons. In this fashion, the earliest men of gentile nations,
like the children of an emerging humankind—as was also discussed in
the Axioms40—created, from their own ideas, the very things themselves.
However, this was still infinitely different from the creating God does
insofar as God, in his purest understanding, knows things and, in know-
ing them, creates them; those men, on account of their robust ignorance,
made things on the strength of a most corporeal imagination, and, be-
cause it was so corporeal, they made them with a sublimity so wondrous
and so great in its wonder that it disturbed the very men who, in devising
things, thus created them; hence, they were called poets, which, in Greek,
means the same as “creators.” There are three kinds of labor that must
make for great poetry: to discover sublime myths made for a popular
understanding; to excite an ecstatic pursuit of the end which the poetry
has proposed; and to teach the common run to do virtuous works, just
as they themselves have taught themselves, as will presently be shown
[§379]. And in that nature of human things abides an eternal property
articulated by the noble expression of Tacitus:41 men who are terrified
emptily fingunt simul creduntque [“believe in something the moment they
devise it”].
377 With such natures should one discover the earliest authors of gentile
humanity at a time two hundred years after the flood for the rest of the
world and one hundred in Mesopotamia (this was stated in a postulate,42
for such was the amount of time needed to reduce the earth to a state in
which it had dried enough from the dampness of the Universal Flood to
emit dry exhalations—that is, the materials igniting in the air to gener-
ate lightning43), the heavens finally flashed lightning, and thundered with
lightning and thunder all the more terrifying since it must have come
to pass that it introduced into the air for the first time so violent an
impression.
At that time, since a few giants (who must have been the more robust of
those spread throughout the wooded places up high on the mountains
where, like wild beasts, they had their dens) were terrified and surrounded
by a great effect whose cause they did not know, they raised their eyes
and looked to the heavens.44 And because, in such a case, the nature of
the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect, as was

39
  Axiom 37.
40
  Axiom 37.
41
 Tacitus, Annals 5.10.2. Compare Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum 1 (Works
I, pp. 455–456).
42
  Axiom 42, and see §62.
43
  Compare Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.1220.
44
  Compare Plato, Cratylus 398c and Republic 9, 568a, as well as Ovid, Meta-
S morphoses 1.85–86.
N
L
134
Book Two 135

stated in the Axioms,45 and because their nature in this state was that of
men who, being all robust bodily strength, express their quite violent
passions through shouts and grunts, they devised a heaven which is one
great animated body and which, in this aspect, they called JOVE—the
first god of the so-called gentes maiores—who, in the sizzle of his light-
ning and the crash of his thunder, intended to say something to them.
And so, they started to give currency to the natural curiosity which, as it
is defined in the Elements above,46 is the daughter of ignorance and the
mother of science, which it begets whenever wonder makes our minds
open. This nature, in every way, stubbornly persists in the common run.
Whenever they see something like either a comet or a parhelion or some
other extraordinary thing in nature, particularly nature in its heavenly
aspect, they are given, at once, to curiosity and, in anxious inquiry, ask
what such a thing means or signifies, as was posited in an Axiom.47 And
whenever the common run wonder at the remarkable effects of a magnet
on iron, even in this age of minds made more discerning and erudite by
the philosophies, they still come up with the following: the magnet has
“a hidden sympathy” for the iron, and thus they make all of nature into a
vast animate body which feels passion and affect, in conformity to what
was discussed above in the Axioms.48
However, even nowadays (because the nature of our human minds, even 378
for the common run, is so withdrawn from the senses by the many ab-
stractions which fill our languages with their many abstract terms, and
has been rendered so subtle by the art of writing and, as it were, so spiri-
tualized by the use of numbers that even the common run know how
to count and to reckon), it is naturally denied to us to be able to form
an image of that vast goddess we call “sympathetic nature”: we say the
words with our mouths, but it holds nothing for us in our minds (insofar
as what we hold in our minds is false and so is nothing), and there is
no succor any longer from the imagination in being able to form some
vast, false image. So, in our time, it is naturally denied to us to enter
into the vast imaginary of those earliest men, whose minds had nothing
abstract, subtle, or spiritualized about them, for they were completely
immersed in the senses, completely buffeted by the passions, completely
buried in the body. Hence, as we said above [§338], in our time, it is
nearly impossible to understand and completely impossible to imagine
how they would have thought, these earliest men who founded gentile
humanity.
In this fashion, the earliest theological poets devised the first divine 379
myth greater than any other devised after, the myth of Jove, king and
father of men and gods, in the act of casting lightning bolts, a myth

45
  Axiom 32.
46
  Axiom 39.
47
  Axiom 39.
48
  Axiom 32.
 136 The New Science

so popular, so disturbing, so instructive49 that even those who devised

it believed it; and in keeping with terrifying religions, as will be shown
later [§517], they feared, revered, and gave observance to this Jove. And,
through that property of the human mind which, in the Axioms, we
learned was noticed by Tacitus,50 such men believe all that they imagine,
that they see, and, even, that they themselves do, to be Jove. And to the
universe as a whole (to the extent they could be capable of seeing it as
a whole) and to all the parts of the universe, they accorded a being of
animate substance. This is the civil history of the phrase,
Jovis omnia plena51
[“all is filled with Jove”].

Later, Plato52 took this to be the ether which penetrates and fills every-
thing; however, for the theological poets, as we will see shortly [§712],
Jove was no higher than the peaks of the mountains.
At that time, the earliest men, who spoke in signs, by their nature be-
lieved that lightning and thunder were signs of Jove; hence, later, from
the verb nuo [“to give a sign”] came numen,53 the term for the divine
will, in connection with an idea quite sublime and worthy of expressing
divine majesty, namely, that Jove decreed by signs—and such signs were
real words54—and that nature was the language of Jove, the science of
which language the gentiles universally believed was divination—which,
for the Greeks, was called theologia, meaning “the science of the speech
of the gods.”55
Thus came to Jove the fearful kingdom of lightning, for which he was
called the king of men and gods, and so came two titles: first, “best,”
by which was signified “strongest” (just as, in a reversal, for early Latin
fortis [“strong”] signified what for the later Latins was signified by bonus
[“good”]56) and, second, “greatest,” because of his body, which was as
vast as the heavens. From this first great benefit done for humankind
came the title soter, or “savior,” because he did not strike them with
lightning, which is the first of the three principles we have taken for this

49
  This triad rehearses the threefold description of what makes for great poetry,
given near the end of §376.
50
 Tacitus, Annals 1.28.2; Axiom 34.
51
  See Virgil, Eclogues 3.60.
52
 Plato, Cratylus 412d.
53
  On the derivation of numen from nuo, compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 404.
54
  On “real words,” compare Bacon, De augmentis scientarum 6.1 (Works I,
p. 651).
55
  For appearances of the term theologia in Greek, see Plato, Republic 2, 379a
and Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.1, 1026a19.
56
  For a comparable proposal about the primal identity of goodness and
strength, see the identification of bonus with “warrior” in Nietzsche, On the
S Genealogy of Morals 1.5.
N
L
136
Book Two 137

science [§333]; and the title, stator, or “stayer,” came to him because he
stayed those few giants from their feral wandering, from which came
to pass the beginning of the gentiles. The Latin philologists57 overly re-
strict this title to the fact that Jove, invoked by Romulus, had stayed the
Romans who were in the midst of flight in their battle with the Sabines.
Consequently, those many Joves at whom the philologists wonder 380
that every gentile nation had one (from all of them, the Egyptians said,
because of their vanity, that their Jove Ammon was the most ancient,
as was stated above in the Axioms58), these Joves are so many physical
histories preserved for us by the myths, which demonstrate that there was
a Universal Flood, as we premised in the Axioms.59
Thus, through what has been stated in the Axioms60 concerning the 381
principles pertaining to poetic characters, Jove came into being in poetry
naturally as a divine character—that is, an imaginative universal—­under
which were subsumed all the things pertaining to the divine auspices by
the ancient gentile nations, all of which, accordingly, were poetic by na-
ture. They started poetic wisdom from a poetic metaphysics of contem-
plating God through the attribute of his providence; and, for this, they
were called theological poets—that is, men wise in understanding the
speech of the gods conceived by the auspices of Jove—and were prop-
erly called divine—in the sense of being diviners, from divinari, mean-
ing “to divine” or “to predict.” This science was called the Muse, de-
fined by us above [§365], following Homer, as the science of good and
evil61—namely, the divination upon prohibition of which God ordered
for Adam his true religion, as was also stated in the Axioms.62 The theo-
logical poets were the mystics of this science (called “mystics” from the
Greek word mystae, which the learned Horace63 translated as “interpret-
ers of the gods”) because they explained the divine mysteries of the aus-
pices and the oracles; in this science, every gentile nation had its own
Sybil, of which twelve are mentioned, and these Sybils and oracles are
the most ancient things of gentile antiquity.
Thus do all the things reasoned upon here accord with that passage 382
of Eusebius cited in the Axioms64 where he reasons upon the beginnings
of idolatry: the earliest gentiles, simple and rude, devised their gods ob
terrorem praesentis potentiae [“on account of their terror at the power
present before them”].

57
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.12.6; Cicero, In Catalinem 1.33; Seneca, De ben-
eficiis 4.7.2.
58
  Axiom 3.
59
  Axiom 42.
60
  Axioms 47–49.
61
  Compare Homer, Odyssey 8.63 with Genesis 2:9 and 2:17.
62
  Axiom 24.
63
 Horace, Ars poetica 391.
64
  Axiom 38. The actual source is Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 1.15.
 138 The New Science

Thus it was fear that devised gods in the world, but, as was noted in the
Axioms,65 men were not made fearful by other men, but were themselves
made fearful by themselves.
Along with this beginning for idolatry is demonstrated, in addition, the
beginning of divination, which came into being in the world in one birth.
The beginning of sacrifices came to follow from these two beginnings,
sacrifices which were made so as procurare—that is, so as to understand
the auspices.
383 That such is the generation of poetry is ultimately confirmed for us
by the following eternal property that belongs to it: the proper mate-
rial of poetry is what is impossible and yet believed,66 impossible to the
extent that bodies are not minds, and yet believed to the extent that the
thundering heavens were Jove. Hence, nothing exercises poets more than
singing about the wonders made by sorceresses through their works of
incantation. This has its foundation in a hidden sense that all nations
have of the omnipotence of God; from this comes to be that other sense
by which all peoples are naturally led to give infinite honors to divinity.
And in this fashion, the poets founded the religions of the gentiles.
384 And all the things reasoned herein upon up until now overturn all
that has been stated about the origins of poetry, first by Plato, then by
Aristotle up until our own Patrizzi, Scaliger, and Castelvetro:67 it has
been discovered that poetry came into being through a deficiency in
human reasoning, poetry so sublime that nothing its equal (much less
better than it) has been produced by the philosophies which came later,
through the arts of both poetry and criticism. Hence comes the privilege
by which Homer is the prince of all the sublime poets—that is, the heroic
poets—first in rank as well as time.
This discovery of the beginnings of poetry dispels the opinion about the
unaccountable wisdom of the ancients, the discovery of which was so de-
sired from Plato up until Baron of Verulam in his De sapientia veterum.68
This is the common wisdom of the lawgivers who founded humankind,
not the recondite wisdom of lofty and rare philosophers.
Hence, as we have started to do in the case of Jove, that entire mystical
sense of a most lofty philosophy, which the learned have given to Greek
myths and Egyptian hieroglyphs, will be found to be as out of season as

65
  Axiom 40, holding that false religions are rooted not in another’s imposture
but in one’s own credulity.
66
  Compare Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a.
67
  Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597), author of Retorica (1562) and Po-
etica (1582). Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), author of Poetices libri septem
(1561). Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571), compiler of Poetica d’Aristotele
vulgarizzata e sposta (1570).
S 68
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128. Bacon’s
N De sapientia veterum was published in 1609.
L
138
Book Two 139

the historical sense, which they must have naturally contained, will come
naturally to us.69

Corollaries
concerning the principal aspects of this science

I. From what has been stated herein, one gathers that divine providence 385
(such as it is apprehended through the only human sense it can be sensed
by men, crude, wild, and savage, who despair of any succor from nature
and who also desire a thing superior to nature which will save them,
which is the first principle upon which we established above the method
of this science [§339]) permits such men to enter into the deception of
fearing the false divinity of Jove because he could strike them with light-
ning: it is thus that within the clouds of those first storms and in the flash
of that light they saw a great truth, that of a divine providence sovereign
over the salvation of all of humankind.
As a result, this science has its start from here in being, in its principal
aspect, a rational civil theology of divine providence; it starts from the
commonplace wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the nations by con-
templating God in the attribute of his providence, and it is completed by
the recondite wisdom of philosophers who demonstrated it by reasoning
upon it in their natural theology.

II. Here also having its start is a philosophy of authority—that is, the 386
second principal aspect this science has—taking the term “authority”
in its primary significance as “property,” the sense in which the term is
always used in the Law of the Twelve Tables. Hence, the term “author”
in the Roman civil code retains the sense of someone who has claim over
some domain inasmuch as it certainly comes from αὐτός [autos]—that
is, proprius [“proper to one”] or suus ipsius [“that which is one’s own”].
Because of this, the erudite often write autor and autoritas without the
aspirant of auctor and auctoritas.
And authority first had its start with a divine authority; by it, the divin- 387
ity appropriated unto itself those few giants of whom we have spoken
by properly casting them into the depths and into the recesses of groves

69
  Vico’s commitment to the claim that myths naturally contain an “historical
sense” should not be confused with euhemerism. Named after Euhemerus, a
Greek mythographer of the fourth century BCE, euhemerism is the view that
myths are simply fabulized accounts of historical persons or events known as
such. According to Vico, however, early humanity does not first think prosai-
cally and decide later to speak mythically. On the contrary, its very perception
is mythical, occurring in poetic characters and imaginative universals. These
are something other and more than allegorical representations of particular
individuals.
 140 The New Science

over the face of mountains. These groves are the iron ring that held the
giants fast, chained them to the earth in their terror at the heavens and
at Jove, and held them fast wherever they were, scattered over the face
of mountains, at the point when the heavens first flashed with lightning.
Those giants were Tityus and Prometheus, who were chained to a rock
on high, whose hearts were devoured by an eagle—that is, the religion of
the auspices of Jove. Similarly, the sense of these giants being rendered
immobile by terror was retained in the heroic expression in Latin, terrore
defixi70 [“fixed by fear”], which is exactly how they are shown by paint-
ers, who depict them chained hand and foot upon the face of mountains.
This iron ring forms the great chain for which Dionysius Longinus won-
dered at the sublimity of all the Homeric myths:71 this is the chain by
which Jove proposed (so as to prove that he was the king of men and
gods) that if all the gods and men were to attend to one side and he alone
to the other side, he would drag all in his train; and if this is the chain by
which the Stoics intend to signify the eternal series of causes with which
that Fate of theirs holds the world encircled and bound, they should see
to it that they do not wind up restrained themselves, for to drag men
and gods along by a chain of this sort depends upon the choice of Jove
himself, but they mean for Jove to be subject to Fate.
388 From a divine authority of this sort tends to follow human authority,
which, in its full philosophical elegance, means that property of human
nature which cannot be taken away from men, even by God, without
destroying that nature; it is with this signification that Terence72 says vo-
luptas proprias deorum [“joy proper to the gods”]—in the sense that the
felicity of the gods does not depend on others—and that Horace says
propriam virtutis laurum73 [“the laurel proper to virtue”]—in the sense
that triumph of virtue cannot be taken away by envy—and that Caesar74
says propriam victoriam [“proper victory”]—about which Denis Pétau75
is in error when he notes this should not be said in Latin, for it signifies,
in a quite elegant Latin, a victory which the enemy cannot take from
one’s hands.
Such authority is the free use of the will, whereas the intellect is a passive
power subject to the truth. For at this earliest point in human things, men
started by paying homage to the freedom of human choice to hold in re-
straint the motions of the body, either through completely calming them
or through giving them better direction, which is the conatus proper to
free agents, as we have stated above in the Method [§340]. Hence, those

70
  Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.39.1 and Tacitus, Annals 13.5.2.
71
  For the myth (which does not actually appear in the text of Longinus), see
Homer, Iliad 8.18–27.
72
 Terence, Andria 960.
73
 Horace, Carmina 2.2.22.
74
 Caesar, De bello gallico 3.70.2.
S 75
  Here Vico has confused Denis Pétau (on whom see the note at §77) with
N Denis Voss (1606–1633), son of G. J. Voss.
L
140
Book Two 141

giants restrained the bestial wantonness to go about wandering through

the great forest of the Earth and inured themselves to a completely op-
posite custom of staying hidden and settling for ages within their groves.
An authority of human nature of this sort is followed by the authority 389
of natural law: by occupying and staying settled for a long time in the
land where fortune found them at the time of the first lightning strikes,
they became lords of that land by the possession that comes from long
occupation, which is the source of all the different domains in the world.
Hence, these men are those
Pauci quos aequus amavit Jupiter76
[“few whom fair Jupiter has loved”].

Later, philosophers translated these few as those whose lot it was from
God to be well disposed toward the sciences and the virtues. However,
the historical sense of this phrase is that, within those recesses [nascon-
digli], in those depths [fondi], they became the princes of the so-called
maiores gentes, who counted Jove as the first god—as was discussed in
the Axioms.77 They, as will be shown later [§433], were the ancient noble
households, branching out into many families, of which the first regimes
and the first cities were composed. This historical sense of those recesses
[nascondigli] and those depths [fondi] is retained in Latin in the beauti-
ful heroic phrases condere gentes, condere regna, condere urbes; fundere
gentes, fundere regna, fundere urbes.78
This philosophy of authority follows the rational civil theology of 390
providence, for through the theological proofs of the latter, the former
with its philosophical proofs renders clear and distinct the philological
proofs (these three kinds of proofs are all enumerated in the Method79),
and concerning the things pertaining to the most obscure antiquity of
the nations, this philosophy of authority reduces human choice to cer-
tainty, which is by its very nature most uncertain, as was discussed in the
Axioms.80 This is as much as to say that it reduces philology to the form
of a science.

III. In its third principal aspect, this science is a history of human ideas, 391
which, as has been seen [§377], took its start from divine ideas in the
contemplation of the heavens done with the eyes of the body (so the

76
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.129–130.
77
  Axiom 108.
78
  Both phrases can be translated “to found peoples, to found kingdoms, to
found cities.” And, from Vico’s perspective, founding, as condere and fundere,
has its roots, etymologically and otherwise, in the “recesses” and “depths” of
these first lords of the lands.
79
  For the “theological proofs,” see §§342–345. For the “philosophical proofs,”
see §§346–351. For the “philological proofs,” see §§352–359.
80
  Axiom 11.
 142 The New Science

Romans spoke of the science of augurs as the activity of contemplari,

of observing the regions of the heavens from which the auspices came
or observing the auspices). The regions marked out by the augurs with
the lituus were called templa coeli81 [“the precincts of heaven”], whence
must have come for the Greeks the earliest θεωρήματα [theōrēmata] and
μαθήματα [mathēmata], things which are divine or sublime in their con-
templation, which ended in the abstract things of metaphysics and math-
ematics. This is the civil history of the saying,
A Jove principium Musae82
[“The Muse begins with Jove”],

for we have seen [§§365, 381] that the earliest Muse takes its start from
the lightning bolts of Jove, the Muse whom Homer defines as the “sci-
ence of good and evil”; later, it became all too easy for philosophers to
insert the tenet that “the beginning of wisdom is piety.”83
As a result, the earliest Muse must have been Urania, the one who con-
templates the heavens to take the auguries, who later came to signify
astronomy, as will be seen below [§508].
And, just as poetic metaphysics was above [§367] partitioned into all
the subaltern sciences, having the same nature as their poetic mother, so
too this history of ideas will give the rude origins of both the practical
sciences, which were customary for the nations, and the speculative sci-
ences, whose cultivation today is so celebrated by the learned.

392 IV. In its fourth aspect, this science is a philosophical art of criticism,
which comes to be from the aforesaid history of ideas. And this art judges
what is true for the authors of nations, nations which must have had to
run a course of more than a thousand years so as to be able to produce
the writers who are the subject of the philological art of criticism.
This philosophical art of criticism, starting from Jove, will give a natural
theogony—or generation of the gods—made naturally in the minds of
the authors of gentile antiquity, who were by nature theological poets;
the twelve gods of the so-called gentes maiores, the ideas of whom were
imagined at different times because of certain human necessities or ad-
vantages, are established throughout twelve smaller epochs, under which
are subsumed the times in which myths come to be. Hence, this natural
theogony will give a rational chronology of a poetic history almost nine
hundred years prior to the earliest starting point of history as commonly
regarded [la storia volgare], which was after heroic times.

81
  On the templa coeli, see Cicero, De divinatione 1.20.40; Terence, Eunuchus
590; Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.1014.
82
 Virgil, Eclogue 3.60.
S 83
  Compare Psalm 110:10; Job: 1.7 and 9:10; Ecclesiastes: 1.16.
N
L
142
Book Two 143

V. In its fifth aspect, this science is an ideal eternal history, upon which 393
the histories of all the nations run their temporal course. Whenever men,
starting from times that are primitive, ferocious, and savage, domesticate
themselves with religion, they start, proceed, and end along the contin-
uum of stages upon which we meditate in Book Two; reencountered in
Book Four, where we treat the course that the nations make; and with
the recurrence of human things in Book Five.

VI. In its sixth aspect, this science is a system of the natural law of 394
the gentile peoples. As was posited in the Axioms above,84 those three
princes of natural-law teaching—Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Sam-
uel Pufendorf 85—should have started their doctrine from the start of the
gentiles, from whom the subject matter starts. In this respect, they all err
in unison, taking their start in the middle—that is, from the more recent
times of genteel nations—and, consequently, from men enlightened by
a fully articulated natural reason; it is from these that the philosophers
came, who rose to meditate upon a perfected idea of justice.
In the first place, Grotius, on account of the same great effect which 395
tends towards the truth, prescinds from divine providence and pro-
fesses that his system will stand, even leaving to one side any knowl-
edge of God. Hence, none of his reproofs against the Roman jurists
on a great number of matters find their mark: for in positing divine
providence as the beginning of their reasoning on the natural law, those
jurists understood that reasoning to pertain to the natural law of the
gentile peoples, not the natural law of the philosophers or of the moral
theologians.
Next, Selden86 grants divine providence, but without taking notice 396
of the lack of hospitality among the earliest peoples; without taking
notice of the distinction made by the people of God among all the
nations at that time in the world, between the Hebrews and gentiles;
without taking notice, first, of the fact that because the Hebrews had
lost sight of their natural law during their servitude in Egypt, God
himself had to reinstitute those orders with the law that he gave to Mo-
ses on Sinai; without taking notice, second, of the fact that God in his
law forbids even thoughts that are less than just, which never troubled
any mortal lawgiver; without taking notice, furthermore, of the bestial
origins of all nations upon which herein we reason [§§369–371]. And
although Selden puts forward that the Hebrews later taught that law to
the gentiles, it turns out to be impossible for him to prove it, not only
because of the magnanimous confession of Josephus, assisted by the
grave reflection of Lactantius drawn upon above [§94], but also with a
view to the enmity, also observed above [§95], which the Hebrews had

84
  Axiom 106.
85
  Compare the earlier criticism of these three thinkers at §§310, 318, and 329.
86
  The reference is to Selden’s De iure naturali et gentium iuxta Hebraeorum.
 144 The New Science

for the gentiles and which even today they preserve for all nations in
their diaspora.
397 Finally, there is Pufendorf,87 who takes his start from an Epicurean hy-
pothesis, which posits that men are cast in this world without any aid or
concern from God; he was reproved for this, and while he justifies him-
self in a different treatise, without divine providence as a first principle,
he is still completely unable to open his mouth to reason about law, as we
heard [§335] Cicero88 say to Atticus, who was an Epicurean, when they
were reasoning about laws.
398 On account of all of this, we take our start from that earliest most an-
cient point of all in reasoning about law (in Latin, law is called ius, a
contraction of the ancient word of Jove, Ious89)—that is, from the mo-
ment when the idea of Jove came to be in the minds of the princes of the
gentiles. In this, there is a convergence between Latin and Greek worthy
of wonder: at first, the Greeks (as Plato90 observes to our good fortune in
his Cratylus) called law, διαΐον [diaion], which, in the sound of the word
as much as in its significance, means discurrens [“running through”] or
permanans [“penetrating”]; at least this is the philosophical origin im-
posed upon the word by Plato, who, in his erudite mythology, takes Jove
to be the ether penetrating and running through everything; but, in the
historical origin, διαΐον comes from the Greek word for Jove, Διός [dios]
(from which comes sub Dio, which in Latin, like sub Iove, means “under
the open heavens”91) and later, for the ease of speech, it came to be pro-
nounced δίκαιον [dikaion].
It is from here that we take our start in reasoning about law, which first
came into being as a divine law because of the property expressed in the
word “divination”—that is, the science of the auspices of Jove, which
were the divine things by which the gentiles would regulate all the hu-
man things—and these two together comprise for jurisprudence the
subject matter adequate to it. And thus do we start our reasoning upon
the natural law with the idea of divine providence, by which the idea of
law came into being and was begotten. Law naturally started to be ob-
served, in the fashion upon which we meditated previously [§§316–317],
by those properly called the princes of the gentiles, by princes of the
most ancient kind who were called the gentes maiores, for whom Jove
was the first god.

399 VII. In the seventh, and final, principal aspect which it has, this is a sci-
ence of the principles pertaining to universal history; this history takes
its start from that first moment of all in the human things of gentile

87
  See Samuel Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2.2.
88
  Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21.
89
  For this etymology, see Voss, Etymologicon, p. 318.
S 90
 Plato, Cratylus 412d–e.
N 91
  See Horace, Carmina 1.1.25.
L
144
Book Two 145

antiquity, with the earliest age of the world which the Egyptians said
the world ran through previous to themselves—that is, that age of gods
when heaven ruled on Earth and made for great benefits for men, as was
held in the Axioms.92 This was the start of the golden age of the Greeks
when gods consorted on Earth with men, as we have seen herein [§§377,
379, 381, 384, 389, 392, 398] Jove starting to do.
Thus, the Greek poets of this first age of the world are trustworthy in
their myths in telling us of the physical existence of a Universal Flood
and of giants; and in doing this, they have told us with truthfulness the
beginnings of a universal profane history.
However, for many reasons, this universal profane history has lacked
these true beginnings. Those who came later were not able to enter into
the imaginations of these earliest men who founded gentile antiquity,
through whose imaginations they seemed to see gods. And those who
came later did not properly understand the term atterrare, which means
“to be sent under the earth.” And the giants who lived hidden in groves
at the foot of mountains were excessively altered by the later traditions
of extremely credulous peoples, who took these giants to have piled
Olympus, Pelion, and Ossa one on top of the other so as to expel the
gods from heaven (these earliest giants not only did not fight with the
gods, but also did not even apprehend them until Jove had cast his light-
ning bolts); and while this heaven was later raised by the more devel-
oped minds of Greeks to boundless heights, it was for these first giants
only as high as the peaks of mountains, as we will demonstrate below
[§712]. The myth of giants fighting the gods must have been devised after
Homer and fastened on to him in his Odyssey by others; in Homer’s
time, shaking Olympus alone would have been enough to bring down the
gods, who Homer always tells us in his Iliad were located on the peak of
Mount Olympus.93 For all these reasons, this universal profane history
has up until now lacked these true beginnings, and because there has
been, up until now, a lack of a rational chronology of poetic history, this
universal history has also lacked continuity.

On Poetic Logic

Now, that which is a metaphysics (inasmuch as it contemplates things 400

with a view to all the kinds of being) is, at the same time, a logic (inas-
much as it considers things with a view to all the kinds of signification);
therefore, just as the poetry we have considered above [§375] is a poetic
metaphysics (insofar as the theological poets imagined bodies in their

92
 In fact, in the Idea of the Work (§4) and the Annotations to the Chronologi-
cal Table (§64).
93
  See Homer, Odyssey 11.315–316; Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484;
5.360 and 367.
 146 The New Science

being largely as divine substances) so that same poetry is now considered

as a poetic logic (insofar as it signifies those bodies).
401 Logic comes from the term λόγος [logos], which, in its first and proper
sense, signifies “myth” [favola] which is translated in Italian as “speech”
[favela], and myth in Greek is also called a μῦθος [muthos],94 from which
comes the term in Latin, mutus [“mute”]; in mute times, what came into
being was a mental λόγος, which Strabo95 says in a golden passage had
existed before a spoken—that is, an articulated one. Hence, λόγος signi-
fies both “idea” and “word.” And it was appropriate that divine provi-
dence instituted orders in those religious times with a view to that eternal
property, that meditating upon religion is more important than talking
about it. Hence, that earliest language in those earliest mute times of
nations—as was stated in the Axioms—must have started with signs, ges-
tures, or objects which have a natural correspondence to their ideas; on
account of this, λόγος or verbum [“word”], also signifies “deed” in He-
brew and in Greek also signifies “thing” (as Thomas Gataker observes in
his De instumenti stylo96).
Indeed, to this we can add the definition of μῦθος as a vera narratio, or
true speech. This was the natural speech that, first, Plato and, later, Iam-
blichus said was spoken at one time in the world; because these two, as we
saw in the Axioms,97 were speaking like diviners, it turned out that Plato’s
toil to find it in the Cratylus was empty, and he was attacked for it by Ar-
istotle and Galen.98 For the first speech belonging to the theological poets
was not a speech according to the nature of the things themselves (this
must have been the sacred speech discovered by Adam, to whom God
granted divine onomathesia—that is, the proposing of names for things
according to the nature of each99). Rather, it was an imaginative speech
through animate substances, for the most part imagined to be divine.
402 Thus, for the sake of example, they understood (and, at first, by mute
pointing, explained) Jove, Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune as the
substance of the heavens, the earth, and the sea, which they imagined
were animate divinities and, consequently, with the truth of the senses,
believed them to be gods. With these three divinities—through what
we have stated above100 about poetic characters—they explained all the

94
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 235.
95
 Strabo, Geography 1.2.6.
96
  Thomas Gataker (1574–1654), English cleric and theologian, educated at St.
John’s College, Cambridge. Author of Of the Nature and Use of Lots (1619) and
Dissertatio de stylo Novi Testamenti (1648), among other works. As Battistini
notes, Gataker attributes the claim that logos means “thing” to Sebastian Pfo-
chen, a professor of Greek, and opposes him on the point.
97
  Axiom 57.
98
  See Plato, Cratylus 423c–e; Aristotle, De interpretatione 16a; Galen, De placi-
tis Hippocratis et Platonis libri novem.
S 99
  See Genesis 2:19–20.
N 100
  See Axioms 47–49.
L
146
Book Two 147

things pertaining to the heavens, the earth, and the sea, and so with other
deities, they signified other kinds of things by the divinity pertaining to
them (so all flowers by Flora, all fruits by Pomona). We ourselves do the
complete opposite of this for things of the spirit—such as the faculties
of the human mind, the passions, virtues, vices, the sciences, the arts—
we make ideas of them, largely in feminine form, and under these ideas,
we subsume all the causes, all the properties, and, finally, all the effects
pertaining to each. For when we wish to treat of spiritual things outside
of the intellect, we must receive succor from the imagination so as to be
able to articulate them and, like painters, must devise human images of
them. However, the theological poets, because they were not able to make
use of the intellect, labored in a more sublime, and completely opposite,
way: they gave sense and passion, as we have seen, to bodies, even bodies
as vast as the heavens, the earth, the sea; later, as these vast imaginings
diminished and the ability to abstract grew more vigorous, these bodies
were taken for the diminished signs of them. And metonymy put on a
show of learned ignorance about the origins of human things which, up
until now, have been buried: Jove has become so small and so light that
he is carried in flight by an eagle; Neptune rides over the sea on a refined
chariot; and Cybele is seated upon a lion.
Consequently, mythology must be the speech proper to myths: the 403
term suggests as much. As a result, since myths are, as was demonstrated
above [§209], imaginative genera, mythology must be the allegory appro-
priate to it; the term which comes to define allegory, as was observed in
the Axioms,101 is diversiloquium. Inasmuch as with an identity not of pro-
portion, but (as the Scholastics would say) of predicability, the allegories
signify different species or different individuals as comprehended under
their genus, they must have a univocal significance, comprehending one
reason common to all the species, or individuals: for example, with Achil-
les, an idea of valor common to all those who have strength; with Ulysses,
an idea of prudence common to all those who are wise. As a result, al-
legories of this sort must be the etymologies of poetic speech in which
must be given their univocal origins, just as those of vernacular tongues
are more often analogical. And, indeed, one can add to this the definition
of the very term “etymology,” which means the same as veriloquium102
[“true speech”] in the same way that we defined myth as a vera narratio.

Corollaries
concerning poetic tropes, monstrosities, and transformations

I. For this Poetic Logic, the corollaries are all the earliest poetic tropes, 404
of which the most luminous (and because the most luminous, also the

101
  Axiom 49.
102
  Compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 231.
 148 The New Science

most necessary and the most frequent) is metaphor.103 And it is a great

deal more praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things
through the metaphysics reasoned upon herein. The earliest poets gave
to bodies the being of animate substances with such capacities as the po-
ets themselves were capable, namely, sense and passion, and thus made
myths; as a result, every metaphor of this sort comes into being as a
myth in miniature.
Consequently, this allows for that art of criticism which is concerned
with the time when metaphor came to be in the languages; all metaphors
tending, by likenesses taken from bodies, to signify the labors of abstract
minds must come from the times in which the philosophies had begun to
be roughed out. This is demonstrated by the fact that, in every language,
the terms needed for the cultivating arts and the recondite sciences are
rustic in their origins.
405 It is worth observing that, in all languages, the majority of expres-
sions concerning inanimate things have been made by transferring to
them features from the human body and its parts and from the human
senses and from human passions. So “head” is used for what is on top
or at the beginning; “face” and “back” are used for what is in front
and behind; “eyes” is used for budding tendrils and for anything which
speaks to light entering the household; “mouth” is used for any open-
ing; “lip” is used for the rim of a vase or something similar; “teeth”
are used for plows, rakes, saws, combs; “beard” is used for the roots
of plants; “tongue” is used for the sea; “throat” is used for a river or
mountain gorge; “neck” for a strip of land; “arm” for the branch of
a river; “hand” is used for a small number; “lap” for a gulf in the sea;
“flank” for the sides of things; “rib” for the coast of sea; “heart” (in
Latin, they use umbilicus [“navel”])—for the middle of something; “leg”
and “foot” are used for countries, “foot” for the boundary and “foot-
ing” for basis or foundation; “flesh” and “bone” are used for the parts
of fruit; “vein” is used for water, rock, minerals; “blood,” which gives
life, is used for wine; “bowels” is used for the earth; the heavens and
the sea “smile” upon us; the wind “whistles”; the waves “murmur”; a
body, under great weight, “groans”; farmers in ancient Latium used to
say sitire agros [“thirsty fields”], laborare fructus [“the fruits of labor”],
luxuriari segetes [“reveling crops”]; farmers today say that plants “fall in
love,” that vines “go crazy,” and that trees “weep with sap.” And count-
less other such expressions can be gathered from every language. All
of this follows from that Axiom, “man in his ignorance makes himself
the measure of all things”104; indeed, as the examples adduced show,
he makes himself the measure of the entire world. For, just as ratio-
nal metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding
them, so this imaginative metaphysics demonstrates that man becomes

103
  Battistini observes that Vico’s image derives from the canonical definition of
S metaphor, citing Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 5.14.34 and 8.6.4.
N 104
  Axiom 1.
L
148
Book Two 149

all things by not understanding them; and perhaps this latter statement
has more truth than the former, for man, by understanding, articulates
his own mind and comprehends those things, but, by not understand-
ing, he makes those things from himself and, by transforming himself,
becomes those things.

II. Through this same logic, sprung from such a metaphysics, the earliest 406
poets must have given names to things from ideas which are particular
and sensible. Sensible ideas are the source of metonymy, particular ideas
the source of synecdoche.
The metonymy which substitutes authors for their works came into
being because authors were more often named than their works. The
metonymy which substitutes subject matter for its form and accidents
came into being because—as we stated in the Axioms105 above—they did
not know how to abstract forms and quality from subjects. And cer-
tainly in the metonymy which substitutes causes for their effects, those
causes are so many myths in miniature: by these causes, they imagine
feminine figures clothed in their effects—that is, ugly Poverty, sad Old
Age, pale Death.

III. Synecdoche turned figurative later when particulars were raised to 407
universals or when, later, parts were composed with other parts to make
wholes.
Thus “mortal,” at first, was properly used only of men, which must have
been the case because only they sense their mortality. “Head” was used
for the man, or for the person (this was frequently the case in common
Latin) because, in the woods, they saw from a distance only the head of a
man; the word “man” itself is an abstract term, comprehending the body
and the parts of the body, the mind and the faculties of the mind, the
spirit and the habits of the spirit.
So must it have come to pass that tignum and culmen used to signify,
in their proper sense in Latin, only a small rafter and thatching during
times when there was thatching; later, in the more lustrous times of cities,
they signified any materials or furnishings for buildings. So was tectum
[“roof ”] later used for an entire “house” because in the earliest times
any covering was enough for a house. So was puppis [“deck”] later used
for “ship” (the deck being the highest part of the ship and the first to be
seen from land) just as, in the return to barbarian times, “sail” was used
for “ship.” So was mucro [“tip”] was used for “sword” because, whereas
sword is an abstract term which, like a genus, comprehends the pummel,
hilt, edge and point, it was their sensing of the point which called forth
their terror. So was a material used for that of which is formed (as when
“iron” is used for “sword”) because they did not know how to abstract
the form from the material.

105
  Axiom 49.
 150 The New Science

That ribbon of synecdoche and metonymy,

Tertia messis erat106
[“It was three harvests later”],

came to be, without doubt, from a necessity of nature, for more than a
thousand years must have had to run their course for the astronomical
term “year” to have come into being among nations; indeed, everywhere
in the Florentine countryside, they say that they have “reaped so many
times” in order to express “so many years.”
And that knot of two synecdoches and a metonymy,
Post aliquot mea regna videns mirabor aristas107
[“After a few ears of corn, I shall wonder to see my rule”],

exposes how infelicitous expression was in the earliest rustic times, when
a number of ears of corn (even more particular than a number of har-
vests) is used to express “so many years.” And where was such infe-
licitous expression, the grammarians supposed that there was an excess
of art.

408 IV. Irony, certainly, could not have started before times in which there is
reflection, for it is formed, on the strength of reflection, from a falsehood
that takes on the mask of truth.
And here emerges a great principle of human things, which confirms the
origin of poetry herein discovered: the earliest men of gentile antiquity
were as entirely simple as children, who are by nature truthful; the earli-
est myths could not have devised anything false. Because of this, those
myths must necessarily have been, as we have defined them above [§401],
true narrations.

409 V. Through all this, it is demonstrated that although all the tropes (which
are all traced back to these four) have up until now been believed to be
the ingenious discoveries of writers, they were the necessary modes in
which the earliest poetic nations articulated themselves, and they have,
in their origins, all the properties native to them. However, when with
the greater articulation of the human mind, terms were discovered that
signified abstract forms, or genera, comprehending species within them
or composing out of parts a whole, such ways of speaking for the earliest
nations became figurative. And consequently, this starts the overturning
of two common errors by grammarians: first, that prose is a more proper
way of speaking than poetry; and, second, that prose, first, came as a
way of speaking and, later, verse.

  See Ovid, Heroides 6.57.

106

S  Virgil, Eclogues 1.69.

107

N
L
150
Book Two 151

VI. Poetic monstrosities and transformations arose from the necessity in 410
that earliest human nature, as we have demonstrated in the Axioms,108 of
not being able to abstract the forms or properties from subjects. Hence,
in keeping with their logic, they must have composed subjects so as to
compose those forms and must have destroyed a subject so as to separate
its primary form from a contrary form imposed upon it.
Such composition of ideas made for poetic monstrosities, just as, in the
Roman legal code (as was observed by Antoine Favre109 in his Jurispru-
dence of Papinianus), they called a child born of a prostitute a “monstros-
ity” because such a child has a human nature and, at the same time, that
bestial property belonging to those born of transient—that is, u­ ncertain—
couplings; such a monstrosity, we will find [§566], was someone born to
an honorable woman, but outside of the solemnity of nuptials, whom the
Law of the Twelve Tables commanded to be cast into the Tiber.

VII. The distinction of ideas makes for metamorphoses, an example 411

of which, among many others the Romans preserved from ancient ju-
risprudence, remains in their heroic phrase, FUNDUM FIERI [“to be
the ground”], as a way of saying autorem fieri110 [“to be the author”] of
something: for just as the ground sustains the farm or soil and whatever
is sowed, planted, or built there, so too someone who advocates some ac-
tion sustains it in that, without his advocacy, it would be overturned. For
the advocate—leaving behind the form of a thing which is in ­motion—
takes on the contrary form of a thing which is stable.

Corollaries
concerning the earliest nations speaking
through poetic characters

Poetic speech, on the strength of that poetic logic upon which we have 412
meditated, ran its course long into historical times, just as great, swift
rivers spread far into the seas and continue to carry fresh waters along
their violent course; it is with a view to this that, as Iamblichus claimed
in the Axiom111 above, that the Egyptians referred to everything discov-
ered advantageous for human life to Hermes Trismegistus; this statement
was confirmed in another Axiom, that “it is with the ideas and names of
men, women, and things which children have first seen that they later
apprehend and call all the men, women, and things which have some
similarity or relationship to those first ones.”112 And this was the great

108
  Axiom 49.
109
  Antoine Favre (1557–1624), Savoisian nobleman and jurist.
110
  See Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19.
111
  Axiom 49.
112
  Axiom 48.
 152 The New Science

natural source of the poetic characters by which the earliest peoples nat-
urally thought and spoke. If Iamblichus had reflected upon the nature
of human things and had combined it with his reference to the Egyptian
custom, as we stated in the Axioms,113 it is certain that he would not have
imposed by force the sublime mysteries of his Platonic wisdom upon the
mysteries of the commonplace wisdom of the Egyptians.
413 Now, with a view to this nature of children and with a view to that cus-
tom of the earliest Egyptians, we state that poetic speech, on the strength
of the poetic characters through which it speaks, can offer many and
important discoveries concerning antiquity.

414 I. It seems that Solon must have been some man wise in commonplace wis-
dom, who was the head of the plebs in the earliest times when Athens was
an aristocratic republic; this is, indeed, preserved where it tells us that, at
first, Athens was held by the optimates. This, as we will demonstrate in this
book, was universally the case for all heroic republics: in such republics,
the heroes—or nobles—said, on account of a certain nature which they
believed to have been of divine origin, that they properly belonged to the
gods and, consequently, that the auspices properly belonged to them; on
the strength of this claim, they kept enclosed within their orders all the
public and private laws of the heroic city, and to the plebeians, whom they
believed to be of bestial origin and, consequently, to be men without gods
and without the auspices, the nobles conceded only the uses of natural lib-
erty; this is one of the great principles of the things which are reasoned
upon for almost this entire work. It was Solon who had admonished the
plebeians to reflect upon themselves and to recognize that they have a hu-
man nature equal to the nobles and that, as a consequence, they must have
a claim equal to the nobles in civil law. This is how it seems, unless, that is,
this Solon was the Athenian plebeians themselves, considered in this aspect.
415 For the ancient Romans must have also had such a Solon among them:
among the Romans, the plebeians in heroic contests with the nobles (as
ancient Roman history plainly tells us) said of the Fathers from whom
Romulus composed the Senate and from whom the patricians came that
they NON ESSE CAELO DEMISSOS114 [“had not been sent down
from the heavens”]—that is, they had no such vaunted divine origins.
And the plebeians said that Jove was fair to all: such is the civil history
of the phrase,
Jupiter omnibus aequus115
[“Jupiter is fair to all”],

upon which the learned, later, imposed that tenet that all minds are equal
and that they took their differences from differences in the organization

113
  Axiom 49.
S 114
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.
N 115
  Here Vico is drawing upon Virgil, Aeneid 10.112.
L
152
Book Two 153

of the body and from different civil educations. It is with this reflection
that the Roman plebeians started to move towards a civil liberty equal
with the patricians and, in the end, changed Rome from an aristocratic
to a popular republic (we noted this as a hypothesis in the Annotations
on the Chronological Table [§§104–114] when we reasoned upon the
Publilian law as an idea; and we will make it possible to see [§§599–618]
by what is actual that this is what came to pass not only in Rome but also
in all the other ancient republics; and we will demonstrate [§620] with
both reasons and authority that, beginning from that reflection of So-
lon, the plebs of peoples universally changed republics from aristocratic
to popular).
Consequently, Solon was made the author of that celebrated saying, 416
NOSCE TE IPSUM [“know thyself ”], which, on account of the great
civil advantage Athenians drew from it, was inscribed on all the public
places of the city; the learned, later, wished to state it as a great maxim
concerning metaphysical and moral things (which it actually is), and
they considered Solon a man wise in recondite wisdom and made him
the prince of the seven sages of Greece.
In this fashion, because all the orders and laws in Athens which formed
a democratic republic took their start from this reflection, the Athenians
declared, in that manner of the earliest peoples thinking through poetic
characters, that those orders and laws had come from Solon, just as the
Egyptians declared everything discovered advantageous for human life
to come from Hermes Trismegistus.

II. Thus to Romulus must be attributed all the laws concerning the 417
orders.

III. And to Numa must be attributed those laws concerning sacred 418
things and divine ceremonies, which Roman religion later displayed in
times of greater pomp.

IV. And to Tullus Hostilius must be attributed all the laws and orders 419
pertaining to military discipline.

V. To Servius Tullius must be attributed the census, the foundation of 420

the democratic republics, and a great number of other laws concerning
popular liberty: as a result of this, he was praised by Tacitus116 as prae-
cipuus sanctor legum [“principal enactor of sacrosanct laws”]. For, as we
will demonstrate [§§619–623], the census of Servius Tullius was the basis
of the aristocratic republic by which the nobles conveyed to the plebe-
ians bonitary domain over the fields, and it was for this reason that the
tribunes of the plebs were created, to defend the plebeians in this share
of natural liberty and who, later, gradually made for their pursuit of all

116
 Tacitus, Annals 3.26.4.
 154 The New Science

of civil liberty. And so, the census of Servius Tullius, because these oc-
casions and initiatives started from it, became the census that was the
basis of the popular Roman republic, as was reasoned upon above in the
annotation of the Publilian law [§107] by way of hypothesis and as will
be demonstrated herein [§619] to be true by what is actual.

421 VI. To Tarquinius Priscus must be attributed insignia and devices, by

which, later, during the most luminous times in Rome the majesty of the
Roman empire was resplendent.

422 VII. Thus was it that many laws must have been affixed to the Twelve
Tables which, as we will demonstrate herein [§§638, 957, 960, 1001], were
decreed in later times. And, as was fully demonstrated in my Principles
of Universal Law,117 because the law by which the nobles shared quiritary
domain in common with the plebs was the first law to be inscribed on
public tables and because it was solely for this law that the decemvirs
were created, all the laws which equalized liberty and which were later
inscribed on public tables, with a view to this aspect of popular liberty,
were brought back to the decemvirs.
Indeed, take the laws concerning Greek luxury at funerals as a demon-
stration of this: the decemvirs must not have taught the Romans such
luxury in their prohibiting it, but the prohibition came after the Romans
had accepted this practice, which itself could not have come to pass until
after the wars with the Tarentines and with Pyrrhus—that is, after they
started to become familiar with the Greeks. And, consequently, it is the
case that, as Cicero118 observed, this law translates into Latin the very
words in which it had been conceived in Athens.

423 VIII. Thus was it with Draco (author of the laws inscribed in blood at a
time which Greek history tells us, as was stated above [§414]) that Athens
was held by the optimates; this was, as we will see below [§592], at a time
of heroic republics when, as Greek history also recounts, Heraclids were
spread throughout all of Greece, even in Attica—as we proposed above
in the Chronological Table [§77]. These Heraclids eventually settled in
the Peloponnesus and established their rule in Sparta, which we have
found to have certainly been an aristocratic republic. And this Draco
must have been one of the serpents of the Gorgon nailed to the shield of
Perseus: you will find [§§542, 616] that this shield signifies the power of
the laws because this shield, with its terrifying penalties, turned to stone
those who looked upon it, just as, in sacred history, such laws, because
they were exemplary in their punishments, were called leges sanguinis119
[“blood laws”]; it was with this shield that Minerva armed herself—who

117
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.36–37 (Cristofolini 706–727).
118
 Cicero, De legibus 2.25.64.
S 119
  The locution “blood laws” does not appear in Scripture, but (as Battistini
N notes) Vico may have in mind Hebrews 9:19–22 or Exodus 24:8.
L
154
Book Two 155

was, as will be explained more fully below [§§542, 616], called ᾽Αθηνᾶ
[Athēna]). And for the Chinese, who to this day write in hieroglyphics a
dragon (it must make one wonder that this poetic manner of thinking
and expressing themselves is the same for two nations, so distant from
one another in time and place) as the insignia for civil power. This must
have been the case for Draco, for we have only these things told of him
in all of Greek history.

IX. This same discovery of poetic characters confirms for us that Aesop 424
be placed well before the Seven Sages of Greece—as we promised in the
Notes on the Chronological Table [§91] that we would be make it pos-
sible to see in this place.
For such philological truth has been confirmed for us by the history of
human ideas: the Seven Sages were admired for their starting to give
precepts of moral and civil teachings through maxims, for example,
the celebrated maxim of Solon, the prince of the Seven Sages, nosce te
­ipsum—we have seen above [§416] that this was, first, a civil teaching and,
later, was translated into a metaphysical and moral teaching.
However, prior to this translation, Aesop had offered his prescriptions
through likenesses which, even prior to this, the poets had used for ex-
pressing themselves. And the order of human ideas is to observe the
similarities in things, first, for expression and, later, for proof; and such
proof proceeds, first, by means of example (for which a single example
suffices) and, eventually, by means of induction (which has need of many
examples). Hence, Socrates, father of all the sects of the philosophers,
introduced dialectics with induction, which, later, Aristotle made com-
plete with the syllogism, which cannot stand without a universal.
However, for more restricted minds, it is enough to draw upon a single
similarity for them to be persuaded, as the good Menenius Agrippa does
with fable [favola] of the sort for which Aesop is founder: with this fable,
he reduced the unrestrained Roman plebs to obedience.120
That Aesop was a poetic character representing the socii—that is, the 425
familial servants of the heroes—the well-raised Phaedrus discovers for
us, with divine inspiration, in the prologue to his Fables:
Nunc fabularum cur sit inventum genus
Brevi docebo. Servitus obnoxia
Quia quae volebat, non audebat dicere
Affectus proprios in fabellas transtulit.
Aesopi illuius semitam feci viam.121
[“Now as to why the writing of fables was invented,
here, in brief, is what I have to show. A fearful servant,
because he did not dare to say what he intended

  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.32.

120

 Phaedrus, Fabulae 3.9–12 and 3.14.

121
 156 The New Science

conveyed the feelings proper to him in fables.

From the trail that famous Aesop blazed I make a path”]

This is clearly confirmed for us in the fable concerning the Society of

the Lion.122 For the plebeians were called the socii of the heroic city, as
was noted in the Axioms,123 and they came to have a share in the toil and
danger of wars, but not in the reward and conquest.
Accordingly, Aesop was called a servant because the plebeians, as will
be demonstrated below [§§553–569], were the familial servants of the
heroes. And we are told that he was a brute, because civil beauty was
deemed to be born from solemn marriages, and only the heroes con-
tracted marriage, as will also be shown below [§565]. In exactly the same
way, Thersites was said to be a brute, who must have been a charac-
ter representing the plebeians who served the heroes during the Trojan
War: he was beaten by Ulysses with the scepter of Agamemnon,124 just as
the ancient Roman plebs were beaten with whipping rods on their bare
shoulders by the nobles regium in morem [“in royal fashion”], as Sallust
tells us in St. Augustine’s City of God,125 until the Porcian law eventually
freed Roman shoulders from whipping rods.126
426 Such prescriptions, therefore, advantageous for living in civil freedom,
must have been the sense nurtured by the plebs of the heroic cities, as
dictated by natural reason. It was to represent the plebeians in the aspect
that Aesop was made a poetic character; later, he was connected with
fables concerning moral philosophy, and in this respect Aesop was made
the first moral philosopher, in the same fashion in which Solon was made
a wise man who ordered the free Athenian republic with the laws.
And because Aesop offered his prescriptions in fables, he was made to
come before Solon, who offered his prescriptions by maxims.
Such fables must have first been conceived in heroic verse. So was there a
later tradition that they had been conceived in the iambic verse in which,
as we will find herein below [§§463–464], the Greek gentiles spoke some-
where between the heroic verse and the prose in which the written fables
came to us.

427 X. In this fashion, the earliest authors of commonplace wisdom were

connected with the later discoveries of recondite wisdom. And Zoroaster
in the Near East, Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt, Orpheus in Greece,
and Pythagoras in Italy, although, at first, they were lawgivers, they were
eventually believed, later, to be philosophers, just as today Confucius is

122
 Phaedrus, Fabulae 1.5.
123
  Axiom 79.
124
 Homer, Iliad 2.265–269.
S 125
 Augustine, City of God 2.18.
N 126
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.9.6.
L
156
Book Two 157

in China. For certainly those Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia, as will

be shown herein [§1087], were given this name to signify that they were
nobles who, because they had tried to reduce the popular republics to
which they belonged to aristocratic republics, were all killed. And the
Golden Hymns of Pythagoras were demonstrated above [§128] to be an
imposture, as were the oracles of Zoroaster, the Poimander of Hermes
Trismegistus, the Orphics—that is, the poems of Orpheus. No book of
philosophy written by Pythagoras came down to those of antiquity, and
Philolaus was the first Pythagorean who wrote one, as was observed by
Scheffer127 in his De philosophia Italica.

Corollaries
concerning the origins of languages and letters,
and therein the origins of hieroglyphics, of
laws, of names, of insignia of noble
houses, of medallions, and of
money; and, so, the origins
of the earliest language and
literature of the
natural law of
the gentile
peoples

Now, from the theology of poets—that is, from the poetic metaphys- 428
ics—and through the poetic logic, which was born from theology, we
proceed to discover the origins of languages and letters, concerning
which there are as many opinions as there are learned men who have
written about them. Thus Gerald Jan Voss,128 in his Grammatica, says:
de literarum inventio multi multa congerunt et fuse et confuse ut ab iis
incertus magis abeas quam veneras dudum [“concerning the discovery of
letters, so many have put together so many things with such profusion
and confusion that you go away from them more uncertain than when
you came”]; and Herman Hugo,129 in his De origine scribendi, observes:
nulla alia res est in qua plures magisque pugnantes sententiae reperiantur
atque haec tractatio de literarum et scriptionis origine. Quantae senten-
tiarum pugnae? Quid credas? Quid non credas? [“There is no other thing
for which one finds more and more conflicting thoughts than for that
discussion of the origin of letters and writing. Why so many conflicting
thoughts? Whom should one believe? Not believe?”]. Hence, Bernard

127
  Johannes Scheffer (1621–1679), Swedish humanist born in Strasbourg, pro-
fessor of eloquence and government at Uppsala University.
128
  The reference is to Voss’s Aristarchus, sive de Arte Grammatica libri septem 1.9.
129
  Herman Hugo (1588–1629), Belgian Jesuit and author of De prima scribendi
origine et universae rei literariae antiquitate (1617).
 158 The New Science

von Mallinckrodt,130 in his De arte typographica, followed by Ingewald

Eling131 in his Historia linguae Graecae, claimed, on account of the in-
comprehensibility of the fashion in which they came to be, that they
were a divine discovery.
429 However, the learned themselves entirely make for this difficulty over
the fashion in which they came to be insofar as they deem the origin of
letters to be a thing separate from the origin of language, whereas they
are by nature connected. Indeed, they ought to have noticed this in the
terms “grammar” and “character.” In the case of the first term, although
“grammar” is defined as the art of speaking, γράμματα [grammata] are
letters; as a result, grammar should have been defined as the art of writ-
ing, as Aristotle132 defined it and as it actually came into being in the first
place when, as will be demonstrated herein [§431], all nations first spoke
through writing because they, at first, were mute.
And in the case of the second term, “character” means “idea,” “form,”
“model”; and certainly, there were poetic characters before there were
those characters which express sounds—so does Josephus vigorously
maintain against Apion the Greek grammarian that, in the times of
Homer, they had not yet found those alphabetic letters called “common”
[volgari].
In addition, if such letters had been the forms expressing sounds and not
conventional signs, they would have to have been uniform for all nations,
just as expressed sounds are uniform for all nations.
Because of this desperate lack of knowledge about the fashion in which
letters and language come to be, it was also unknown that the thinking
of the nations was done through poetic characters, that speaking was
done through myths, and that writing was done through hieroglyphs.
These (having by their nature the most certainty) ought to have been the
principles of philosophy, with a view to human ideas, and of philology,
with a view to human terms.
430 For reasoning of the sort in which must engage herein, let us offer
a small taste of the many opinions held, as uncertain and flimsy and
incongruent and vain and ridiculous as they are, opinions which are so
many and of such a kind that one must leave off relating them all.
Let this be a taste of them: insofar as, during the return to barbarism,
Scandinavia was called (on account of the vanity of nations) the vagina
gentium [“the womb of the gentiles”] and was believed to be the mother
of all the other nations in the world, Johannes and Olaus Magnus (on ac-

130
  Bernard von Mallinckrodt (1591–1644), noted book collector, dean of Mün-
ster Cathedral, Catholic convert, and originator of the term “incunabula.” The
work Vico cites was published in Cologne in 1640.
131
  Lorenz Ingewald Eling, professor of logic and metaphysics at Uppsala. The
S text mentioned by Vico was published in Leipzig in 1691.
N 132
 Aristotle, Topics 6.2, 141b31.
L
158
Book Two 159

count of the vanity of the learned) were of the opinion that their Goths
had preserved letters, since the beginning of the world, divinely discov-
ered by Adam, and for this dream they were ridiculed by all the learned.
However, they were not ridiculed so much that Jon van Gorp resisted
following them and proposing, further, that his own language, Dutch,
which is not too different from Saxon, had come down from the earthly
paradise and was the mother of all other languages. Joseph Justus Sca-
liger, Philipp Camerarius, Christian Becman, and Marten Schoock133
made of these opinions they were myths.
And, indeed, this vanity became more swollen and burst forth in that
work of Olaus Rudbeck134 entitled Atlantica, which wishes to say that
Greek letters grew out of Norse runes; that these runes were inverted
Phoenician letters to which Cadmus gave an order and sound similar to
Hebrew; that eventually the Greeks straightened and rounded these let-
ters with a ruler and compass; and that because the discoverer of these
letters was called Merkurssman among the Nords, the Mercury who dis-
covered the letters for the Egyptians was a Goth.
So great a license in opining about the origins of letters should make the
reader alert in receiving the things that we are going to say, not only with
an indifference in seeing what they draw out by means of novelty, but
also with attention in meditating upon them and taking them as what
they must be, as principles pertaining to the whole of human and divine
wisdom of gentile antiquity.
Consider the following principles. The earliest men conceived ideas of 431
things through characters of substances animated by their imaginations.
As mutes, they expressed themselves with gestures and objects, which
had a natural correspondence with the ideas (as, for example, when the
act of swinging three times or three ears of corn signified three years).
And they expressed themselves with a language whose significations
were natural (this is the language that Plato and Iamblichus135 said was
at one time spoken in the world, which must have been the most an-
cient language of Atlantis and which the erudite wish to say expressed
ideas through the nature of things—that is, through the properties natu-
ral to them). It is from these principles, we would say, that all the phi-
losophers and all the philologists ought to have started in treating the
origins of languages and letters. Instead, they treated these two things
(connected, as we stated, by nature) separately. Hence, they encountered
such difficulties in their research into the origins of letters, even though

133
  Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), tenth child and third son of Julius Cae-
sar Scaliger, and nemesis of Jesuits. Philipp Camerarius (1537–1624), German
jurist and historian. Christian Becman (1580–1648), Reformed theologian. Mar-
ten Schoock (1614–1659), Dutch author of Diluvium Noachi universale.
134
  Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), professor of medicine at Uppsala and author of
the four-volume Atland eller Manheim (Latin edition Atlantica sive Manheim).
135
 Plato, Cratylus 423c–e; Iamblichus, On the Egyptian Mysteries 7.4.
 160 The New Science

the ­difficulties involved are equal to those concerning the origins of lan-
guages, for which they had little or no concern.
432 Therefore, at the start of our reasoning on this, we posit for our first
principle that philological Axiom:136 the Egyptians tell us that, through-
out the entire course of the world prior to them, there were three lan-
guages spoken, corresponding in number and order to the course of
three ages in the world also prior to them—the age of gods, the age of
heroes, and the age of men. And they said that the first language was
hieroglyphic—sacred, or divine; the second was symbolic—language
by signs or heroic devices; and the third is epistolary—language for
those distant from one another to communicate the needs immediate
to their lives.
Concerning these three languages, there are two golden passages from
Homer in his Iliad, through which it is plain that the Greeks agreed with
the Egyptians in this matter. The first137 is where he tells us that Nestor
lived through three lifetimes of men speaking different languages; as a
result, Nestor must have been a poetic character representing the chro-
nology established by the three languages corresponding to the three ages
of the Egyptians, whence the expression “to live as long as Nestor” must
have meant to live as long as the world. The second passage138 is where
he tells us that Aeneas recounted to Achilles that there were humans
speaking a different language when Ilium started to be inhabited, after
Troy was conveyed to the seashore and Pergamum became its fortress.
To this first principle, we add the tradition (also from the Egyptians) that
their Thoth, or Mercury, discovered both laws and letters.
433 With this truth, we group the following other truths. For the Greeks, the
words “name” and “character” have the same significance. Because of
this, the church fathers used the two interchangeably when reasoning de
divinis characteribus [“concerning divine characters”] and de divinis no-
minibus [“concerning divine names”].139 And the terms nomen [“name”]
and definitio [“definition”], signify the same thing when, in rhetoric,
what is called a quaestio nominis [“inquiry about a name”] is an inquiry
about the definition of what something actually is.140 And, in medicine,
the nomenclatura [“nomenclature”] for diseases is the area that defines
that nature of those diseases. For the Romans, “names” signify, first and
properly, the households from which many families branched. And that
the earliest Greeks also considered names to have a significance of this
sort is demonstrated by their patronymics, which signify the names of
the Fathers of which the poets so often make use, and above all Homer,

136
  Axiom 28.
137
 Homer, Iliad 1.250–252.
138
 Homer, Iliad 20.216–218.
139
  This is an oblique reference to the Divine Names of Pseudo–Dioynsius.
S 140
  Vico makes the same claim at De antiquissima 1.1; see On the Most Ancient
N Wisdom of the Italians, p. 24[25].
L
160
Book Two 161

the first of all of them; this is exactly the way that the Roman patricians
were defined by a tribune of the plebs in Livy,141 qui possunt nomine
ciere patrem, “those who are able to use the household name of their
fathers”; these patronymics, later, were lost in the popular liberty of
the rest of Greece, but were preserved by the Heraclids in Sparta, an
aristocratic republic. In the Roman legal code, nomen signifies “right.”
In Greek, the similar term νόμος [nomos] signifies “law”; and from νόμος
comes νόμισμα [nomisma], which, as Aristotle142 noted, means “money.”
And, for the etymologists, νόμος comes to be called numus [“money”]
in Latin. For the French, loi signifies “law” and aloi means “money.”
And in the return to barbarism, the term “canon” was used both for an
ecclesiastical law and what the tenant under lease paid to the patron of
land who granted the lease;143 it was through this uniformity in think-
ing, perhaps, that in Latin the term ius named both law and the fat of
the sacrificial victim which was owed to Jove, who was originally called
Ious, from which later were derived the genitives, Iovis [“of Jove”] and
iuris [“of the law”], as was noted above [§398]; so too for the Hebrews,
of the three parts of the animal which they made as a peace offering,
the fat was the one which was owed to God and which was burned on
the altar.144 In Latin, praedium [“landed property”] (this must have been
used for country properties prior to urban ones) were called such, as we
will make it possible to see [§486], insofar as the first cultivated lands
were the first praedae [“spoils”] in the world; hence, the first domesti-
cating was of lands of this sort, lands which on account of this, in the
ancient Roman legal code, were called manucapatae (the sense of this
is retained in the term manceps, someone who has an obligation to the
public treasury in real estate). And those lands called manucapatae must
have originally been, and have been called, mancipia [“repossessions”],
which is certainly the sense in which we must understand the section in
the Law of the Twelve Tables saying QUI NEXUM FACIET MANCI-
PIUMQUE—that is, “whoever makes a consignment of his bond with
this consigns his freehold [poderi].” Hence, Italians were of the same
mind as those of ancient Latium in calling the Latin manucapatae free-
holds [poderi], for they have been acquired by force; one is further per-
suaded by the fact that, in the return to barbarism, they called the fields
and their boundaries presas terrarum [“captured lands”]. The Spanish
call brave enterprises prendas. The Italians name family coats of arms
imprese and use termini [“boundaries”] to signify “terms,” a sense re-
tained in Scholastic dialectic; family coats of arms, in addition to im-
prese, are called insegne, whence comes the word insegnare [“to teach”];
so too, Homer, in whose time the alphabetic letters called “common”

141
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.
142
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.5, 1133a30.
143
  That is, a Roman law contract known as an emphyteusis. Vico will allude to
emphyteusis again at §§489, 573, 575, 1067.
144
  Exodus 29:13; Leviticus 3:3–5, 4:8–10, 8:16, 9:10.
 162 The New Science

[volgari] had not yet been found, says that the l­ etter from Proetus to Eu-
reia against Bellerophon was written in σήματα [sēmata], “in signs.”145
434 Of all these things, let us make a summary with these final three in-
contestable truths. First, since it has been demonstrated that the earli-
est gentile nations were all mute at their start, they must have expressed
themselves with gestures and objects that have a natural correspondence
to their ideas. Second, it was with signs that they must have secured the
borders of their freeholds and had perpetual witnesses of their rights.
Third, all of them had founded the practice of using money.
All these truths will give us herein the origins of languages and letters;
and, from them, the origins of hieroglyphics, of laws, of names, of the
insignia of noble houses, of money, and of the language and writing
in which the earliest natural law of the gentile peoples was spoken and
written.146
435 And so as to establish from all this these beginnings more firmly,
we must here overturn that false opinion that hieroglyphics were dis-
covered by philosophers so as to hide within them the mysteries of a
lofty recondite wisdom, as was believed by the Egyptians. For it was a
natural necessity common to all the earliest nations to speak in hiero-
glyphics—as was proposed above in the Axioms.147 So, in Africa, to what
we have already considered in the case of the Egyptians, let us add the
case of the Ethiopians, following Heliodorus148 in his On the Things of
Ethiopia: they used as hieroglyphics the tools of all the arts of building.
In the Near East, these same hieroglyphics must have been the magical
characters of the Chaldeans. In northern Asia, as we have seen above
[§§48, 99], the king of the Scythians, Idanthyrsus (at a time quite late
in the Scythians’ boundless antiquity, in which they defeated even the
Egyptians, who themselves boasted that they were the most ancient of
all nations) responded with five real words to Darius the Great, who had
threatened Idanthyrsus with war—that is, with a frog, a mouse, a bird,
a ploughshare, and a bow of an archer. The frog signified that Idan-
thyrsus was born from the land of Scythia, just as frogs are born from
the land during the rainy season, and that he was the son of that land.
The mouse signified that he, like a mouse, had made a house where he
was born, that is, had founded a people. The bird signified that, in that
house, the auspices were his—that is, as we will see below [§490], he was
subject to no one but to God. The ploughshare signified that he had
reduced those lands to cultivation, and so had domesticated them and
made them his own by strength. Finally, the bow of an archer signified
that he had, as the supreme commander of armed forces in Scythia, the
duty and ability to defend it. Compare this explanation, so natural and

145
  See Homer, Iliad 6.168.
146
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
S 147
  Axiom 57.
N 148
 Heliodorus, Aethiopica 4.8.1.
L
162
Book Two 163

necessary, with the ridiculous ones that, in St. Cyril,149 are given by the
counselors of Darius, and it will prove to be general evidence of the fact
that up until now no one has known the true and proper use made of the
hieroglyphics, which the earliest peoples gave currency (this is especially
the case when you combine the interpretations the counselors of Darius
gave to the Scythian hieroglyphics with those far-fetched, overwrought,
and contorted interpretations the learned have given to the Egyptian
hieroglyphics). In Italy, Roman history has not left us wanting for some
tradition about hieroglyphs in the mute, heroic response that Tarquinius
Superbus sent to his son in Gabii by making it possible for the messenger
to see that he was cutting of the heads of poppies with a stick which he
held in his own hands: some have believed that he did this out of pride
when what was needed was total discretion. In northern Europe, Taci-
tus150 observes, in writing about their customs, that the ancient Germans
did not know of literarum secretum [“secret letters”]—that is, did not
know how to write hieroglyphics of their own—and this must have re-
mained the case up until the time of Frederick the Swabian, even up un-
til the time of Rudolph of Austria, after which they started to write state
documents in common German script. In northern France, there was
the hieroglyphic way of speaking, the so-called rebus de Picardie [“the
things from Picardy”], which must have been, as in Germany, speak-
ing with things—that is, hieroglyphics like those of Idanthyrsus. Up in
Ultima Thule, and in its most remote part, Scotland, Hector Boece tells
us in his History of Scotland that this nation, in ancient times, wrote
in hieroglyphics. In the West Indies, the Mexicans were discovered to
write in hieroglyphics, and Jan de Laet151 in his Description of New India
describes the hieroglyphics of the West Indians as the different heads of
animals, plants, flowers, fruits, and says that through their stock they
distinguish the different families, which is exactly the use that family
coats of arms have in our world. In the East Indies, the Chinese to this
day write in hieroglyphics.
In this way, the vanity of the learned is deflated (this came later than 436
that of the extremely vain Egyptians and was not nearly as inflated),
the vanity that all the other wise men of the world had learned from the
Egyptians how to hide their recondite wisdom within hieroglyphics.
Having posited the principles pertaining to the Poetic Logic and hav- 437
ing dissipated the vanity of the learned, let us return to the three lan-
guages of the Egyptians; on the first of these, the language of gods, as
was noted in the Axioms,152 the Greeks agreed with the Egyptians, for

149
 In fact, Clement, Stromata 5.8.
150
 Tacitus, Germania 19.1–2. Vico’s interpretation of this passage is highly
questionable.
151
  Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), Dutch geographer, director of the Dutch
West India Company, author of the History of the New World. Vico’s reference
is to the 1633 edition of this text.
152
  Axiom 29.
 164 The New Science

Homer, in five passages from the whole of his two poems, mentions a
language more ancient than his own (his own language, certainly, being
heroic) and called the language of the gods. Three passages are in the
Iliad:153 the first is where he tells us of someone called Briareus by the
gods, Aegaeon by men; the second is where he recounts a bird called
χαλκίδα [chalkida] by the gods, κύμινδιν [kumindin] by men. In the third,
there is a river in Troy which the gods call Xanthus, men call Scaman-
drus. In the Odyssey,154 there are two passages: first, that the gods call
πλαγκτάς πέτρας [plagktas petras], those whom men speak of as Scylla
and Charybdis; second, where Mercury gives Ulysses a secret antidote
to the witchcraft of Circe, the name of which is μῶλυ [mōly] for the gods
and knowledge of which is completely denied to men. Concerning these
passages, Plato155 has many things to say, but emptily; as a result of
Plato, Dio Chrysostom156 later accuses Homer of the imposture that he
understood the language of the gods.
However, we may harbor some doubts about the agreement of the
Greeks with the Egyptians: the gods in these passages perhaps ought be
understood as representing heroes who, as will be shown a little below
[§449], took for themselves the names of gods and, from on high, called
the plebeians of their cities “men,” just as in the return to barbarism,
they called vassals homines [“human beings”] (as was observed with
wonder by Hotman157) and great lords, then as well as during the return
to barbarism, made it a part of their glory that they possessed wondrous
medical secrets. And so, these passages might show nothing more than
the differences between the noble and common tongues.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt in the case of Latin, for Varro set
to work diligently to collect thirty thousand gods, as was noted in the
Axioms,158 which must have been enough for a dictionary of divine
names copious enough to express every human need had by the peoples
of Latium, which, in those simple and spare times, must have been very
few, because their needs were the necessities of life. The Greeks also
counted thirty thousand gods, as was also stated in the Axioms,159 mak-
ing deities out of every rock, every fountain or brook, every plant, every
reef (numbered among these are the dryads, the hamadryads, the oreads,
and naiads) just as those in the Americas make gods out of all the things
which exceed their limited capacities. As a result, the myths about the

153
 Homer, Iliad 1.403–402; 14.291; 20.74.
154
 Homer, Odyssey 23.327–328; 10.305.
155
  See Plato, Cratylus 391d–392e.
156
 Dio Chrysostom (40–115 CE), Greek orator. The reference is to Oration 11.23.
157
  François Hotman (1524–1590), French Protestant jurist whose writings are
important for Vico’s interpretation of medieval law. The reference is to De verbis
feudalibus, p. 764.
158
  Axiom 30.
S 159
  Axiom 30.
N
L
164
Book Two 165

gods in Latium and Greece must be the earliest true hieroglyphics, com-
parable to the sacred characters of the Egyptians.
The second way of speaking, corresponding to the age of heroes, the 438
Egyptians claimed was speaking through symbols, which are reducible
to heroic emblems; these must have been the mute similes which Homer
calls σήματα [sēmata]—the signs in which heroes wrote—and, conse-
quently, must have been the metaphors, images, similes, or comparisons
which later, in articulated language, made for all the resourcefulness of
poetic speech.
For certainly Homer (following the resolute denial by Josephus the Jew160
that any more ancient writer than Homer has come down to us) comes to
be for us the first author of the Greek language and since we have from
the Greeks everything that has reached us from gentile antiquity, he was
the first author of all of gentile antiquity.
Among the peoples of Latium, the earliest memories of their language
are preserved in fragments of the Salian hymns. And the first writer of
whom we are told is the poet, Livius Andronicus.161
And in the recurrence of barbarism in Europe, with the birth of other
languages, the earliest language of the Spanish, and consequently of he-
roic poetry, was that which is called the language “of romance”; for the
writers of romances were the heroic poets of the returned barbarous
times. In France, the first writer in common French was Arnaut Daniel
Pacca,162 the first of all the Provençal poets who flourished in the elev-
enth century. And, finally, the first writers in Italy were the Florentine
and Sicilian rhymers.
The epistolary way of speaking for the Egyptians—agreeable to the 439
expression of the immediate needs of common life among those distant
from one another—must have come to be among the common run of
a principal people in Egypt, which must have been the people of The-
bes, whose king, Ramses, as was stated above [§44], extended his power
over the entirety of that great nation; this is because, for the Egyptians,
this language corresponds to the age of men, those who were called the
plebs of heroic peoples, as distinct from the heroes, as was stated above
[§437]; and this language must be conceived as having come forth from
free agreement among those plebs through this eternal property, namely,
that commonplace speech and writing is a right of peoples. Hence, when
Emperor Claudius discovered three additional letters needed in the Latin
language, the Roman people would not accept them, just as the Italians

160
  Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12.
161
  Livius Andronicus (c. 284–205 BCE), earliest known Roman poet and the
first translator of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin.
162
  Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1200), Occitan troubadour whom Dante praises as a
“better craftsman” (miglio fabbro) at Purgatorio 26.117.
 166 The New Science

have not accepted those discovered by Giorgio Trissino,163 although their

loss is felt in Italian speech.
440 This epistolary, or common, way of speaking for the Egyptians must
have been written in letters equally common, which are found to resem-
ble the common alphabetic letters of the Phoenicians. Hence, it is neces-
sarily the case that one of them must have received the letters from the
other.164
For, from this, those of the opinion that the Egyptians were the first dis-
coverers of all the things necessary or advantageous for human society
must conclude that the Egyptians taught them to the Phoenicians.
However, Clement of Alexandria, who must have been better informed
than any other author on things pertaining to Egypt, tells us that Sanc-
huniathon, or Sancuniates the Phoenician—who is placed in the Chron-
ological Table in the age of heroes in Greece—had written Phoenician
history in common alphabetic letters, and so he proposes Sanchuniathon
as the first author of gentile antiquity to have written in common alpha-
betic characters. On account of this passage, it has been said that the
Phoenicians, who certainly were the first merchant people in the world,
entered into Egypt for reasons of trade and brought with them their
common alphabetic letters.
However, without any argument or conjecture, a folk tradition certifies
for us that these Phoenicians brought letters to Greece. Reflecting on
this tradition, Cornelius Tacitus165 says that they brought with them, as
if discovered by themselves, the discoveries of others, by which he under-
stands Egyptian hieroglyphs.
However, because this folk tradition must have some foundation in
the true—as we have proved must be universally true of all folk tradi-
tions [§144])—let us say that the Phoenicians brought with them hiero-
glyphs received from others and that these could not have been anything
other than the mathematical characters which they had received from
the Chaldeans, who indisputably were the first mathematicians and,
especially, the first astronomers of the nations. Hence, Zoroaster the
Chaldean (called this name because it means “observer of stars,” ac-
cording to Bochart166) was the first wise man of gentile antiquity. And
the Phoenicians used these mathematical characters as numbers in their
trade, for which reason, long before Homer, they frequented the shores
of Greece, evidence for which is offered in both poems of Homer, but

163
  Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550), Renaissance humanist born in Vincenza.
164
  Vico thus qualifies his opposition to “diffusion” theories (see the note at §125),
allowing for the possibility of cultural borrowing in the third “hu­man” age.
165
 Tacitus, Annals 11.14.1.
166
  Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), Protestant theologian, teacher of Pierre
S Daniel Huet, and author of Geographia sacra seu Phaleg et Chanaan, printed
N in 1646.
L
166
Book Two 167

especially in the Odyssey; for in the time of Homer (as Josephus vigor-
ously maintains, contrary to Apion the grammarian) common alpha-
betic letters had not yet been found in Greece. The Greeks, who take
the prize for ingenuity, in which they surpassed all the nations, later
translated these geometrical forms into the forms of different articu-
lated sounds and, with the highest beauty, formed the common charac-
ters of alphabetic letters; these letters, afterwards, were taken up by the
peoples of Latium, which that same Tacitus167 observed were similar to
ancient Greek letters. A most weighty proof of this is that the Greeks,
for a long time, and the people of Latium, down to their final days, used
capital letters so as to write numbers, and it must have been the case
that Demetrius the Corinthian and Carmenta, the wife of Evander the
Arcadian, taught these letters to the people of Latium when, as we will
explain below [§§762, 772], the Greeks committed to coastal and inland
colonies in Latium.
And there is no worth to the contention from many men of erudition 441
that the common alphabetic letters of the Hebrews must have been
brought to the Greeks inasmuch as the names for those letters are ob-
served to be almost the same for one as they are for the other. It would be
more reasonable that the Hebrews had imitated the Greek names for let-
ters than that the Greeks imitated the Hebrews. For everyone agrees that
from the time at which Alexander the Great conquered the empire of the
Near East (which, after his death, was divided up by his generals), Greek
speech spread throughout the entire Near East and Egypt, and everyone
also agrees that grammar was introduced quite late among the Hebrews.
The necessary thing would be for Hebrew men of letters to have named
Hebraic letters after the names given to them by the Greeks.
In addition, since elements are most simple by nature, it must have
originally been the case that the Greeks minted letters in their simplest
sounds, and on account of this aspect, they must have called them “ele-
ments,” just as the peoples of Latium, following the Greeks, minted let-
ters with the same weightiness and preserved forms of letters similar to
ancient Greek letters. Hence, one must say that the practice of naming
letters with complex sounds was introduced late among the Greeks and,
much later, was brought by the Greeks in the Near East to the Hebrews.
Reasoning upon things in this way dispels the opinion of those who 442
want Cecrops the Egyptian to have brought common alphabetic letters
to Greece.
In addition, as for the opinion of those who deem that Cadmus the
Phoenician had brought these letters to Greece from Egypt inasmuch
as there was founded in Greece a city with the name Thebes (the capital
of a major dynasty in Egypt), this will be resolved below in the Poetic
Geography [§§742–753], in which it will be found that the Greeks who

 Tacitus, Annals 11.14.4.

167
 168 The New Science

went to Egypt called the capital of Egypt “Thebes” on account of its

similarity to a city native to them of the same name.
Finally, one can understand why the perceptive critics (cited by the anon-
ymous English author of On the Uncertainty of the Sciences168) judge
that, because the date assigned to Sancuniates was too ancient, he never
existed in the world. Hence, so as not to remove him completely from the
world, we deem that he must be put at a much later time, certainly after
Homer. And, so as to preserve the fact that the Phoenician invention of
alphabetic letters called “common” [volgari] was more ancient than that
of the Greeks and, at the same time, giving correct weight to the fact that
ingenuity of the Greeks was much greater than that of the Phoenicians,
one must say that Sancuniates existed somewhat before Herodotus, who
is called the father of Greek history, a history that he wrote in com-
monplace speech. It is on account of this that Sancuniates was called the
historian of truth—that is, someone writing on historical times, as Varro
calls them in his division of time. Following the Egyptian threefold divi-
sion of language corresponding to the threefold division of ages through
which the world had previously run its course, it was in historical times
that they spoke in an epistolary language written in common alphabetic
characters.
443 Now, just as heroic, or poetic, language was founded by heroes, so too
the vernacular languages were introduced by the common run, whom
we will find herein [§§597–598] to have been the plebs of heroic peoples.
Such languages were properly called by the peoples of Latium vernaculae
[“indigenous”], but they could not have been introduced by those vernae
whom the grammarians define as servants born in a household of those
who were made slaves in war, for they naturally take up the languages of
the peoples where their parents were born.
However, as will be found herein [§§556, 994, 1017], those who were first,
and properly, called vernae were the familial servants of the heroes in the
state of the families, from whom were composed, later, the common run
who were the first plebs of the heroic cities, and they were the precursors
of those who were eventually made slaves by cities in wars.
And all of this is confirmed by the two languages of which Homer
speaks, the language of the gods and the language of men, which were—
as we explained herein above [§437] and as we explain shortly a great deal
more [§§446–454])—“heroic language” and “vernacular language.”
444 However, concerning the vernacular languages, it has been accepted
with too much good faith by all the philologists that their significations
were conventional. For they must have had, on account of their natural

168
  Thomas Baker (1656–1740), English antiquarian born in Durham, edu-
cated at St. John’s College at Cambridge, author of Reflections upon Learning
S (1738). As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Vico significantly misquotes the title of
N Baker’s book.
L
168
Book Two 169

origins, natural significations. This is easy to observe in the Latin vernac-

ular language, which is more heroic than the Greek vernacular language
and, accordingly, is as much hardened as Greek is more refined; almost
all the words in vernacular Latin are formed by some natural correspon-
dence, either by natural properties or by sensible effects. More generally
speaking, metaphor makes for the majority of words the languages of
all the nations.
However, the grammarians encountered a great number of terms which
give confused and indistinct ideas of things, and since they did not know
the origins which must have originally formed luminous and distinct
ideas, they established as a universal maxim—to make peace with their
ignorance—that human words expressed significations which are con-
ventional; and they drew in Aristotle, along with Galen and other phi-
losophers, and armed themselves against Plato and Iamblichus, as we
have stated [§227].
However, there still remains a very great difficulty: how is it that there 445
are as many vernacular languages as there are peoples? In order to un-
ravel this difficulty, we herein establish the following great truth: just as it
is certain that peoples, on account of difference in climate, came to have
a range of different natures, whence came so great a range of different
customs, so too out of their different natures and customs grew just as
many different languages. As a result, on account of this very diversity
in their natures, they regarded the same advantages and necessities of
human life from different perspectives, whence came the many customs
so different from and contrary to one another. It was in this way, and
not otherwise, that it came about that there are as many languages as
there are nations. This is confirmed by the evidence of proverbs—that is,
the maxims of human life—whose substance is the same, but which are
expressed from as many different perspectives as there are nations which
have and do exist, as was noted in the Axioms.169
Consequently, these same heroic origins, preserved with concision within
vernacular tongues, have made biblical critics disposed to wonder at the
fact that the names of the same kings are expressed in one way when
reading sacred history and in another when reading profane history. For
the former, with a view to what has come to pass, regards men in terms
of appearance, of power; the latter regards this in terms of customs, en-
terprises, or other such things which have been. Thus do we observe all
the time that the cities of Hungary are named in one way by the Hungar-
ians, in another by the Greeks, in still another by the Germans, and in
still another by the Turks. And the German language, which is a living
heroic language, transforms almost all the words of foreign languages
into native words proper to itself. This allows us to conjecture that the
peoples of Latium and Greece did the same in reasoning upon so many
barbarous things in elegant Greek and Latin. This must be the cause of

169
  Axiom 22.
 170 The New Science

the obscurity encountered in ancient geography and in the natural his-

tory of fossils, plants, and animals.
Accordingly, in the first edition of this work, we meditated upon an idea
of a mental dictionary for giving the significations for all the differently
expressed languages, reducing them all to certain unities of ideas in sub-
stance, which, in connection with various modifications as considered
by the peoples, have come to be assigned different and various terms
by those peoples. We will make use of this dictionary everywhere in the
reasoning of this science, and we offered the fullest test of it in Chapter
Four of the first edition,170 where we made it possible to see that the
paterfamilias, observed from fifteen different perspectives in the familial
state and the earliest republic (the time when languages must have been
formed) had as many as fifteen different names in fifteen different lan-
guages, ancient and modern—the weightiest arguments about this time
were those concerning the things which take their native significance
from words, as was proposed in the Axioms.171 This is one of the three
places for which we do not regret that that book was printed.
This dictionary reasons in an alternative way upon the argument which
Thomas Hayne172 discusses in his treatise, De linguarum cognatione, and,
in addition, in De linguis in genere et variorum linguarum harmonia.
It is from all this that one gathers the following corollary: the richer a
language is in this concise, heroic speech, the more beautiful it is; and
they are more beautiful because they are more evident; and because they
are more evident, they are truer and more trustworthy. Contrariwise, the
more crowded they are with words of hidden origins, the less delightful
they are because they are obscure and confused and, accordingly, subject
to deception and error. This must be the case for languages formed from
a mixture of many barbarous languages, the history of whose origins
and transmission has not come down to us.
446 Now (so as to enter upon the greatest difficulty concerning the fashion
in which all three of these kinds of languages and letters were formed)
one must establish the following principle: just as gods, heroes, and men
started at the same time (for it was men who imagined the gods and
believed that their heroic nature was a mixture of that of the gods and
of men), so too these three languages started at the same time, with the
understanding that each proceeded with letters equivalent to it. Never-
theless, at their start, they had these three great differences among them.
The language of the gods was almost completely mute, barely articulate.
The language of heroes was an equal mixture of articulate and mute
language and, consequently, a mixture of the vernacular tongues and the

170
 In fact, Scienza nuova prima 3.41 (§§387–389).
171
  Axiom 65.
172
  Thomas Hayne (1582–1645), English linguist, schoolmaster, and theologian,
S educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. Vico’s reference is to Hayne’s Linguarum
N cognatio (1639).
L
170
Book Two 171

heroic characters with which the heroes wrote (these are called σήματα by
Homer173). The language of men was almost completely articulate and
barely mute, insofar as there is no vernacular language so copious that
there are not more things than it has words for.
Consequently, it was necessarily the case that heroic language at its be-
ginning was extremely discomposed, which is the great source of the
obscurity of myths, of which the myth of Cadmus would be a signal
example. He kills the great serpent; he sows its teeth; from the furrows
are born armed men; he throws a great rock among them; they fight to
the death; and, finally, Cadmus himself is changed into a serpent.174
Such was the great ingenuity of this Cadmus, who brought the letters
to Greece by which the myth was transmitted, a myth which, as we will
explain below [§679], contains several centuries of poetic history!
To follow upon what has already been stated, at the same time that the 447
divine character, Jove, was being formed (this was the first of all human
thoughts in gentile antiquity), at equal pace was formed articulate lan-
guage by onomatopoeia; it is by this that we everywhere observe children
successfully expressing themselves. And this Jove for the peoples of La-
tium was because of the crash of thunder originally called Ious; because
of the crackle of lightning, he was, for the peoples of Greece, called Ζεύς
[Zeus]; for the peoples of the Near East, because of the sound of burning
fire, he was called Ur, from which came Urim, the power of fire. From
these same origins must have come the Greek word οὐρανός [ouranos],
the “heavens,” and the Latin verb uro, “to burn.” Also in Latin, from that
same crackle of lightning must have come cel, one of the monosyllables
of Ausonius, but with the pronunciation of the Spanish “ç” in order to
make sense of alliteration in his line on Venus:
Nata solo, suscepta solo, patre edita coelo.175
[“Born in the salt, raised on the soil, by her father borne to the heavens.”]

Within these origins, it must be noted that, along with that same sublim-
ity of invention—which we observed above [§379] in the myth of Jove—is
the equally important start of sublime poetic locution in onomatopoeia,
which Dionysius Longinus176 puts among the sources of the sublime and
which he notes in Homer in the sound emitted by Polyphemus’s eye when
Ulysses pierces it with a flaming stake, the sound σίζ [sis].
These were followed by forming human words with interjections—that 448
is, articulate words under the impetus of violent passions, which in all
languages are monosyllables.

173
 Homer, Iliad 6.168.
174
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.1–140; 4.563–603.
175
 Ausonius, Epigrams on Various Matters, epigram 52.
176
  The illustration does not appear in Longinus. Battistini suggests Quintilian,
Institutiones Oratoria 1.5.72, as a possible source.
 172 The New Science

Hence, it is not beyond verisimilitude that, when the start of the first
lightning bolts awakened wonder in men, the first interjection came into
being from the interjection of Jove, taking form in the word “pa!” which
was later retained in the duplication “papa!” an interjection expressing
wonder; hence came into being Jove’s title, “father of men and gods,”
and later, all the gods were called “fathers,” all the goddesses “mothers.”
This is retained in the Latin words, Jupiter, Diespiter, Marspiter, Juno
genitrix (even though myths certainly tell us that Juno was sterile). And
we observed above [§80] how many gods and goddesses in heaven did
not contract marriages (for example, Venus was called the concubine,
not the wife, of Mars) and, nevertheless, they were all named parents, on
which there are some verses by Lucilius referred to in the notes in our
On Universal Law.177 And they were called “fathers” [padre] in the sense
that patrare [“to bring to completion”] must have originally signified the
making that is proper to God, since this accords with the sacred text
which, in telling us of the creation of the world, says that on the seventh
day God rested ab opera quod patrarat [“from the work He brought to
completion”].178
Consequently, the word impetrare [“to obtain a request”] must have been
used as if it were impatrare, which, in the science of auguries, they say
as impetrire—that is, “to seek a good augury”—about whose origin, the
Latin grammarians have said such nonsense. This proves that the first
“interpretation” was an interpretation of the divine laws ordered by the
auspices, as if the word were written interpatratio.179
449 Now, it was a divine title of this sort, out of the natural ambition of
human pride, that men with power in the familial state arrogated to
themselves, the men who were named Fathers (this perhaps gave the im-
petus to the folk tradition that the earliest men with power on the Earth
made themselves adored as if they were gods). However, through the
piety owed to the numinous ones, only the latter were called “gods”;
later, when the powerful men of the earliest cities took for themselves the
name of gods, through that same piety, they called the numinous ones
dei immortali [“immortal gods”] in order to distinguish them from dei
mortali [“mortal gods”]—that is, men such as themselves.
However, in this can be noted the gullishness of those giants of whom
travelers in Patagonia tell us, a fair vestige of which remains in Latin in
the ancient words pipulum and pipare, which mean “complaint” and “to
complain”: this must have come from interjections of lament, “pi! pi!” It
is in this sense that pipulum is used later in Plautus180 as synonymous with

177
 In fact, Vico treats Lucilius not in his Notae, but at De constantia iurispru-
dentis 2.20 (Cristofolini 515[1]).
178
  Compare Genesis 2:2 in the Vulgate.
179
  See Vico, Notae in Librum Alterum 49 (Cristofolini 779).
S 180
  See Plautus, Aulularia 446.
N
L
172
Book Two 173

the obvagulatio [“wailing”] of the Twelve Tables, a term which comes

from vagire, which is the “crying” proper to children.
As a result, it is necessarily the case that out of these interjections of
fear was born the Greek word παιάν [paian], which started with παί [pai,
“child”]. About this word, there is a golden ancient tradition among the
Greeks that, when they were terrified by the great serpent, Python, they
invoked the succor of Apollo with the words ἰὼ παιάν [iō paian]; at first,
they beat out the words in rhythm three times slowly while paralyzed by
terror; then, jubilantly (because Apollo had killed Python) they beat out
the words again three times, but quickly and separating out the “ω!” into
“ο! ο!” and the diphthong “αι” into two syllables. Hence, first, spondaic
heroic verse naturally came into being and, later, dactylic verse; and this
verse has retained that eternal property of giving priority to the dactyl in
all feet other than the final one. And song in the metrics of heroic verse
naturally came into being under the impetus of the most violent passions
and, above all, under the impetus of extreme affliction and joy, as was
stated above in the Axioms.181 And what has been said here will be put to
good use a little below [§463], when we reason upon the origins of song
and verse.
They went on, after interjections, to form pronouns, insofar as interjec- 450
tions give vent to passions proper to oneself, which can be done even
when one is alone, but pronouns serve to communicate our ideas with
others about things that either we do not know how to call by their
proper names, or whose proper names another may not understand;
and, indeed, the majority of pronouns in almost all languages are mono-
syllables, and the first of these (or, at least, among the first) must have
been that which in this golden passage from Ennius,
Aspic HOC sublime cadens, quem omnes invocant Iovem182
[“Behold that which descends sublimely from on high, that which ev-
eryone calls Jove”];

here, the HOC [“that”] is said in place of “the heavens,” and the demon-
strative function of the pronoun remains in common Latin in expres-
sions like
Luciscit hoc iam183
[“That there now grows light”]

in place of albescit coelom [“the heavens grow light”]. And the definite
article from its birth has that eternal property of going before the word
to which it is connected.

181
  Axiom 59.
182
  This verse of Ennius is attested at Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2.4.
183
 Plautus, Amphytrion 543.
 174 The New Science

451 Afterwards, particles were formed, of which the majority are the prepo-
sitions, which are also, in almost all languages, monosyllables and which
preserve as words the eternal property of going before the nouns which
depend upon them and the verbs with which they are composed.
452 Gradually, nouns came to be formed. Concerning these nouns, in the Ori-
gins of the Latin Language in the first edition of this work,184 we counted
a great number which grew in Latium out of the primitive life of those
peoples and continued through their rustic period up until the time of the
earliest civil life; all these nouns took the form of monosyllables, and none
of them were of foreign origin, not even Greek, with the exception of four:
βοῦς [bous], σῦς [sus], μῦς [mus], and σήψ [sēps], the last of which means
“hedge” in Latin, “serpent” in Greek. This is the second of three places
that we deem complete in that first edition. For it can offer a model for
those with learning in other languages to search for the origins in these
languages most fruitfully for the Republic of Letters; for example, it is cer-
tainly the case that, insofar as no foreign nation ever entered to have com-
mand over Germany, the German language (which is a mother language)
has monosyllables for all of its root words. And that nouns came into exis-
tence before verbs is proved by this eternal property, that no sentence holds
up unless it starts with a noun, either expressed or tacit, which supports it.
453 Finally, the authors of languages formed verbs, just as we observe
children expressing nouns and particles, but omitting the verbs. For
nouns awaken ideas that leave definite traces, and particles, which signify
these modifications, do the same. However, verbs signify motions, which
imply a “before” and an “after,” which are measured by the indivisible
present, something difficult to understand even by philosophers.
And here is an observation from physiology, which more than proves
what we are saying: there is alive among us an honorable man who,
struck down by a serious stroke, still remembers nouns but has com-
pletely forgotten verbs.
And, indeed, there are verbs which are genera for all the other verbs:
sum [“to be”] for the genus “being,” under which are subsumed all es-
sences—that is to say, all the metaphysical things—and so there is sto
[“to stay”] for the genus “rest,” and eo [“to go”] for the genus “motion,”
under which are subsumed all the things pertaining to physics; do and
dico and facio [“to give” and “to say” and “to do”], under which are
subsumed all the things pertaining to agency, whether moral or domes-
tic or, eventually, civil. These verbs must have started with imperatives,
for in the familial state, impoverished to the highest degree in terms of
language, the Fathers alone must have used speech and given orders to
children and familial servants. These children and familial servants, sub-
ject to a terrifying familial power, as we will see below [§518], must have
silently followed these commands with a blind obsequiousness, impera-

S
N   Scienza nuova prima §§369–370.
184

L
174
Book Two 175

tives which were all monosyllables, retained in the words es, sta, i, da, dic,
and da [“be,” “stay,” “go,” “give,” “speak,” “do”].
This account of the generation of languages thus conforms with the 454
principles of universal nature, by which the elements of all things are in-
divisible; from these elements, these things are composed and into them
they are resolved. Similarly, they conform to the principles particular to
human nature; through the Axiom185 that children born into this abun-
dance of articulate speech, even though the tissues of the organ neces-
sary for articulate language is quite supple in children, still start with
monosyllables, we must deem all the more, then, that this was the case
for the earliest men of the gentiles, whose organs were extremely inflex-
ible and who had never heard a human voice.
Moreover, this account offers an order in which the parts of speech came
into being and, consequently, the natural causes of syntax.
All these things seem more reasonable than what Julius Caesar Scaliger 455
and Francisco Sanchez186 have stated with respect to the Latin language.
As if the peoples who discovered the languages had first gone to school
with Aristotle, with whose principles both Scaliger and Sanchez have
discussed the matter!

Corollaries
concerning the origins of poetic locution,
digression, inversion, rhythm,
song, and verse187

In this fashion, the poetic language was formed by the nations, a lan- 456
guage composed of divine and heroic characters; it was, later, expressed
in the vernacular tongues; and, finally, it was written in common alpha-
betic characters.
And this came into being entirely from the poverty of language and the
necessity to express oneself. This fact is demonstrated by the first adorn-
ments of poetic locution: hypotyposes, images, similes, comparisons,
metaphors, periphrases, phrases expressing things through their natural
properties, descriptions gathered from the most special and sensible ef-
fects, and, finally, emphatic and redundant epithets.
Poetic digression came into being from the excessiveness of the heroic 457
mind, which does not know how to separate out what is proper to the

185
  Axiom 60.
186
  Here Vico probably has in mind Scaliger’s De causis linguae latinae (1540)
and Sanchez’s Minerva seu de causis linguae latinae (1587).
187
  The corresponding section of the 1730 edition bears the title “Demonstra-
tion of the Truth of the Christian Religion.”
 176 The New Science

things which they propose to do, which we see is naturally the usage of
idiots and, above all, women.
458 Poetic inversion came into being from the difficulty of giving the verb
of a sentence, which, as we have seen [§453], is the last part of speech
to be discovered. Hence the Greeks, who were a most ingenious people,
invert speech less than people of Latium, and the people of Latium less
than the Germans.
459 Prose rhythm was understood late by writers, by Gorgias of Leontini
in Greek and by Cicero in Latin. This was insofar as previously (as Ci-
cero188 himself relates), they had given rhythm to their speeches by using
certain poetic meters. This will serve us well subsequently [§§461–462]
when, shortly, we reason upon the origins of song and verse.
460 From all this, it would seem to be demonstrated that poetic locution,
because of a necessity of human nature, came into being prior to prose
locution, just as, by a necessity in human nature, myths—that is, imagi-
native universals—came into being prior to rational, or philosophical,
universals, which came into being by means of prose locution. Insofar
as poets previously went on to form poetic speech by the composition of
particular ideas, as has been fully demonstrated herein [§209], later there
came peoples after them who formed prose speech by contracting in a
single word, as if under a genus, the parts which had been composed in
poetic speech; so, for example, from the poetic phrase “the blood in my
heart boils” (this expresses an eternal and universal property belonging
to the nature of humankind), the people contracted the parts—blood,
boiling, and heart—in a single word, as if under a genus, which is, in
Greek, στόμαχος [stomachos], in Latin, ira, and, in Italian, anger [collera].
At the same pace, hieroglyphics and heroic letters were contracted to
a few common alphabetic letters, as genera to which countless differ-
ent articulated words could conform; for this, the peak of ingenuity was
necessary. With these commonplace genera, both of words and of let-
ters, the minds of peoples became quicker at thinking and at forming
abstractions, at which later the philosophers were able to arrive, the phi-
losophers who formed the intelligible genera. This is but a piece of our
reasoning in the history of ideas.
Thus, to the extent that one seeks to find the origins of letters, one must,
in the same breath, treat the origins of languages!
461 Concerning song and verse, we have proposed the Axioms189 that
demonstrate the origins by which men, who originally were mute, must
have issued forth vowels while singing, just as those who are mute do;
and by which, later, they must have issued forth articulate consonants,
also while singing, just as those who stutter do. A great proof for this is

S 188
 Cicero, De oratore 3.44.173.
N 189
  Axioms 58–59.
L
176
Book Two 177

that the earliest song by peoples is in the diphthongs, which persists in

our languages; these diphthongs must have originally been much more
numerous, as they are in Greek and in French, which passed before their
time from the poetic age to the common [volgare], retaining a great many
of them—as was observed in the Axioms.190 The cause of these diph-
thongs is that vowels are easy to form, but consonants are difficult; and
that, as was demonstrated, those first, stupid men, so as to be moved to
issue words, must have felt the most violent passions, which are natu-
rally expressed in a very loud voice. And nature tends, when a man raises
his voice, towards diphthongs and song, as was noted in the Axioms,191
whence it was demonstrated a little above [§449] that the earliest Greek
men, in their age of gods, had formed the earliest spondees of heroic verse
with the diphthong παί [pai], with twice as many vowels as consonants.
Again, this first song of peoples came into being naturally from diffi- 462
culties in enunciation in those earliest times, which we will demonstrate
by both its causes and its effects. The cause is that these men had an
organ for speaking which was formed of tissues not flexible enough for
articulating words, and there were very few words to articulate. Even
children (who, by contrast, have the most supple tissue and are born into
the greatest abundance of words) are observed to have the greatest diffi-
culty in enunciating consonants, as was also stated in the Axioms,192 and
the Chinese (who have no more than three hundred articulated sounds
which, by various modifications of pitch and stress, correspond to a ver-
nacular language of one hundred and twenty thousand hieroglyphics)
speak by singing. As for the effects, it is demonstrated, first, by the con-
traction of words (of this there are countless cases in Italian poetry, and
in the Origins of the Latin Language in the first edition of this work,193
we demonstrated, in a great number of cases, that words must have come
into existence in a contracted form and, over time, were lengthened) and,
second, by redundant sounds insofar as stutterers compensate with syl-
lables that they are better disposed to utter by singing for those which
are difficult to enunciate, as was also proposed in the Axioms.194 Hence,
with us, during my lifetime, there was an excellent tenor with a speech
defect who, when he was unable to utter some word, would offer it in the
pleasing song and, in doing so, enunciate it.
So, certainly the Arabs start almost all their words with “al,” and it has
been affirmed that the Huns were called this because they started all their
words with “un.”
Finally, it is demonstrated that languages started in song by the fact that,
as we have stated above [§459], prior to Gorgias and Cicero, the Greek

190
  Axiom 21.
191
  Axioms 21 and 59.
192
  Axiom 60.
193
  Scienza nuova prima §§369–372.
194
  Axiom 58.
 178 The New Science

and Latin prose writers used certain meters that were quasi-poetic, just
as, in the return to barbarism, the Latin church fathers did (the Greek
church fathers will be found to do the same) and, as a result, their prose
resembles canticles.
463 The first verse—we have demonstrated just above [§449] its actual
coming to be—must have come to be in a way agreeable to the language
and age of heroes—that is, as heroic verse, the greatest of all the verses
and the one proper to heroic poetry—and it came to be out of the most
violent passions of terror and joy, since heroic poetry treats of nothing
but the most disturbing passions. And yet, it did not come into being
as spondaic out of a great fear of Python, as folk tradition recounts,
for such disturbances quicken ideas and words rather than slow them
down (hence, in Latin, solicitus [“restless”] and festinans [“hastening”]
also signify “fearful”). Rather, it was on account of the slowness of mind
and the difficulty of speaking for the earliest authors of the nations that
heroic verse first came into being, as we have demonstrated, as spondaic;
because of this, it holds on to the last foot, allowing only a spondee.
Later, when thought and speech became quicker, the dactyl was admit-
ted. Later, as both became even quicker, iambics came into being, which
Horace195 calls “the swift foot,” as two Axioms196 proposed with respect
to these origins. Finally, with both at their quickest, came prose, which,
as we saw above, speaks in almost intellectual genera, and iambic verse
is so close to prose that prose writers will often inadvertently fall into it.
Thus, song went along at the same pace as speech and ideas, hastening
as both became quicker among the nations, as was also noted in the
Axioms.197
464 Such philosophy is confirmed for us by history, which tells us, as was
proposed in the Axioms,198 that there are no things more ancient than
oracles and the different versions of Sybil: hence, so as to indicate that
a thing is very ancient, it was said that it was “older than Sybil”; and
there were different versions of Sybil spread throughout all the earliest
nations, of which twelve come down to us; and there is a folk tradition
that the Sybil sang in heroic verses, and the oracles of all the nations also
gave their responses in heroic verse, whence such verse was called, by
the Greeks, Pythian from the famous oracle of the Pythian Apollo, who
must have been named this from killing the serpent called Python, from
whom, as we have stated above [§449], the earliest spondaic verse came
into being; by the peoples of Latium, such verse was called Saturnian,
as Festus199 ascertains, which must have come into being in Italy during

195
 Horace, Ars poetica 252.
196
  Axioms 61–62.
197
  Axiom 65.
198
  Axiom 40.
S 199
  Sextus Pompeius Festus, second-century-CE grammarian and author of De
N verborum significatu.
L
178
Book Two 179

the age of Saturn, corresponding to the golden age in Greece, in which

Apollo, along with the other gods, consorted on Earth with men; and
Ennius, according to that same Festus, says that, in such verse, the fauns
in Italy rendered their fati—that is, their oracles, which, it is certain, in
Greece they rendered in hexameters, as was stated. However, later, Satur-
nian verses remained in iambics called senarii, perhaps because by then
it was as natural to speak Saturnians in iambic verse as previously it was
natural to speak Saturnians in heroic verse.
Although those in our times who are learned about the sacred texts are 465
divided into their different opinions concerning Hebrew poetry over
whether it is composed with meters or, more truly, with rhythms, never-
theless, Josephus, Philo, Origen, and Eusebius stand in favor of meter.
And, what is most important for our purposes, St. Jerome insists that the
Book of Job, which is more ancient than the Books of Moses, was put
together in heroic verse from the beginning of third chapter up until the
beginning of the forty-second chapter.200
The Arabs, when they were ignorant of letters (as was related by the 466
anonymous author201 of On the Uncertainty of the Sciences) preserved
their language by keeping its memory in their poetry until they inun-
dated the Near Eastern provinces of the Greek empire.
The Egyptians inscribed memory of the departed in verse on s­ iringi— 467
or columns—so-called from sir, which means “song,”202 whence came
the name “Siren,” a deity without doubt renowned for song; Ovid says
the nymph, Syrinx, was as equally renowned for her song as for her
beauty, and the origin of the names, Syrians and Assyrians (who must
have originally spoken in verse) was also sir.
Certainly, the founders of Greek humanity were the theological poets, 468
and they were called heroes and sang in heroic verse.
We have seen [§438] that the earliest authors of the Latin language were 469
the Salians, sacred poets from whom we have fragments of Salian verse,
which have the air of heroic verse and are the most ancient memorials
of Latin speech.
The ancient triumphant Romans left memorials of their triumphs also
with the air of heroic verse; thus, there is that of the triumph of Lucius
Aemilius Regillus,203

200
 In his Preface to Job (c. 392 CE), Jerome claims that Job 3:3–42:6 is writ-
ten in hexameter verse, composed of dactyls and spondees (PL 28:1081). He
proceeds to cite the same four authors mentioned by Vico in support of the
claim that Hebrew meters bear a resemblance to Greek authors such as Pindar,
Alcaeus, and Sappho (1082).
201
  See the note at §442 on Thomas Baker.
202
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 550.
203
  Lucius Aemilius Regillus (fl. 190 BCE), Roman admiral and praetor.
 180 The New Science

Duello magno dirimendo, regibus subiugandis

[“He brought the great fight to its conclusion and subjugated kings”];

and also that of Acilius Glabrio,

Fudit, fugat, prosternit maximas legiones
[“He routs, he sets in flight, he destroys mighty legions”];

and other such verses on other triumphs.

The fragments of the Law of the Twelve Tables (if one reflects well upon
them) in the majority of its sections end in adonic verse, the pattern for
the final feet of heroic verse. This is what Cicero must have imitated in
his own Laws, which begin thus:
Deos caste adeunto
Pietatem adhibento204
[“Let them approach the gods chastely;
let them conduct themselves with piety].

Hence must have come that Roman custom to which Cicero refers, whereby
children, so as to recite the Law of the Twelve Tables word for word, sang
them tamquam necessarium carmen205 [“as if they were hymns about the
necessities of life”], just as Cretan children did, as Aelian tells us.
For certainly Cicero (as famous for inventing prose rhythms in Latin as
Gorgias of Leontini was in Greek, to which we referred above [§459])
would have otherwise avoided in prose, especially prose on so weighty
a subject as the laws, not just the adonic meter in these lines, but even
iambic meter, a meter quite similar to prose, but which he guards against
even in his letters to friends.206
Hence, in Cicero’s need for this kind of verse lies the truth of the fol-
lowing folk traditions. The first is in Plato,207 which says that the laws
of the Egyptians were the poems of the goddess, Isis. The second is in
Plutarch,208 which tells us that Lycurgus offered laws to the Spartans
in verse, out of which one particular law forbade knowledge of letters.
The third is in Maximus of Tyre, which recounts that Jove gave laws to
the Minos in verse. The fourth, and last, is referred to by Suidas,209 that
Draco gave laws to the Athenians in verse; of Draco, we are commonly
told that he wrote those laws in blood.
470 Now, if we return from laws to history, Tacitus210 relates, concerning the
customs of the ancient Germans, that they preserved the beginnings of

204
 Cicero, De legibus 2.8.19.
205
 Cicero, De legibus 2.23.59.
206
  See Cicero, De oratore 3.47.182.
207
 Plato, Laws 2.3, 657a.
S 208
 Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 4.
N 209
 Suidas, Lexicon, “drakon” entry.
L 210
 Tacitus, Germania 2.3.
180
Book Two 181

their history by conceiving them in verse; Lipsius,211 in his notes on this

passage, relates that the natives of America did the same. The authority
of these two nations (the first of these was unknown to other people ex-
cept to the Romans, and even to them quite late, and the second was dis-
covered only two centuries ago by those of us in Europe) gives a strong
argument for conjecturing that the same was the case for all other bar-
barian nations, ancient and modern. And there is no need to conjecture
about the Persians, among the ancient nations, or the Chinese, among
the nations newly discovered, for there are those who say with authority
that both wrote their early histories in verse.
And let us make the following important reflection upon this: if peoples
are founded by the laws, and if the laws for all peoples are stated in verse
and if the earliest things of these peoples are also preserved in verse, then
among those things which are necessary is that all the earliest peoples
were poets.
Now, taking up again the argument at hand concerning the origins of 471
verse, Festus relates that the Carthaginian Wars were written by Naevius
prior to Ennius in heroic verse. And Livius Andronicus,212 the first Latin
writer, wrote the Romanidae, a heroic poem that preserves the annals of
the ancient Romans.
In the return to barbarian times, the historians in Latin were heroic po-
ets: Gunther,213 William of Apulia,214 and others.
We have seen that the earliest writers in the new languages of Europe
were versifiers, and that those in Silesia—a province whose people are
almost all rustics—are born poets.
And, more generally, insofar as the German language preserves quite
intact its heroic origins, this is why (whose cause Adam Rechenberg215
affirms, although he is ignorant of it) it is possible to render compound
words in Greek so successfully in German, especially in poetry; Matthias
Bernegger216 wrote a catalogue of these words, which Georg Christoph
Peisker217 later sought to expand in his index, De Graecae et Germaniae

211
  Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), Flemish humanist philosopher and philologist.
212
  See the note at §438 on Andronicus.
213
  Gunther of Pairis (c. 1150–1220), German Cistercian monk and poet to
whom is attributed the poem Ligurinus, sive de gestis divi Frederici I libri X,
printed in 1507. The poem is an epic about Frederick Barbarossa.
214
  William of Apulia, chronicler of the Normans (fl. 1090), about whose life
very little is known. An edition of his Historicum poema de rebus Normanorum
in Sicilia, Appulia et Calabria gestis was published in 1724.
215
  Adam Rechenberg (1642–1721), German philologist and author of the pref-
ace to Eling’s Historia linguae Graecae (mentioned at §428).
216
  Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), German philologist, historian, and math-
ematician, translator of Galileo’s works into Latin, and author of a commen-
tary on Tacitus’s Germania and Agricola.
217
  Georg Christoph Peisker, author of not only the 1677 work that Vico men-
tions, but also De negatione (from the same year).
 182 The New Science

linguae analogiae. The ancient Latin language also left a good share of
compound words, which the poets, as is their right, continued to use.
For this must have been a property common to all the earliest languages.
These languages, as was demonstrated [§§452–453], were provided, first,
with nouns and, later, with verbs, and it was on account of the lack of
verbs that nouns were joined together.
These must be the principles pertaining to what Morhof218 has written in
his Disquisitionibus de Germanica lingua et poesi.
And let this be proof of the observation that we noted in the Axioms,219
that if those who are learned in the German language give their atten-
tion to finding its origins by these principles, they will make the most
wondrous discoveries.
472 Through all the things upon which we have reasoned here, it would
seem to be evident that we have refuted that common error of the gram-
marians who say that prose speech was born first and poetic speech later.
And within the origins of poetry that have herein been discovered are
found the origins of languages and the origins of letters.

The additional corollaries

that were proposed above

473 I. Along with the earliest coming into existence of characters and lan-
guages, law also came into being, which, in Latin, was called ius and, in
ancient Greek, was called διαΐον [diaion], which, as we explained above
[§398], meant “heavenly,” derived from Διός [dios]; hence in Latin, the ex-
pressions sub dio [“under god”]) and sub Jove [“under Jove”] both came
to mean “under the open heavens”; and, as Plato220 states in his Cratylus,
διαΐον was later, for the ease of speech, said as δίκαιον [dikaion].
For all gentile nations universally observed the heavens in their aspect as
Jove so as to accept as laws the divine warnings and decrees which they
believed the auspices were. This demonstrates that all nations were born
of their persuasion that divine providence exists.
474 Let us start by enumerating these versions of Jove. For the Chaldeans,
Jove was the heavens insofar as he was believed to warn of what was to
come in the aspects and motions of the stars, whose sciences were called
astronomy and astrology, the former being the science on the laws of the
stars, the latter on the language of the stars, but in the sense of “judicial
astrology”; thus, the word “Chaldeans,” remains, in Roman law, a term
for judicial astrologers.

218
 Daniel Georg Morhof (1639–1691), German writer and scholar, professor of
eloquence and poetry at Kiel, and author of the 1682 work mentioned by Vico.
S 219
  Axiom 18.
N 220
 Plato, Cratylus 412d–e.
L
182
Book Two 183

Also for the Persians, Jove was the heavens insofar as the heavens were 475
believed to contain things hidden from men; those wise in the science of
such things were called mages, and their science was named magic, both
in the sense of the licit science of natural things, which are the wondrous
occult forces of nature, and in the sense of the forbidden science of su-
pernatural things; in this latter sense, a mage means “wizard”; and mages
did their work with wands (the lituus of the augurs among the Romans)
and described the circuits of astronomy, and these same wands and cir-
cuits were later used by mages in their sorcery; and for the Persians, the
heavens were the temple of Jove, and it was in keeping with this religion
that Cyrus overturned the temples built by the Greeks.
Also for the Egyptians, Jove was the heavens insofar as it was believed 476
that the heavens influenced terrestrial things and warned of what was to
come. Hence, they believed that they could fasten on to these celestial
influences through foundry, casting images of the gods at certain times,
and even today they preserve a commonplace art of divination.
Also for the Greeks, Jove was the heavens insofar as they believed, as we 477
have stated in other places [§391], that the theorists and mathematicians
who considered the heavens to be contemplating and observing divine
and sublime things, contemplating with the eyes of the body and observ-
ing in the sense of “following” the laws of Jove; such mathematicians in
Roman law were called mathematici, a term used for judicial astrologers.
Concerning the Romans, there is the famous verse from Ennius, to which 478
we referred above [§450],
Aspic HOC sublime cadens, quem omnes invocant Iovem221
[“Behold that which descends sublimely from on high, that which ev-
eryone calls Jove”];

there, the demonstrative pronoun HOC signifies, as was stated [§391],

the heavens; the same Romans spoke of templa coeli [“the precincts
of heaven”], the regions designated by the augurs for their taking of
the auspices, a sense retained in the Latin use of templum to signify
any place which is free on all sides and whose prospect is unimpeded;
hence, the term extemplo signifies subito [“immediately”], and it is in
this ancient sense that Virgil calls the sea neptunia templa222 [“Neptune’s
precincts”].
Concerning the ancient Germans, Tacitus223 tells us that they worshipped 479
their gods in sacred places which he calls lucos et nemora [“groves and
woods”], which must have been places cleared of trees within a wooded

221
  This verse of Ennius is attested at Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2.4.
222
 Virgil’s Aeneid contains many references to the descendants of Neptune, but
none to his “temples.” Vico may be thinking of the description of the sea at
Plautus, Miles gloriosus 412–413.
223
 Tacitus, Germania 9.3.
 184 The New Science

enclosure; and from this primitive custom, the Church toiled hard to
separate them (as one can gather from the Councils of Nantes and Braga
collected by Burchard224) and traces of it persist even today in Lapland
and Livonia.
480 Concerning the Peruvians,225 it is found that they spoke of God in ab-
solute terms as “the sublime,” whose temples, open to the heavens, were
mounds where one ascends from either side by high staircases and in
whose heights reposes the entirety of their magnificence.
Hence, even today, the magnificence of the temples reposes in their
boundless height; the tops of these temples, according to Pausanias,226
were called in Greek (this is very much to our point) ἀετός [aetos], which
means “eagle,” for they cleared the forests of trees so as to have a pros-
pect for contemplating the auspices of eagles, which fly much higher
than all other birds; and it is perhaps a consequence of this that the tops
of temples were called in Latin pinnae templorum [“the wings of tem-
ples”] and that, later, parapets were called pinnae murorum [“the wings
of walls”], for upon the borders of those earliest temples were raised
the walls of the earliest cities, as we will see below [§550]; and, finally, in
architecture, the parapet of a building, which was called an “eagle,” is
today called a merlo [“blackbird,” “merlon”].227
481 However, the Hebrews worshipped the one who is truly Most High, who
is above the heavens in the enclosure of the Tabernacle; and Moses,228
wherever the people of God extended their conquests, ordered the sa-
cred groves to be burned, within which were enclosed the luci of which
Tacitus speaks.
482 Hence, one can gather that the earliest laws everywhere were the divine
laws of Jove. It is from such antiquity that it has come to pass in the
languages of many Christian nations that they take the heavens to be
God. So, for example, we say in Italian voglia il Cielo [“may heaven will
it”] and spero al Cielo [“I hope to heaven”], in both of which expres-
sions we understand “God.” The Spanish use the same expressions.
And the French say bleu, “blue” for God because the term “blue” is a
thing that can be sensed and can be understood to represent the blue
of the heavens; and, consequently, just as the gentile nations under-
stood “the heavens” as representing Jove, so the French by the heav-
ens understand God in that impious expression of theirs, moure bleu,

224
  Burchard of Worms (c. 950–1025), bishop and author of the Decretum Bur-
chardi, a work of canon law.
225
  Vico’s source for the Peruvians, according to Battistini, is José de Acosta (c.
1539–1600), Spanish Jesuit and author of The Natural and Moral History of the
Indies (1590).
226
 Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.9.13.
227
  On the “eagles” that supported the wooden roof of the Capitol, see Tacitus,
S Histories 3.71.
N 228
  See Deuteronomy 12:3 and Exodus 34:13.
L
184
Book Two 185

meaning “God’s death,” and they frequently say par bleu!, meaning
“by God!”229
One can take this as a test of the mental dictionary proposed in the
Axioms,230 upon which we reasoned above.

II. Establishing certainty of domain made, in great part, for the neces- 483
sity behind discovering characters and names in their native significance
as the households branching off into multiple families, households
which were called, with supreme propriety, gentes. Thus, Hermes Tris-
megistus (a poetic character for the first founders of the Egyptians, as
we have demonstrated [§§66–68]) discovered laws and letters. It is from
this Hermes, who was, in addition, believed to be the god of trade [mer-
catanzie], that Italians (and this uniformity in thought and expression,
preserved even up until our times, ought to call forth wonder from us)
use the verb mercare, in the sense of marking, by letters or other insignia,
beasts or other merchandise [roba da mercantare] so as to distinguish and
render those who own them.

III. These are the earliest origins of the insignia of noble households 484
and, consequently, of medallions. From these insignia, discovered, first,
for the sake of private necessity and, later, for sake of public neces-
sity, came the insignia of the erudite for the sake of pleasure, insignia
which the erudite called, by some divination, “heroic”; the insignia of
the erudite need to be brought to life by their mottos, for they have
an analogical significance, whereas natural heroic insignia were insignia
because of their lack of such mottos, and thus they spoke in their mute-
ness. Hence, they were, in their own right, the best insignia, for they
contained the significance proper to them, as when three ears of grain
or three swings of the scythe naturally signified three years. From this,
it came about that “character” and “name” could be exchanged for one
another, and “name” and “nature” had the same significance, as was
stated above [§433].
Now, we can make another attempt at the insignia of noble house- 485
holds because, in the return to barbarian times, the nations returned to
being mutes in terms of commonplace speech. Hence, we are completely
lacking any early record of the languages of Italy, France, Spain, or any
other nation from these times. And the Latin and Greek languages were
known only by priests; as a result, in French, they said clerc [“priest”] to
signify someone with letters, and in Italian (as we encounter in a fine pas-
sage in Dante231), they said laico [“layman”] to signify a man who did not
know letters. Even within the regime of priests, there was such ignorance
that one can read documents with signatures written by bishops with

229
  Vico himself uses this oath at §783.
230
  Axiom 22.
231
  The passage appears not in Dante, but in a passage about Dante in a work
by the fifteenth-century Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani (Cronica 9.136).
 186 The New Science

the sign of the cross because they did not know how to write their own
names, and even learned prelates knew very little about writing (thus the
diligence of Father Mabillon232 in his work, De re diplomatica, allows one
to see, in engraved facsimiles, the signatures of bishops and archbishops
on the acts of councils in those barbarous times; one observes signatures
written in letters so misshapen and brutish that they might have been
written by the unlearned idiots of today); indeed, these prelates were, by
and large, the chancellors of the kingdoms of Europe, which is retained
today in the chancellor archbishops of the empire, one for each of the
three languages, German, French, and Italian; and it must have been
from them (on account of their manner of writing with such irregulari-
ties) that there is the expression “chancellor’s script.” It is from a scarcity
of this sort that there was ordered, as a law in England,233 that a criminal
under sentence of death, if he was knowledgeable about letters because
he excelled in this art, did not have to die. It is from scarcity, perhaps, that
the term “lettered” later came to have the same significance as “erudite.”
486 It is on account of this same short supply of writers that, in ancient
households, we do not observe walls that have not been stamped with
some device [impresa].
Elsewhere, in barbarous Latin, the expression terrae presa [“a holding
of land”] is used for a farm and its boundaries, and in Italian, the word
for farm, podere [“power”], expresses the same idea as does the word
in Latin, praedium [“seized property”], for the lands reduced to culti-
vation were the earliest seizures in the world; and grounds were called
municipia [“holdings”] in the Law of the Twelve Tables, and those under
real-estate bond, especially to the public treasury, were called praedes or
manucipes, and what we call “real servitude” was called iura praediorum.
Elsewhere, prenda [“undertakings”] is used for brave enterprises, for the
earliest enterprises in the world were the taming of the lands and bring-
ing them under cultivation, which will be found [§540] to be the greatest
of all the labors of Hercules. What is called a device [impresa] in more
recent Italian used to be called an insegna, an insignia which, conceptu-
ally, is “a thing which signifies,” whence the verb in Italian, insegnare
[“to teach”]; it was also called a devisa, for devices are discovered to have
been the signs marking out the earliest divisions of the land, which previ-
ously had been used by all of humankind in common; hence, the termini,
which early on were the real terminations of these fields, were carried,
later, over into the termini of the Scholastics, verbal terminology—that
is, words which, in their signification, define the limits of propositions—
and this is exactly how hieroglyphics in the Americas are used, as we saw

232
  Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), French Benedictine scholar and philologist,
editor of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of paleography and diplo-
matics. The work to which Vico refers, De re diplomatica, was published in 1681.
233
  Vico may be associating the “English law” with those laws promulgated by
S Edward the Confessor (1004–1066).
N
L
186
Book Two 187

above [§434], as real terminations for distinguishing among the different

familial clans.
From all of this, one can conclude that, in the times of mute nations, 487
the great necessity behind insignia giving significance must have been
to make certain the borders of domains. These passed, later, over into
public insignia during peace, whence they became the medallions which,
when even later still they were introduced, are found to have been well
prepared to use as military insignia: military insignia are, as their pri-
mary use, hieroglyphics during wars that are made, for the most part, be-
tween nations whose spoken words are different and who, consequently,
are mutes relative to one another.
The wonder we feel in reasoning upon all the things here is confirmed
by the truth of the fact that, on account of a uniformity of ideas, the
hieroglyph of an eagle on the top of a scepter is uniform among the
Egyptians, the ancient Etruscans, the Romans, and the English, who use
it as a mark of honor on their royal coat of arms; among all these na-
tions—separate from each other by immense distances over land and
sea—the hieroglyph must have signified, equally for all of them, that
their kingdoms took their start in the earliest divine regimes of the dif-
ferent versions of Jove on the strength of his auspices.
Finally, when commerce which uses coinage was introduced, these me-
dallions are found to be well prepared for use as money, which, in their
use as money, were in Latin called monetae, derived from monendo [“to
warn”], just as in Italian insegna [“insignia”] is derived from insegnare
[“to teach”].
Thus, from νόμος [nomos] came νόμισμα [nomisma] (as was discussed
by Aristotle234), and from it also came, perhaps, the Latin word numus
[“money”], which has only one “m” in the best writers; the French call
law, loi, and money, aloi; these ways of speaking can have come from
nowhere else except from the laws and rights signified by hieroglyphs,
which is exactly the use that medallions have.
Our wonder at all this is confirmed by the words for money: ducato,
which is derived from ducendo [“to lead”], which is proper to captains;
soldo, from which is derived soldato [“soldier”]; and scuto, a shield, which
was previously the background for the coats of arms of noble families
(this background was originally the ground itself, the lands cultivated by
each Father in the time of the families, as will be demonstrated below
[§§529, 562–563]).
Consequently, this must shed light on those medallions where one sees an
altar; or a lituus—that is, the rod used by the augurs for taking the aus-
pices, as was stated above [§475]; or a tripod, where oracles were given,

234
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, 1133a30.
 188 The New Science

from which comes the expression dictum ex tripode [“spoken from the tri-
488 pod”], which means “a statement from an oracle.” To medallions of this
sort must belong the wings which the Greeks in their myths connected
with all the objects signifying heroic rights founded upon the auspices:
so Idanthyrsus, among the real hieroglyphs with which he responded to
Darius, sent a bird; and the Roman patricians in all the heroic contests
they had with the plebs (as one plainly reads in Roman history) so as to
preserve for themselves their heroic rights, opposed the plebs with the
claim, AUSPICIA ESSE SUA235 [“the auspices were theirs”]; in exactly
the same way, in the return to barbarism, one observes that noble devices
were topped by helmets with crests adorned with feathers; and, in the
West Indies, no one is adorned with feathers except the nobles.

489 IV. Thus, the word Ious, Jove, and its contracted form Ius, prior to any-
thing else must have signified the fat of the victims owed to Jove, in
conformity with what was stated above [§433]; and, in the same way in
the return to barbarism, the word “canon” was used of ecclesiastical
laws and that which was paid by someone under fealty236 directly to his
patron, perhaps because the first fealties were introduced by ecclesiastics
who, not able themselves to cultivate grounds owned by the Church,
gave them to others to cultivate. The two things stated here agree with
two stated above, first, that among the Greeks, νόμος [nomos] signified
law and νόμισμα [nomisma] signified money [§433], second, that the
French call law, loi, and money, aloi [§487]. It is from these very actu-
alities, and from nothing else, that Ious Optimus was used for Jove as
the strongest of the gods, who, through strength in the lightning bolt,
afforded a beginning to divine authority in its primary signification: it
was the domain he had because, as was stated above [§379], all things
490 came from Jove. For that truth from metaphysical reasoning about the
ubiquity of God (taken, later, in a false sense) was a truth of poetic
metaphysics, that
Jovis omnia plena237
[“all is filled with Jove”];

this truth produced the human authority of the giants, who occupied
the first vacant lands of the world as their domain in the same sense
as above, which is retained in the Roman legal code in the expression
ius optimum [“supreme law”], even though its native significance then
was different from the significance it had in later times. This is because
ius optimum came into being with the significance that Cicero238 gives it

235
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6.
236
  L’enfiteuticario—that is, someone under the Roman law contract known as
“emphyteusis.”
237
  See Virgil, Eclogues 3.60.
S 238
 Cicero, De haruspicum responso 7.14; De lege agraria 3.2.7.
N
L
188
Book Two 189

in a golden passage from his speeches, where he defines it as “domain

over real estate subject to no encumbrance either private or public,” and
it was a law deemed “supreme” in terms of strength (this is found to
conform with the earliest times of the world) in the sense that it was
strongest because it was not weakened by any encumbrance foreign to it.
This must have been the domain held by the Fathers in the familial state
and, consequently, the natural domain that must have come into being
prior to the civil domain. And when cities were later composed from
these families in Greece upon this supreme domain, which was called
the δίκαιον ἄριστον [dikaion ariston], they came into being with an aristo-
cratic form, as will be found below [§586]. It was because of these same
origins that they were called, by the peoples of Latium, “republics of
the optimates,” and thus were also called “republics of the few,” for they
were composed of those
Pauci quos aequus amavit Jupiter239
[“few whom fair Jupiter has loved”].

In their heroic contests with the plebs, they maintained their claim over
the divine auspices; in mute times, these auspices were signified by the
bird of Idanthyrsus and by the wings in Greek myths; eventually, the Ro-
man patricians used articulate language to state AUSPICIA ESSE SUA
[“the auspices were theirs”]. This is because with his lightning bolts, from 491
which come the greater auspices, Jove drove those earliest giants into the
earth and sent them under the earth into caves in the mountains, and by
driving them to the earth, he granted them the good fortune of becoming
lords of the lands where they hid as settlers; and from there they became
lords of the earliest republics. It is on account of this domain that each
of them spoke of himself as FUNDUS FIERI240 [“being the ground”]
rather than fieri auctor [“being the author”]. And it was the union of
their private familial authority, as we will see below [§584], that made
for the civil—or public—authority of their regnant heroic senates. This
is expressed in the medallion, observed so frequently among those in
Goltz,241 displaying three human legs united at the center, with the base
of their feet resting on the edge, which signifies domain over the ground
within the orbit, or territory, or district of any republic (this is now called
“eminent domain” and is signified by an apple which today rests upon
the crowns of civil power, as will be explained below [§548]) and which
signifies the strongest domain with the number three. The Greeks were
wont to use that number for superlatives; so too the French say très to-
day; it is from this sort of way of speaking that the lightning bolt of Jove
was called “thrice-furrowing” in that it furrowed most strongly through
the air, whence, perhaps, the idea of furrowing applied, first, to air, later,

239
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.129–130.
240
  Compare Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19.
241
  Hubert Goltz (1526–1583), Dutch painter, engraver, and printer.
 190 The New Science

to land, and, finally, to water; the trident of Neptune was so called be-
cause, as we will see [§634], it was the strongest hook for grabbing or
grappling ships; and Cerebus was called “thrice-gulleted” because of his
enormous throat.242
492 The things stated here concerning the devices of noble households are
those which were reasoned out from their principles in the first edition of
this work (this is the third place in that book for which we are not vexed
at its having come to light).

493 V. As a consequence of all this, it is from here—from those letters and

laws found by Hermes Trismegistus for the Egyptians, from those char-
acters and names of the Greeks, from those names which signify both
peoples and laws for the Romans—that the three princes of the doctrine
of natural law of the gentile peoples—Grotius, Selden, and P ­ ufendorf—
ought to have taken their start in speaking about this law; and thus ought
to have explicated it with intelligence by the hieroglyphs and myths
which were the medallions of those times when the gentile nations were
founded; and thus they ought to have made certain the customs of those
nations with a metaphysical art of criticism concerning those authors
of nations, from which that philological art of criticism ought to take
its first lights, concerning writers who did not arrive until more than a
thousand years after the nations were founded.

Final corollaries
concerning the logic of the learned

494 I. By the things upon which we have reasoned up until now concerning
the origins of languages on the strength of this Poetic Logic, we have
done justice to the earliest of the authors who were taken in all later
times to be wise men, insofar as they gave names to things naturally and
with propriety (hence, as we saw above [§433] for the peoples of Greece
and Latium, nomen and natura signified the same thing).

495 II. The earliest authors of humanity gave their attention to an art of
topics for the senses,243 by which they united properties or qualities or
relations which were, so to speak, concrete and which belonged to the in-
dividuals, or species, from which were formed the poetic genera to which
they belonged.

496 III. As a result, that first age of the world can truly be said to be occupied
with the first operations of the human mind.

  See Virgil, Aeneid 6.417.

242

  Vico discusses the ars topica at some length in the third chapter of his
243

S inaugural oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an expanded version of

N which was published in 1709.
L
190
Book Two 191

IV. And, first of all, it started by roughing out a crude art of topics—that 497
is, the art of regulating well the first operation of our minds—teaching
the commonplaces that must all be run through so as to know all there is
in something that one wishes to know well—that is, fully.

V. Providence gave good counsel to the human things by moving the hu- 498
man mind towards the art of topics prior to the art of criticism, just as
to know things comes first, and to judge them comes later. For the art
of topics is the faculty of making minds ingenious, just as criticism is
the faculty of making them exact; and in those earliest times, they had
to discover all the things necessary for human life, and discovery is the
property of ingenuity.244
And anyone who reflects will notice that, in effect, not only the neces-
sary, but also the advantageous, the convenient, the pleasurable, and
even the luxurious superfluous to human life, had already been discov-
ered in Greece prior to the arrival of the philosophers, as we will make
it possible to see [§§793–801] when we reason upon the age of Homer.
Concerning this, we proposed an Axiom above “that children avail them-
selves of imitation in quite powerful ways, that poetry is nothing other
than imitation,” and that “the arts are nothing other than imitations of
nature and consequently, in a certain way, are real poems.”245
Thus, first, the earliest peoples—who were the children of human-
kind—founded the world of the arts; later, the philosophers—who came
a long time afterwards and who, consequently, are the old age of the
­nations—founded the world of the sciences, by which humanity was
made complete.246

VI. This history of human ideas, much to our wonder, is confirmed by 499
the history of philosophy itself. The first manner in which men practiced
a rude form of philosophizing was αὐτοψία [autopsia]—or “the testimony
of the senses”—which, later, was used by Epicurus, the philosopher of
the senses, who was content with suppositions about things relying on
the testimony of the senses; the senses, as we have seen in the origins of
poetry [§424], were most vivid for the earliest poetic nations.
Later came Aesop—that is, one of the moral philosophers called “com-
mon” [volgari], who, as we stated above [§424], took their start prior to
the seven sages of Greece—who reasoned from examples; and since it

244
  For Vico’s most complete theory of ingenium, see De antiquissma 7.3, which
defines it as “the faculty of joining together into one things which are scattered,
diverse” (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 111).
245
  Axiom 52, inexactly quoted.
246
  Here and elsewhere (§§4, 209, 241–243, 819) Vico suggests a strong parallel
between the stages of a human being’s life and the stages of humankind as a
whole, so that the latter reproduces the former. This parallel may be compared
to the (highly disputed) claim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a dictum
of German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919).
 192 The New Science

was still a poetic age, the examples he took were ones devised and based
upon comparisons. With one such example, the good Menenius Agrippa
reduced the Roman plebs to obedience.247 And even today, one example
of this sort, especially one which is true, is better for persuading the com-
mon run than any irrefutable reasoning through maxims.
After, came Socrates, who introduced the dialectic of reasoning by in-
duction from more certain things which have a relation to doubtful
things which are in question.
Medicine, through reasoning by induction from observations prior to
Socrates, gave us Hippocrates, the prince of doctors both on his merits
and as first of them, who deserves the immortal eulogy, nec fallit quen-
quam nec falsus ab ullo est248 [“he deceived no one and was deceived
by none”].
Mathematics, through reasoning by the unitive, so-called “synthetic”
method, had made, in the time of Plato, its greatest progress in the Ital-
ian school of Pythagoras, as one can see in the Timaeus.249
Thus, through reasoning by this unitive method in the time of Socrates
and Plato, Athens was resplendent in all the arts for which human inge-
nuity can be admired, the arts of poetry, eloquence, and history as well
as those of music, foundry, painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Later came both Aristotle, who taught the syllogism (a method which
explains universals in their particulars rather than uniting particulars
to gather what is universal), and Zeno, who taught by the sorites (this
method corresponds to that of modern philosophizers and makes inge-
nuity subtle, not acute). And they did not bear any other fruits that were
more noteworthy on behalf of humankind.
Hence, it is with good reason that Lord Verulam, equally great in phi-
losophy and politics, proposes and illustrates reasoning by induction in
his Organon250 and is followed today in England very fruitfully by the
experimental philosophers.

500 VII. By this history of human ideas, we convict of an error common to

all those who, because they were preoccupied with the false, common
opinion about the lofty wisdom which the ancients had, believed that
Minos, first lawgiver for the gentile peoples, Theseus for the Athenians,
Lycurgus for the Spartans, Romulus and the other Roman kings had
all ordered universal laws. For the most ancient laws are observed to be
conceived as commands and prohibitions for a single case, which, later,

247
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.32.
248
  The source is Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 1.6.64.
249
 It is not clear which passage from the Timaeus Vico has in mind.
S 250
  See Bacon, Novum Organum 1.14, 1.40, 1.105–106.
N
L
192
Book Two 193

were run through for all: this is how little capable the earliest peoples
were of universals. And, indeed, these laws were not conceived until after
the deeds that called for them had come to pass.
And the law of Tullus Hostilius against the accused, Horatius, it is noth-
ing but the penalty which the duumvirs (who were created by the king
for this purpose) pronounced against that illustrious defendant, and it
is proclaimed to be a lex horrendi carminis [“a law of dreadful form”] by
Livy.251 As a result, it is one with those laws which Draco wrote in blood
and the leges sanguinis252 [“blood laws”]) of sacred history. For Livy,
his reflection on this law—namely, that the king did not wish to publish
the law on his own so as not to be the author of a judgment so harsh
and unpopular—is ridiculous since the king prescribed the formula to
the duumvirs so that they could not acquit Horatius, even if he were
discovered to be innocent. Here, Livy makes this completely unintel-
ligible, because he himself did not understand, first, that in the heroic
senate (which is discovered to have been aristocratic) the kings had no
power other than that of creating the duumvirs as commissioners, who
stand in judgment of those publically accused; second, that the peoples
of heroic cities, to whom the condemned could appeal, consisted only
of nobles.
Now, to return to our purpose, this law of Tullus is, in actuality, one 501
of what are called exempla, in the sense of “exemplary punishments,”
and these must have been the earliest examples used by human reason.
This agrees with what we learned from Aristotle above in the Axioms253
that “heroic republics did not have laws concerning damages and pri-
vate offences.” In this fashion, there were, first, real examples and, later,
the reasoned examples which are used in logic and rhetoric. However,
after intelligible universals were understood, this essential property of
laws—namely, that to be laws, they must be universal—was recognized
and this maxim of jurisprudence—namely, that legibus non exemplis est
iudicandum [“judgment must be based on laws, not examples”]—was
recognized.

On Poetic Morals,
And therein on the origins of the
commonplace virtues taught
by religion along with marriage

Just as the metaphysics of the philosophers, by means of the idea of 502

God, performs its first labor, that of clarifying the human mind, and

251
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.6.
252
  See note on §423.
253
  Axiom 81. See Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.
 194 The New Science

needs logic in order, by the clarity and distinction of ideas, to inform its
own reasoning, and by use of this, the mind descends to purge the hu-
man heart with morals; so too, the metaphysics of the poetic giants, who
had made war on the heavens with their atheism, were defeated by terror
of a Jove, feared for his lightning bolt, who drove them into the earth,
not only physically but also mentally, with their devising so terrifying
an idea of Jove; and if that idea was not formed by reasoning (of which
they were not yet capable) but by the senses, and if it was as materially
false as it was formally true, this still was a logic conforming to the sort
of nature they had, and from it sprouted poetic morals by making them
pious. From this nature of human things comes that eternal property of
the human mind, that for it to make good use of the knowledge of God,
it needs to bow itself down to the earth, just as, by contrast, pride in the
human mind tends towards atheism, and it is by such pride that atheists
become giants of the spirit who, with Horace, must say:
Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia254
[“We seek after heaven itself in our foolishness”].

503 It was certainly pious giants of this sort that Plato255 recognized in the
Polyphemus of Homer, and we are emboldened by what Homer256 tells
us of this same giant, where he makes Polyphemus say that an augur,
who had been among them at one time, had predicted the disgrace that
he would later suffer at the hands of Ulysses, for augurs certainly do not
live among atheists.
At that time, poetic morals took its start from piety, for piety was or-
dered by providence for the founding of the nations, among all of which
piety is commonly understood as the mother of all the virtues pertaining
to moral, economic, and civil life. And religion alone makes the work of
virtue effectual, for philosophy is better at reasoning about virtue.
And piety takes its start from religion, piety which, in its proper sense, is
fear of the divine; the heroic origin of the word “religion” is preserved in
Latin by those who derive it from religando [“to bind”]—that is, who de-
rive it from the fetters with which Tityrus and Prometheus were fettered
to rocks on high so that eagles, the terrifying religion of the auspices of
Jove, might devour their heart and entrails. In this is retained a property
eternal for all nations, that piety is instilled in children by a fear of some
divinity.
504 Moral virtue takes its start, as it must, from conatus257; it is by cona-
tus that the giants, by the terrifying religion of lightning bolts, fettered
themselves at the foot of mountains and held in check their bestial vice

254
 Horace, Carmina 1.3.38.
255
  See Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e.
S 256
 Homer, Odyssey 9.507–512.
N 257
 On conatus, see the note at §340.
L
194
Book Two 195

of wandering wild through the great forest of the Earth and took on
the completely contrary custom of staying hidden and settled on those
grounds (hence, they later became the authors of nations and lords
in the earliest republics, as we have noted above [§§387–389] and will
explicate at greater length below [§§553–559]); this is one of the great
benefits, preserved by folk tradition, that heaven did for humankind
when heaven reigned on Earth with the religion of the auspices (hence,
Jove was given the title Stator—that is, the “One Who Settles,”—as was
stated above [§379]).
In addition to moral virtue, virtue of the spirit also started to break
forth among them from conatus, containing their bestial lust from being
exercised in the sight of a heaven for which they held the greatest terror.
And each of them was given to dragging off into their caves for himself
one woman and keeping her there within in continuous companionship
for his life. And they gained experience with each other in that Venus of
human life, a love covered and hidden—that is to say, done with a sense
of shame. And thus was the start of the sense of shame that Socrates
says is the color of virtue,258 which, after religion, is the second bond
which preserves the unity of nations, just as audacity and impiety are
what destroy that unity.
In this fashion, marriages were introduced—that is, chaste carnal 505
unions made in fear of some divinity—which were posited as the second
principle [§336] of this science and which came from the principle that
we posited as first, that of divine providence; and marriage came with
three solemnities.
The first of these solemnities of marriage were the auspices of Jove taken 506
from the lightning bolts, when the giants were induced to celebrate the
auspices. The lot [sorte] taken in the auspices is retained in Latin in the
definition of marriage as omnis vitae consortium [“sharing in the lot of
an entire lifetime”], and from this, husband and wife were called con-
sortes [“those sharing in lot”]; and even today among ourselves, they
commonly say that young women are “taking up their lot” [prender sorte]
for “getting married.”
In this determinate fashion and from this earliest time of the world, this
law of the gentile peoples is retained: namely, that the wife adopts the
public religion of her husband inasmuch as husbands started to share
with their wives their earliest human ideas, drawn from the idea about
some divinity of theirs which forced them to drag their wives into their
caves. And so, even this commonplace metaphysics starts to know the
human mind in God.
And it must have been from this first point of all the human things
that gentile men started to praise the gods in the sense in which ancient
Roman law speaks of praise, as “citing” or “calling by name”; this sense

258
  Compare Plato, Euthyphro 12c.
 196 The New Science

of divine praise is retained in the expression laudare auctores [“to name

authors”],259 for they cited the gods as the authors of all that men had
themselves done (these must have been the praises that were appropriate
for men to give to the gods).
507 From this most ancient origin of marriage was born the custom of
women entering into the family and household of the men to whom they
were married. This natural custom of the gentile peoples was preserved
by the Romans, among whom wives had the place of daughters relative
to their husbands and sisters relative to their children.
And, consequently, even from its start, marriage must have been, on the
one hand, with one woman only (a custom preserved by the Romans and
admired by Tacitus in the ancient Germans,260 who, like the Romans,
preserved it intact from the earliest origins of their nation, a passage
which allows one to conjecture that it was the same for all other nations
at their beginnings), and, on the other hand, a continuous companion-
ship for their whole lives, as it remains in the customs of many, many
peoples. Hence, the Romans defined nuptials, with a view to this prop-
erty, as individua vitae consuetudo261 [“the inseparable intimacy of a life-
time”], and these same Romans introduced divorce quite late.
508 Proceeding from the auspices of this sort taken in the lightning bolts
seen as Jove, Greek mythical history tells us that Hercules—the charac-
ter pertaining to the founders of the nations—as we saw above [§82] and
will observe more below [§514]—was born of Alcmena in the thunder of
Jove; another great hero of Greece, Bacchus, was born of lighting-struck
Semele.
For such was the first impetus for the heroes to call themselves the
sons of Jove: they said this in keeping with a truth of the senses and
based on an opinion in whose persuasion they lived, that the gods had
made all things, as was reasoned upon above [§449]. And one reads of
this in Roman history: that, in the heroic contests, the patricians said
AUSPICIA ESSE SUA262 [“the auspices were theirs”], to which the plebs
responded that the Fathers (of whom Romulus composed the Senate and
from whom those patricians traced their origin) NON ESSE CAELO
DEMISSOS263 [“had not been sent down from the heavens”]; if this does
not mean that the Fathers were not heroes, one cannot understand how
this response could be suitable.
Consequently, so as to signify that connubium—that is, the right to con-
tract solemn nuptials, whose major solemnity was the auspices of Jove—
was the property of the heroes, they made noble Love out to be winged

259
 In Latin, the laudare of the expression laudare auctores means “to praise.”
260
 Tacitus, Germania 18.1.
261
  Institutes of Justinian 1.9.1.
S 262
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6.
N 263
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.
L
196
Book Two 197

and with a blindfold (so as to signify his modesty) and called him ῎Ερως
[Erōs], a name similar to those heroes;264 and they made out Hymen to be
winged, who was the son of Urania, so called from οὐρανός [ouranos], or
coelum [“the heavens”], and so “she who contemplates the heavens in or-
der to take the auspices”265 (she must have come into being as first of the
Muses, defined by Homer, as we observed above [§§365, 381, 391], as the
“science of good and evil,” and she was also, like the other Muses, de-
scribed as winged, because she belonged to the heroes, as was explained
above [§488]). Also, in relation to this, we have explained above [§391] the
historical sense of the phrase,
A Jove principium Musae266
[“The Muse begins with Jove”];

hence was she, as with all the others, believed to be the daughter of Jove,
because the arts of humanity came into being from religion, and the
numinous source of these Muses is Apollo, who is principally believed to
be the god of divination, and when they sing, they do so in the sense of
the Latin verbs canere or cantare, which mean “to foretell.”
The second solemnity of marriage was that women were veiled as a sign 509
of their modesty, which made for the first marriages in the world. This
custom has been preserved by all nations, and in Latin it is preserved in
the very name they gave to nuptials, called nuptiae from nubendo, which
means “to cover,”267 and in the return to barbarian times they described
young women who were unmarried as in capillo [“with hair uncovered”]
to distinguish them from matrons who were veiled.

The third solemnity of marriage (preserved by the Romans) was the tak- 510
ing of one’s spouse with a certain feigned force, derived from the true
force with which the giants dragged the earliest women into their caves;
and in keeping with the first lands occupied by the giants who encum-
bered them with their bodies, wives solemnized by marriage were called
manucaptae [“those taken in hand”].
The theological poets made from solemn marriages the second di- 511
vine character after that of Jove, JUNO, the second divinity of the so-
called gentes maiores. She is the sister and wife of Jove,268 for the earli-
est ­lawful—that is, solemnized—marriages (called lawful because of the
solemnity of the auspices of Jove) must have started between brothers
and sisters. She was queen of gods and men because later regimes came

264
  This doubtful etymology also appears at Plato, Cratylus 398c–d.
265
  See Plato, Cratylus 396b–c.
266
 Virgil, Eclogues 3.60.
267
  This etymology was proposed by Festus, and is reported by Voss (Etymologi-
con, p. 405).
268
  See Augustine, City of God 4.10.
 198 The New Science

into being from legitimate marriages. She is completely clothed (as one
can observe in statuary and medallions) in order to signify her modesty.
512 Hence, the heroic Venus, to the extent that she is also a numinous source
for solemn marriages, was called pronuba269 [“bridesmaid”], and is cov-
ered in her shame by the marriage girdle, which later effeminate poets
embroidered with all their incentives to lust. However, by then, the strict
history of the auspices had been corrupted, and just as Jove was believed
to lie with women, so too was Venus believed to lie with men: with An-
chises, she made Aeneas, who was produced under the auspices of this
Venus. And it was this Venus to whom they attributed the swan, common
to both her and Apollo, which sang in the sense of the Latin verbs canere
or cantare, which signify divinari or “to foretell”; it is in the form of a
swan that Jove lies with Leda—that is to say, Leda, under the auspices of
Jove, conceived Castor, Pollux, and Helen from eggs.
513 This is the Juno called “yoke-bearing,” from the yoke whence solemn
marriage was called coniugium, and husband and wife were called coni-
uges. Juno is also called Lucina, she who brings offspring into the light,
although not light in its natural aspect (this is also shared in common
with the offspring of slaves) but in its civil aspect, whence nobles were
called illustri [“illustrious”]. Her jealousy is a political jealousy, because
of which the Romans, up until Year 309 of Rome, considered connubium
closed off to the plebs.
However, she was called by the Greeks ῞Ηρα [Hera], from which must
have been derived the name of the heroes themselves, for they came to be
from the solemn nuptials whose numinous source was Juno and, accord-
ingly, were produced by a noble love, which is what ῎Ερως [Erōs], who is
the same as Hymen, means. And the heroes must have been named after
Hera in the sense of their being “lords of the families,” in contrast to
their familial servants who, as we will see below [§556], were like slaves.
The Latin word heri [“heir”] had this same sense; hence, the use of the
word hereditas, “inheritance,” for which, the native Latin term was famil-
ia.270 As a result of this origin, hereditas must have signified the condition
of a despotic master. So in that Law of the Twelve Tables, a sovereign
power of testamentary disposition was reserved for the paterfamilias—
UTI PATERFAMILIAS SUPER PECUNIAE TUTELAEVE REI
SUAE LEGASSIT ITA IUS ESTO [“as the paterfamilias disposes his
possessions and the guardianship of his estate, let this be the law”]—for
“to dispose” is generally the verb legare, which is proper to a sovereign,
whence an heir came to be a legate, who, in the inheritance, represents
the person of the dead paterfamilias, and children no less than slaves
were comprehended in the expressions REI SUAE [“his estate”] and PE-
CUNIAE [“his possessions”]; this is all too weighty a proof of the mo-
narchical power which the Fathers had in the state of nature over their

S 269
  See Virgil, Aeneid 4.166.
N 270
  See Ulpian, Digest 50.16.195.1.
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198
Book Two 199

families, which they ought to have reserved for themselves and which,
as we will see below [§§521–522], they actually did reserve in the state of
the heroic cities, which must have come into being as aristocracies—that
is, republics of lords—for they retained this power even within popular
republics—all of these things will be completely reasoned through by us
below [§§584–586]).
The goddess, Juno, commanded the great labors of the so-called Theban 514
Hercules—that is, the Greek Heracules, for every ancient gentile nation
had a Hercules who founded it, as was stated above in the Axioms271—
for the piety connected with marriage is the school where they learned
the first rudiments of all the great virtues; and Hercules, with the favor
of Jove under whose auspices he was produced, overcomes all these la-
bors and so is called ῾Ηρακλῆς [Heraklēs]—that is, ῾Ηρακλείς [Herakleis],
“the glory of Juno”—and if we were to esteem this glory by the correct
idea of it (which Cicero272 defines as “popular fame for worthy deeds
done for humankind”), then how great must be the glory of these ver-
sions of Hercules, who with their labors founded the nations.
However, since these strict significations were obscured by time and by
the customs becoming effeminate, first, the sterility of Juno taken to
be natural and, second, her jealousy was taken to be at the adulterous
Jove, and Hercules was taken to be the bastard son of Jove; and, with a
name completely at odds with things—he was actually the “disgrace of
Juno”—Hercules overcame all these labors with the favor of Jove and
in spite of Juno, and Juno was considered the mortal enemy of virtue.
And that hieroglyph, or myth, of a Juno hanging in the air, with a rope
around her neck, and with her hands bound with another rope and with
two heavy stones attached to her feet, this signified the sanctity of mar-
riage: the air represents the auspices needed for solemn nuptials, whence
Iris, the rainbow, was given to Juno as her assistant, and the peacock
with its rainbow tail was her sign; the rope around her neck is to signify
the force used by the giants on the first matrons; the rope binding the
hands (this was later represented among the nations of gentile humanity
by a ring) is to demonstrate the subjection of wives to their husbands;
and the heavy stones on her feet are to denote the stability of nuptials,
whence Virgil called solemn marriage “coniugium stabile.”273 Ever since
this myth was taken (because of the sense given to it by later times cor-
rupted by their customs) to represent the cruel punishment of an adul-
terous Jove (a sense of a sort unworthy of it), the myth has troubled the
mythologists up until now.
Precisely on account of these causes did Plato,274 with the Greek 515
myths, do what Manetho had done with the Egyptian hieroglyphs:

271
  Axiom 43.
272
 Cicero, Pro Marcello 8.26
273
  See Virgil, Aeneid 1.73; 4.26. (The expression in the text is conubium stabile.)
274
  See Plato, Cratylus 412d.
 200 The New Science

­ bserving, on the one hand, the incongruity of gods with customs of

o
this sort and, on the other hand, the congruity between them and his
own ideas, he imposed upon the myth of Jove his idea of the ether which
runs through and penetrates all—because of which,
Jovis omnia plena
[“all is filled with Jove”],

as was stated above [§379]—but the Jove of the theological poets was no
higher than the mountains and the regions of air that produced light-
ning bolts. And on the myth of Juno, he imposed this idea of breathable
air, but Juno was not produced by Jove, even though ether, along with
air, produces everything. This is how much the theological poets in their
phrase understood the truth of physics that teaches that the universe is
filled with ether, or the truth of metaphysics that demonstrates the ubiq-
uity with which natural theology speaks of God!
Upon poetic heroism, Plato raised up his own philosophical heroism,
for the hero stands above man, not just beasts. According to that hero-
ism, a beast is slave to the passions; man is placed in the middle, fighting
the passions; and a hero commands the passions at his pleasure, and so
the heroic is in the middle between divine and human nature.275 And he
found congruent that the noble love of the poets (called ῎Ερως [Erōs]
at its origins, from which a hero was called ἥρως [herōs]) was winged
and blindfolded and that the plebeian love was without a blindfold and
without wings, both congruous for explaining the two loves, divine and
bestial: the one blind to things of the senses, the other intent upon things
of the senses; the one rising on wings to the contemplation of intelligible
things, the other, without wings, falling back into sensible things.276 And
as for Ganymede taken away on an eagle to the heavens by Jove, the strict
poets meant by this that he was one who contemplates the auspices of
Jove; in later corrupt times, he was made into the profane delight of Jove;
and Plato, in keeping with a beautiful congruity, made him into that
metaphysical contemplative who, in his contemplation of the supreme
being by means of what is called the unitive method, is united with Jove.
516 In this fashion, piety and religion made the earliest men naturally men
of prudence, who sought the counsel of the auspices of Jove; it made them
men of justice, who were just, in those earliest times, both toward Jove
(who, as we have seen [§§398, 433], gave his name to justice) and toward
men, not meddling in the things of others, the sort of justice, as Poly-
phemus tells Ulysses, belonging to the giants separated from each other
throughout the caves of Sicily, although, by comparison, this justice was
quite primitive; it made them men of temperance, content with one woman
for their entire lifetime. And, as we will see below [§§708, 1099], it made
them men of fortitude, industry, and magnanimity, which are the virtues

S   See Plato, Symposium 202c–203a and Laws 7, 792c–d.

275

N   See Plato, Symposium 180d–181c; Phaedrus 255b–c.

276

L
200
Book Two 201

of the golden age. This age was not as the later effeminate poets devised
it, in which pleasure is license, for, in the age of theological poets, where
men were immune (just as we observe that even to this day rustics are simi-
larly ­immune) to any taste for nauseating reflection, there was no pleasure
­unless it was licit, and there was no pleasure unless it was helpful; the he-
roic origin of this is preserved in the Latin expression iuvat [“it helps”],
which is used to say “it is beautiful.” Nor was this age as later philosophers
devised it, as one where men read, off the heart of Jove, the eternal laws
of justice, for originally they read, off the aspect of the heavens, the laws
dictated to them by lightning bolts. And, in conclusion, the virtues of this
earliest age were like those which—as we learned above [§100] in the Anno-
tations on the Chronological Table—were praised by the Scythians, who
used to stick a knife in the earth and worship it as a god because, by this,
they could justify the murders which they were about to perform—that is
to say, they were virtues of the senses mixing together religion and brutal-
ity, and whose customs comport tolerably well with those of the witchcraft
we observe even today, as was noted in the Axioms.277
Out of these early morals of a superstitious and savage gentile human- 517
ity came the custom of consecrating human victims to the gods, a custom
held by the most ancient Phoenicians, among whom, when some great
calamity, like war or famine or plague, had sovereign claim over them, the
kings would consecrate their own children so as to placate heavenly anger
(as Philo of Byblus278 tells us), and they made such sacrifice of children
even under ordinary circumstance to Saturn (as Quintus Curtius279 re-
lates), and this custom (as Justin recounts) was preserved by the Carthag-
inians, a people who, undoubtedly, came from the Phoenicians, as was
herein observed [§660], and this custom was practiced by the Carthagin-
ians up until their latest times (as was preserved by Ennius in that verse,
Et Poinei solitei sos sacruficare puellos280
[“And the Phoenicians are accustomed to sacrifice their own
children”]).

The Carthaginians, after the rout they received from Agathocles,281 sacri-
ficed two hundred children of the nobility to their god so as to placate him.
And along with the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, we see that this
custom of impious piety was a convention for the Greeks in the offering
and sacrifice which Agamemnon made of his daughter Iphigenia.

277
  Axiom 40.
278
  Philo of Byblos (c. 64–141 CE), grammarian and historian, known primarily
for his Phoenician History.
279
  Quintus Curtius Rufus, Roman historian of uncertain date, author of Histo-
riae Alexandri Magni.
280
  Ennius, fr. 125.
281
  Agathocles (360–289 BCE), Greek tyrant of Syracuse, mentioned by Ma-
chiavelli at Prince 8.
 202 The New Science

This ought not evoke wonder in anyone who reflects upon the cyclopean
paternal power of the earliest Fathers of gentile humanity, which was
practiced by the most learned of nations, the Greeks, and the wisest, the
Romans: both of them, even until the time of their most cultivated hu-
manity, had the choice to kill their infant children who had just been born.
Such reflection ought certainly to lessen the horror which, in our meek-
ness, we are made to feel at Brutus decapitating his two sons because
they had conspired to restore the tyrant, Tarquinius, to rule in Rome and
our horror at the Manlius called “the Imperious,” because he severed the
head of his generous son, who had fought and won a battle contrary to
his father’s orders.282
That such sacrifices of human victims had currency among the Gauls
is confirmed by Caesar;283 and Tacitus,284 in his Annals, relates of the
English that the Druids with their divine science (here, the vanity of the
learned hopes to find the riches of recondite wisdom) divined, in the en-
trails of human victims, what was to come. This was the savage and bru-
tal religion prohibited by Augustus to the Romans who lived in France
and forbidden by Claudius to the Gauls themselves (as Suetonius285 re-
lates in his biography of Emperor Claudius).
Consequently, those who are learned in Near Eastern languages infer
that it was the Phoenicians who spread throughout other parts of the
world their sacrifices to Moloch (whom Mornay,286 van der Driesche,287
and Selden say was Saturn), sacrifices in which they burned a man alive.
Such was the humanity of the Phoenicians who brought letters to Greece,
coming as teachers for those earliest nations in a most barbarous gentile
humanity!
They say that Hercules purged Latium of a similar custom, exceptionally
brutal, that of casting into the Tiber living men as sacrifices, and that he
introduced the custom of instead throwing in men made of straw.
However, Tacitus tells us that the sacrifice of human victims was a so-
lemnity among the ancient Germans, who were certainly, for all the time
for which there is memory, closed off from foreign nations (as a result of
this, even the Romans, with all the strength in the world, could not pen-
etrate Germany), and the Spanish found these sacrifices in the Americas
(hidden up until two centuries ago from the rest of the world), where

282
  For the Brutus episode, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.5; for Manlius, Ab urbe
condita 7.4–5.
283
 Caesar, De bello gallico 6.16.
284
 Tacitus, Annals 14.30.
285
 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (Claudius 25.5).
286
  Philippe de Mornay, (1549–1623), also known as Duplessis-Mornay: Calvin-
ist, counselor to Henry IV, founder of first Protestant academy in 1604.
S 287
  Johannes van den Driesche (1550–1616), Flemish Protestant divine and
N Dutch Hebraist.
L
202
Book Two 203

barbarians feed upon human flesh, which (as observed by Lescarbot288

in his De Francia nova) must have been the flesh of men thus consecrated
and killed (sacrifices of which Oviedo289 tells us in his De historia Indica).
As a result, at the same time that the Germans saw gods on Earth,
those in the Americas did as well. As we stated of both above [§375], the
ancient Scythians were rich in the many golden virtues we have heard
praised by writers at the very time when this most inhumane humanity
had currency among them!
And these were the victims which Plautus290 called Saturni hostiae [“sac-
rifices to Saturn”], made at a time which authors wish to call the golden
age of Latium, and what an age it was, so tame, so benign, so restrained,
so tolerant, so dutiful!
From all this one has to conclude the emptiness of the vanity of the 518
learned up until now concerning the innocence of the golden age observed
in the earliest gentile nations. By what was, in actuality, a fanaticism of
superstition, the earliest men of gentile humanity—wild, arrogant, most
savage—held to some kind of duty by the terrifying strength of a divinity
which they themselves imagined; reflecting on this superstition, Plutarch
proposes in his Problema the question: which is the lesser evil, to venerate
gods impiously or not to believe in any gods at all?291 However, he does
not justly weigh the evil of this savage superstition relative to the evil of
atheism. For it was by this superstition that the most luminous nations
arose, but atheism has never founded any nation in the world, which con-
forms with what was demonstrated above in the Principles [§334].
And this is what should be said about the divine morals of the earliest 519
peoples of this now lost humankind. What should be said about heroic
morals will be reasoned upon in its place below.292

On Poetic Economics,
and therein on the earliest families
comprised of children

The heroes sensed through human senses those two truths which com- 520
prise the whole of economic doctrine,293 truths which the people of

288
  Marc Lescarbot (1570–1641), French author, poet, and lawyer. The text to
which Vico refers, an early history of Canada, was published in 1609.
289
  Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), Spanish historian
whose book made Europeans aware of the hammock, the pineapple, and
tobacco.
290
  See the note to Plautus at §191.
291
 Plutarch, De superstitione 10.
292
  That is, in the final chapter of the Poetic Politics (§§666–678).
293
  “Economic doctrine,” la dottrina iconomica. Though the term iconomica will
be translated as “economic” throughout, the reader should remember that the
 204 The New Science

Latium preserved in their verbs, educere [“to bring forth”] and educare
[“to bring up”]: with masterful elegance, the first verb pertains to the
educating of the soul; the second to the educating of the body. The first
verb was, by a learned metaphor, applied by the physicists to bring forth
forms from matter inasmuch as this heroic education, first, took its start
from bringing forth, in a certain mode, the form of the human soul,
which had been completely buried in the matter of the vast bodies of
giants, and, second, took its start from bringing forth the form of the
human body from their gigantic bodies lacking in all measure.
521 And, with a view to what is regarded as the first part of economic dis-
cipline, the heroic Fathers must have been, as was noted in the Axioms,294
while in that state which is called the “state of nature,” men wise in the
art of divining from auspices—that is, in commonplace wisdom—and,
as a consequence of this wisdom, they were priests through procuring—
that is, through understanding well—the auspices by means of sacrifices;
and, finally, they were kings who must have brought the laws of God to
their families in the proper sense of the term “lawgiver”—that is, those
who are “bringers of law,” just as, later, they were the first kings of the
heroic cities, who brought the laws of the regnant senates to peoples
(we observed this later form of lawgiving above in the Annotations on
the Chronological Table [§67] with the two kinds of heroic assemblies
in Homer, one called the βουλή [boulē] and the other called the ἀγορά
[agora]; in the former, the heroes ordered laws orally and, in the latter,
they made these laws public orally inasmuch as common alphabetic let-
ters had not yet been found; hence, the heroic kings brought laws for the
regnant senates to the people in the persons of duumvirs, whom they cre-
ated in order to declare these laws, just as Tullus Hostilius did in the trial
of Horatius295 with the result that those duumvirs came into being as
living and speaking laws, which Livy does not understand and, because
of this, does not offer a narrative of the judgment of Horatius which is
intelligible, as we observed above [§500].
522 This folk tradition, along with the false opinion of the unaccountable
wisdom of the ancients,296 tempted Plato with the empty desire for times
in which philosophers ruled or rulers philosophized.
And certainly these Fathers, as was noted in the Axioms,297 must have
been monarchical rulers in their families, superior to everyone in their
families and subject only to God, fortified by a power armed with ter-
rifying religions and consecrated by the most brutal punishments, which

terms “economy” and “economics” have come to acquire connotations that do

not necessarily fit Vico’s usage, which is frequently closer to the older sense of
“household management.”
294
  Axiom 72.
295
  On the trial of Horatius, see the note at §268.
S 296
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128.
N 297
  Axioms 73 and 75.
L
204
Book Two 205

must have been the power belonging to the sons of Polyphemus in whom
Plato298 recognized the earliest paterfamilias in the world. The poor re-
ception of this tradition gave occasion to an error common to all the
political theorists, that of believing that the first form of civil governance
in the world was that of monarchy and, hence, that civil governance al-
lowed for the unjust principles of wicked politics, that civil rule came
into being from either open force or fraud that later bursts out in force.299
However, in times of such complete arrogance and savagery fresh from
their origins in bestial liberty—as we have also posited above in an
­Axiom300—in lives of such extreme simplicity and coarseness, where they
were content with the fruits immediately offered by nature, with water
from fountains, with sleeping in caves, in the natural equality of the famil-
ial state, in which all the Fathers were sovereign, it is completely impos-
sible to understand there being in this state either the force or the fraud
by which one Father would be able to subject all others to a civil mon-
arch, proof of which will be more fully explicated below [§§1009–1019].
Only here, then, is it permitted for us to reflect on how long it took for men 523
in a gentile humanity still wild in its native liberty to become, through
many stages of cyclopean family discipline, domesticated enough for the
obedience natural to the laws of the civil state, which came later. This
process remains in the eternal property that happier than those in the
ideal republic of Plato are those in the republic where fathers teach noth-
ing other than religion and are admired by their children as their wise
men, revered as their priests, and where the children fear them as rulers.
So great a quantity and kind of divine force needed to reduce these
­giants—as gullish as they were savage—to what they ought to be as men!
Since they were not able to speak of this force abstractly, they named it
concretely with a physical object, a cord called in Greek χορδά [chorda]
and, in early Latin, fides [“lyre string”], whose earliest and proper sense
was still understood in the phrase fides deorum, the “force of the gods.”
From this cord (for the lyre must have started with a single cord) was
made the lyre of Orpheus, and by singing to them of the force of the gods
in the auspices, Orpheus reduced the wild beasts of Greece to human-
ity. And Amphion with self-moving stones raised the walls of Thebes:
these were the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who stood before the
temple of Themis—that is, in fear of divine justice—with veiled heads—
that is, in the modesty of marriage—and found, placed before their feet,
stones—that is, men who, previously, were stupid (which is retained in
Latin when lapis [“stone”] is used for someone who is stupid301)—and
they threw the stones over their shoulders—introducing the family order

298
 Plato, Laws 3, 678c–681e.
299
  Compare Machiavelli, Prince 7 and Discourses on Livy 2.13, as well as the
locus classicus in Cicero, De officiis 1.13.
300
  Axiom 94.
301
 Terence, The Self-Tormentor 831 and 917.
 206 The New Science

by means of economic discipline—and, thus, made men come into be-

ing, as this myth was explained above in the Chronological Table [§79].
524 And, with a view to what pertains to the second part of economic
discipline, the education of the body, these Fathers, with terrifying reli-
gions and with their cyclopean power and with sacred ablutions, started
to bring up their children—that is, bring forth from the gigantic stature
of their children their correct human stature, in conformity with what we
have stated above [§371].
Here, providence is to be admired, above all, in disposing that, until the
economic discipline which came later, these lost men would become gi-
ants so that, in their wild wandering, they could sustain by their hard-
ened complexion the inclemency of the weather and the seasons and
could penetrate by their boundless strength the great forest of the Earth,
which because of the recent flood must have been most thick; and on ac-
count of providence, until such time as the Earth was found fully popu-
lated, these human beings fled wild beasts and pursued shy women and,
consequently, becoming lost in their search for food and water, they were
scattered over the Earth. However, after this, they started to stay settled
with their women, first, in caves and, later, in huts next to springs with
year-round water and then, as we are about to state [§526], by the fields
which they reduced to cultivation and which gave them the sustenance
to live. These were the causes, now reasoned upon herein, by which men
decreased to the correct stature which they have now.
525 There, at the very coming-to-be [nascere] of economics, they perfected
economics in its ideal form, which is that the Fathers, by travail and by
industry, left to their children a patrimony, whereby there was easy and
convenient and secure subsistence, even if commerce with foreigners was
lacking, even if the fruits of civil life were lacking, even if cities them-
selves were lacking, so that, even in such extreme circumstances, families
would be preserved, from which there would be hope that the nations
might rise again. They ought to have left their children a patrimony in
a place with a good climate, with its own water flowing year-round; in a
situation of natural strength where they can retreat if they despair of the
protection of cities; with fields having large grounds which can support
impoverished rustics fleeing from the destruction of cities who, in turn,
by their labors can support the lords of these fields.
These are the orders providence posited in the familial state (in keeping
with the statement of Dio Cassius to which we referred in the Axioms302),
not the legal orders of a tyrant, but the customary orders of a queen, the
queen of the human things who is providence. For these men of fortitude
were found based in lands high in the mountains, where there is a windy
and thus healthy climate; they were also situated in places of natural
strength, the first arces [“citadels”] in the world, which, following its own

S
N 302
  Axiom 104.
L
206
Book Two 207

rules, military architecture later fortified (so, in Italian, steep and rugged
mountains were called rocce, whence later fortresses were called rocche).
Finally, these men of fortitude were found based next to springs flowing
with water year-round, which, for the most part, are located at the tops
of mountains. Next to these fountains, birds of prey make their nests;
hence, next to such fountains, hunters set their nets. It is because of this,
perhaps, that all birds in ancient Latin were called aquilae [“eagles”],
as if to say they were aquilegae [“those gathering at water”] (certainly,
aquilex retains the sense of “someone who finds or gathers water”), but
there is no doubt that the birds by which Romulus observed the auspices
so as to take the site of the new city (although we are told in history that
they were vultures) later became eagles and were the numinous source
for all Roman armies.
Thus, men who were simple and rude pursued eagles, which they be-
lieved to be the birds of Jove (for they flew high in the heavens) and dis-
covered perennial fountains, whence they venerated Jove for this second
great benefit that the heavens made for them when the heavens ruled on
Earth; the auspices observed from the flight of eagles were second only
to those of lightning bolts, and were called by Messala and Corvinus303
the “major, or public, auspices”; these are the auspices that the Roman
patricians understood when they replied to the plebs that AUSPICIA
ESSE SUA [“the auspices were theirs”].
All of this, which providence ordered so as to give a beginning to gentile
humankind, Plato304 deemed to have been the result of a discerning hu-
man providence on the part of the earliest founders of cities.
However, in the recourse to barbarism which destroyed cities everywhere,
the families were preserved in this fashion, families out of which came
the new nations of Europe; and this is retained in Italian in the word
castella [“castles”] for all the lordships which newly arose. For, gener-
ally speaking, one observes that the more ancient cities, and most of the
capitals of peoples, were placed high on mountains and, by contrast, vil-
lages were spread throughout the plains. From this must have come those
Latin phrases summo loco nati [“those born in a lofty place”] and illustri
loco nati [“those born in an illustrious place”] used to signify the nobles,
and the phrases imo loco nati [“those born in a lowly place”] and obscuro
loco nati [“those born in an obscure place”] used to speak of plebeians,
for, as we will see below [§608], the heroes inhabited the cities while the
familial servants inhabited the countryside.
But it was, above all else, with a view to perennial fountains that the 526
political theorists stated that the community constituted by the sharing
of water was the occasion which united the families closely together;

303
  “Messala” is Marcus Valerius Messala (64 BCE–8 CE), Roman general and
author of De auspiciis. “Corvinus” is Marcus Valerius Massimus, commander
in the early Roman Republic.
304
 Plato, Laws 5.9, 738b–c.
 208 The New Science

consequently, the earliest communities were called, in Greek, φρατρίαι

[phratriai], just as the earliest lands came to be called in Latin pagi, and so
too, in Doric Greek, fonts were called πηγή [pēgē]. And water is the first
of two principal solemnities pertaining to nuptials, which the Romans
celebrated aqua et igni [“with water and fire”]. For the earliest marriages
were naturally contracted between men and women who had water and
fire in common, and so belonged to the same family; hence, as was stated
above [§511], husbands and wives must have started as brothers and sis-
ters. It was from this fire that there was a tutelary god for each house-
hold, which originally was called the focus laris, the hearth where the pa-
terfamilias sacrificed to the gods of the household; these gods (according
to Jacob Raewaerd’s305 reading of the chapter in the Law of the Twelve
Tables on parricide) were called DEIVEI PARENTUM [“the gods of the
fathers”], and in sacred history one frequently reads a similar expression,
Deus parentum nostrorum [“God of our fathers”], which, in its more ar-
ticulated form, is the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob”;306 Cicero
conceived a law concerning these gods in his Laws307 in the following
terms, SACRA FAMILIARIA PERPETUA MANENTO [“let the sa-
cred things of the family be perpetually maintained”], whence the same
phrase in Roman law, in sacris paternis [“within the sacred things of the
father”], is used for the son in a family, and paternal power itself is called
sacra patria [“the sacred things of the father”], for rights in the earliest
times, as is demonstrated in this work were all believed to be sacred.
This custom, it has to be said, is observed in the barbarism that came
after antiquity, for in the Florence of the times of Giovanni Boccaccio
(as is attested in his Genealogy of the Gods308), the paterfamilias, at the
beginning of each year, sat at the hearth and put incense and sprinkled
wine on the top of a log which he had set on fire. And among the lowly
plebs of our Naples, one observes, on the night of Christmas Eve, that
the paterfamilias must solemnly set on fire a log of this sort in the hearth,
and because of this, they say that families in the kingdom of Naples are
counted by the number of these fires.
Consequently, after the founding of cities, it became a universal custom
that marriages were covenanted only among citizens, and this eventually
remained even when they were contracted with strangers, in the fact that
they had, at least, to share between them religion in common.
527 To return now from fire to water, the Styx by which the gods swore was
the spring of the fountains; in this case, the gods must have been the

305
  Jacob Raewaerd (1534–1568), Belgian jurist and author of On the Law of the
Twelve Tables (1563).
306
  See (for example) Exodus 3:15.
307
 Cicero, De legibus 2.9.22. Cicero’s text actually reads: Sacra privata perpetua
manento. See also De legibus 2.11.27: ritus familiae patrumque servare (“to pre-
S serve the rites of family and the fathers”).
N 308
 Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium 12.65.
L
208
Book Two 209

nobles of the heroic cities, as was stated above [§449], for the community
of water made for the rule of these gods over mere men. Hence, in Year
309 of Rome, the patricians withheld from the plebs any common share
in connubium, as was stated somewhat above [§110] and will be stated
more fully below [§§589, 986]).
On account of all this, in sacred history, we often read of either the “well
of the oath” or the “oath of the well.”309 Hence, the city of Pozzuoli
retains, in its very name, an indication of its great antiquity, for it was
called “Puteoli” because of the many small wells it united. And it is a
reasonable conjecture (founded upon the mental dictionary of which we
have spoken [§162]) that the many cities spread throughout the ancient
nations which have names with plural endings come from a thing that
is, in substance, one, although they are differently named by means of
articulate speech.
From there was imagined a third major deity—that is, DIANA—who 528
was the earliest human necessity made sensible to giants after they set-
tled in certain lands and joined in marriage with certain women.
The theological poets have left us descriptions of the history of these
things in two myths about Diana. The first of these signifies the mod-
esty of marriage in the modesty of a Diana who, in complete silence in
the darkness of nighttime, lies with the sleeping Endymion, the result
of Diana chaste in that chastity with which one law in Cicero’s Laws
decrees DEOS CASTE ADEUNTO310 [“let the one going to the gods
be chaste”]—that is, the one going to make a sacrifice must first make
sacred ablutions. The second myth tells of the terrifying religion of
fountains retained in their perpetual epithet “sacred”; this is the myth
of Actaeon,311 who, since he saw Diana—the living spring—naked and
was sprinkled by the goddess with water—which is to say that the god-
dess struck him with a great terror of her—he became a stag, the most
timid of the animals, and was devoured by his own dogs, by the remorse
of his own conscience for violating religion. As a result, in Latin, lym-
phati is properly used for “those who have been sprinkled with water,”
which is to say that lympha must have originally been understood to
be someone like Actaeon, driven mad by terrifying superstition. This
poetic history is preserved in the Latin term latices [“streams”], which
must have come from latendo [“to hide”]: these streams have the per-
petual epithet puri [“pure”], and signify the water rising from fountains;
they must have, in Latin, been the nymphs who are the companions of
Diana in Greek, for nymphae, in Greek, signifies what lymphae does in
Latin. And such nymphs must have been so named at times when they
perceived all things as animate substances and, for the most part, in

309
  Genesis 21:32.
310
 Cicero, De legibus 2.8.19.
311
  For the myth of Actaeon, see Ignius, Fabula 181; Pausanias, Description of
Greece 9.2.3; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.183–252.
 210 The New Science

terms of human substance, as we reasoned above in the Poetic Meta-

physics [§379].
529 Later, the pious giants who were located in the mountains must have
become sensible of the stench which came from the cadavers of those
belonging to them who passed away and were rotting upon the land near
to them; hence, they must have buried their dead, whose immense skulls
and bones have been found and are still found even today high upon
the mountains (a great argument that, from the impious giants spread
throughout the plains and valleys everywhere and from the cadavers rot-
ting unburied, there came the skulls and bones that were either carried
by storms to the sea or eventually rotted in the rains). And these pi-
ous giants imbued these graves with so much religion—that is, divine
­terror—that religiosa loca [“religious place”] remained primarily, in
Latin, an expression for places where there were graves.
And from here was the start of the universal belief which we showed
above in the Principles [§337] was the third principle taken by this sci-
ence, namely, belief in the immortality of the soul. These souls were, in
Latin, called DII MANES and, in the chapter in the Law of the Twelve
Tables on parricide, were called DEIVEI PARENTUM [“the gods of the
fathers”].
In addition, there must have been some marker for the grave, either on
or beside each mound, which could only have been called such because
the ground was slightly raised; thus, there is a custom of the ancient
Germans (to which Tacitus refers in a passage312) which allows us to
conjecture that it was the same custom for all the other earliest nations,
a custom whereby the Germans deemed that the dead should not be
weighed down by too much earth, whence came that prayer for the dead,
sit tibi terra levis [“may the earth be light upon you”]; the marker for the
grave (what we call in Italian a ceppo) must have in Greek been called
φύλαξ [phulax], which means “guardian,” because in their simplicity they
believed that this post guarded the grave; and, in Latin, cippus [“bound-
ary stone”] continued to signify a grave, and for Italians, ceppo signifies
the base of a genealogical tree. Hence, in Greek, φύλαξ must have come
from φυλή [phulē], which means “tribe,” and the Romans described their
genealogies by placing, in the halls of their households, statues of their
ancestors in lines [fili] which they called stemmata, whose origin must
have been temen—that is to say “thread” [filo]—and from which came
subtemen, the “crossthread” which extends under the other threads when
cloth is woven; these genealogical threads were, later, called by jurists,
linnae [“lines”] and, subsequently, down to our times, stemmata have re-
tained their significance as insignia of noble households. As a result, one
can strongly conjecture that the earliest lands containing these graves
were the earliest family shields, whence one must understand that ex-
pression of the Spartan mother who assigned a shield to her son going
S
N 312
 Tacitus, Germania 27.2.
L
210
Book Two 211

to war, saying to return aut cum hoc aut in hoc [“either with it or on it”],
means that he should return with the shield or on a funeral bier (so too
even to this day in Naples, a funeral bier is called a shield). And since
these graves were on the ground of the first fields to be planted, a shield
in the science of heraldry is defined as the background of the fields,
which later was called the background of the coats of arms.
From origins of this sort came the word filius [“son”], and when a 530
son was distinguished by the name or household of his father, the word
signified someone who was a noble, exactly as we learn that a Roman
patrician was defined as someone qui potest nomine ciere patrem313 [“who
can cite his father by name”]; these Roman names, as we saw above
[§433], are equivalent to the patronyms which are so often used by the
early Greeks (hence, Homer calls heroes filii Achivorum314 [“sons of the
Acheans”]), and similarly in sacred history filii Israel signifies the nobles
among the Hebrew people.315
As a result, it is necessarily the case that if the tribes originally were con-
stituted by nobles, then cities originally were composed only of nobles,
as we will demonstrate below [§597].
Thus, with the graves of their buried, the giants demonstrated lordship 531
over their lands, which is retained in the Roman legal code in the bury-
ing of the dead in their proper place so as to make the burial a religious
one. And the giants would truthfully speak the heroic phrases, “we are
sons of this earth, we were born from these oaks”;316 just as the heads of
families, in Latin, were called stirpes [“stems”] and stipites [“root stock”],
and the descendant of one of them was called a propago [“offshoot”],
and such families, in Italian, are called legnaggi [“lineages”]; the most
noble households of Europe and almost all sovereigns take their sur-
names from the lands over which they have lordship, whence, in Greek
as much as in Latin, “sons of the Earth,” means that the same as “noble”
and, in Latin, the nobles were signified with the word ingenui, as if it were
derived from indegeniti [“indigenous”] and a shortened form of ingeniti
[“native”]; certainly, in Latin, indigenae [“the indigenous”] retains its sig-
nificance as “those born from a land,” and dii indigetes were, by defini-
tion, the gods native to a land, who must have been the nobles of the
heroic cities, who called themselves “gods,” as was stated above [§370],
and whose great mother was the earth. Hence, from the beginning, in-
genuus and patricius signified nobility because the earliest cities belonged
only to the nobles. And these ingenui must have been aboriginals, used

313
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 10.8.10.
314
 Homer, Iliad 1.162, 237, 240, 276, 368, 392.
315
 In fact, the term is applied to the people in general. Compare Genesis 32:32
and Exodus 2:23, 4:29, 5.14; 12:21.
316
  “We are sons of this earth”—an allusion to the myth of Cadmus; compare
Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.118. “We are born from these oaks”—compare Virgil,
Aeneid 8.315.
 212 The New Science

as if to indicate that the nobles were “without origins”—that is, were

born of themselves, which is the exact equivalent of what the Greeks
call αὐτόχθονες [autochthones]—and these aboriginals were giants, and
“giants” in the proper sense means “sons of the earth,” and so myths are
trustworthy when they tell us that the earth is the mother of the giants
and of the gods.
532 We have reasoned upon all these things above, and we repeat them here,
in their proper place, so as to demonstrate that Livy317 poorly connected
the heroic phrase “sons of the earth,” with Romulus and with the Fa-
thers who were his companions, when he had them say to those who had
recourse to the asylum opened in the lucus that they were sons of that
earth, and so made it become, in their mouths, a shameless lie what had
been for the founders of the earliest peoples a heroic truth; for, on the one
hand, Romulus was recognized as ruler of Alba and, on the other hand,
this mother of theirs, in producing only men, had been so unjust that
they needed to seize the Sabine women so as to have wives. Hence, one
must say that, through the manner of earliest people thinking through
poetic characters, they connected with Romulus (regarded in his aspect
as city-founder) the properties of the founders of the earliest cities of La-
tium, in the midst of a great number of which Romulus founded Rome.
Together with this error is the definition that Livy318 gives of asylum,
vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old counsel of founders of
cities”]: for the earliest city-founders in their simplicity, it was not yet
counsel, but a nature that served providence.
533 From there was imagined a fourth divinity of the so-called gentes
maiores—that is, APOLLO—taken as the god of the light pertaining to
civil life (hence, in Greek, the heroes were called in κλειτοί [kleitoi], “bril-
liant,” from κλέος [kleos], “glory,” and, in Latin, they were called incluti
[“renowned”] from cluere, “to be brilliant at arms” and, consequently,
from that light into which Juno Lucina brought noble offspring).
As a result, after Urania (who, as we saw above [§§365, 391], was the
Muse whom Homer defines as the “science of good and evil”—that
is, of the divination through which, as was stated above [§§365, 391],
Apollo is the god of poetic wisdom, or of divinity), there was imagined
a second Muse, who must have been the Clio who tells heroic history;
and the first history of this sort must have started with the genealogies
of those heroes, just as sacred history starts with the descendants of the
patriarchs.
This sort of history of Apollo begins with his pursuit of Daphne,319 the
wandering maiden who was errant throughout the forests, living a pro-

317
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
318
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
319
  For the myth of Apollo and Daphne, see Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.9; Ovid,
S Metamorphoses 1.452–600.
N
L
212
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fane life. This maiden (with the aid which she implored from the gods
whose auspices are needed for solemn nuptials) settled in her wandering
and became a laurel tree, a plant which is always green in its certain and
recognized offspring; it is with this same significance that, in Latin, the
heads of families are called stipites [“rootstock”], and the recourse to
barbarism brought with it the same heroic phrases, whereby they call
descendants of the same family “trees,” and the founders of families are
called the “stock” or “roots,” and the descendants are called “branches,”
and the families themselves are called “lineages.” Thus, the pursuit of
Apollo was proper to a god, the flight of Daphne was proper to a wild
beast; however, later, when the speech of strict history was unknown, this
pursuit of Apollo became that of a shameless man, the flight of Daphne
that of a Diana.
Moreover, Apollo was the brother of Diana, for along with the peren- 534
nial fountains came the age of founding the earliest gentile peoples upon
mountains, whence Apollo had his seat upon Mount Parnassus, which
the Muses, who are the arts of humanity, inhabit and near the spring,
Hippocrene, from whose waters swans drink (birds who sing in the sense
of canere or cantare, which, in Latin, means “to foretell”); under the aus-
pices of one of these swans, as was stated above [§512], Leda conceives
two eggs, and from one is born Helen and from the other Castor and
Pollux in one birth.
And Apollo and Diana are the children of Latona, called this from 535
latere, “to hide,” whence the expressions condere gentes, condere regna,
condere urbes and, more particularly, whence came, in Italy, Latium.
And Latona took her offspring near the waters of perennial fountains,
as we have stated [§526]. At their birth, men became frogs,320 which, dur-
ing the summer rains, are born from the earth, who is called the “mother
of giants,” giants who are properly called sons of the earth. One of these
frogs was that which Darius sent to Idanthyrsus, and it must be three
frogs and not toads on the royal arms of France, which, later, changed
into lilies of gold, depicted with the superlative of three (which French
retains with très) to signify one great frog—that is, one great son of the
earth, and so Lord of the Earth. Both Apollo and Diana are hunters, 536
who hunt with unrooted trees, one of which is the club of Hercules;
they kill wild beasts, so as first to defend themselves and their families
(since they were no longer permitted, like wanderers living a lawless life,
to escape by flight) and so as, later, to feed themselves along with their
families (just as Virgil321 makes his heroes feast on meat and, as Tacitus322
relates, to such an end, the ancient Germans went hunting wild beasts
along with their wives).

320
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.316–381.
321
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.184–193.
322
 Tacitus, Germania 46.
 214 The New Science

537 And Apollo is the god who is the founder of humanity and its arts,
which, as we have said [§534], are called the Muses; these arts, in Latin,
are called liberales [“free”], meaning the arts of “nobles,” one of which
is the art of cavalry, whence Pegasus flies above Mount Parnassus armed
with wings, for being so armed is within the rights of the nobility; and
in the return to barbarism, because they alone were able to be armed on
horseback, the nobles of Spain were called “cavaliers.”
This humanity had its start in humare, “burying,” and it was for this that
we took burial as the third principle of this science. Hence, the Athe-
nians, the most humane of all the nations, were (as Cicero323 relates) the
first to bury their dead.
538 Finally, Apollo is always a young man, just as Daphne, changed into a
laurel tree, lives evergreen, for Apollo is the eternity men enjoy in their
families because of the names given to progeny. He wears long hair as
a sign of his nobility; this, in many nations, is retained in the custom of
nobles wearing long hair, and one reads that one of the punishments for
nobles, among both the Persians and those in the Americas, is to tear
out one or more of these hairs. And, consequently, perhaps the region
of Gallia Comata [“long-haired Gaul”] was called this because of the
nobles who founded that nation, just as, among all nations, slaves cer-
tainly have their heads shaved.
539 However, as some point, these heroes settled within circumscribed
lands, and their families grew in number so that the immediate fruits
of nature were no longer enough for them. And yet, they feared going
beyond their borders so as to have enough resources because those bor-
ders had been circumscribed by the same chains of religion by which the
giants were chained below the earth, and this same religion insinuated to
them that they should set fire to the forest so as to have a prospect of the
heavens from which the auspices came. Thus, they gave themselves over
to the large, long, hard toil of reducing the lands to cultivation and sow-
ing them with the grain which, roasted along with the briar and thorns,
they observed was advantageous for human sustenance. And here, with
quite beautiful, natural, necessary comparison, they called the ears of
grain, “golden apples,” transferring the idea of apples, which are the
fruits of nature gathered in the summer, to the ears of grain which are
gathered by industry.
540 Because of this toil, which was the greatest and most glorious of all,
the character of Hercules sprang up, the Hercules who made such glory
for Juno in her command to sustain the families. And with another meta-
phor that was as beautiful as it was necessary, they imagined the land
under the aspect of a great dragon, armed with scales and spines, which
were the briar and thorns of that land. They imagined it with wings be-
cause these lands rightfully belonged to the heroes. They imagined it as

S
N  Cicero, De legibus 2.25.63.
323

L
214
Book Two 215

always awake—that is, always thickly overgrown—and guarding over the

golden apples of the gardens of the Hesperides. Because of the damp-
ness from the waters of the flood, it was, later, believed that the dragon
was born in water.
Under another aspect, they imagined the land as a hydra (coming from
the word ὕδωρ [hudōr], “water”), which, whenever one of its heads was
cut off, grew another and which changed into three colors—black, the
color of the burnt land; green, the color of plants; and gold, the color of
ripe grain—the three colors of the skin of a serpent which, as it grows
old, takes on a new skin.
Finally, for the land in the aspect of its ferocity to being tamed, they
devised an animal of the greatest strength—that is, the Nemean lion—
whence, later, the strongest of animals was given the name “lion,” which
philologists suggest had the form of a serpent. And all these animals
spewed fire, which was the fire Hercules set to the forests.
These three different histories from three different parts of Greece 541
mean the same thing in substance. So too, in another part of Greece,
there was another history, also about Hercules, that in his infancy, he
killed serpents while still in the cradle—that is, in the infancy of heroic
times. In another, Bellerophon kills the monster called the Chimera, a
monster that has the tail of a serpent and the chest of a goat (so as to
signify the lands still in a primitive state) and the head of a lion spew-
ing flames. In Thebes, it was Cadmus who also kills a great serpent and
sows teeth (in a beautiful metaphor, they called the hard pieces of curved
wood which, prior to finding the use of iron, they must have used to plow
the lands “serpent’s teeth”). And Cadmus himself became a serpent:324
the ancient Romans would have said that Cadmus FUNDUS FACTUS
EST [“was made into the ground”]—as was explicated above [§446] and
as will be more fully explicated below, where we will see that the serpents
on the head of Medusa [§616] and on the staff of Mercury [§604] signi-
fied “dominion over those lands,” which is retained in ὠφέλεια [ōpheleia],
derived from ὄφις [ophis], “serpent,” the word in Greek for “land rent,”
which is also called the “tithe of Hercules.” It is in this sense that one
reads in Homer325 of the diviner, Calchas, who interprets a serpent de-
vouring eight sparrows and their mother to mean that, at the end of nine
years, the land of Troy would come under the dominion of the Greeks;
and the Greeks, while they were fighting the Trojans, took a serpent
killed in the air by an eagle, which fell in the middle of the battle, to be
an augury conforming with what Calchas divined with his science.
Accordingly, Proserpina—who is the same as Ceres—is seen in sculpture
carried off in a chariot drawn by serpents, and serpents are frequently
observed on the medallions of Greek republics.

324
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.563–603.
325
 Homer, Iliad 2.308–330; 12.200–230.
 216 The New Science

542 Consequently, in accord with our mental dictionary (and it is a thing

worthy of reflection), kings in the Americas are found (as was sung
by Fracastoro326 in his Syphilis) to have carried the shed skin of a ser-
pent instead of a scepter. And the Chinese royal coat of arms bears a
dragon, and they take the dragon as an insignia of civil power (this
must have been the same dragon, Draco, who wrote laws for the Athe-
nians in blood). And we stated above [§423] that this dragon was one of
the serpents of the Gorgon whom Perseus nailed to his shield, which,
later, was the shield of Minerva, goddess of the Athenians (this aspect
of her petrifying people who look upon the shield will be found [§616]
to have been a hieroglyph for the civil power of Athens). And sacred
scripture in the book of Ezekiel327 gives the king of Egypt the title the
“great dragon” which lies in the midst of his own rivers, in exactly the
same way that what we called dragons above [§540] were born in water
and that the Hydra took its name from water. The emperor of Japan
has made an order of cavaliers, who carry as their device a dragon.
And, in the return to barbarous times, histories tell us that household
of the Visconti was called to the duchy of Milan on account of its great
nobility and bore, on its coat of arms, a shield with a dragon devouring
a child—that is, the python which, in exactly the same way, devoured
the men of Greece and was killed by Apollo, whom we have discovered
to be the god of nobility. This device of the Visconti must make one
wonder at the uniformity between the heroic thought of men in that
second age of barbarism and that of the ancients of the earlier age of
barbarism.
So too must have been the two-winged dragons who keep possession of
the golden fleece and who hold up a necklace of flint stones, igniting the
fire they spew forth. (Chifflet,328 who writes the history of the order of
the golden fleece, is not able to understand this insignia, and therefore
Pietrasanta329 argues that his history is obscure).
543 Just as, in some parts of Greece, it was Hercules who killed the serpents,
the lion, the Hydra, the dragon and, in other parts, it was Bellerophon
who murdered the Chimera, so too, in another part, it was Bacchus who
domesticated the tigers, who must have been lands clothed in as many
colors as the coat of tigers (later the name “tiger” passed over to the
strongest kinds of animals). But that Bacchus who domesticated tigers
with wine, this is a physical history that in no way pertains to what was
known by the rustic heroes who founded the nations. Similarly, that Bac-
chus whom we are told went to Africa or to Hyrcania to tame tigers,

326
  Girolamo Fracastoro (1483–1553), Italian humanist physician and poet, and
author of Naugerius sive de poetica (1553) and Syphilis sive de morbo gallico
(1530). Vico wrote the preface to Pietro Belli’s Italian translation of Syphilis.
327
  Ezekiel 29:3.
328
  Jean-Jacques Chifflet (1588–1660), French archaeologist and physician.
S 329
  Silvester Petra Sancta (1590–1647), Roman Jesuit and heraldist, and author
N of De symbolis heroicis (1634).
L
216
Book Two 217

he could not have been known to the Greeks of heroic times, as we will
demonstrate in the Poetic Geography [§747], for those Greeks did not
know of any Hyrcania in the world, much less Africa, to say nothing of
tigers in the forests of Hyrcania or in the deserts of Africa.
Moreover, the ears of grain called golden apples must have been the 544
first gold in the world, for at this time, the metal, gold, encased in earth,
and the art of extracting it from ore was still unknown, to say nothing
of the art of shining or shaping it; nor when they were still drinking
water from fountains could gold have any use that was prized. It was
only later, from the similarity it had to the color of the food most highly
prized at that time, that it took the name of gold (hence, Plautus must
say thesaurum auri330 [“a treasury of gold”] so as to distinguish this kind
of gold from the gold in a granary). For certainly Job331 counts, as part
of the greatness from which he has fallen, the fact that he used to eat
bread made from grain, just as in our more remote provinces, the sick eat
bread made from grain, instead of the potions in our cities made from
gems, and to say of someone who is sick that he is “eating bread made of
grain” means that he is at the end of his life.
Later, by further explicating this idea of such preciousness and dearness, 545
“golden” must have been said of fine wool. Hence, in Homer,332 Atreus
laments that Thyestes had stolen his golden sheep, and the Argonauts
stole the golden fleece from Pontus.
Accordingly, Homer also continuously names his kings and heroes
with the epithet πολύμηλος [polumēlos], which they interpret as “rich in
flocks,”333 just as, in Latin, because of the uniformity of ideas, a patri-
mony was called pecunia, which Latin grammarians suggest is derived
from pecus [“sheep”]; so too among the ancient Germans, as Tacitus334
tells us, flocks and herds solae et gratissimae opes sunt [“are the most
favored and the only wealth”]. This custom must have been the same
among the ancient Romans, for whom a patrimony was called pecunia,
as is attested in the Law of the Twelve Tables in the chapter on testa-
ments, and μῆλον [melon] meant both “apple” and “sheep” to the Greeks,
who perhaps under the aspect of precious fruit called honey, μέλι [meli]
and Italians call apples meli.
As a result, these ears of grain must have been the golden apples, which 546
Hercules before all others brought back—that is, gathered at harvest,
from Hesperia. And the Gallic Hercules with chains of this gold coming
out of his mouth chained men by their ears, which, below, will be found
[§560] to have been the history concerning the cultivation of fields.

330
 Plautus, Aulularia prologue, 7.
331
  Job 31:40.
332
 Homer, Iliad 2.105–106.
333
 Homer, Iliad 2.605 and 705; 14.490.
334
 Tacitus, Germania 5.
 218 The New Science

Consequently, Hercules remains the divinity propitious for the discovery

of treasure, of which Dis is god; Dis is the same as the Pluto who abducts
Proserpina down into the underworld, who herself will be found [§§716,
720, 721] to be the same as Ceres—that is, grain—and, according to the
poets who tell us of her being carried off, the underworld was, first of
all, where the Styx was; second, where graves were; and third, the bottom
of furrows—as will be demonstrated in its place [§715]. From this god,
Dis, the rich were called dites, and the rich were the nobles; accordingly,
among the Spanish, nobles are called riccosombres [“rich men”] and,
among the Italians of ancient times, they were called benestanti [“those
faring well”], and in Latin, they used ditio [“wealth”] to name what we
would call, in the affairs of a state, “lordship,” for the fields were the true
riches of states, whence, also in Latin, an ager [“field”] is the precinct of
some lordship, and ager in its proper sense is land aratro agitur [“worked
with the plough”].
Thus, it must be true that the Nile was called χρυσοῥῤόας [chrusorrhoas],
“flowing with gold,” because it overflows into the wide fields of Egypt,
and its flooding brings great abundance when the harvest is gathered.
Thus, they called the Pactolus, the Ganges, the Hydaspes, and the Tagus
“rivers of gold” because they made the fields of grain fertile.
It is from these golden apples, certainly, that Virgil, so learned about he-
roic antiquity, extended further the previous comparison and made that
golden bough which Aeneas carries down into the underworld335—this
myth will herein be explicated more fully in its proper place [§721].
As for what remains, gold which is a metal, it was not considered in
heroic times any more precious than iron. So, Etearchus, king of Ethio-
pia, responded to the ambassadors of Cambyses, who had presented on
behalf of their king numerous golden vases, that he did not recognize in
them anything useful, much less necessary, and so made his refusal of
them out of a natural magnanimity exactly like that of the ancient Ger-
mans, of whom Tacitus tells us that (and the Germans at that time were
found by Tacitus336 to be as ancient as the heroes about whom we are
now reasoning) est videre apud illos argentea vasa legatis et principibus
eorum muneri data non alia vilitae quam quae hum fingetur [“one sees that
among them silver vases offered as gifts to their envoys or princes are not
valued any differently from those devised from clay”]. Accordingly, in
Homer,337 heroes keep in their armories arms made of gold and of iron
without any distinction. For the earliest world must have had metals of
this sort in abundance just as they had with the discovery of America,
and it was only later that they were exhausted by human avarice.

335
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.137.
336
 Tacitus, Germania 5.
S 337
 Homer, Iliad 6.234–236.
N
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218
Book Two 219

From all this comes the following great corollary, that dividing the world 547
into four ages—namely, the ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron—was
discovered by poets from baser times. For it was this poetic gold that, for
the earliest Greeks gave its name to the golden age, whose innocence was
only the extreme primitiveness of sons of Polyphemus, in whom Plato338
recognizes, as was stated otherwise above [§§296, 338, 503], the earliest
paterfamilias, who remained separated and alone throughout these caves
with their wife and children, never meddling with others’ things, as Poly-
phemus recounts to Ulysses in Homer.339
As confirmation of all that has been stated herein up until now about 548
poetic gold, it would help to draw upon two customs which still have
currency and whose causes cannot be explained except by the principles
above.
The first custom is that of placing a golden ball, or apple, in the hand of
the king as part of the solemnities of his coronation (this must also be
the same apple in the insignia resting on the top of their royal crowns).
This custom can have no other origin than in the golden apple, which, as
we have stated here, was grain and which has been found herein [§602] to
have been a hieroglyph representing the dominion which the heroes had
over the lands (a dominion which, perhaps, Egyptian priests signified
with an apple, if it is not an egg, in the mouth of their Kneph, about
which we will reason below [§605]). This was the hieroglyph brought by
the barbarians who invaded all the nations that were subjects of the Ro-
man Empire.
The second custom is that of kings giving gold coins as part of the so-
lemnities of their nuptials to the wives, the queens. This custom must
have come from the poetic gold, which, as we stated here, was grain.
So too did gold coins have the exact same significance in heroic nup-
tials, which the ancient Romans celebrated coëmptione et farre [“with
bride-purchase and spelt cake”] and is in conformity with the heroes, as
Homer340 recounts, who bought their wives with gifts; Jove must have
changed into a shower of this kind of gold in order to be with Danae
enclosed in a tower—which must have been a granary—so as to signify
the abundance which is a part of this solemnity, and this should make
one wonder when it is connected with the Hebrew expression et abun-
dantia in turribus tuis341 [“and abundance in thy towers”]. This conjecture
is confirmed by the ancient Britons, among whom grooms regaled their
brides, through the solemnity of nuptials, with cakes.
For the coming-to-be [nascere] of these human things, three other dei- 549
ties of the gentes maiores were awakened in the Greek imagination, ideas

338
 Plato, Laws 3.3, 680b.
339
 Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115.
340
 Homer, Iliad 9.144–148.
341
  Psalm 121:7.
 220 The New Science

whose order corresponds to the order of things: first, VULCAN; second,

SATURN (so called from satis, “sown ground,”342 whence the age of Sat-
urn of the peoples of Latium corresponds to the golden age of the peo-
ples of Greece); and, in third place, CYBELE, or ­BERECYNTHIA—
that is, the cultivated land—and, accordingly, she is depicted as seated on
a lion, which is the primitive earth which the heroes reduced to cultiva-
tion, as was explained above [§§3, 540]. She is called the “great mother
of the gods” and also the “mother of the giants,” and she was properly
called the latter in the sense that the giants were “sons of the earth,”
upon which we have reasoned above [§370]. So, also, she is mother of the
gods—that is, the mother of giants who in the time of the earliest cities
arrogated to themselves the name of “gods,” as was also stated above
[§449]. And the pine is consecrated to her, a sign of the stability by which
the authors of peoples, after they had settled on the first lands, founded
cities whose goddess is Cybele.
Cybele was called VESTA, goddess of divine ceremonies, by the Ro-
mans. For the lands ploughed at that time were the first altars of the
world, as we will see in the Poetic Geography [§776], and it was there that
the goddess, Vesta, armed with a savage religion, guarded over the fire
and the spelt, which was the grain of the ancient Romans. Hence, the
same nuptials which were celebrated aqua et igni [“with water and fire”]
were also celebrated with spelt and were called nuptiae confarreatae, a
solemnity which later was retained only by Roman priests, for the earli-
est families were comprised entirely of priests (as has been discovered to
be the case for the regimes of Buddhist monks in the East Indies). Water
and fire and spelt were the elements of divine ceremonies in Rome.
Upon these first lands, Vesta sacrificed to Jove those impious men who
engaged in that profane sharing in common, a sharing that violated the
first altars which, we have stated above, were the first fields producing
grain, as we will explain below [§776]). They were the first sacrificial
hosts, the first victims of gentile religion, and were called the Saturni hos-
tiae [“the victims of Saturn”] by Plautus, as we observed above [§§191,
517], and were called victimae from victus [“defeated”], on account of
being weak because they were alone, a sense of weakness which is re-
tained in the Latin word victus. And they were called hostes [“enemies”]
in keeping with the correct idea that those who are impious in this way
were considered enemies of all of humankind. The Romans retained this
idea in their spreading a paste of spelt on the brow and horns of victims
and sacrificial hosts.
It was from the goddess Vesta that these Romans also named the vestal
virgins, those who guarded the eternal fire which, if it were by unhappy
chance extinguished, must be relit by the sun, for it was from the sun, as
we will see below [§713], that Prometheus stole the first fire and brought
it to Earth among the Greeks, who set fire to the forests with it and
S
N 342
  On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3.
L
220
Book Two 221

started to cultivate the land. And, accordingly, Vesta is the goddess of

the divine ceremonies for the Romans, because the first colere [“cultiva-
tion,” “religious observance”] that came to be in the world for gentile hu-
manity was the cultivation of the earth, and the first culto [“husbandry,”
“worship”] was the raising of altars of this sort, lighting these first fires,
and making sacrifice upon those stated above to be impious men.
Such is the fashion in which the boundaries of fields came to be lo- 550
cated and guarded. We have been told about this division of the fields in
a way too general by Hermogenianus the jurist, who imagined that it was
made through the deliberate consensus of men, that it emerged because
of much justice and was observed by no less good faith, even though
there was not yet, in those times, any arms for public enforcement and,
consequently, no laws connected with civil power; such division of the
fields cannot be fully understood except as one which was made by men
who were extremely savage and observed a terrifying religion, which
settled those men and circumscribed them within certain lands; it was
by these blood ceremonies that the first walls were consecrated, walls
which even the philologists say were traced out by city-founders with
a plough whose moldboard, as was discovered above through the ori-
gins of languages, must have originally been the word urbs [“city”], from
which comes the archaic word urbum, meaning “curved” (and from this
same origin, perhaps, comes orbis [“globe”]). So, originally, orbis ter-
rarum [“globe of the world”] must have been used of every enclosure of
this sort, so low that Remus passed over it with one leap and was killed
by Romulus; and the Latin historians tell us that he consecrated with
his blood the first walls of Rome.343 As a result, such an enclosure must
have been a fence [siepe]; and among the Greeks, σήψ [sēps] signified a
“serpent” in its heroic significance, as cultivated land. It was from these
origins that the expression munire viam [“to make a way”], must have
come: this “making” was done by fortifying fences in the fields, whence
the word for “walls” [mura] was moenia or, nearly the same, munia; simi-
larly, munire [“to build”] certainly retains the sense of “to fortify.” These
fences must have been planted with the plants which, in Latin, are called
sagmina—that is, “bloodwort,” “elder,” which to this day retain both this
use and this name, and it is preserved in the use of sagmina to signify
the plants used in worship at altars. These words must have been derived
from the blood of those murdered, who, like Remus, transgressed what
was forbidden. From this came the sanctity of walls, as was stated, and,
in addition, from this came the sanctity of heralds who, as we will see
below, crowned themselves in plants of this sort (just as the ancient am-
bassadors of Rome certainly did with plants plucked from the fortress
on the Capitoline), and, finally, from this came the sanctity of the laws
which those heralds conveyed, both in war and peace, whence that part
of the law which imposes a penalty on someone who transgress is called
the “sanction.”

343
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.7.2.
 222 The New Science

And, consequently, here starts what we are proving in this work, that
the natural law of the gentile peoples344 came from a divine providence
which instituted orders privately among peoples, who in coming to know
one another would come to know what they had in shared in common.
Because the Roman heralds who were consecrated with plants of this
sort were inviolate among the other peoples of Latium, it is necessarily
the case that the latter, without any knowledge of the former, celebrated
the same custom.
551 Thus, the paterfamilias arranged for the subsistence of his heroic
family by religion, which he was obliged to preserve by religion. From
this came the continuous custom of nobles being religious (as was ob-
served by Julius Scaliger in his Poetica345), as a result of which, it must be
a great sign of a nation coming to its end when the nobles despise their
native religion.
552 It is an opinion common to both the philologists and the philoso-
phers that families in what is called the state of nature were comprised
of nothing but children, whereas these families were also comprised of
familial servants [famoli], from whom is principally derived the word
“family.” Hence, upon this defective economics, they establish a false
politics, as was noted above [§§257, 516] and will be shown more fully
below [§§555–559, 582–584]).
Therefore, by starting from that part of families comprised of famil-
ial servants—which, properly speaking, belongs to economics—we here
start our reasoning about politics.

On the families comprised of familial

servants prior to cities,
without which it was
completely impossible
for cities to come into being

553 For finally, there came an end to the long age of impious giants, who
remained in that profane sharing of things and women in common in
the quarrels produced (as the jurists say) by that sharing, then the sim-
pletons of Grotius346 and the abandoned men of Pufendorf347 had re-
course to the altars of men of fortitude so as to save themselves from the
violent men of Hobbes, just as wild beasts, driven by intense cold, will
go to places which are inhabited in order to save themselves. And there
these ferocious men, because they were already united in familial society,

344
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
345
  J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem 1.28.
S 346
 Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis 2.2.1–2.
N 347
  See Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 2.2.2.
L
222
Book Two 223

killed the violent who had violated their lands and received under their
protection the unfortunate who had fled from them. And, moreover, the
natural heroism born of Jove—that is, conceived under the auspices of
Jove—shined forth principally in the virtuous heroism in which the Ro-
mans excelled above all other peoples on the Earth, exercised in exactly
the following two practices:
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos348
[“sparing the subjected and conquering the proud”].

And here is offered a thing worthy of reflection so as to understand how 554

men who, in this wild state, were so ferocious and untamable in their
bestial liberty came to human society: so as to come to the first form
of human society—which was the society of marriage—these first men
needed, so as to make themselves enter into it, the sharp sting of a bes-
tial lust, and they needed, so as to keep themselves within it, the strong
restraint of a terrifying religion, as was demonstrated above [§529]. From
this, marriage became the earliest form of friendship that came to be in
the world. Hence, Homer,349 to signify Jove and Juno lying together, says
with heroic gravity that they “celebrated their friendship [amicizia],” the
Greek word for which, φιλία [philia], is derived from φιλέω [phileō], “to
love”; it is from here that the Latin word filius [“child”], is derived, and
in Ionic Greek, the word φίλιος [philios] is “friend,” and, consequently,
with the morphing of one letter similar in sound, there is the word φυλή
[phulē], “tribe”; hence, we saw above [§529] that the stemmata that were
called the “genealogical lines” were called by the jurists lineae.
From this nature of human things remains this eternal property: that
the true natural friendship is marriage, in which naturally all three final
goods are shared in common, namely, the honorable, the advantageous,
and the pleasurable, whence husband and wife share, by nature, all the
prosperity and adversity of their lot in life (exactly as, by choice, amico-
rum omnia sunt communia [“friends share all things in common”]).350 On
account of this, Modestinus defines marriage as omnis vitae consortium
[“sharing in the lot of an entire lifetime”].351
Those who were the second to come to the second form of society 555
(which, on account of a certain excellence, bears the name of “society,”
as we will make known shortly hereafter [§558]) did not come to it except
for the extreme necessity of life itself.
This too is worthy of reflection: because the first men who came to
human society were driven by religion and by the natural instinct to

348
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.853.
349
 Homer, Iliad 14.314.
350
  A Greek proverb, attested (for example) at Plato, Phaedrus 279c and Laws
739c; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.9, 1159b31, and 9.8, 1168b8.
351
  Modestinus, student of Ulpian and among the last representatives of classi-
cal jurisprudence.
 224 The New Science

­ ropagate the human race—the first cause being pious, the second, prop-
p
erly speaking, being genteel—they gave a beginning to friendship which
is noble and lordly; and because those second men came to it on account
of the necessity of saving their lives, they gave a beginning to society in
the proper sense of the term, society which is principally to share in com-
mon the advantageous and which, in consequence, is base and servile.
Accordingly, those seeking refuge were received by the heroes in keeping
with the just law of protection, whence they would have sustenance for
their lives with the obligation of serving the heroes as day laborers.
Here, because of the fama [“repute”] of the heroes (which they acquired
principally by the practice in the two areas in which we said [§553] that
virtuous heroism is exercised) and because of worldly renown352 (which,
in Greek, is κλέος [kleos] or gloria [“glory”] and came to be called in
Latin fama, which, in Greek was called φήμη [phēme]), those seeking ref-
uge were named familial servants, from whom is principally derived the
word “family.” Certainly it is because of this fama that sacred history,
in telling us of the giants prior to the Flood, defines them as viros famo-
sos353 [“famous men”] in exactly the same terms that Virgil354 describes
the goddess, Fama: she is seated above in a high tower—representing the
lands of the heroes located up high; she puts her head up in the heav-
ens, whose height started no higher than the peaks of mountains; she is
winged because this was the right of heroes, whence Fama in the fields
of Troy flies in the midst of the ranks of Greek heroes, not in the midst
of the throng of their plebeians355; she has a trumpet, which must be the
trumpet of Clio, who is heroic history, and celebrates the names of the
great inasmuch as they were the founders of nations.
556 Now, in families of this sort prior to cities, the familial servants lived
in the condition of slaves, who were the precursors to those later made
slaves in the wars that came to be after the cities. These latter slaves were,
in Latin, called vernae, from which came the languages which also in
Latin were called vernaculae [“vernacular”], as was reasoned upon above
[§443]. The sons of heroes, so as to distinguish them from the sons of
the familial servants, were called liberi [“free”], although, in actuality,
this did not distinguish them: just as, concerning the ancient Germans
(who permit us to understand that the same custom belonged to all the
earliest barbarous peoples), Tacitus356 tells us that dominum ac servum
nullis educationis deliciis dignoscas [“you cannot distinguish master from
servant by any refinement of education”], so too certainly among the
ancient Romans the paterfamilias had the sovereign power of life and
death over his children and despotic dominion over their acquisitions

352
  Mondano romore—a phrase from Dante, Purgatorio 11.100.
353
  Genesis 6:4.
354
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.173–188.
S 355
 Homer, Iliad 2.93–94.
N 356
 Tacitus, Germania 20.
L
224
Book Two 225

(hence, down to the time of the Roman emperors, sons were no different
from slaves in terms of peculium [“property held by someone without
legal ownership”]).
However, the term liberi also originally meant, in Latin, “noble,” whence
the artes liberales were the arts of nobles and liberalis retains the signifi-
cance of genteel, liberalitas the significance of gentility, from this same
ancient origin. Hence, gentes was the term used for noble households in
Latin, for, as we will see below [§597], these earliest gentes were composed
only of nobles and only nobles were free [liberi] in the earliest cities.
In addition, the familial servants were called clientes [“associates”] and
originally cluentes from the ancient verb cluere, “to shine bright in the
light of arms,” which brilliance was called cluer, for the servants shone in
the brilliance of the arms used by the heroes, who from this same origin
were originally called incluti and, later, inclyti [“famed”]; without being
seen in this light, it was as if they did not even exist among men, as will
be explained below [§559].
And here would be the beginning of clientele [“clientships”] and the ear- 557
liest roughed-out forms of fealties, about which we will reason more be-
low [§§599–618, 1058–1059], and we read of these clientele [“clientships”]
and clienti [“clients”] scattered throughout all the ancient nations, as was
proposed in the Axioms.357
However, Thucydides tells us that, in the Egypt even of his time, the
dynasties of Tanis were all divided, one to each paterfamilias, the shep-
herd-princes of families of this sort; and Homer358 calls all the heroes
of whom he sings “kings,” and defines them as shepherds of peoples,
who must have existed before the shepherds of flocks, as we will dem-
onstrate below [§§607, 1058–1059]. Even today in Arabia, there is as
great a number of them there as there was in Egypt. And in the West
Indies, the greater part were found in such a state of nature, governed
by families of this sort and thronged by so many slaves that Emperor
Charles V, the king of Spain, thought about bringing some moderation
and measure to it. And it must have been with one of these families that
Abraham359 made war with gentile kings; the name of the servant with
whom he made this war is translated in a way very much to our purpose
by those learned in the sacred language as vernaculos, explained by us a
little above [§556] in connection with vernae.
It was with the coming-into-being of these things that, in truth, 558
started the famous knot of Hercules: because of it, the clientes [“clients”]
were called nexi, “tied by knot” to the lands which they must cultivate for
the inclyti; this passed over, as we will see [§§1030–1031], into the legal

357
  Axiom 82.
358
  See, for example, the description of Diomedes at Iliad 11.370 and Achilles at
Iliad 16.2.
359
  See Genesis 14:1–17.
 226 The New Science

fiction of a knot in the Law of the Twelve Tables, which gave form to the
civil mancipation which solemnized every Roman legal act.
Now, because one cannot understand a kind of society which is either
more restrictive on the part of those who had an abundance of goods
or more necessary for those who needed them, it is here that the earliest
socii in the world must have had their start; these were the socii who, as
we noted in the Axioms,360 received life from the heroes and, thus, put
their lives at the discretion of those heroes. Hence, because of just one
word from Antinous, the head of the socii of Ulysses361 (a word which,
although it was spoken to good purpose, was not to his liking), Ulysses
intends to cut off his head; and, hence, the pious Aeneas362 kills his so-
cius, Misenus, who was needed in order to make a sacrifice. This episode
was also preserved in a folk tradition.
However, the wise poet, Virgil, devises (because, in the tameness of the
Roman people, it was too crude to hear this of Aeneas, whom he cel-
ebrates for his piety) that Misenus was killed by Triton because he had
dared to contend with Triton at the trumpet. However, at the same time,
he offers quite plain indications for understanding this (by telling us,
concerning the death of Misenus, that among the solemnities prescribed
by the Sybil to Aeneas so as to be able descend into the underworld, one
was that he needed to bury Misenus beforehand), and he plainly says
that the Sybil had foretold his death.
559 As a result, to these socii belonged only the toil, but not the acquisitions
and much less the glory in which only the heroes shone—for this, they
were called in Greek κλειτοί [kleitoi], “illustrious” and, in Latin, inclyti.
And Aesop laments this in the fable of the Society of the Lion, as we
stated above [§425].
For certainly concerning the ancient Germans (from whom we are per-
mitted to make a necessary conjecture about all the other barbarous peo-
ples), Tacitus363 tells us that what belonged to these familial servants, or
clients, or vassals was suum principem defendere et tueri sua quoque fortia
facta gloriae eius adsignare praecipuum iuramentum est [“principally that
they must swear to defend their prince and also to designate all his own
brave deeds to the glory of his prince”]; this is one of the properties most
sensible in our own fealties.
And it is a consequence of this, and not otherwise, that it must have
come to pass that it was under the persona—or “head,” which, as we will
see below [§1033], signified the same thing as “mask”—of the Roman
paterfamilias and under his “name” (what we would now call his “in-
signia”) that all his children and all his slaves were legally held (and this

360
  Axiom 79.
361
 Homer, Odyssey 10.438–441.
S 362
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.160–189.
N 363
 Tacitus, Germania 14.2.
L
226
Book Two 227

is retained in what the Romans called clypea [“shields”], the semi-busts

representing images of their ancestors placed in the concave hollows of
their courtyard walls, and it is quite congruent with these things that
we stated herein [§487] concerning the origins of medals that in modern
architecture these “shields” are called “medallions”).
As a result, it must have been stated with truth when Homer364 recounts,
about such heroic times of the peoples of Greece, that Ajax, tower of the
Greeks, alone fought against entire battalions of Trojans, just as, in the
heroic times of the people of Latium, Horatius alone held back an army
of Etruscans on a bridge365—that is, Ajax and Horatius were with their
vassals. In exactly the same way, in the history of the return to barba-
rism, forty Norman heroes who returned from the Holy Land scattered
an army of Saracens who held Salerno under siege.
Hence, one needs to say that it was from these earliest, most ancient
protectorates, in which the heroes took in those seeking refuge in their
lands, that fealties must have had their start in the world. At first, these
were personal rustic fealties, and through them, such vassals must have
been the earliest vades, bondsmen who gave surety with their persons
and were obliged to follow in person their heroes wherever they were
brought to cultivate the fields of those heroes (this is retained in the use
of vades for defendants obliged to follow their attorneys into the court-
room). Hence, just as in Latin vas and in Greek βάς [bas] signified “vas-
sal,” so too was and wassus continued to signify this for the barbaric
feudalists. Later, real rustic fealties must have come, and through them,
vassals must have been the earliest praedes, or mancipes, bondsmen who
were obliged to give surety with real property; in its proper sense, man-
cipes was used of those who were obliged to the public treasury, about
which we will reason more below [§1064]).
As a consequence, this must have been, in addition, the start of the 560
heroic colonies which we call “inland” colonies in order to distinguish
the others which came later, which were “coastal” colonies (we will see
[§§634–636] that the latter colonies were bands of those seeking refuge
in the sea in order to find safety in other lands, as the Axioms366 have
noted). For the term “colony” is used in its proper sense only for a group
of day laborers who cultivate the fields, as they do even today, for their
daily bread.
For the histories of these two kinds of colonies, there are the following
two myths. For inland colonies, there is the myth of the famous Gal-
lic Hercules who, with chains of poetic gold—that is, grain—which are
coming out of his mouth, enchains by their ears groups of men and leads
them behind him wherever he wishes—up until now, this has been taken

364
 Homer, Iliad 3.229; 6.5; 7.211 and 219, 11.485; 17.128.
365
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.10.
366
  Axiom 100.
 228 The New Science

as a symbol of eloquence, but the myth came into being in the times in
which heroes did not even know how to use articulate speech, as I dem-
onstrated more fully above [§§446, 546].
For the coastal colonies, there is the myth of the nets with which the he-
roic Vulcan drags the plebeian Venus and Mars from the sea367—the dis-
tinction between heroic and plebeian gods will be explained herein more
generally [§§579–581]—and the Sun spied them in their ­nakedness—that
is, not clothed in the civil light with which the heroes shone, as was
stated [§553]—and the gods—that is, the nobles of heroic cities, as was
explained above [§449]—made mockery of them (as the patricians made
mockery of the impoverished plebs in ancient Rome).
561 And, finally, as a consequence, the asylums had their earliest origins.
Hence Cadmus with the asylum founded Thebes, the most ancient city
in Greece. Theseus founded Athens upon the Altar of the Unfortunates,
so called in keeping with the correct idea that they are unfortunate, those
who, as impious wanderers, are deprived of all the divine and human
goods which human society has produced. Romulus founded Rome with
the asylum opened up in the lucus, or rather, as a new city-founder, he
founded it along with his companions on the basis of the asylum from
which arose the ancient cities of Latium, which Livy368 for this purpose
defines generally as vetus urbes condentium consilium [“the age-old coun-
sel of founders of cities”] and which is not well connected, as we saw
above [§532], with the statement that Romulus and his companions were
sons of the earth there.
However, for all that, this statement of Livy is to our purpose in that it
demonstrates for us that asylums were the origins of cities, whose eternal
property is that men live in them secure from violence.
In this fashion, from the groups of impious wanderers who everywhere
repaired to the lands of men of piety and strength and became safe
there, Jove came to have the gracious title of the Hospitable,369 insofar
as asylums of this sort were actually the earliest hospices of the world,
and those received in this sort of way, as we will see below [§611], were
the earliest guests, or foreigners, in these earliest cities. It is preserved in
Greek history that among the many labors of Hercules are the following
two, that, first, he went throughout the world slaying monsters (whose
aspect was that of men, but whose customs were those of beasts), and
that, second, he purged the Augean stables of their extreme filth.
562 It is here that the poetic gentes maiores imagined two other greater
divinities, first, MARS, and, second, VENUS. The former was a char-
acter representing the heroes who first and properly fought pro aris et

367
 Homer, Odyssey 8.267–302 and 8.325–327.
S 368
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
N 369
  See Cicero, De finibus 3.20.66.
L
228
Book Two 229

focis370 [“‘on behalf of altar and hearth”], which sort of fighting is always
heroic, as one is fighting for the religion proper to humankind, to which
it has recourse when it despairs of succor from nature (hence religious
wars are the bloodiest, and so libertine men who grow old, as they sense
that nature fails to succor them, become religious371) and because of this
above [§§333–335], we took religion as the first principle of this science.
It is here that Mars fought on true, real fields and behind true, real shields
(which, as derived from the Latin verb, cluere [“to be brilliant at arms”],
were, at first, called clupei and, later, clypei by the Romans, just as, in
the return to barbarian times, enclosed pastures and forests were called
“defenses”). These shields bore true arms which, at first, since there were
not yet arms made of iron, were spears of poles whose tip was burned,
and then tapered and sharpened so as to inflict wounds (such simple
spears, and not arms made of iron, were given as military prizes to Ro-
man soldiers who had conducted themselves heroically in war). Hence
among the peoples of Greece, it was Minerva, Bellona, and Pallas who
were armed with spears, and, among the peoples of Latium, from the
word quiris, “spear,” Juno was named Quirina, Mars was named Quiri-
nus, and Romulus, because he was to be trusted with a spear during life,
was named Quirinus after his death. And when the Roman people met
in assembly armed with javelins (just as the Spartan people, the heroic
people of Greece, met armed with spears), they were called Quirites.
However, concerning barbarous nations, Roman history tells us that they
made war with these early spears of which we were just speaking and de-
scribes them as praeustas sudes, “spears burnt at the tip,” just like those
with which the American peoples have been discovered to be armed; and
in our times, nobles are armed with spears at tournaments, just as earlier
they were part of the business of war. This sort of arms was discovered
because of the correct idea of strength, because they are an extension of
the arm and of its ability to keep injuries far from the body, just as arms
which are held closer to the body are more bestial.
Above we discovered [§529] that the first grounds of the fields—that 563
is, the graves—were the first shields in the world, whence it is retained,
in the science of blazonry, that the shield is the background for coats
of arms.
The colors of the field were true colors. Black came from the burnt lands
to which the heroes set fire. Green came from the blades of grain in leaf.
It was by an error that the metal was taken for the gold of grain,372 which
in the yellowing of its dry blades was the third color of the earth—as
was stated elsewhere above [§540]; so the Romans counted shields loaded
with grain among their military prizes for the heroism of soldiers who

370
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.12.3; 10.44.8.
371
  See the note at §339 on Cephalus and Socrates.
372
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.101–110.
 230 The New Science

distinguished themselves in battle, and they called military glory adorea

from ador, the “burnt grain” that they ate early on and which the ancient
people of Latium called adur from uro, “to burn”; as a result of this, the
earliest worship in religious times was the burning of grain. Blue was the
color of the heavens, which covered those in the lucus (which is why the
French say bleu, “blue” for the heavens and for God, as was stated above
[§482]). Red was the blood of the impious thieves whom the heroes killed
when found in their fields.
The devices of nobles which have come down to us from the return to
barbarism are observed bearing lions who are black, green, gold, blue,
and, finally, red, which (through what we saw above [§§18, 434, 486] stand
for the fields of plantings, which later passed over to the fields of coats of
arms) must have been the cultivated lands regarded under the aspect, as
we reasoned above [§540], of the lion defeated by Hercules and of their
colors enumerated above. Many such devices bear furs, which must have
been the furrows whence, from the sown teeth of the great serpent killed
by Cadmus, came armed men. Many such devices bear iron bars, which
must have been the spears with which the earliest heroes were armed.
And, finally, many such devices bear harrows, which are certainly instru-
ments of the countryside.
Through all this, one has to conclude that agriculture, both in the earlier
times of barbarism, as we ascertained with the Romans, and in the later
times of barbarism, makes for the first nobility of nations.
564 Shields of later ancients were covered in leather, as attested by the poets
who dress the old heroes in leather—that is, in the pelts of wild beasts
which they hunted and killed. Of this, there is a fine passage in Pausa-
nias373 where he relates that Pelasgus (the most ancient hero of Greece,
who gave his name to the nation of Pelasgians, whom, as a result, Apol-
lodorus in his De origine deorum374 calls αὐτόχθονα [autochthona], “son
of the earth,” which is, in a word, a “giant”) discovered leather clothing.
And it is a wonder how well the earlier times of barbarism correspond
with the later such times: Dante,375 speaking of great ancient personages,
says that they were dressed in leather and bones, and Boccaccio376 tells
us that they went about burdened with leather clothing. It is because of
this that it must have come about that the devices of noble families were
covered with leather and that the scrolling of the top and bottom of
these pelts was a congruent finishing touch.
Shields were round, for the deforested and cultivated lands were the ear-
liest orbis terrarium, as was stated above [§550], and this property was
retained in the Latin words for “shield”: a clypeus was a round shield,
distinct from a scutum, which had sides. This land was called a lucus in

373
 Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.1.5.
374
  See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.8.1.
S 375
 See Paradiso 15.113.
N 376
 Boccaccio, Decameron 4.1.22.
L
230
Book Two 231

the sense of an “eye” (so too, even today, we call the openings by which
light enters into a house “eyes”). That heroic phrase, “every giant has his
own lucus,” is true, although, later, unknown as a consequence of being
altered and eventually corrupted, and it was already false when it came
to Homer; it was taken to mean that every giant has an eye in the middle
of his brow, and with these one-eyed giants came that Vulcan who in
the first forges—that is, the forest to which Vulcan set fire—must have
fabricated the first arms—that is, as we have stated [§562], spears with
burned tips—and by extending this idea, he fabricated the lightning bolt
of Jove, for Vulcan must have set fire to the forest so as to observe in the
open heavens where the lightning bolts were sent by Jove.
The second divinity that came into being in the midst of these most 565
ancient human things was the divinity of VENUS, who was a character
representing civil beauty, whence, in Latin, honestas continues to signify
“nobility” and “beauty” and “virtue.”377 For it was in the following order
that these three ideas must have come into being. The first beauty to be
understood was the civil beauty which pertained to the heroes. Later
came the natural beauty, which falls under the human senses and yet
senses belonging to men with discerning and comprehending minds, who
know how to discern the parts and combine them agreeably in the body
as a whole, in which beauty essentially consists378 (hence, rustics and men
of plebeian taint understand little or nothing of beauty). This would
demonstrate of the error of philologists who say that, in the simple-
minded and bewildered times about which we are reasoning, kings were
elected with a view to their beautiful and well-proportioned bodies; for
such a tradition is to understood in terms of civil beauty—that is, the no-
bility of the heroes, as we are about to state [§566]. Finally, the beauty of
virtue was understood, whose name is honestas and which is understood
only by philosophers.
Hence, it must have been in civil beauty that they were beautiful, Apollo,
Bacchus, Ganymede, Bellerophon, and Theseus, along with other he-
roes, and it was because of them, perhaps, that Venus was imagined as
masculine.
The idea of civil beauty must have come into being in the minds of the 566
theological poets when they saw the impious seeking refuge in their
lands—men in aspect, but beasts in custom.
It was this beauty, and no other, that was valued by the Spartans, the
heroes of Greece who cast from Mount Taygetus offspring that were
brutish and deformed—that is, were conceived by noble women outside
the solemnity of nuptials—and these must have been the monstrosities
which the Law of the Twelve Tables commanded be cast into the Tiber.
For there is no verisimilitude in the point that the decemvirs would have

377
  See Cicero, De oratore 3.31.125.
378
  Compare Plato, Phaedrus 264c.
 232 The New Science

given any thought (in that parsimony for laws which was proper to the
earliest republics) to natural monstrosities so rare—things which are rare
in nature are called monstrosities—while, in the present abundance of
laws under which we toil, lawgivers leave to the discretion of judges cases
which rarely come up.
As a result, those originally and properly called MONSTROSITIES
must have been civil monstrosities; it was with this understanding that
Pamphilus said of one of these, when he falsely suspected that the
maiden, Philumena, was pregnant, that
Aliquid monstri alunt379
[“Some monstrosity is being nursed”],

and so they continued to be called this in Roman law, which was spoken
with complete propriety (as Antoine Favre observes in his Jurisprudence
of Papinianus, which was observed above in another place for another
purpose [§410]).
567 Hence, it must be this that Livy is saying when he writes (with as much
good faith in as he is otherwise ignorant about Roman antiquity) that if
the nobles gave a common share in connubium to the plebeians, the off-
spring born would have been SECUM IPSA DISCORS380 [“in discord
with itself ”], which is as much as saying that it would have been a “mon-
strosity mixed of two natures,” one heroic from the nobles, the other
wild from those plebeians, who AGITABANT CONNUBIA MORE
FERARUM381 [“practiced marriage in the manner of wild animals”];
this expression Livy took from some ancient writer of annals and used
it without knowledge [senza scienza]. He shows his lack of knowledge
insofar as he reports it as though it meant “if the nobles intermarry with
the plebeians.”382 This is wrong because the plebeians, in their unfortu-
nate state of near-slavery, could not put this forward to the nobles, but
rather demanded the right to contract the solemn nuptials—for this is
what connubium means—a right that belonged to the nobles alone; as
for “in the manner of wild beasts,” no one species has intercourse with
any other species. As a result, one is forced to say that it was an expres-
sion with which the nobles, in that heroic contest, intended to mock
the plebeians, none of whom (because they had no share in the public
auspices which by their solemnity make nuptials legitimate) had a father
who was certain (so, in the Roman legal code, there remains the defi-
nition that nuptiae demonstrant patrem383 [“marriages demonstrate the
father”]), and as a result of uncertainty of this sort, the plebeians could

379
 Terence, Andria 250.
380
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. Livy’s text actually reads ne secum quidem
ipse concors.
381
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1.6.
S 382
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1.2.
N 383
 See Digest 2.1.5.
L
232
Book Two 233

be said to have intercourse with their mothers, with their daughters, as

wild beasts do.
On the one hand, to the plebeian Venus were attributed doves, not 568
yet to signify visceral love, but rather because they are, as Horace de-
fines them, degeneres, birds which are “base” in comparison with eagles,
which the same Horace defines as feroces; this is to signify that the ple-
beians held private, or minor auspices, different from the auspices of
eagles and lightning bolts which were noble and which Varro and Mes-
sala called “the major, or public auspices,” upon which depended all the
heroic rights of the nobles, as Roman history plainly confirms.
On the other hand, to the heroic Venus, Venus pronuba, were attributed
swans (birds proper also to Apollo, who, we saw above [§533], was the
god of nobility), and under the auspices of one of these swans, Leda
conceived from Jove an egg—as was explained above [§512].
The plebeian Venus was described as naked, whereas Venus pronuba was 569
covered with a nuptial girdle, as was stated above [§512], and this naked-
ness (one sees here how greatly distorted ideas are about this poetic an-
tiquity!) was believed to have been devised as an incentive to lust, when
it is discovered truly to signify the natural modesty—that is, the punctili-
ousness of good faith—with which the plebeians observed their natural
obligations insofar as they had no share, as we will see shortly in the
Poetic Politics [§§597–598], in the citizenship of heroic cities and so did
not contract in their obligations any that were bound to some constraint
of civil law that made it necessary to fulfill them.
Consequently, to Venus were attributed the Graces, also naked [nude],
and, in Latin, causa [“the grounds for an action”] and gratia [“grace,”
“the goodwill behind an action”] signify the same thing. As a result, the
Graces must have signified for the poets those pacts which are bare [nudi]
because they are the product only of natural obligation; and, as a con-
sequence, the Roman jurists called some pacts “stipulated” (these were,
later, called “vested” by medieval interpreters of Roman law). For since
they meant that bare pacts were pacts which were not stipulated, stipu-
latio must not have come from the word stipes [“stump”] (for the word
derived from such an origin would be stipatio, and the justification for
such a derivation would be forced insofar as it would be the stump which
“sustains” the pacts). Instead, stipulatio must have come from stipula
[“stalk”], as the rustics of Latium used the word, insofar as it is the stalk
which “clothes” the grain384 (by comparison, pacts which were called
“vested” by the earliest feudalists came from the same origin, whence the
term “investiture” for fealties, from which certainly comes exfestucare,
“depriving of rank”).
On account of this reasoning, gratia and causa were understood to be the
same thing by the poetic peoples of Latium with respect to the c­ ontracts

384
  Compare Voss, Etymologicon, p. 570.
 234 The New Science

to which the plebeians of heroic cities paid homage, just as later with
respect to the contracts which were introduced by the natural law of
people (Ulpian adds HUMANARUM [“of the humane peoples”]), causa
[“legal case”], and negotium [“transaction”] signified the same thing385
insofar as in this kind of contract the transaction itself almost always is
the causa—here, cavissae, or “indemnity”—because these transactions
indemnify the pact.

Corollaries
concerning contracts completed by
consent alone

570 Because, through the most ancient law, the heroic gentile peoples cared
about nothing but the things necessary for life, and because they gath-
ered no fruits other than the fruits of nature, as yet understood nothing
about the advantage of money, and were, so to speak, all body (they
certainly could have recognized the contracts which are today completed
by consent alone). And they were also extremely rude, because of which
it is proper to be suspicious, for rudeness is born of ignorance,386 and
it is a property of human nature that it always doubts what it does not
know. On account of all this, those peoples did not recognize good faith,
and they made all their obligations secure with a handing over—either a
true handing over or one which was a legal fiction—and made them still
more certain during the process of the transaction with solemn stipula-
tions. From here comes that celebrated heading in the Law of the Twelve
Tables: SI QUIS NEXUM FACIET MANCIPIUMQUE UTI LINGUA
NUNCUPASIT IUS ESTO [“if anyone shall make bond or conveyance,
as he has declared with tongue, so shall it be law”]. From this nature of
human civil things come the following truths.

571 I. As they say, the most ancient form of sale and purchase was exchange,
and when this involved real estate, this must have been what was called,
in the return to barbarism, livellus, the advantage of which exchange was
understood to lie in one party having an abundance of fruits which were
scarce for another party, and vice versa.

572 II. The leasing of houses could not have had currency when cities were
small and habitations were confined; as a result, proprietors must have
offered their grounds for others to build on, and so there could have been
no other kind of rent.

385
  Vico makes the same claim about causa and negotium at De antiquissima 3;
see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 50[49].
386
  The term Vico uses here is ignorazione, a term whose connotation is less
S pejorative (as Battistini and Fubini observe) than ignoranza.
N
L
234
Book Two 235

III. The leasing of lands must have been the emphyteusis,387 which, in 573
Latin, is called clientele [“clientship”], whence grammarians have di-
vined that they used the word clientes [“clients”] as if it were colentes388
[“cultivators”].

IV. As a result, this must be the reason that, in the midst of the return to 574
barbarism, one reads of no other contracts in the old archives than those
for the rent of houses or farms, either in perpetuity or for a set time.

V. This is perhaps the reason that emphyteusis is a contract de iure civili 575
[“pertaining to civil law”]: that, through the principles found herein, this
is the same as de iure heroico Romanorum [“pertaining to the heroic law
of the Romans”], to which Ulpian opposes the ius naturale gentium hu-
manorum [“the natural law of the humane gentile peoples”], a law which
he called “humane” in comparison with the law of the barbarian peoples
who came earlier, not that of the barbarian peoples, who, in his time,
were outside of the Roman empire, for these were of no importance to
Roman jurists.

VI. Society was unknown during the cyclopean custom whereby each 576
paterfamilias cared only for his own things and did not meddle in those
of others (as above [§547] Homer allows us to learn in recounting what
Polyphemus did to Ulysses389).

VII. And, for the same reason, mandates were unknown, whence remains 577
that rule of ancient civil law, per extraneam personam acquire nemini [“no
one can make an acquisition by means of an external party”].

VIII. However, when the law of the heroic peoples was succeeded by 578
what Ulpian defines as the law of humane peoples, it made such a revolu-
tion in things which are sold and purchased that, whereas in olden times,
no return was guaranteed unless a “double” return was stipulated in the
process of making the contract, today, this is the rule for all contracts
said to be “of good faith” and is naturally the obligation, even if it is not
stipulated.

Mythological canon

Returning now to the three characters of Vulcan, Mars, and Venus, it is 579
noted here (and such notice must be considered an important canon of
this mythology) that there were three divine characters who signified the

387
  See the note on emphyteusis at §489.
388
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 165.
389
 Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115.
 236 The New Science

heroes, as distinct from another three characters who signified the plebe-
ians. So, there is the Vulcan who rends the head of Jove with a blow from
an ax, whence Minerva390 is born, and who, when he tries to intervene
in a contest between Jove and Juno, falls with a kick from Jove from
the heavens and remains lame. There is the Mars whom Jove strongly
reproaches where Homer makes him say that Mars is the basest of all the
gods, and Minerva in a contest among the gods, also in Homer, wounds
Mars with a blow from a rock—these must have represented the plebe-
ians who served the heroes in battle—and Venus—who must have repre-
sented the natural wives of plebeians of this sort—is caught, along with
that plebeian Mars, in the nets of the heroic Vulcan and, when both are
discovered to be naked by the Sun, they are mocked by the other gods.
Consequently, Venus was later erroneously believed to be the wife of
Vulcan. However, we saw above [§§80, 511] that in the heavens there was
no marriage except that between Jove and Juno, and, indeed, this was
sterile; and Mars was not said to have committed adultery with Venus,
but to have lain with a concubine, for the plebeians would only contract
in the natural marriages which, as will be shown below [§§598, 610], were,
in Latin, called concubinati.
580 Just as we have explained these three characters here, so too we will ex-
plain in their places others below. Among these, we will find a plebeian
Tantalus [§583], who can neither take hold of apples rising too high nor
touch water sinking too low; a plebeian Midas [§649], who, because all
that he touches becomes gold, dies of hunger; a plebeian Linus [§647],
who contends with Apollo in song and, defeated by him, is killed.
581 The double myths or characters must have been necessary in the heroic
state, where the plebeians did not have names and took the names of
the heroes to whom they belonged, as was stated above [§559], and this
in the midst, moreover, of the extreme poverty of language which they
must have had in those times (even in the present abundance of lan-
guage, the same term often signifies two different, and, in some cases,
contrary, things).

On Poetic Politics,
by Which the Earliest Republics
in the World Came to Be
in the Strictest Aristocratic Form

582 In this fashion were founded the families comprised of familial servants
of this sort, received within trust, or strength, or protection of the he-
roes; these were the first socii of the world, as we saw above [§§558–559],
whose lives were within the bailiwick of their lords and, as a conse-
S
N   See Hesiod, Theogony 886–900.
390

L
236
Book Two 237

quence of their lives, also their possessions, whereas those heroes, by

their paternal, cyclopean power, had the right of life and death over their
own children and, as a consequence of this right over their persons, also
had despotic right over all their possessions; this is what Aristotle391 un-
derstands in defining children in families as the living instruments of
the fathers, and the Law of the Twelve Tables, even down to the most
unrestricted popular liberty, preserved for the Roman paterfamilias both
parts of this monarchical right: power over their persons and domain
over their possessions. On the one hand, up until the arrival of the em-
perors, sons, just like slaves, had only one kind of wealth, that which is
possessed because the father allowed it; on the other hand, fathers in the
earliest times must have truly had the power to sell their sons up to three
times, and later when the tameness of human times grew, they made, as
legal fictions, three sales when they wished to free their sons from pa-
ternal power. However, the Gauls and Celts preserved equal power over
their children and their slaves; and the custom of fathers truly selling
their children has been discovered in the West Indies; and in Europe, it
is the practice to sell them up to four times among the Muscovites and
the Tartars.
This is how much truth there is to the claim that other barbarian nations
did not have paternal power talem qualem habent cives Romani [“of the
sort which Roman citizens had”].392 This is plainly false and came from
a common folk error, from which the learned have accepted the expres-
sion. Rather, it was the case that when the jurists said it, it was in connec-
tion with nations defeated by the Roman people, to whom—as we will
demonstrate more fully in its place below [§§557, 608, 1023]—nothing
remained, after their entire civil law was taken away by right of the vic-
tor, except natural paternal power and, as a consequence of this, the ties
of blood called kinship ties and the natural part of dominion which is
bonitary; on account of all this, they retained the natural obligations
which are called de iure naturali gentium [“concerned the natural law of
the gentile peoples”], which Ulpian specified above with the addition
HUMANARUM [“of the humane gentile peoples”]. All the peoples out-
side the Roman Empire would have had civil rights, and ones exactly like
those which the Romans had.
However, turning back to our reasoning, once freed by the death of 583
their fathers from this private monarchical power, the sons of the fami-
lies each instead assumed it themselves, whence every Roman citizen free
from paternal power in the Roman legal code is called a paterfamilias,
but the familial servants always must live in that servile state. At the end
of a long age, they must have naturally tired of this, through the Axiom

  See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.11, 1161b3–4.

391

  Institutes of Justinian 1.9.2. Modern Italian editions include an exclamation

392

point after this sentence, but neither the autograph nor the edition printed in
1744 contains one.
 238 The New Science

we proposed above,393 that “a man who is a subject naturally longs to

deliver himself from servitude.”
As a result, they must have been the Tantalus whom we called plebeian
above [§580], who cannot get his teeth into the apple; this must have
been the golden apples of the grain, explained above [§539], which rise
from the lands of the heroes to whom they belonged, and (explaining his
burning thirst in the same way) he cannot take the smallest sip from the
water which rises up to his lips and then retreats. They must have been
the Ixion who forever turns a wheel, and the Sisyphus who pushes up-
ward the rock which Cadmus threw, the hard earth which returns once it
reaches the top—this is retained in the Latin expressions, vertere terram
[“turning earth”], for cultivating the land, and saxum volvere [“turn the
stone”], for arduously performing a long and difficult task.
It was on account of all this that the familial servants must have rebelled
against the heroes.
And this is the necessity upon which we conjectured in general terms
in the Axioms,394 the necessity which the familial servants made for the
heroic fathers in the familial state, from which the republics came into
being.
584 For at that time, a great urgency must have naturally brought the heroes
to unite in orders so as to resist the multitude of familial servants rising
up, and they must have made as their head some Father more ferocious
than the rest and more spirited in presence. And such men were called
kings, from the verb, regere, which, in its proper sense, means “to sus-
tain” and “to direct.”
In this fashion (to use the phrase of the jurist, Pomponius, who under-
stood this quite well), REBUS IPSIS DICTANTIBUS REGNA CON-
DITA395 [“regimes are founded by the dictates of the things themselves”],
a statement agreeing well with the doctrine of the Roman legal code,
which establishes that ius admirat gentium DIVINA PROVIDENTIA
constitutum [“the natural law of the gentile peoples is founded by divine
providence”].
And behold the generation of the heroic regimes: for the Fathers were
sovereign kings in their families, and since, because in the equality in
this sort of state and through the ferocious nature of these sons of Poly-
phemus, none of them ought to have ceded to any of the others, there
emerged from them regnant senates—that is, senates comprised of such
who were kings in their own families—these kings are found, without
any human discernment or counsel, to have united their private interests

393
  Axiom 95.
394
  Axiom 81.
S 395
  An inexact rendering of a passage found at Digest 1.2.2.11.
N
L
238
Book Two 239

in an interest common to each, which (with the word res understood)

was called patria [“fatherland”], meaning “the interests of the Fathers,”
and the nobles were called patricians, whence it must be the case that
only the nobles were citizens in the earliest fatherlands.
It is thus that there can be truth in the tradition which has come down
to us that, in the earliest times, kings were elected by nature. Concerning
this, there are two golden passages by Tacitus in his On the Customs of
the Germans, which allow room to conjecture that this was the same cus-
tom for all of the other earliest peoples. The first of these is non casus non
fortuita dmirationn turman aut cuneum facit, sed familiae et propinquitates
[“their cavalry and infantry formations are not the result of chance or
fortuitous congregations, but are comprised of members of households
and of relatives”].396 The second is duces exemplo potius quam imperio,
si prompti, si conspicui, si ante aciem agant admiratione praesunt [“their
leaders lead by example rather than power: quick to respond, conspicu-
ous, and acting at the front lines, they stand out in admiration”].397
That such were the earliest kings on Earth is demonstrated by the fact 585
that such heroic poets imagined Jove in heaven to be king of gods and
men (as in that golden passage of Homer398 where Jove explains to The-
tis that he cannot do anything contrary to what the gods at one time
determined in heavenly council, speaking like a true aristocratic king;
this is the same passage where, later, the Stoics fixed their dogma of Jove
being subject to Fate). However, Jove and the other gods held council
concerning such things pertaining to men and so determined them with
free volition.
The passage related here explains two other passages, also in Homer,
upon which the political theorists have erroneously founded their con-
tention that Homer had an understanding of monarchy: the first399 pas-
sage is Agamemnon reproving the contempt of Achilles; the second400 is
Ulysses persuading the Greeks, who are rebelling to return home, to con-
tinue the siege they have started at Troy. Both passages state that “one is
king,” and both passages state this in reference to war, where there is only
one general captain, which accords with the maxim noted by Tacitus,401
when he says eam esse imperandi conditionem, ut non aliter ratio constet
quam si uni reddatur [“it must be a condition of power that there is no
stable accountability unless it is rendered to one”].
Again, Homer also, as often as he mentions the heroes in his two poems,
continuously gives them the epithet “king.” In connection with these,

396
 Tacitus, Germania 7.3.
397
 Tacitus, Germania 7.1–2.
398
 Homer, Iliad 1.526–527.
399
 Homer, Iliad 1.287–289.
400
 Homer, Iliad 2.204–205.
401
 Tacitus, Annals 1.6.3.
 240 The New Science

one wonders at a golden passage from the book of Genesis,402 where as

often as Moses tells of the descendants of Esau, he names them “kings,”
which means “captains,” or, as the Vulgate reads, duces; and the ambas-
sadors of Pyrrhus403 related to him that they had seen in Rome a senate
comprised of such kings.
For truly one cannot understand any cause in our civil nature by which
the Fathers, in changing their state, should have altered anything which
they already had in the state of nature except being subject, in their sov-
ereign family power, to their own regnant orders. For it is the nature of
the strong, as we posited above in the Axioms,404 to surrender, from what
has been acquired by virtue, as little as they are able and only as much as
is needed in order to preserve what they have acquired (hence, one reads
often in Roman history of that heroic disdain of the strong, who do not
suffer gladly virtute parta per flagitium amittere [“to surrender through
disgrace what is the part of virtue”]).
Among all the possibilities in human life (once one has seen that the
civil state came into being neither by fraud nor by the force of one, as
we demonstrated above [§522] and will demonstrate more fully below
[§§1009–1019]), one cannot imagine how it is that civil power can be
formed from familial power and how it is that the eminent domain of
the civil state is formed from a natural paternal domain, which, we noted
above [§490], was ex iure optimo, in the sense of being free from any pri-
586 vate or public encumbrance, in any other fashion than this.405 This fash-
ion, as we have meditated upon it, is wondrously proven by the origins
of words pertaining to it. For upon this dominion of those who are best,
which the Fathers held (which the Greeks called δίκαιον ἄριστον [dikaion
ariston]), were formed the republics which, as we stated in another place
above [§490], were called, by the peoples of Greece, “aristocratic”; and
these were called, by the peoples of Latium, “republics of the optimates,”
from Ops, whom they called the goddess of power; hence, it is perhaps
the case that Ops, who must have been so called from optimus—that is,
ἄριστος [aristos] in Greek, and so optimus in Latin—was called the wife
of Jove—that is, the wife of the regnant orders of those heroes—who,
as was stated above [§449], arrogated to themselves the name of “gods.”
For Juno, by reason of the auspices, was the wife of a Jove taken as
the heavens flashing with lightning. And, as mother of the gods, as was
stated above [§549], she was Cybele, who was also called “mother” of the
“giants”—the word used in its proper signification for “nobles”—and it

402
  See Genesis 36:15–21 and 29–30.
403
  See Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 19.
404
  Axiom 91.
405
  Here Vico rejects, at least implicitly, contractarian accounts of how humans
leave the state of nature for civil society. Civil society, Vico implies, cannot pos-
sibly arise from rational calculation, because humans in the prepolitical state
S have not yet become rational calculators.
N
L
240
Book Two 241

was she who, as we will see below in the Poetic Cosmography [§722], was
later taken as the queen of cities.
From Ops, therefore, came the term “optimates,” for such republics were
only ordered to preserve the power of the nobles and, by preserving it, to
retain as their eternal properties those two principal guardianships: the
first being guardianship over the orders; and the second, guardianship
over boundaries.
And from the guardianship over the orders came, first, guardianship over
kinship, by which, up until Year 309 of Rome kept connubium closed to
the plebs;406 and, later, came guardianship over the magistracies, whence
the patricians so contested the claims of the plebs to the consulate; and,
later still, came the guardianship over the priesthood and, by this, guard-
ianship of the laws, which all the earliest nations regarded, in this as-
pect, as sacred things. Hence, up until the Law of the Twelve Tables, the
nobles governed Rome with custom—as was made certain in the Axi-
oms407 by Dionysius of Halicarnassus—and, for a hundred years after
the Law, they kept their interpretation closed off inside the college of the
­pontiffs—as Pomponius the jurist tells us.408 For up until that time, only
the nobles were admitted to this college.
The other principal guardianship is that over boundaries (hence the Ro-
mans, up until their bringing Corinth to an end, were incomparable in
their observance of justice in wartime, so as not to make soldiers of the
plebeians, and were extreme in their observance of clemency in victory,
so as not to enrich them) as was proposed above in two Axioms.409
This great and important section of poetic history is contained in the 587
myth that Saturn410 intended to devour the infant Jove, and the priests of
Cybele hid him and, by the clamor of their arms, made his cries unheard.
Here, Saturn must be a character representing the familial servants who,
in their day-laboring, cultivated the fields of their lords, the Fathers, and,
with the burning covetousness of desire, wished for fields from the Fa-
thers so as to sustain themselves. And so, this Saturn is the father of
Jove, for it was from this Saturn, as occasion, that the civil rule of the
Fathers came into being (this rule, as was previously stated [§586], was
explicated by the character of Jove, whose wife is Ops); for Jove, taken
as the god of the auspices (the most solemn of which are the lightning
bolt and the eagle) is the Jove whose wife is Juno and is the father of the
gods—that is, of the heroes who believed themselves to be the sons of
Jove, just as they believed that they had been generated by the auspices

406
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.1 and 4.4.
407
  Axiom 92.
408
 See Digest 1.2.2.6.
409
  Axioms 87 and 88.
410
  On the fable of Saturn, see Hesiod, Theogony 485, and Lucretius, De rerum
natura 2.633–639.
 242 The New Science

of Jove because of the solemn nuptials whose numinous presence was

Juno, and who took for themselves the names of gods, whose mother is
Earth, that is, Ops, wife of this Jove, all of which was stated above [§586].
And this same Jove is called the king of men—that is, of the familial
servants in the state of the families and of the plebs in the state of heroic
cities. There was confusion, because of ignorance of this poetic history,
between these two titles, as if Jove was also father of men: these men,
even into the times of the ancient Roman republic, non poterant nomine
ciere patrem [“could not cite their fathers by name”] (as Livy tells us),
for they were born from natural marriages, not solemn nuptials, whence
remained, in jurisprudence, the rule that nuptiae demonstrant patrem
[“marriages demonstrate the father”].411
588 The myth continues that the priests of Cybele—that is, Ops—for
everywhere, the earliest regimes were regimes of priests—as was stated
somewhat above [§§254, 267–268] and will be shown more fully below
[§§593–594]—hid Jove (it is from this hiding, say the Latin philologists by
some divination, that Latium has its name, and the Latin language pre-
serves this history in the phrase condere regna, as was stated in another
place [§535]), for the Fathers closed themselves off within their orders
against the rebelling familial servants; from this secrecy was the start of
the coming of what the political theorists call arcana imperii.412 By the
clamor of their arms, they made the cries of Jove unheard (a Jove just
born in the union of these orders) and in this fashion they saved him; this
tells us distinctly what Plato413 relates to us confusedly, that republics are
born on the basis of arms, to which one must join what Aristotle said
above in the Axioms,414 that in heroic republics the nobles swore to be
the eternal enemies of the plebs (an eternal property retained in what we
say now, that servants are the paid enemies of their patrons). The Greeks
preserved this history in the etymology by which “war” is called πόλεμος
[polemos] from the word for “city,” πόλις [polis].
589 At that time, the Greek nations imagined a tenth divinity of the so-
called gentes maiores—that is, MINERVA—and she is devised as being
born by an imagination as savage as it is gullish: Vulcan rends the head
of Jove with an ax, whence Minerva was born, meaning that the multi-
tude of familial servants who practiced servile arts (this, as was stated
[§579], came under the poetic genus of the plebeian Vulcan) broke (in the
sense of “enfeebling” or “diminishing”) the rule of Jove (this is retained
in the Latin expression minuere caput for “to batter the head”). For
not knowing how to speak an abstract word, “rule,” they said instead
a concrete one, “head” (in the familial state, rule was monarchical and
changed to aristocratic rule in the civil state). As a result, it is no empty

411
 See Digest 2.1.5.
412
  See Tacitus, Histories 1.4.2: “the secret of empire was now made public, that
a princeps could arise elsewhere than from Rome.”
S 413
 Plato, Laws 1.2, 626a.
N 414
  Axiom 86.
L
242
Book Two 243

conjecture that from that verb minuere [“to diminish”] comes the name
Minerva in Latin. Nor is it an empty conjecture that retained from this
distant poetic antiquity is the expression in the Roman legal code, capitis
deminutio, to signify “a change in state,” just as, with Minerva, there was
an alteration from the familial state to the civil state.
Onto this myth, the philosophers later attached the most sublime of 590
their metaphysical meditations, that the eternal idea is generated by God
in God, whereas created ideas are produced by God in us.415 However,
the theological poets contemplated a Minerva with the idea of civil order
(this was retained, in Latin, by ordo [“order”] as a term par excellence
for the Senate), and this idea, perhaps, gave impetus to philosophers be-
lieving that it was the eternal idea of God, which is nothing other than
eternal order (and in it was retained the eternal property that the order
of the best is the wisdom of cities). However, the Minerva of Homer
is always distinguished by the continuous epithets “Warlike” and “De-
spoiler,” and only twice do we recall her having the epithet “Counselor”;
and the owl and the olive were consecrated to her, not because she medi-
tates at night, not because she reads and writes by the light of a lamp,
but rather, first, to signify the night of what is hidden (by this, as we
stated above [§387], humanity is founded) and, second, to signify (per-
haps more properly) that the heroic senates which composed the cities
conceive laws in secret (certainly, the Areopagites continued to give their
votes under the darkness of the Senate of Athens—that is, the city of
the Minerva who was called ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athēna]). From this heroic custom
comes, in Latin, the expression condere leges [“to found laws,” “to hide
laws”]. As a result, legum conditores [“founders of laws”] were properly
the Senators who decreed laws, just as legum latores [“bearers of laws”]
were those who brought the laws from the Senate to the plebs of people,
as was stated above [§§500, 521] concerning the trial of Horatius. This
is how much the theological poets consider Minerva to be the goddess
of wisdom, that in statues and medallions, she is observed to be armed,
and this Minerva of the Curia, the Pallas of the plebeian assemblies (in
Homer,416 it is Pallas who leads Telemachus into an assembly of plebs,
who are called “another people,” as he intends to go to find Ulysses, his
father) is ultimately the same as the Bellona of war.
As a result, what has been stated—that it was an error that the theo- 591
logical poets understood Minerva as representing wisdom—goes to-
gether with another error, that the word “curia” is derived from curanda
republica417 [“caring for the republic”], in times when the nations were
stunned and stupid. The most ancient Greeks must have used the word
κυρία [kuria] as derived from χείρ [cheir], “hand”; and that, in Latin, the

415
  Compare to De antiquissima 7, where Vico holds that “God, by understand-
ing, generates divine truth and makes human truth” (On the Most Ancient
Wisdom of the Italians, p. 103).
416
 Homer, Odyssey 2.12. As Battistini notes, the exegesis is somewhat forced.
417
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 193.
 244 The New Science

word curia similarly accords with one of those two great fragments of
antiquity which—as was stated in the Chronological Table and in the
Annotations [§77] written upon it—to our good fortune, Denis Pétau418
found lying in the midst of Greek history prior to the age of heroes in
Greece and, consequently, during the age of which we are here in pur-
592 suit, the age of gods. The first fragment is that the Heraclids—that is, the
descendants of Hercules—were spread throughout the whole of Greece,
even in Attica where Athens was, and that, later, they retreated to the
Peloponnesus where Sparta was; Sparta was an aristocratic regime, or
republic, of two kings from the race of Hercules, called Heraclids, or
nobles, who administered the laws under the guardianship of the ephors,
who were guardians of the liberty not of the people, but of the lords;
these ephors had the king, Agis, strangled419 because he had attempted
to bring to the people, first, a law reckoning debts anew (which Livy420
defines as facem ad accendendum adversus optimates plebem [“a firebrand
for inciting the plebs against the optimates”]) and, second, a law con-
cerning testaments, which would have popularized inheritances outside
of the orders of the nobles, inheritances which had previously been pre-
served among the nobles by means of legitimate succession. For only the
nobles must have had familial relations in the forms of direct paternal or
tribal kinship, and there must have been attempts of this sort in Rome
prior to the Law of the Twelve Tables, as will below be demonstrated
[§598]. Hence, just as those like Cassius, Capitolinus, Gracchus, and
other principal citizens intended with laws of this sort to raise up the
poor and oppressed Roman plebs a little and so were declared traitors
and killed, so too Agis was strangled by the ephors.
This is how much the ephors of Sparta (as Polybius would have it) were
guardians of the peoples of Lacedaemonia!
Hence, Athens (named for Minerva, who, in Greek, is called ᾽Αθηνᾶ
[Athēna]) must have had, in its earliest times, an aristocratic constitu-
tion, and Greek history tells us most faithfully about this, as noted above
[§423], where it says that Draco ruled in Athens at a time when it was
occupied by the optimates; and this is confirmed by Thucydides, who
tells us that as long as Athens was governed by the most severe Are-
opagites (which Juvenal translates as “judges of Mars,” in the sense of
armed judges, although because the word is derived from ῎Αρης [Arēs]—
Mars—and πηγή [pēgē]—from which, in Latin, comes pagus [“country
district”]—it would be better translated as “peoples of Mars”—which
is what the Romans were called—for at their coming-into-being [nasci-
mento], peoples were composed only of nobles, who alone had the right
to bear arms), Athens was brilliant with the most beautiful heroic vir-
tues and engaged in the most outstanding enterprises (precisely as Rome

418
  On Pétau, see the note at §77.
419
  See Plutarch, Life of Agis 19–20.
S 420
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 32.38.9.
N
L
244
Book Two 245

was when, as we will see below [§625], it was an aristocratic republic). It

was this constitution that Pericles and Aristides (precisely as Sextius and
Canuleius, tribunes of the plebs, started to do in Rome) overturned in
favor of popular liberty.
The other great fragment was that Greeks who left Greece observed that 593
the Curetes—that is, the priests of Cybele—were spread out in Saturni—
that is, ancient Italy—and in Crete and in Asia; and as a result, they must
have paid homage everywhere among the earliest barbarous nations to
regimes of Curetes, corresponding to the regime of Heraclids spread
throughout most ancient Greece. These Curetes were those armed priests
who, with the clamor of their arms, drowned out the cries of the infant
Jove, whom Saturn intended to devour, the myth which was explained
above [§§500, 521].
Through all that upon which we have reasoned, it was at this most 594
ancient point in time and in this fashion that the earliest Comitia Cu-
riata came into being. These are the most ancient assemblies, of which
we read in Roman history; they must have been held under arms and
remained in later times for treating sacred things, for it was under this
aspect that, in the earliest times, they regarded all profane things. Con-
cerning these assemblies, Livy421 wonders that at the time when Hanni-
bal passed through Gaul, if they were held there. However, Tacitus422 in
his On the Customs of the Germans tells us that they were also held by
priests—that is, those who decreed penalties while surrounded by arms,
as if they were in the presence of their gods. And this is the correct sense
in which heroic assemblies were armed for decreeing penalties, for the
supreme power of the laws comes in with the supreme power of arms in
its train.423 And, in general terms, Tacitus tells us424 that only when armed
did they treat of their public affairs and with priests presiding over them,
as was just stated [§593]. Hence, among the ancient Germans (who afford
us a place to understand that the same customs existed for all the earli-
est barbarous peoples), we encounter the Egyptian regime of priests; we
encounter the regime of Curetes—that is, armed priests—whom, as we
have seen, the Greeks observed in Saturnia—that is, ancient Italy—and
in Crete and in Asia; and we encounter the Quirites of ancient Latium.
Through these things upon which we have reasoned, the law of the 595
Quirites must have been the natural law of the heroic gentile peoples
of Italy, which, so as to distinguish it from the law of other peoples,
was called IUS QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM [“the law of the Roman

421
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.20.1.
422
 Tacitus, Germania 7.2–3.
423
  A likely allusion to Machiavelli, Prince 12: “And because there cannot be
good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there
must be good laws, I shall leave out the reasoning on laws and speak of arms.”
424
 Tacitus, Germania 13.1.
 246 The New Science

Quirites”]; it was not on account of a pact agreed upon between the

Sabines and Romans that they were called Quirites—that is, from Cures,
the capital city of the Sabines—for in that case they would had to have
been called the Curetes, but this is the name of those whom the Greeks
observed in Saturnia. Moreover, if this city of the Sabines was called
Ceres (as the Latin grammarians suggest), then the Quirites would have
had to be called (see how ideas are distorted!) “Cerites,” but this is the
name of the Roman citizens condemned by the censors to bear the pen-
alty of having no share in civil honors, exactly the burden borne by the
plebs who were later composed of familial servants when heroic cities
came to be, as we will see presently [§597], and it was into the plebs that
those Sabines were incorporated in barbarous times when a defeated city
was destroyed (this is a destruction the Romans did not spare Alba itself,
their mother) and those captured were scattered over the plains, obliged
to cultivate the fields for the conquering people. It was these defeated
who were the first provinces, called this as if to say prope victae [“those
defeated nearby”] (hence the Corioli, from whose defeat Marcius was
called Coriolanus), in contrast to what were called faraway provinces
because they were procul victae [“defeated far away”]. And it was into
this countryside that they led the first inland colonies, which are, with
complete propriety, called coloniae deductae—that is, bands of those rus-
ticated for day labor who were “led down from above”—whereas, later,
the expression “faraway colonies” meant the complete opposite, that
from the lowly and burdensome places in Rome which they inhabited,
the impoverished plebeians were led up to the lofty and strong places of
the provinces so as to hold them as lords must and to change the lords of
those fields into impoverished day laborers.
In this fashion (referred to by Livy,425 who saw only its effects), Rome
grew upon the ruin of Alba, and the Sabines brought to their sons-in-
law in Rome, as dowries for their abducted daughters, the riches of Ce-
res, upon which Florus426 offers empty reflections. These are the colo-
nies prior to those which came after the Agrarian Laws of the Gracchi,
colonies which (as the same Livy relates) the Roman plebs, in the heroic
disputes in which they engaged with the nobility, disdained, or rather
considered a provocation, because they were not like the colonies far
away and because they did nothing to raise up the Roman plebs (and
when Livy finds that the disputes continued even with these colonies, he
offers his empty reflections upon them).
596 Finally, that Minerva signified the armed aristocratic orders is proved by
Homer427 where he tells us that in their dispute, Minerva wounds Mars
(who, as we saw above [§597], is a character representing the plebeians
who served the heroes in war) with a blow from a rock, and where he
relates that Minerva intended to conspire against Jove, which is the con-

425
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.30.1.
S 426
 Florus, Epitoma 1.1.14.
N 427
  See Homer, Iliad 21.444–445.
L
246
Book Two 247

vention in aristocracies when the lords by secret counsels suppress their

princes when they affect tyranny (it is only in aristocratic times that one
reads of statues raised for tyrannicides; if we were to suppose that the
rulers killed were monarchs, then their killers would have been traitors).
Thus, the earliest cities were composed only of nobles who were in 597
command; however, since they also still needed others who would serve
them, the heroes were constrained by a common sense of advantage to
make content the multitude of clients rising up and to send to them the
earliest embassies (which, by the law of the gentile peoples, sovereigns
send), and to send with those embassies the earliest agrarian law which
came to be in the world, by which the strong concede to their clients only
as much as they can bear to concede—that is, bonitary domain over the
fields—which concessions are the mark of heroes. And thus is it true that
Ceres discovered both grain and laws.428
Such a law was dictated by this natural law of the gentile peoples: since
domain comes with power in its train, and since these familial servants
had a precarious life owing to the heroes, who had saved them with their
asylum, it was lawful and legitimate that they would have a similarly
precarious domain over the fields, which they enjoyed as their own only
to the extent that it pleased the heroes to maintain them in possession of
the fields to which they had been assigned.
Thus, the familial servants came together to compose the earliest plebs
of the heroic cities, having none of the privileges of citizens. This is ex-
actly the way that Achilles says he was treated by Agamemnon, when
Agamemnon wrongfully took Briseis from him: there, Achilles says that
Agamemnon had committed an outrage which would not have been com-
mitted against a day laborer who had none of the rights of a citizen.429
Such were the Roman plebeians up until the dispute over connubium. 598
For by the second agrarian law granted to them by the nobles with the
Law of the Twelve Tables, the plebeians had taken quiritary dominion
over the fields (as was demonstrated many years ago in our Principles
of Universal Law,430 one of two places for which we are not sorry that
that work came into the light), and yet, by the law of the gentile peoples
whereby foreigners have no ability to acquire civil dominion, the plebe-
ians were still not citizens so that, when they died, they were not able
to leave the fields intestate to their relatives because they did not have
familial relations in the forms of direct paternal or tribal kinship, which
depend completely on solemnized nuptials, and they were not able to
dispose of the fields by testament because they were not citizens; as a
result, the fields assigned to them returned to the nobles, from whom
came the legitimacy of the domain of the plebeians; they noticed this

428
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.342–343.
429
  See Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59.
430
  See Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 727[23]).
 248 The New Science

quickly, after three years, and made claim to connubium, in which they
did not make claim (in that state of miserable slaves which Roman his-
tory plainly tells us they were in) to join in marriage with the nobles (for
which claim, in Latin, they would have said connubia cum patribus [“nup-
tials with the patricians”]) but, instead, demanded that they be able to
contract in the solemnized nuptials which the Fathers contracted and so
demanded CONNUBIA PATRUM (“the marriages of the patricians”),
the major solemnity of which is the public auspices which Varro and
Messala called the public auspices, to which the Fathers said AUSPICIA
ESSE SUA431 [“the auspices were theirs”].432 As a result, the plebeians,
by this claim, demanded Roman citizenship, whose natural beginning
was those nuptials which are defined by the jurist Modestinus, as omnis
divini et humani iuris communicatio433 [“the sharing in common all rights,
divine and human”], and no more proper definition can be assigned to
citizenship itself.

All republics have come to be

from certain eternal
principles of fealties

599 In this fashion (first, because it is the nature of the strong to preserve
their acquisitions and, second, because it is the nature of benefits which
they can expect from civil life, upon which the twofold nature of human
things are founded the eternal principles of fealties, as we said in the
Axioms434), there came to be in the world republics with three kinds of
domain for three kinds of fealty, which three kinds of person have over
three kinds of thing.
600 The first was the bonitary domain of rustic, or human fealties, which the
“men”—those who in the feudal laws of the return to barbarism were
called “vassals,” a source of wonder for Hotman, that is, plebeians—had
over the fruits of the farms belonging to their heroes.
601 The second was the quiritary domain of noble fealties—that is, the he-
roic and armed fealties which today are called military fealties—in which
the heroes, by uniting in armed orders, preserved sovereignty over their
farms: in the state of nature, this was the supreme domain of which, as
was stated in another place [§490], Cicero,435 in his speech De aruspicum
responsis, knew in some of the households which remained in Rome in
his time; he defined it as “domain over real estate subject to no encum-
brance either private or public.” About this, there is a golden passage

431
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6.
432
  See the note at §110 on Vico’s reinterpretation of the lex Canuleia.
433
  Digest 23.2.1.
S 434
  Axioms 80 and 81.
N 435
 Cicero, De aruspicum responsis 7.14.
L
248
Book Two 249

in the Pentateuch436 where Moses tells us that, in the times of Joseph,

the Egyptian priests did not pay the king tribute for their fields; and we
have just demonstrated above [§594] that all heroic regimes were priestly
and we will demonstrate below [§619] that, at first, the Roman patricians
did not pay the public treasury any tribute for theirs. These sovereign,
private fealties, in the forming of heroic republics, were naturally subject
to the greater sovereignty of the ruling heroic orders; this was an interest
common to each of them which, with the word res implicitly understood,
was called patria [“fatherland”]—that is, “the interests of the Fathers,”
which must be defended and maintained because it preserved their sov-
ereign family power and the equality of all them relative to each other,
and this alone made for the liberty of the lords.
The third, with complete propriety, was called “civil domain,” which 602
those heroic cities, composed in their beginning only of heroes, had
over the grounds through certain divine fealties which the paterfamilias
had previously received because of the divine providence by which, as
we demonstrated above [§§586–587], they found themselves to be sov-
ereigns in the familial state and composed themselves in ruling orders
in the civil state; thus, they became sovereign civil regimes subject only
to a supreme sovereign God, in whose providence is recognized all civil
sovereign power. This is well professed, in a human sense, by the sov-
ereign powers when they join to their titles of majesty the expressions
THROUGH DIVINE PROVIDENCE and THROUGH THE GRACE
OF GOD, expressions in which they must publicly profess that they have
received their regimes by providence and grace; as a result, if the worship
of providence were forbidden, those regimes would naturally go toward
their downfall, for nations of fatalists or chance-ists437 or atheists never
existed in the world. And we saw above [§334] that all the nations of
the world, through four primary religions and no more,438 believe in a
provident divinity.
Accordingly, the plebeians swore by the heroes (there are remnants of
this in the oaths “mehercules!” “mecastor!” “aedepol!” and “mediusfid-
ius!” to the god Fidius who, as we will see [§§658, 761, 766, 1065], was the
Roman Hercules), but the heroes swore by Jove;439 for the plebeians were,
from the first, subject to the strength of the heroes (so Roman nobles
up until Year 419 of Rome exercised the right of private incarceration
over plebeians who were debtors), and the heroes, who formed regnant

436
  Genesis 47:26.
437
  Casisti, a term that utterly defies English translation, derived from Latin
casus, “chance.”
438
  That is, pagan worship of the gods, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam;
see §334.
439
  Battistini suggests a comparison of this passage to Machiavelli, Discourses
on Livy 1.11: “the citizens feared to break an oath much more than the laws, like
those who esteemed the power of God more than that of men” (trans. H. Mans-
field and N. Tarcov, p. 34).
 250 The New Science

orders for themselves, were subject to the strength of a Jove whose right
was in the auspices; with these auspices, if they seemed to permit it, the
heroes would appoint magistrates, decree laws, and exercise other rights
of sovereignty, and if the auspices seemed to forbid it, the heroes would
abstain. All this is in the fides deorum et hominum440 [“the faith of gods
and men”], to which pertain the Latin expressions implorare fidem,441 “to
implore succor and help,” and recipere in fidem,442 “to receive under one’s
protection and power”; and to which pertains the exclamation proh deûm
atque fidem imploro!443 by which the oppressed implore on their behalf
“the strength of gods and of men,” which, in connection with its human
sense, Italians turned into “the powers of the world!”
For, on the one hand, this is the power by which the highest civil powers
are called “potentates.” This is the strength, this is the fealty by which
those observed above who swear the oaths bear witness to the deference
of subjects. On the other hand, this is the protection that the powerful
owe to the weak. And in these two things consist the complete essence
of fealties: it is this strength which sustains and directs the civil world
whose center was sensed, but not reasoned out, by the peoples of Greece
in their medallions, as we noted above [§491], and by the peoples of La-
tium in their heroic phrases, as we observed, as being the ground of each
civil sphere, just as today sovereigns have, on their crowns, a sphere upon
which is set the ensign of the divinity of the cross. This is the sphere that,
as we demonstrated above [§548], is a golden apple, which signifies the
high domain that sovereigns have over the lands of which they are lords,
and, accordingly, in the midst of the greater solemnities of their corona-
tion, it is put in their left hand.
Hence, this is to say that civil powers are lords over the substance of peo-
ples which sustains, contains, and maintains all that is above it and rests
upon it; and because it is one part of this substance—a part which is
pro indiviso [“indivisible”]—the patrimony of each paterfamilias, in the
distinctions of the Roman legal code, was called patris substantia [“the
father’s substance”] or paterna substantia [“the paternal substance”].
This is the fundamental reason why sovereign civil powers can dispose
of all that is conjoined to their subjects—as much their persons as their
acquisitions, work, and labor—and can impose tributes and taxes when-
ever they must exercise their domain over this ground [fondi], which
today from an opposite perspective (but one that in substance has the
same meaning) is called by moral theologians and writers de iure publico
[“on the public law”] “eminent domain,” just as the laws regarding this
domain are also now called the fundamental [fondamentali] laws of the
regime. This domain, because it is domain over the ground [fondi] itself,
sovereigns naturally cannot exercise except to preserve the substance of

440
 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 5.16.48
441
 Cicero, Academica 2.28.89.
S 442
 Cicero, De officiis 1.11.35.
N 443
 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.6.13.
L
250
Book Two 251

their state, on whose standing or falling the particular things of their

peoples stand or fall.
That the Romans sensed, even while they did not understand, this 603
generation of republics on such eternal principles of fealties, this is dem-
onstrated in the formula left to us for claiming property, conceived as
follows: AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM
[“I say this ground is mine by law of the Quirites”]. This is the formula
connected with a civil action for domain over the ground that belongs to
the city itself and comes from the center, so to speak, of the strength of
that city; by this center, every Roman citizen is the certain lord over his
own farm with a dominion pro indiviso (as a scholastic would say, since
it is a purely rational distinction), and, accordingly, they said that this
domain was ex iure Quiritium (these Quirites, by a thousand proofs so
far made or to be made [§§562, 1077], were, at first, the Romans armed
with spears in public assembly, who made up the city).
Such is the profound reason that the grounds [i fondi] and all the goods
which come from these grounds, when they are vacated, fall back to the
treasury, for every private patrimony pro indiviso is a public patrimony,
whence, in absence of a private patron, it loses its designation as a part
and retains its designation as a whole. This must be the cause of that
elegant legal phrase, that inheritances, particularly those of legitimate
heirs, are said TO RETURN to the heirs, even though, in truth, the in-
heritance only comes one time, for the founders of Roman law—those
who were the founders of the Roman republic—established as orders all
private patrimonies as fealties (which the feudalists say are ex pacto et
providentia—that is, all of them come from the public patrimony), and
these patrimonies, “by pact and providence” of the civil laws, rotate with
certain solemnities from private person to private person and, in the ab-
sence of them, must return to the beginning whence they came.
All that has been stated clearly becomes confirmed in the Lex Papia
Poppaea concerning caducaries, which punishes those who were celi-
bate with the just penalty that, for citizens who have forgone propagat-
ing their Roman name by marriage, if they should have made a testa-
ment, it is rendered void and, in addition, they were deemed to have
no relatives who succeed them if they died intestate; and so, one way
or the other, they would have no heirs who would preserve their name.
And their patrimony fell back to the treasury, not as an inheritance but
as wealth which—as Tacitus444 puts it—goes to the people TAMQUAM
OMNIUM PARENTUM [“as the parent of all”]. Here, this fundamen-
tal writer calls forth the reason for caducary penalties from the most
ancient times when the earliest Fathers of humankind occupied the
earliest empty lands, an occupation which was the originary source of
all domains in the world; these Fathers, later united in cities, made the
civil power out of their paternal power, and made out of their private

444
 Tacitus, Annals 3.28.3.
 252 The New Science

­ atrimonies the public patrimony (which is called the “treasury”), and

p
these patrimonies went from private citizen to private citizen in the qual-
ity of inheritances, but when they fall back to the treasury, they take on
their first, most ancient quality of wealth.
604 Here, during the generation of their heroic republics, the poet heroes
imagined an eleventh major divinity—that is, MERCURY—who con-
veys to the rebelling familial servants the law as a divine rod, a real word
for the auspices; this is the rod with which Mercury calls back souls from
Orcus (as Virgil445 tells us), and it calls back, to the life of sociability, the
clients who, when they left the protection of the heroes, returned to being
scattered in a lawless state (which is the Orcus of the poets, who devours
all men, as will be explained below [§§688, 717]).
This rod comes to be depicted with one or two serpents wound around
it, which must be the skins of serpents, signifying the bonitary domain
left to them by the heroes and the quiritary domain which the heroes
reserved for themselves; it is depicted with two wings at the top of the
rod, to signify the eminent domain of the orders; and it is depicted with
a cap (also winged) to affirm the profound legitimacy for their sovereign
liberty (so too, the cap remains a hieroglyph for liberty). In addition to
this, Mercury is depicted with wings on his ankles, to signify that domain
over the ground belonged to the regnant senate. Except for this, he is
conveyed the law completely naked, for he conveys to them a domain
naked of civil solemnities and which consists completely of the shame
of the heroes—this is exactly the nakedness which, we saw above [§569],
was devised for Venus along with the Graces.
As a result, from the bird of Idanthyrsus (by which he meant to say to
Darius that he was sovereign lord over Scythia by the auspices which he
held), the Greeks sprouted the wings to signify heroic legitimacy, and
eventually the Romans, with articulate language, said in abstract terms
that AUSPICIA ESSE SUA [“the auspices were theirs”], by which they
meant to demonstrate to the plebs that all civil legitimacy and law was
their property.
Thus, this winged rod of Mercury of the Greeks, when its serpents
are removed, is the eagled scepter of the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the
Romans, and, last of all, the English, as we stated above [§487], which
was called by the Greeks κηρύκειον [kērukeion], for it conveyed that
agrarian law to the familial servants of the heroes, who, in Homer, are
named κήρuκες [kērukes]; it conveyed the agrarian law of Servius Tul-
lius by which he instituted the order of the census so that rustics under
its conditions were called, in Roman law, censiti [“those assessed”]; it
conveyed, in those serpents, bonitary domain over the fields—in Greek,
ὠφέλεια [ōpheleia], derived from ὄφις [ophis], “serpent,” is the word for
the land rent which, as we demonstrated above [§541], the plebeians

S
N 445
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.242.
L
252
Book Two 253

paid to the heroes. Finally, it conveyed the famous knot of Hercules, by

which men paid to the heroes the tithe of Hercules; and by which the
Roman plebeians, in debt up until the Petelian law, were bound, or liege,
vassals of the nobles—we reason much upon all of these things below
[§§1065–1066].
Consequently, one must say that this Greek Mercury was the Thoth, or 605
Mercury, who gave laws to the Egyptians, signified by the hieroglyph of
Kneph: he is depicted as a serpent to denote the cultivated land; he is
depicted with the head of a hawk or an eagle, just as, later, the hawks
of Romulus became the eagles of the Romans, by which are understood
the heroic auspices; he is depicted as girded with a belt, a sign of the
knot of Hercules; he is depicted with a scepter in hand, which means the
Egyptian regime of priests; he is also depicted with a winged cap, which
points to the profound domain of the ground; and, finally, he is depicted
with an egg in his mouth, which allows one to understand the Egyptian
sphere, unless, perhaps, it is the golden apple which, as we demonstrated
above [§548], signifies the profound domain which the priests held over
the lands of Egypt. It is within this hieroglyph that Manetho stuck the
generation of the entire world, and the vanity of the learned reached
such a point of madness that Athanasius Kircher,446 in his Pamphili Obe-
lisk, says that it signifies the Holy Trinity.
Here was the start of the earliest commerce in the world, whence Mer- 606
cury has his name and, later, was considered the god of mercantile trade,
just as from those earliest embassies, he was also believed to be the god
of ambassadors; and in a way true to the senses, he was said to have been
sent by the gods—whom we found above [§449] to be what the heroes of
the earliest cities named themselves—to men (which Hotman notes with
wonder was what, in the recourse to barbarism, they called vassals), and
the wings, which herein we saw [§§488, 604] signify heroic origin, were
later believed to be used by Mercury to fly from heaven to Earth and
subsequently to fly back from Earth to heaven.
However, to return to commerce, it started with the commerce concern-
ing real estate, and the earliest payment was, as it must have been, most
simple and natural—that is, payments in the fruits gathered from the
land. Such payment, either in toil or in goods, is even today the custom-
ary commerce of rustics.
The Greeks preserved all of this history in the word νόμος [nomos], 607
which signifies both “law” and “pasture,” for the earliest law was that
agrarian law by which heroic kings were called shepherds of the people,

  Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), author of Obelisus Pamphilius. A similarly

446

disapproving reference to Kircher occurs at De antiquissima 7.4 (On the Most

Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 116 [114]), where Vico claims that the proce-
dure common to him and Ramon Llull (1232–1315) is suitable for “someone
who knows letters but cannot gather them together to read the great book of
nature.”
 254 The New Science

as has been noted herein [§557] and will be explained more fully below
[§§1058–1059].
608 Thus the plebeians of the earliest barbarous nations (exactly as Tac-
itus447 tells us concerning the ancient Germans, where he erroneously
believed that their plebs were slaves because, as has been demonstrated
[§§258, 555, 558, 582], the socii of the heroes were like slaves) must have
been scattered by the heroes throughout the countryside; and lived in
their houses in the fields to which they were assigned; and contributed,
with the fruits of these villas, as much as was needed to sustain their
lords; along with these conditions, they swore the oath (which above
[§559] we also heard from Tacitus448) that they must guard and defend
and serve the glory of their lords. And if one thought to define this kind
of rights with a legal term, one will clearly see [§§1057–1087] that an-
other term could not agree better with them than the one by which we
have called them: “fealties.”
609 In this manner, the earliest cities are discovered to have been founded
upon the orders of nobles and bands of plebeians by two opposite eter-
nal properties which come from the nature of the human civil things,
upon which herein we have reasoned: the nature of the plebeians is to
want always to change the state, as it is always they who do change it;
and the nature of the nobles is always to preserve it. Hence, during up-
heaval in civil governance, the ones who are all called “optimates” are
those who work to maintain the state, so named from their property of
standing firm and on a stable footing.
610 At that time, two distinctions came into being. The first distinction
is between the wise and the common run, insofar as the heroes founded
their regimes on the wisdom of the auspices, as was stated in the Axi-
oms449 and was reasoned upon more fully above [§§365, 488, 525]. As a
result of this distinction, the common run has retained the perpetual
epithet, “profane”; for the heroes, or the nobles, were the priests of
heroic cities, just as they certainly were among the Romans up until
one hundred years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, as was stated
above [§250]. Hence, the earliest peoples, by a certain kind of excom-
munication, took away citizenship (among the Romans, this was the
interdict of water and fire, as will be shown below [§957]). Accordingly,
the earliest plebeians of the nations were considered foreigners, as we
will see herein [§611], and this is retained in the eternal property of not
granting citizenship to a man whose religion is different. And it was of
such “common people” [volgo] that vulgo quaesiti [“those begotten of
the common run”] remained as an expression for children conceived
in whoring on account of the fact that, as we reasoned above [§567],
insofar as the plebeians of the earliest cities had no common share in

447
 Tacitus, Germania 25.3.
S 448
 Tacitus, Germania 14.2.
N 449
  Axiom 72.
L
254
Book Two 255

sacred or divine things, they did not contract solemnized marriages for
many centuries.
The second distinction was between civis [“citizen”] and hostis, signify- 611
ing both “guest,” or foreigner, and “enemy.”450 For the earliest cities were
composed of heroes and of those received in their asylums, and it is in
this sense that one has to take all heroic hospitality, which, because of
the return to barbarism, Italian retains in the word “oste” for innkeeper
and soldier’s quarters, and in the word “ostello” for inn.
Thus, Paris was a guest of the royal household of Argos—that is, was
an enemy who abducted noble Argive women. Thus Theseus was a guest
of Ariadne, and Jason of Medea, whom they later abandoned and with
whom they did not contract marriages: these were reputed to be heroic
actions, while, to our present sensibilities, they seem to be (and, indeed,
are) the actions of wicked men.451 Thus does one have to defend the piety
of Aeneas (he abandoned Dido after he ravished her, besides the great
benefits he had received from her and the magnanimous offer that she
had made of the regime of Carthage as a dowry for their nuptials452): it
was a piety obedient to the Fates who had destined Lavinia in Italy, al-
though she was also a foreigner, to be his wife. This heroic custom is pre-
served by Homer453 in the person of Achilles, the greatest of the heroes
of Greece, who refused any of the three daughters whom Agamemnon
offered him in marriage along with the royal dowry of seven lands well
populated with ploughmen and shepherds, replying that he intended to
take in marriage the woman whom, in his fatherland, his own father,
Peleus, gave to him.
In sum, the plebeians were guests in the heroic cities, against whom (we
have learned many times from Aristotle [§§271, 588]) the heroes swore to
be eternal enemies.
The same distinction is demonstrated for us with the opposite terms civis
[“citizen”] and peregrinus [“alien”]), taking “alien” with the property na-
tive to it, of being a man who wanders through the countryside (called,
in Latin, an ager, meaning a “territory” or “district,” from which the ex-
pressions in Latin ager neapolitanus, ager nolanus for “Naples,” “Nola”),
and a peregrinus, as it were, wanders thus, whereas foreigners who travel
through the world do not wander through the fields, but hold straight to
the public roads.
Reasoning out such origins for heroic guests sheds great light on Greek 612
history when it tells of Samians, Sybarites, Troezenians, ­Amphipolitans,

450
  See Cicero, De officiis 1.37.
451
  Here Vico renders a starkly negative judgment against the norms of the he-
roic age—a judgment that must be kept in mind when in other places he seems
to praise its merits over against those of the human age.
452
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.102–104.
453
 Homer, Iliad 9.378–394.
 256 The New Science

Chalcedonians, Cnidians, and Chians, whose republics were changed by

foreigners from aristocratic to popular. And it sheds conclusive illumina-
tion on a fact which we published many years ago in our Principles of
Universal Law454 concerning the myth of the Laws of the Twelve Tables
coming from Athens to Rome (one of the two places for which we deem
that it was not useless to have composed that work). We proved that
for the heading—FORTI SANATE NEXO SOLUTO [“The strong, once
corrected, are freed from bondage”]—its entire subject was the dispute
in which the expression “the strong, once corrected,” referred not, as
the Latin philologists say, to foreigners reduced to obedience, but to the
Roman plebs, who revolted because they could not take from the nobles
certain domain over the fields, a domain which could not remain certain
unless its law was fixed eternally on a public tablet; by this tablet, what
was uncertain in the law was made determinate and what was hidden was
made manifest, thus binding the nobles from taking it back again with a
royal hand, which is the truth in what Pomponius recounts. Because of
this dispute, the plebs made such a clamor that there was need to create
the decemvirs, who gave a new form to the constitution and reduced the
plebs in their uprising to obedience by declaring, in the heading above,
that the plebs were released from the true bondage of bonitary domain
(by which they were glebae addicti [“bound to the soil”], ascriptiti [“en-
rolled”], or censiti [“assessed”] under the census of Servius Tullius, as
was demonstrated above [§§597, 604]) and, instead, were obligated by the
fictive bondage of quiritary domain; however, a vestige of the old bond
was preserved up until the Petelian law in the right of private impris-
onment, which the nobles had over plebeians who were debtors; it was
these “foreigners” who with the “enticements” of the tribunes (as Livy455
elegantly calls them, and enumerated by us in the note on the Publilian
law in the Chronological Table [§104]) eventually changed the Roman
constitution from aristocratic to popular.
613 That Rome was not founded upon the earliest agrarian revolts dem-
onstrates for us that it was a new city, as is sung in its history. It was
founded, instead, upon the asylum where, while violence still prevailed
everywhere, Romulus and his companions must have, first, made them-
selves strong and, later, received those seeking refuge and at that time
founded clientships, as we have explained above [§§556–557, 597]. Hence,
two hundred years must have passed for the clients to grow weary of this
state, exactly the amount of time to run its course for the king, Servius
Tullius, to bring the earliest agrarian law, but it must have taken five
hundred years to run its course in cities which were old, for they were
composed of men most simple, while Rome was composed of those most
cunning. This is the cause of Rome manumitting Latium, then Italy, and,
later, the world, for more than the other peoples of Latium, its heroism
was young. This is also the most proper reason, as was stated in the

S 454
 Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis 2.37 (Cristofolini 727[21–23]).
N 455
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.4.
L
256
Book Two 257

Axioms,456 that the Romans wrote their heroic history in vernacular lan-
guage, while the Greeks wrote this history with myths.
All of that upon which we have meditated concerning the principles 614
of Poetic Politics and have seen in Roman history is wondrously con-
firmed in the following four heroic characters: first, the lyre of Orpheus,
or Apollo; second, the head of Medusa; third, the Roman fasces; fourth
and last, the struggle of Hercules with Antaeus.
And, in the first place, the lyre was discovered by the Mercury of the 615
Greeks (just as law was discovered by the Mercury of the Egyptians),
and this lyre was given to him by Apollo, the god of civil light, or the
nobility, for in heroic republics, the nobles decreed the laws. And by this
lyre, Orpheus, Amphion, and the other theological poets who professed
science of the laws founded and established humanity in Greece, as we
will explain more fully below [§§661, 734].
As a result, the lyre was the union of the cords, or the strengths of the
Fathers, whence was composed the public strength called “civil power,”
which finally made private strength and violence cease. Hence, with per-
fect propriety, law continued to be defined by the poets as the lyra reg-
norum [“the lyre of regimes”] in that it brought into accord the familial
regimes of the Fathers which previously were discordant, for they were
all alone and separated from one another in the familial state, as Poly-
phemus says to Ulysses; and the glorious history of the sign of the lyre,
later, was described with a constellation in the heavens; and the regime
in Ireland, in its coat of arms for the king of England, bears on its shield
a harp.
However, later, the philosophers made this lyre into the harmony of the
spheres brought into accord by the sun. Yet, Apollo played the lyre on
Earth, a lyre which Pythagoras not only could have, but must have heard
and played himself, when he is taken as a theological poet and a founder
of nations, not as a part of the imposture of which he has until now been
accused.
The serpents united on the head of Medusa, whose temples bear wings, 616
are the profound family domains the Fathers have in the familial state,
which come to compose the civil eminent domain. And this head was
nailed onto the shield of Perseus, the same shield with which this Mi-
nerva is armed, she who, in the midst of these arms—that is, these armed
assemblies of the first nations among which we found [§§593, 594, 562]
the Roman assembly—declared terrifying punishments that turn to
stone those who look at them. One of these serpents, we stated above
[§423], was Draco, who was said to have written laws in blood, for Ath-
ens (which called Minerva ᾽Αθηνᾶ [Athēna]) was armed with these laws
at the time when it was occupied by the optimates, as was stated above

456
  Axiom 21.
 258 The New Science

[§§423, 542]. And the Dragon, among the Chinese—who still write with
hieroglyphics, as was seen above [§542]—is the insignia for civil power.
617 The Roman fasces are the litui of the Fathers in the familial state, and
Homer457 names one rod of this sort in the hands of those Fathers with
the freighted word “scepter,” and he calls such Fathers “kings” when he
describes the shield of Achilles, which contains the history of the world;
in this passage, the epoch of the families is situated prior to the epoch
of cities—as will be explained more fully below [§§683–684]. For when
the Fathers had with these litui taken the auspices what they decree, they
dictated punishments to their children—one such punishment for the
impious son was passed on to the Law of the Twelve Tables, as we saw
above [§526]. Hence, the union of these rods—or litui—signifies the gen-
esis of the civil power upon which we reason herein.
618 Finally, Hercules, a character representing the Heraclids—or nobles of
the heroic cities—struggles with Antaeus, a character representing the
rebelling familial servants, and by raising Antaeus to the heavens—­
leading the familial servants back to the earliest cities located on high—
Hercules defeats him and binds him to the Earth, which is retained in the
Greek game called the knot—that is, the knot of Hercules—by which
Hercules founded the heroic nations and through which the plebeians
paid the tithe of Hercules to the heroes, which must have been the census
which was the basis of aristocratic republics; hence, the Roman plebe-
ians, through the census of Servius Tullius, were the nexi [“bondsmen”]
of the nobles, and through swearing the oath which Tacitus tells us was
given by the ancient Germans to their princes, they must have been at the
service of those princes as vassals pressed into service during war at their
own expense. About this, the Roman plebs complained during what was
dreamed to have been popular liberty. These must have been the earliest
assidui [“tribute payers”], who suis assibus militabant [“were soldiers at
their own expense”], but these were soldiers not of fortune, but of hard
necessity.

On the origins of the census

and the treasury

619 However, finally, the heavy usury and frequent usurpations which the
nobles made upon the fields were so marked that, at the height of this
age, Philippus, tribune of the plebs, cried out in a loud voice that two
thousand nobles possessed all the fields which should have been por-
tioned out among the well over three hundred thousand citizens counted
in Rome at the time. For now forty years after the expulsion of Tarquin-
ius Superbus, because the nobility was secure in his death, they started
again in their insolence towards the impoverished plebs, and the Senate
S
N  Homer, Iliad 18.556–557.
457

L
258
Book Two 259

at this time must have started to enact the ordinance that the plebeians
pay the census to the treasury, which previously they were required to pay
privately to the nobles, so that this treasury could thenceforth administer
the expenses of later wars. At this time, the census displayed something
new in Roman history: Livy458 relates that the nobles disdained to ad-
minister it as a thing disagreeable with their dignity, for Livy could not
understand that the nobles did not want it because it was not the census
instituted by Servius Tullius—that is, the one which was the basis for
the liberty of lords and which was paid privately to those nobles—and
so Livy, along with everyone else, was deceived into thinking that this
census of Servius Tullius was the basis for popular liberty. For certainly
there was no magistracy of greater dignity than that of the censorship,
and from its first year it was administered by the consuls.
Thus, the nobles themselves through these avaricious arts came to estab-
lish the census in the form which later was the basis of popular liberty;
as a result, when all the fields came within their own farms during the
time of Philippus the tribune, two thousand nobles were required to pay
tribute for the three hundred thousand other citizens who had then been
counted (exactly as in Sparta, where the entire Spartan countryside had
come into the hands of a few). For in the treasury were written down
the census taxes imposed privately by the nobles on fields which, uncul-
tivated, the nobles had assigned ab antiquo [“from an ancient date”] to
the plebeians for cultivation. On account of such inequality, there must
have come great unrest and revolts from the Roman plebs; these Fabius
set in good order with the wise ordinance which earned him the title
Maximus,459 by ordering that all the Roman people be partitioned out
into three classes, senators, knights, and plebeians, and that citizens be
put into these classes according to their ability; this consoled the plebe-
ians insofar as previously the senatorial order, which held the magis-
tracies, was comprised from the first of all nobles, whereas thenceforth
plebeians could advance to it by wealth and, consequently, this opened
to the plebeians an ordinary avenue to all civil honors.
Such is the fashion which makes true the tradition that the census of Ser- 620
vius Tullius was the basis of popular liberty, for it was from it that mate-
rial was arranged and occasions came into being—as was reasoned upon
hypothetically above in the Annotations to the Chronological Table in
the passage on the Publilian law [§111].
And it was this ordinance, born within Rome itself, that truly instituted
the orders of the democratic republic, not the Law of the Twelve Tables
brought there from Athens. So much so that Bernardo Segni460 renders
what Aristotle called a “democratic republic” in Tuscan as a “republic by

458
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.8.7.
459
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.46.14.
460
  Bernardo Segni (1504–1588), Florentine historian and popularizer of Aris-
totle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics.
 260 The New Science

census,” to express a “republic of popular liberty.” This is demonstrated

by Livy461 himself who, in spite of being ignorant about the Roman con-
stitution in those times, still tells us that the nobles complained that they
had lost more by that law within the city than they gained by arms out-
side the city, in a year when they, indeed, had brought back many, great
victories. This is the cause of Publilius, who was the author of the law,
being called the “people’s dictator.”
621 With popular liberty, in which the entire people is the city itself, it
came to pass that the civil domain (the term “civil” was derived from the
word for city) lost its proper significance as the public domain and was
dispersed throughout all the private domains of the Roman citizens who
all later made up the Roman city.
The supreme domain came to be obscured in its native signification of
the “strongest domain” which, as we stated above [§490], “is not weak-
ened by any real encumbrance, even public ones” and retained its sig-
nificance as “domain over property free from any private encumbrance.”
The quiritary domain no longer signified domain over the ground, which,
if the client or plebeian lost possession of his grounds, obliged the noble,
because of this domain, to come to his defense; these were the earliest
auctores iuris [“authors of law”] in the Roman legal system, who only for
these clientships instituted by Romulus instructed the plebeians in only
these laws. Indeed, in what other law would the nobles have instructed
the plebeians when, up until Year 309 of Rome, the plebs did not have
the privilege of citizenship, and when, up until one hundred years after
the Law of the Twelve Tables, the nobles kept these laws secret from the
plebs in the college of pontiffs?
Thus, the nobles in those times were auctores iuris [“authors of law”] of
the kind which still remains for those who possess lands that have been
purchased: when such owners are summoned to a lawsuit by a claim on
that land by others, they “cite the authors” and defend them. Such quiri-
tary domain now came to signify private civil domain assisted by claims
of ownership, as distinct from bonitary domain, which was maintained
by possession alone.
622 In this same fashion, and not otherwise, these things based upon the
eternal nature of fealties came back in the return to barbarous times.
Let us take, for example, the regime in France: the several provinces of
which it is now composed were sovereign lordships of princes subject to
the king of this regime. There, these princes must have held their goods,
not subject to any public encumbrance. Later, either by succession or
by rebellion or by failure in succession, these goods were incorporated
into the regime, and all the goods of these princes ex iure optimo were
subject to public encumbrance. For even the household and grounds of
S
N 461
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.12.17.
L
260
Book Two 261

that king, including the royal chambers proper (because they have been
transferred to their vassals either by parental lineage or by concessions),
are today found to be subject to taxes and tributes. In this way, heredi-
tary regimes come to confound domain ex iure optimo with private do-
main subject to public encumbrance (so the Roman fisc, which was the
patrimony of the princeps, came to be confounded with the treasury).
This research into the census and the treasury has been the most rigor- 623
ous of our meditations upon Roman things, as we remarked in the Idea
of the Work [§25].

On the origins of the Roman assemblies

Through the things upon which we have thus far meditated [§§67, 521], 624
the βουλή [boulē] and the ἀγορά [agora] (the two heroic assemblies of
which Homer tells and which we observed above [§§67, 521]) must have
been, among the Romans, the Curiate Assembly (which we read was the
most ancient assembly under the kings) and the Tribal Assembly.
The former was called “curiate” from quir, “spear,” whose genitive, qui-
ris, was later kept as the nominative (in conformity with our reasoning
in the Origins of the Latin Language462), just as it was that from χείρ
[cheir], “hand,” which among all nations signifies “power,” must have
come the Greek word κυρία [kuria], used in the same sense as the Latin
word curia; hence came the Curetes, the priests armed with spears, for all
heroic peoples were composed of priests and only heroes had the right
to bear arms, and the Greeks, as we saw above [§§593, 594], observed
these Curetes in ancient Italy, in Crete, and in Asia. And κυρία, in this
ancient sense, was understood to mean “lordship,” just as now we call
aristocratic republics “lordships”; from these heroic senates came the
word κῦρος [kuros], “authority,” but—as we have observed above [§§389,
603, 621] and will observe more below [§§944, 1073]—it was an “author-
ity of domain,” whose origins are retained in the use of κύριος [kurios]
and κυρία for “sir” and “madam,” and just as the Greek Curetes came
from χείρ, so we saw above [§562] that the Roman Quirites came from
quir, which was the title of Roman majesty given to the Roman people
in public assembly, as we noted above [§594] when we observed from
the Gauls and the ancient Germans, in combination with those called
Curetes by the Greeks, that all the earliest barbarous peoples held public
assemblies under arms.
Consequently, such a title of majesty must have started at a time when 625
the people were comprised only of nobles, who alone had the right to
bear arms, and when, later, it passed on to a people composed also of
plebeians, the Roman republic became popular.

462
  Scienza nuova prima §370.
 262 The New Science

For it was from the plebs, who did not at first have such a right, that the
Tribal Assemblies were named from tribus, “tribe,” and just as, among
the Romans, families in the familial state were named from famuli, so
too, later, in the civil state, the tribe was understood as derived from the
plebs who assembled to receive the orders of the regnant senate, among
which orders (because it was the principal and most frequent) the one
requiring the plebeians to contribute to the treasury came to be named
tributum [“tribute”], derived from the word “tribe.”
626 However, afterwards, Fabius Maximus introduced the census which sep-
arated the whole Roman people out into three classes, according to the
patrimonies of the citizens, for previously only senators were knights
because only the nobles in heroic times had the right to bear arms; ac-
cordingly, one reads of the ancient Roman republic based on this his-
tory divided between PATRES [“the Fathers”] and PLEBEM [“the
plebs”]. As a result, previously the word “senator” meant the same as
“patrician,” and, by contrast, “plebeian” meant the same as “lowborn”
[ignobile].
Consequently, just as there were previously only two classes for the an-
cient Roman people, so too there were only two sorts of assembly: first,
the Curiate Assembly comprised of Fathers, or nobles, or senators; sec-
ond, the Tribal Assembly of plebeians—that is, those who were lowborn.
However, afterwards, when Fabius portioned out the citizens according
to their ability into the three classes of senators, knights, and plebs, those
nobles no longer made up an order in the city, and they were placed, ac-
cording to their ability, into these three sorts of classes. From that time
on, they came to distinguish “patrician” from “senator” and “knight,”
and “plebeian” from “lowborn”; and “plebeian” was no longer con-
trasted with “patrician,” but with “knight” and “senator.” No longer
did “plebeian” mean “lowborn,” but rather “a citizen with a small patri-
mony,” who might well be a noble; and, by contrast, “senator” no longer
meant “patrician,” but rather “a citizen with a quite ample patrimony”
who might well be lowborn.
627 On account of all this, thenceforth, the Comitia Centuriata [“Centuriate
Assembly”] was the assembly in which the whole Roman people from all
three classes convened so as to decree, among other public activity, con-
sular laws, and they retained the Comitia Tributa as the assembly where
only the plebs decreed tribunicial laws—that is, the plebiciti [“plebic-
ites”]—previously called this in the sense in which Cicero463 called them
plebi nota—that is, “laws made public to the plebs”—one of these laws is
that of Junius Brutus, of which Pomponius464 tells us; by it, Brutus pub-
licly announces to the plebs that kings have been forever expelled from
Rome (just as, in a monarchy, royal laws with equal propriety would be

S   See Cicero, De legibus 3.3.10 and 3.15.33–34, and compare Vico, De uno 150.1.
463

N   Digest 1.2.2.3.
464

L
262
Book Two 263

called popolo nota [“laws made public to the people”]). Because of this,
Baldus465 (with little erudition but great acuity) wonders at the fact that
the term plebiscitum, as it comes down to us, has only one s, because if it
had the sense of a law decreed by the plebs, it should have been written
with two, plebisscitum,466 and would have been derived from sciscor [“to
approve”], and not from scio [“to know”].
Lastly, for certainty in divine ceremonies, they retained the assembly 628
called the Comitia Curiata, assemblies of only the heads of the Curias,
which treated of sacred things; for in the times of kings, they regarded all
profane things under the aspect of the sacred, and the heroes everywhere
were the Curetes, or armed priests, as was stated above [§593]. Hence,
even up until the final times of Rome, paternal power continued to be
regarded under its aspect as a sacred thing, and the regulations in the
laws for this power were often called the sacra patria [“sacred things of
fathers”]. Such is the cause of celebrating adoptions in such assemblies
with curiate laws.

Corollary
It is divine providence which is the institutor of the orders
of republics and, at the same time, of the
natural law of the gentile peoples467

This genesis of republics is discovered above in the age of the gods in 629
which governance was theocratic—that is, was divine governance—and
later came the earliest human governance—that is, heroic governance
which is called “human” so as to distinguish it from divine governance.
Into such human governance, like the great current of a royal river re-
tains long into the sea the impression of its current and the sweetness
of its waters, coursed this age of gods. For there must have persisted
that religious manner of thinking, that it is the gods who do all that
men themselves do. Hence, from the ruling Fathers of the familial state,
they made Jove; from those same Fathers, closed off in orders when the
earliest cities came to be, they made Minerva; from the embassies sent
to the clients rising up against them, they made Mercury; and, as we
will see shortly below [§634], from the corsair heroes, they finally made
Neptune. It is because of this, especially, that divine providence is to be
admired, that although men intended to do something completely differ-
ent, it brought them, from the first, to a fear of divinity, whose religion is
the earliest fundamental base of republics. Thence, because of religion,
they settled in the first empty lands, which they occupied first, before all

465
  Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), medieval Italian jurist born in Perugia,
student of Bartolus de Saxoferrato.
466
  See Vico, De uno 150 (Cristofolini 195[3]); Voss, Etymologicon, p. 458.
467
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141. “Institutor”
translates l’ordinatrice (more literally, “ordinatrix”).
 264 The New Science

others, and this occupation is the source of all domains. And when the
even hardier giants occupied the heights of mountains, where sprang
forth perennial fountains, providence disposed that they would discover
places healthy, and strongly situated, and with an abundance of water, so
that they could remain settled there and no longer wander; these are the
three qualities that lands must have for cities to spring from them later.
Then, by that same religion, providence disposed them to unite with cer-
tain women in continuous companionship for life: these are marriages,
recognized as the source of all power. Later, they are discovered to have
founded families with these women, which are the seedbeds of the repub-
lics. Finally, by opening asylums, they are discovered to have founded
clientships, whence were arrayed the materials that later, through the
earliest agrarian laws, gave birth to cities upon the two communities of
men that compose them, first, that of the nobles who command and, sec-
ond, that of the plebeians who obey (the latter, Telemachus in his speech
in Homer468 calls the “other people”—that is, a subject people different
from the ruling people, which was composed of heroes). Hence comes
the matter of political science, which is nothing other than the science of
commanding and obeying in cities.
And in that same coming-into-being [nascimento], providence makes it
that republics come into being in an aristocratic form, conforming to
the primitive and retiring nature of those earliest men; this form con-
sisted entirely (as indeed the political theorists have noticed) in guarding
boundaries and orders, so that peoples freshly arrived to their human-
ity might even by their form of governance continue for a long time to
remain enclosed within them and leave off from the primitiveness of
that profane and infamous community of the state of beasts and wild
animals.
And, because these men had minds entirely beholden to particulars
and, thereby, were unable to understand the common good, they were
accustomed never to meddle with the particular things of others (just
as Homer469 has Polyphemus say to Ulysses; in this giant, Plato470 rec-
ognizes the paterfamilias in what they call the “state of nature,” which
is prior to that of the cities). With this same aristocratic form of gover-
nance, providence led them to unite themselves to their fatherlands, so as
to preserve such great private interests as they had in their monarchical
families, and preserving those interests is all that they intended. And so,
beyond any of their purposes, they came together in a universal civil
good, which is called a “republic.”
630 Now reflect here, through those divine proofs upon which we remarked
in the Method [§343], by meditating upon the simplicity and naturalness

468
 Homer, Odyssey 2.12.
S 469
 Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115.
N 470
 Plato, Laws 678c–681e.
L
264
Book Two 265

with which providence orders these human things, such that, although
in a false sense, men say truly that the gods have done everything. Re-
flect by combining this with meditation upon the countless number of
civil effects all evoked by the following four causes which are, as will be
observed throughout this entire work, the four elements, as it were, of
this civil universe: namely, religion, marriage, asylum, and the earliest
agrarian law, upon which we reasoned above [§§265, 597, 604]. And then
go on to inquire among all the human possibilities if so many things so
varied and so different could have had in some other fashion a starting
point that was simpler and more natural among those very men whom
Epicurus says have come about by chance and Zeno says burst forth by
necessity, men whom neither chance swerved nor fate dragged away from
this natural order. It was at this point—the point at which these republics
must have come into being—that, prior to their birth, the materials were
already arrayed and ready to receive form, and there came from them the
forming of republics composed of mind and body.
The materials arrayed were their own religions, their own languages,
their own lands, their own nuptials, their own names—that is, their own
peoples and households—their own arms, and, consequently, their own
power, their own magistracies, and, last of all, their own laws; and be-
cause these were their own, they were, accordingly, completely free, and
because they were completely free, they were constitutive of true repub-
lics. And all this came to be because all the aforesaid rights previously
belonged to the monarchical paterfamilias in the state of nature. These
Fathers, at the point when they united in orders, came to generate civil
sovereign power, just as in the state of nature these Fathers had held their
family powers previously subject to no one but God.
This sovereign civil person was formed of a mind and a body. The mind
was an order of such wise men as could naturally exist in that state of
extreme rudeness and simplicity; and with this order, republics retain the
eternal property that, without an order of wise men, states seem, at first
sight, to be republics, but are dead bodies without a soul. For its other
part, the body of this person is formed of a head and other second-
ary members, whence republics retain this second eternal property, that
some must exercise the mind in the employments of civil wisdom, and
others the body in trades and arts required to serve in peace as well as
war. With this comes a third eternal property, that the mind always com-
mands and that the body must perpetually serve.
However, it is this which must induce even greater wonder, that just as 631
providence, in the midst of making families come into being, which all
came into being with some knowledge of a divinity (although because
of their ignorance and disorder, they did not know the true Divinity),
families which each had their own religion, language, land, nuptials,
name, arms, governance, and laws, had at the same time made for the
coming-into-being of the natural law of the gentes maiores, with all the
aforesaid propriety for the paterfamilias to use later over his clients; so
 266 The New Science

too ­providence, in the midst of making for the coming-into-being of re-

publics, by means of that aristocratic form with which they came into
being, made it such that the natural law of the gentes maiores—that is,
the law of the families which was previously observed in the state of
nature—passed over to the natural law of the gentes minors—that is, the
law of peoples observed in the civil state.
For the paterfamilias, who held as their own all of the aforesaid rights
over their clients, at the point at which they closed themselves off in a
natural order against those clients, came to close off all the aforesaid
properties within their civil orders against the plebs, which constituted
the strict aristocratic form of heroic republics.
632 In this fashion, the natural law of the gentile peoples, which now comes
to be celebrated among peoples and nations, was at the coming-into-
being of republics born as a property of the civil sovereign powers. As
a result, a people or nation which has within it no civil sovereign power
furnished with all the aforesaid properties is not, properly speaking, a
people or nation, nor could it exercise abroad against another people or
nation the natural law of the gentile peoples. Rather, both legitimacy and
its exercise will be held by another people or a superior nation.
633 These things upon which we have reasoned, put together with what was
noted above [§449]—that the heroes of the earliest cities called them-
selves “gods”—allow for an explanation of the significance of that say-
ing, IURA A DIS POSITA [“laws posited by the gods”], used to express
the dictates of the natural law of the gentile peoples.
However, when later it was succeeded by the natural law of humane
peoples (as Ulpian has called it many times above [§§569, 575, 578, 582]),
upon which the philosophers and moral theologians ascended to under-
stand the natural law of eternal reason fully explicated, then this saying
congruously passed on to signify the natural law of the gentile peoples,
ordained by the true God.

Heroic politics, continued

634 However, all historians allow that the HEROIC AGE begins with the
corsairs of Minos471 and the naval expedition that Jason made to Pontus;
that it continues on with the Trojan War; and that it ends with the wan-
dering of the heroes, which comes to a close with the return of Ulysses
to Ithaca.
Hence, there must have come into being at this time the last of the major
divinities—that is, NEPTUNE—as attested by the authority of histori-

S   See Strabo, Geography 10.4, 8, 15 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.456–474,

471

N 490–500, and 8.6–10.

L
266
Book Two 267

ans. We may corroborate this authority with philosophical reasoning,

assisted by several golden passages in Homer.
The philosophical reasoning is that the naval and nautical arts were the
last discovered by the nations, for they needed the peak of ingenuity to
discover them, such that Daedalus, who was their discoverer, continued
to signify this ingenuity (and Lucretius uses daedala, in the expression
daedala tellus [“daedal earth”] for “ingenious”).
The passages from Homer472 are the ones in the Odyssey where Ulysses,
either landing or carried by storm, mounts some hill so as to look inland
for smoke, which signifies that the place is inhabited by men.
These passages from Homer are strengthened by a golden passage in
Plato (to which, we learned in the Axioms,473 Strabo refers) concerning
the longstanding horror which the earliest nations had of the sea; the
reason for this was noted by Thucydides,474 that it was on account of
their fear of corsairs that the Greek nations were slow to come down to
inhabit the coasts.
Accordingly, we are told that Neptune was armed with a trident which
made the earth shake; this must have been a great hook for grappling
ships (spoken of with a beautiful metaphor, a tooth, with the superlative,
three, as we stated above [§§491, 535]), and with this trident, he made the
lands of men shake in terror of his corsairs. Neptune later, already in the
times of Homer,475 was believed to make the lands of nature shake, and
in this opinion Homer was later followed by Plato,476 with his abyss of
waters which he placed in the bowels of the Earth—the extent to which
he did so discerningly will be demonstrated below [§§714, 753].
These corsairs must have been the bull by which Jove abducted Eu- 635
ropa477 and the Minotaur, or the bull of Minos, by which he abducted
lads and maidens from the shores of Attica (this is retained in speaking
of sails as “the horns of ships,” an expression later used by Virgil478);
and those on the land explained with complete truthfulness that the lads
and maidens were devoured by the Minotaur, whom they saw in horror
and sadness were swallowed up by the ships. So, Orcus wants to devour
Andromeda,479 chained to a rock, who becomes a stone on account of
terror (this is retained in the Latin expression terrore defixus, “to be-
come immobilized on account of terror”). The winged horse with which
Perseus frees her must have been the ship of another corsair (thus, sails

472
  See Homer, Odyssey 9.167, 10.97–99, 148–149.
473
  See Axiom 98.
474
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.7–8.
475
  See Homer, Iliad 8.445; 13.18–19, 34, 43, 231; 15.174, 201; 20.34, 57–66.
476
 See Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b.
477
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.836–875.
478
 See Aeneid 3.549.
479
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.671–734.
 268 The New Science

continued to be called the “wings of ships,” and Virgil,480 with his knowl-
edge of heroic antiquity, when he spoke of Daedalus, whom he says dis-
covered a ship which mechanically could fly, called it alarum remigium
[“an oarage of wings”]; and, indeed, we are told that Daedalus was the
brother of Theseus).
As a result, Theseus must have been a character representing the Athe-
nian lads who, by the law of force practiced upon them by Minos, were
devoured by his bull, or ships of corsairs. Ariadne, the seafaring art,
teaches him how, by the thread of navigation, to leave the labyrinth of
Daedalus—which, prior to the labyrinths which are the delight of royal
villas, must have been the Aegean Sea, on account of the great num-
ber of islands which that sea washes over and surrounds—and when he
learns the art from the Cretans, he abandons Ariadne and returns with
Phaedra, her sister—that is, a similar art—and thus, he kills the Mino-
taur and frees Athens from cruel ransom imposed by Minos by allowing
those Athenians to be corsairs. And just as Phaedra was the sister of
Ariadne, so Theseus was the brother of Daedalus.
636 On the occasion of these things, Plutarch says in his Life of Theseus481
that the heroes took it as a great honor and considered it a part of their
prestige in arms, to be called “thieves,” just as in the return to barbarous
times, “corsair” was considered a title of lordship. At about this time
comes Solon, who is said to have permitted in his laws societies for the
purpose of pillage: this is how much Solon understood our own per-
fected humanity, in which corsairs enjoy no protections from the natural
law of the gentile peoples!
However, we may wonder even more that Plato and Aristotle482 pos-
ited thievery as a kind of hunting: so, these great philosophers of the
most humane people agree with the barbarous ancient Germans, among
whom Caesar483 relates that thievery was not only not infamous, but was
even considered a part of the exercise of virtue, by which someone who
was not committed to some art would escape idleness.
This barbarous custom endured for so long among the most luminous
nations that Polybius484 tells us that the peace between the Romans and
the Carthaginians, among its other laws, decreed that the Romans could
not pass by the Cape Pelorum in Sicily, because of pillage or trade.
However, the point about the Carthaginians and Romans is minor:
they put themselves forward as barbarians in those times (as one can
observe in Plautus,485 in the passage where he says that he translated

480
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.301 and 6.19.
481
  See Plutarch, Life of Theseus 6 and 10.
482
  See Plato, Sophist 222c and Aristotle, Politics 1.8 (1256a).
483
 Caesar, De bello gallico 6.23.
S 484
 Polybius, Histories 3.24.4.
N 485
 Plautus, Asinaria, Prologue, 11, and Trinummus, Prologue, 19.
L
268
Book Two 269

Greek comedies into a barbarous tongue, by which he means Latin).

It is a major point that the most humane Greeks in the times of their
most cultivated humanity celebrated so barbarous a custom. Hence,
it is treated in almost all the plots of their comedies, and it is, per-
haps, because of the same custom (for it is still practiced today against
Christians) that the coast of Africa opposite to us is called the Barbary
Coast.
The principle pertaining to this most ancient law of war was the lack 637
of hospitality in heroic peoples, upon which we reasoned above [§611]:
they regarded foreigners under the aspect of perpetual enemies and
rested their reputation for power upon keeping foreigners as far from
their border as possible (as Tacitus tells us concerning the Suevi, the na-
tion of greatest repute in ancient Germany). And they regarded foreign-
ers as thieves, upon whom, we have reasoned a little above: concerning
this, there is a golden passage in Thucydides,486 that up until his own
time, whenever they encountered one another traveling by land or mak-
ing passage by sea, they would ask, interchangeably, if they were thieves
or foreigners, which meant the same.
However, as Greece hastened on in its humanity, it presently shed this
custom, and they called “barbarous” all nations which preserved it. This
significance was retained in the name Βαρβαρία [barbaria] for the Trog-
lodytes, who must have killed the sort of guests who entered within their
borders, just as even today there are barbarous nations for whom this is
customary. Certainly, even humane nations do not allow in foreigners
without their having been given permission.
Among those whom, because of this custom, the Greeks called “barba- 638
rous nations” was the Roman nation, on account of two golden passages
in the Law of the Twelve Tables: the first is ADVERSUS HOSTEM
AETERNA AUCTORITAS ESTO [“Against a stranger, let authority
be eternal”]); the second, reported by Cicero,487 is SI STATUS DIES
SIT CUM HOSTE VENITO [“If a day is established, let him come
with the stranger”]. And here the term hostis is taken as suggestive of
more general terminology, as a metaphor expressing an adversary in the
courtroom. However, Cicero’s reflection on this passage is much to our
purpose: he says that, for the ancients, hostis meant the same as what
was later called peregrinus [“traveler”]. Putting these two passages to-
gether allows one to understand that, from the beginning, the Romans
considered foreigners as eternal enemies at war. However, the two pas-
sages as stated must be understood in terms of those who were the earli-
est hostes in the world, those who, as was stated above [§611], were the
foreigners received in the asylums, who later took on the condition of
plebeians in the formation of heroic cities, as more fully demonstrated
above [§§553, 555].

486
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.5.2.
487
 Cicero, De officiis 1.12.37.
 270 The New Science

As a result, the passage in Cicero means “on the established day, let
the noble come with the plebeian to claim the farm,” as was also stated
above [§§603, 621].
Accordingly, the “eternal authority” expressed in the same laws must
have been authority against the plebeians (against whom Aristotle says
in the Axioms488 that the heroes swore eternal enmity).
On account of this heroic law, usucaption of any Roman ground was
impossible for the plebeians, no matter how long the course of time, for
such grounds were exchanged only among the nobles. This is, in good
part, the reason why the Law of the Twelve Tables did not recognize bare
possession. Hence, later, when heroic law started to fall into disuse and
human law grew stronger, the praetors assisted those with bare posses-
sion on an extraordinary basis, for neither openly nor by any interpreta-
tion did they have in the Law of the Twelve Tables any basis for estab-
lishing ordinary judgments, either strict or equitable. And all this was
because this same law considered even bare possession by the plebeians
to be entirely at the disposal of the nobles.
In addition, this law was untroubled by the furtive or violent acts of
these same nobles on account of that other property of the earliest re-
publics (which Aristotle also stated in the Axioms489) that they did not
have laws concerning private damages and offences. They must have seen
to these private matters by force of arms, as we will demonstrate more
fully in Book Four, and this true force, later, remained in the fictive force
in the solemnities around repossession of property, which Aulus Gell-
ius490 calls “of straw.”
All this is confirmed by the interdict Unde vi [“On force”] (which was
granted by the praetors in extraordinary cases, because the Law of the
Twelve Tables had no understanding of, much less language for, private
violence) and by two acts, De vi bonorum raptorum [“Concerning the
use of force with stolen goods”] and Quod metus caussa [“Action whose
cause is duress”] (which came late and were also from the praetors).
639 Now, this heroic custom of considering foreigners as eternal enemies,
which was observed in private affairs by each people in peace, when it
was brought to bear abroad, was recognized as common to all heroic
peoples in their exercise of eternal wars with each other by continuous
raiding and piracy.
Thus, it is from these cities, which Plato491 says were born on the basis
of arms, as we have seen above [§588], and which at their start were gov-
erned in a warlike fashion, even before the arrival of wars waged between

488
  See Aristotle, Politics 5.9 (1310a9) and Axiom 86.
489
  Axiom 85.
S 490
  Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 20.10.10.
N 491
 Plato, Laws 1.2 (626a).
L
270
Book Two 271

cities, it is from this πόλις [polis], “city,” that the Greek word for “war,”
πόλεμος [polemos] came.
Now, as proof of what has been said, the following important obser- 640
vation must be made: the Romans extended the conquests and spread
out the victories they brought back from the world by four laws which
they used upon the plebeians within Rome. For with the more ferocious
provinces, they used the clientships of Romulus, by sending Roman colo-
nists which changed the patrons of fields into day laborers. With the
tamer provinces, they used the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, by per-
mitting those provinces bonitary domain over the fields. With the Italian
provinces, they used the agrarian law of the Law of the Twelve Tables,
by permitting quiritary domain, which they enjoyed as grounds called
Italian soil. With the municipalities, or well-deserving cities, they used
the laws pertaining to connubium and the consulship, which were shared
with the plebs.
This eternal enmity among the earliest cities did not require that 641
wars were declared, and so pillaging was considered just. And so, by
contrast, when, later, nations left behind primitive and barbarous cus-
toms of this sort, they held undeclared wars to be pillaging, no longer
recognized by the natural law of the gentile peoples which Ulpian492
calls “humane.”
This same eternal enmity of the earliest peoples must explain for us that
the long period of time in which the Romans waged war with the Albans
was the whole previous time in which both sides practiced one against
the other, back and forth, the pillaging of which we are here speaking.
Hence, it was more reasonable that Horatius would kill his sister,493 for
she mourned that her Curiatius was someone who had abducted, not
married, her, whereas Romulus himself was not able to have a wife from
those same Albans, in no way aided either by the fact that he was one of
the Alban royalty or by the great benefit of expelling the tyrant, Aemu-
lius, and restoring the Romans’ legitimate king, Numitor.
It is noteworthy that they contracted laws of victory upon the outcome
of combat between those principally interested in the outcome: in the
case of the war with Alba, these were the three Horatii and the three Cu-
riatii: and in the case of the Trojan War, these were Paris and Menelaus,
and when this outcome remained undecided, the Greeks and the Trojans
later continued the war until its conclusion. So too, in the more recent
barbarous times, princes by personal combat would similarly bring the
controversies over their regimes to a conclusion, to whose outcome their
peoples were subject.
And behold, Alba was the Latin Troy, and the Roman Helen was
Horatia, who had a history among the Greeks which was completely

492
 Ulpian, Digest 2.14.7.1.
493
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5.
 272 The New Science

the same (as was reported by Gerald Van Voss in his Rhetoric). And
the ten years494 of the siege of Troy for the peoples of Greece must
have been the ten years of the siege of the Veii for the peoples of
Latium—that is, a finite number representing an infinite amount of
previous time in which cities practice eternal hostility toward one an-
642 other.495 For reckoning numbers, insofar as they are most abstract,
was the last thing to be understood by the nations—as will be rea-
soned upon in this book to other purposes [§§713, 1026]. This, even
after reason was more fully articulated, was retained in Latin by sex-
centa [“six hundred”] (just as, in Italian, we said “one hundred” at
first and “one thousand and a hundred” later) in order to express a
number beyond counting, for the idea of an infinite number can only
fall within the mind of philosophers. Consequently, it is, perhaps, in
order to express a great number that the earliest peoples said “twelve.”
So, twelve were the gods of the gentes maiores (of which Varro496 and
the Greeks counted thirty thousand); twelve also were the labors of
Hercules, which must have been countless. And the peoples of Latium
said that twelve were the parts of a penny, which can be divided into
infinite parts; of this sort must have been what was called the Law of
the Twelve Tables, representing the infinite number of laws which were
inscribed on tables over time.
643 Therefore, at the time of the Trojan War, it was necessary that the Greeks
were called “Achaeans” in that part of Greece where it was waged—they
had been previously called “Pelasgians” after Pelasgus, one of the most
ancient heroes of Greece, upon which we reasoned above [§564]. Later,
the name “Achaean” came to expand over all of Greece, and this lasted
up until the time of Lucius Mummius (as was observed by Pliny497) such
that, from that point and for all of time thereafter, they were called “Hel-
lenes.” And so, the propagation of the name “Achaeans” made those in
the time of Homer find that all of Greece was allied in that war. This
is exactly how (as Tacitus498 relates) the name “Germany” eventually
spread over all that great part of Europe, derived from those who had
crossed the Rhine and, from there, expelled the Gauls and started to call
themselves “Germans.” And so, the glory of these peoples poured this
name out over Germany, just as the fame of the Trojan War spread the
name “Achaeans” over all of Greece.
For this is how much peoples in their earliest barbarism understood of
leagues, that none of the peoples of those kings who were offended cared
to take up arms so as to vindicate them, as was observed at that begin-
ning of the Trojan War.

494
  The ten years are from 406 to 396 BCE. See Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.22.
495
  See Plautus, Bacchides 128; Menaechmi 222; Miles gloriosus 355; Horace,
Satires 1.3.13, and Epistles 1.18, 1.25.
496
  On the claim that Varro counted thirty thousand gods, see the note at §175.
S 497
 Pliny, Natural History 35.8.24.
N 498
 Tacitus, Germania 2.5.
L
272
Book Two 273

Because the nature of human civil things is such, and not otherwise, 644
one can resolve the following problem worthy of wonder. How is it that
Spain, which was the mother of such nations which Cicero499 acclaimed
as the strongest and most bellicose and which Caesar himself experi-
enced (while in every other part of the world which he defeated, Caesar
fought for empire, only in Spain did he fight to save himself), how is it,
we say, that with the disaster of Saguntum500 (which for eight continuous
months made Hannibal sweat with his entire force fresh from Africa,
forces with which later, although they were tired and much reduced, he
came just short after the rout at Cannae of a triumph over Rome on the
Capitoline itself), how is it with the clamor from Numantia (which made
Roman glory tremble although it already triumphed over Carthage and
proved a match to the very virtue and wisdom of Scipio which had tri-
umphed over Africa), how is it that Spain did not unite all its peoples
into a league to establish a universal empire on the banks of the Tagus,
but instead afforded Lucius Florus501 a place for the unhappy eulogy
which he made, that Spain became aware of its strength only after it
had been defeated in all its parts? Tacitus502 in his Life of Agricola no-
ticed this same custom in the English at a time when they were found to
be most ferocious and reflected on it with another expression of sound
understanding: dum singuli pugnant, universi vincuntur [“while they fight
separately, they are defeated as a whole”]. For while they remained un-
touched, like wild beasts within the dens of the borders, they continued
to pay homage to the primitive and solitary life of the sons of Polyphe-
mus demonstrated above [§§516, 547, 576, 615, 629].
Therefore, historians are completely taken up by the fame of heroic 645
warfare at sea and so completely stunned by it that they have not noticed
heroic warfare on land, much less the heroic politics by which the Greeks
at this time must have governed themselves.
However, Thucydides,503 a writer of great acuity and wisdom, left us with
a great indication of this where he tells that heroic cities were without
walls, as remained the case with Sparta in Greece and with Numantia,
which was the Sparta of Spain. And given their arrogant and violent
nature, the heroes all were expelling one another from their seats, just as
Amulius expelled Numitor, and Romulus expelled Amulius and restored
Numitor.
This is how much assurance504 the chronologists should take from the
genealogies of the royal households of heroic Greece and from the suc-
cession of fourteen kings in Latium in their reckoning of time! For in

499
 Cicero, Ad Quintum fratrem 1.1.27.
500
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 21.6–15.
501
 Florus, Epitome of Roman History 1.33.4.
502
 Tacitus, Agricola 12.3.
503
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.5.1.
504
  Antiphrasis: the meaning is closer to “how little assurance.”
 274 The New Science

the recourse to barbarism, at the time when Europe was at its crudest,
one reads of a thing no more inconstant and no more variable that the
fortune of regimes, as was noted above in the Chronological Table [§76].
And truly Tacitus,505 with great awareness, remarks upon this in the
opening words of his Annals—urbem Romam principio reges HABUERE
[“the city of Rome at its beginning had kings”]—by using the verb which
signifies the weakest of the three kinds of possessions made out by the
jurists—that is, habere [“to have”], tenere [“to hold”], and possidere [“to
possess”].
646 The civil things celebrated under regimes of the sort are told to us in
the poetic history of these myths, which contain contests of song (tak-
ing the word song [canto] as derived from canere or cantare, which mean
“to foretell”) and, consequently, contain heroic contests concerning the
auspices.
647 Thus, Marsyas506—the satyr who is SECUM IPSE DISCORS [“in dis-
cord with himself ”] and the monstrosity of whom Livy speaks—after
defeated by Apollo in a contest of song, he is flayed alive by the god.
Behold the savagery of heroic punishments! Linus—who must be a char-
acter representing the plebeians, for the other Linus was a heroic poet
counted among Amphion, Orpheus, Musaeus, and others—was killed in
a similar contest of song by Apollo.507 And in both of these myths, the
contests are with Apollo, the god of divinity, of the science of divination
or of the auspices—and we found above [§§537, 538] that he was also the
god of the nobility, for the science of the auspices, as has been demon-
strated with many proofs, belonged to the nobles alone.
648 There are the myths of Sirens who put to sleep wayfarers with song and
then murder them, of the Sphinx who proposes riddles to travelers and,
when they do not know how to solve them, kills them; of Circe, who
with her incantations changes the companions of Ulysses to swine. As a
result of this, later, cantare was taken to mean “making witchcraft,” as
in the phrase
. . . cantando rumpitur anguis508
[. . . “the serpent bursts from the singing”],

whence the magic (which in Persia must have, at first, been wisdom in
divining the auspices) continues to signify the art of witches, and the
word witchcraft itself continues to be used to express “incantations.” The
wayfarers, travelers, and wanderers of this sort were the foreigners of

505
 Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.
506
  For the myth of Marsyas and Apollo, see (among other sources) Diodorus
Siculus, Historical Library 3.58–59; Pliny, Natural History 16.89; Ovid, Meta-
morphoses 6.382–400.
S 507
  See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 3.67.
N 508
 Virgil, Eclogue 8.71.
L
274
Book Two 275

heroic cities, who, we stated above [§§611, 638], were the plebeians who
contend with the heroes so as to take a share of the auspices in common
with the nobles and who, when they were defeated in these efforts, were
cruelly punished.
Because of the same deeds, Pan the satyr tries to seize Syrinx, a nymph, 649
as we said above [§467], valiant in song, and finds himself embracing
reeds,509 and, just as with Pan and Syrinx, in his turn Ixion, in love with
Juno, goddess of solemnized nuptials, embraces a cloud. As a result, the
reeds signify the lights and the cloud signifies the emptiness of natural
marriages. Hence, it is said that born from this cloud are centaurs—that
is to say, plebeians—who are monstrosities because of their discordant
natures (as Livy says510), centaurs who abduct their spouses from the
Lapiths in the midst of their celebrating their nuptials.
So too Midas, whom here we have found above [§580] to be a plebeian,
wears hidden the ears of an ass, and the reeds which Pan seizes—that is,
natural marriages—uncovers those ears, exactly as the Roman patricians
proved to their plebeians that each of them was a monstrosity, for they
AGITABANT CONNUBIA MORE FERARUM511 [“practiced marriage
in the manner of wild animals”].
Vulcan, who here also must be a plebeian, tries to interpose in a con- 650
test between Jove and Juno, and with a kick from Jove, he falls from
the heavens and remains lame.512 This must be a contest that the plebe-
ians had made so as to take a share of the auspices of Jove and the
connubium of Juno in common with the heroes, and when they were
defeated in this contest, they remained lame in the sense that they were
humiliated.
Thus, Phaethon, from the family of Apollo and consequently a child of 651
the Sun, tries to direct the golden chariot of this father—the chariot of
the poetic gold of grain—and turns it away from the accustomed paths
which lead to the granary of his paterfamilias, and, with pretensions of
domain over the fields, he falls from the heavens.513
However, above all, there is also falling from the heavens the apple of 652
discord—that is, the apple which, as we have demonstrated above [§548],
signifies domain over lands. For the earliest discord came into being be-
cause of the fields that the plebeians wished to cultivate for themselves,
and Venus, who must here be the plebeian Venus, contends with Juno
over connubium and with Minerva over power. For concerning the judg-
ment of Paris, Plutarch,514 to our good fortune, notices in his Life of

509
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689–712.
510
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6.
511
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6.
512
  See Homer, Iliad 1.590–91; 15.22–24.
513
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.150–213.
514
  Actually, the pseudo-Plutarch, in On the Life and Poetry of Homer 1.5.
 276 The New Science

Homer that the two verses at the end of the Iliad515 which speak of this
judgment were not from Homer, but from the hand of someone who
came later.
653 Atalanta,516 by casting away the golden apples, defeats her suitors on
the racecourse, exactly as Hercules wrestling with Antaeus raises him
to the heavens and defeats him, as was explained above [§618]. Atalanta
leaves to the plebeians first bonitary domain and then quiritary domain
over the fields, and reserves connubium for herself, exactly as the Ro-
man patricians with the first agrarian law of Servius Tullius and with
the second agrarian law of the Law of the Twelve Tables also preserved
connubium within their own order in the chapter entitled CONNUBIA
INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO [“nuptials are not to be shared
in common with the plebs”], itself the consequence of another earlier
chapter, AUSPICIA INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO [“the aus-
pices are not to be shared in common with the plebs”].517 Hence, three
years after the Law of the Twelve Tables, the plebs started to make a
claim to the auspices and nuptials, and after a heroic contest of three
years they took them.
654 The suitors of Penelope invade the royal household of Ulysses—that is
to say, the regime of the heroes—and call themselves kings. If they de-
vour the royal substance, this is because they consider domain over the
fields to be their property. They seek to claim Penelope in marriage; they
make claim to connubium. In some versions, Penelope remains chaste,
and Ulysses hangs the suitors like thrushes in nets of the kind by which
the heroic Vulcan caught the plebeian Venus and Mars518; he ties them
up to cultivate the fields, like the day laborers of Achilles (just as Corio-
lanus tried to reduce the Roman plebeians who were not content with the
agrarian law of Servius Tullius to the day laborers of Romulus, as was
stated above [§108]).
At this point, Ulysses519 also fights with the impoverished Irus, and
murders him, which must have been an agrarian contest in which the
plebeians were devouring the substance of Ulysses. In other versions,520
Penelope prostitutes herself to the suitors, allowing the plebs to share
in connubium. From this she gives birth to Pan, a monstrosity with two
discordant natures, human and bestial, which is precisely the SECUM
IPSE DISCORS [“something in discord with itself ”] in Livy,521 which

515
 Homer, Iliad 24.29–30.
516
  See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.9.2 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.560–680.
517
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6 and 10.8.9.
518
  See Homer, Odyssey 22.171–192 and 300–305.
519
 Homer, Odyssey 18.66–104.
520
  See Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.12; Cicero, On the Nature of the God
3.22.56; Maurus Servius Honoratus, Commentary on Aeneid 2.44; Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso 35.27.8.
S 521
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6. Livy’s text actually reads ne secum quidem
N ipse concors.
L
276
Book Two 277

the Roman patricians said to the plebeians would be the nature of who-
soever was born from those plebeians who had a share of connubium in
common with the nobles, a monstrosity similar to the Pan who, a mon-
ster with two discordant natures, was the offspring of Penelope when she
prostituted herself to the plebeians. From the Pasiphaë, who lies with a 655
bull, was born the Minotaur, a monstrosity of two different natures.522
This must be the history of the heroic Cretans sharing connubium with
foreigners, who must have come to Crete in the ship called “Bull”; it was
by this ship, as we have explained above [§635], that Minos abducted lads
and maidens from Attica and that Jove previously had abducted Europa.
It is to this kind of civil history that the myth of Io must appeal. Jove 656
falls in love with her; he is favorable to her in his auspices. Juno is jeal-
ous with a civil jealousy that, as we explained above [§513], preserves
solemnized nuptials for the heroes. Jove gives her to be guarded by Ar-
gus of the hundred eyes; she is guarded by the Argive Fathers, each one
with his own lucus, with his own cultivated land, as we interpreted the
lucus above [§564]. Mercury, who here must be a character representing
plebeian traders, by the sound of his pipe—or rather, by his song—
puts Argus to sleep; he defeats the Argive Fathers in a contest over the
auspices, by which they sang out each person’s lot in solemnized nup-
tials. And Io at this point changes into a cow and lies with the bull
with which Pasiphaë laid. She goes wandering in Egypt—that is, among
those Egyptian foreigners by whom Danaus had expelled the Inachids
from rule in Argos.523
However, Hercules at the end of his time becomes effeminate and spins 657
under the command of Iole and Omphale; the heroic right over the fields
came to be subject to the plebeians, in comparison with whom the he-
roes called themselves viri [“men”], which means the same in Latin as
“heroes” does in Greek. So, Virgil starts his Aeneid with a weight given
to this word,
Arma VIRUMque cano524
[“I sing of arms and the man”];

and Horace translates the first verse of the Odyssey,

Dic mihi, Musa, VIRUM525
[“Speak to me, Muse, of the man”].

And VIRI continued for the Romans to signify solemnized husbands,

magistrates, priests, and judges, for in the poetic aristocracy, nuptials and

522
  See Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.60; Apollodorus, Epitome 3.1.2–4;
Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.4.5.
523
  See Hyginus, Fables 168; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.1.5; Strabo, Geography 8.6.9.
524
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.1.
525
 Horace, Ars poetica 141.
 278 The New Science

civil powers and priesthoods and judgeships were all enclosed within the
heroic orders. And thus, there was a sharing of the heroic right over the
fields with the plebeians of Greece, just as there was by the Roman patri-
cians a sharing of quiritary right with the plebeians (fought for through
the second agrarian law and taken with the Law of the Twelve Tables, as
was demonstrated above [§§109, 598]). Exactly in this way in the times
of the return to barbarism, feudal goods were called GOODS OF THE
LANCE, and borough goods were called GOODS OF THE DISTAFF,
as it is held in the laws of the English; hence, the royal arms of France,
in order to signify the Salic law which excludes women from succession
of rule, are supported by two angels dressed in priestly robes and armed
with spears and adorned with the words, LILIA NON NENT [“lilies do
not spin”].
As a result, just as Baldus526 by our good luck called the Salic law IUS
GENTIUM GALLORUM [“the law of the Gallic peoples”], so we can
call the Law of the Twelve Tables (inasmuch as in its rigor it preserved
in succession intestate to direct paternal or tribal kinship) IUS GEN-
TIUM ROMANORUM [“the law of the Roman peoples”]. For it will be
shown below [§991] how true527 it is that, in the earliest times of Rome, it
was customary for daughters to succeed intestate their fathers, such that,
later, this passed into the Law of the Twelve Tables.
658 Finally, Hercules goes into a fury by being stained by the blood of Nes-
sus the centaur, the exact plebeian monstrosity of two discordant na-
tures of which Livy speaks—that is, in the midst of civil furor he shares
connubium with the plebs and is contaminated by plebeian blood—and
it is in this fashion that, as Fidus, the Roman Hercules, dies, on ac-
count of the Petelian law called De nexu: by this law, VINCULUM FI-
DEI VICTUM EST [“the bond of faith was unbound”], and although
Livy528 reports this on the occasion of a deed which came to pass ten
years later, it was in substance the same as that which was the cause
of the Petelian law, which must have required that they institute as an
order what was contained in the words—these words must have been
in some ancient writer of annals, which Livy with as much good faith
as ignorance reported. For by freeing the plebeians from the private in-
carceration by the noble creditors, those in debt were still constrained
by judicial laws to pay their debts; however, they were released from the
law of fealties, the law of the Herculean knot, born inside the earliest
asylums of the world.
Accordingly, it is a strong conjecture that the author of these annals had
written VINCULUM FIDI [“THE BOND OF FIDUS”], for the god

526
 Baldus, Commentaria in primam Digesti veteris partem 1.9, and quoted at
Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 6.5.
527
  Antiphrasis: the intended meaning is closer to “how untrue.”
S 528
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.28.8.
N
L
278
Book Two 279

Fidus (whom Varro529 says was the Roman Hercules), and others who
came later, not understanding the word, erroneously believed that it was
written FIDEI: this heroic natural law has been found to be the same for
peoples in the Americas, and even today it endures in our world among
the Abyssinians in Africa and among the Muscovites and Tartars of Eu-
rope and Asia; however, it was practiced with greater tameness among
the Hebrews, with whom debtors served for no more than seven years.
And, to bring this to an end, eventually Orpheus, the founder of Greece 659
with his lyre—or his cord, or his force, all of which signify the same thing
as the knot of Hercules, the knot of the Petelian law—dies, killed by the
Bacchantes of the plebs in their furor; the Bacchantes broke into pieces
his lyre,530 which, in the many proofs made above, signifies the law. Hence,
already in the time of Homer, the heroes brought foreign women as their
wives, and bastards came into royal successions. This demonstrates that
popular liberty had already started to have currency in Greece.
On account of all this, one has to conclude that these heroic contests 660
gave the AGE OF HEROES its name. And one has to conclude that in
these contests, many leaders, defeated and suppressed, were given to tak-
ing to the sea in wandering so as to discover other lands; that some, like
Menelaus and Odysseus, eventually returned to their fatherlands while
others, like Cecrops, Cadmus, Danaus, and Pelops, settled in foreign
lands insofar as these heroic contests had come to pass many centuries
previously in Phoenicia, Egypt, and Phyrgia, since in these places hu-
manity had its start much earlier than those who settled in Greece; Dido
must have been one of those who, after fleeing Phoenicia from the fac-
tion of her brother-in-law, who was pursuing her,531 settled in Carthage,
which was called Punica as if for Phoenicia; and of all the Trojans after
the destruction of Troy, Capys settled in Capua, Aeneas landed in La-
tium, Antenor entered into Padua.
In this fashion, there came an end to the wisdom of the theological po- 661
ets, the wise men or political theorists of the poetic age of Greece—that
is, Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus, and others—and by singing to
the Greek plebs of the strength of the gods of the auspices (these were
the praises these poets must have sung to the gods—that is, praises to the
divine providence it belonged to them to sing), they kept those plebs in
deference to their heroic orders. This is exactly how Appius, the grand-
son of the decemvir, around Year 300 of Rome (as was stated in another
place [§81]), maintained the obedience of the plebs to the nobles, when
he sang to the Roman plebeians of the strength of the gods in the aus-
pices, whose science was held by the nobles. In the same way Amphion,

529
 Varro, De lingua latina 5.66.
530
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.1–43.
531
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.341. Virgil, however, portrays Pygmalion as Dido’s brother,
not her brother-in-law.
 280 The New Science

when he sang on his lyre, raised from stones thus moved the walls of
Thebes, which three hundred years previously Cadmus had founded—
that is, confirmed—by singing the heroic state.

Corollaries
concerning the ancient Roman things and, in particular,
the dreamed-up monarchical regime in Rome
and the dreamed-up popular liberty instituted
by Junius Brutus

662 Such great convergences between the human civil things of the Romans
and the Greeks (by this ancient Roman history is found, by so many
proofs, to be a continuous historical mythology for the numerous, var-
ied, and different Greek myths) put anyone who has understanding
(which is not the same as memory or imagination) under the necessity
of affirming resolutely that from the time of kings up until the sharing
of connubium with the plebs, the Roman people, the people of Mars,
was composed only of nobles; and that to this people, the king Tullus,
starting with the trial of Horatius,532 permitted the one condemned of
a crime by the duumvirs or by the quaestors to appeal to the entire
order at a time when the only orders were the heroic peoples and the
plebs were mere additions to such peoples (later, provinces continued
to be such additions to conquering nations, as Grotius533 well noticed),
and it is exactly these plebs who are the “other people,” which Telema-
chus534 called his plebeians in assembly, as we noted herein above
[§§590, 629].
Hence, on the strength of an undefeatable metaphysical art of criticism
applied to these authors of the nations, one must shake out the error
that a band comprised of the basest of day laborers, who were kept as
slaves up from the death of Romulus, held elections for their kings, who
were later approved by the Fathers. This must be an anachronism, from
times in which the plebs were already part of cities and concurred in
electing consuls (this was after connubium was shared with the plebs by
the Fathers), and imposed on a time three hundred years earlier during
the interregnum of Romulus.
663 This term “people,” when applied to the earliest times of the world of
cities with the signification it has in more recent times (because neither
philosophers nor philologists are able to imagine this kind of strict aris-
tocracy), tends to entail two errors concerning two other terms, “king”
and “liberty.” Hence, all have believed that the Roman regime was a
monarchy and that the liberty instituted by Junius Brutus was popular.

532
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.6.
S 533
 Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis 1.3.7.2.
N 534
  See Homer, Odyssey 2.12.
L
280
Book Two 281

However, although Jean Bodin enters into that common folk error into
which all previous political theorists entered, that first there were mon-
archies, later tyrannies, then popular republics, and finally aristocra-
cies (here one sees what distortions can be made and actually are made
when there is a lack of true principles!), when he observes, during the
dreamed-up popular liberty of ancient Rome, that the effects were nev-
ertheless those of an aristocratic republic and so shores up his system
with the following distinction, that in ancient times Rome had a popular
constitution, but aristocratic governance.535 Even with all this (because
the effects came to contradict it) and even by shoring his system up in
this way, his political structure eventually collapsed under the weight
of the truth, and with brute inconsistency he confesses that in ancient
times, the Roman republic had an aristocratic constitution, and not just
aristocratic governance.
All of this is confirmed by Titus Livy:536 in telling us that Junius 664
Brutus instituted the order of two yearly consuls, Livy plainly says and
claims that this did not change the constitution (and in doing so, the wise
Brutus must have called that constitution back to its beginnings), and he
says that with the two annual consuls NIHIL QUICQUAM DE REGIA
POTESTATE DEMINUTUM [“in no way was royal power decreased”].
This is inasmuch as the consuls came to be two yearly aristocratic kings,
whom Cicero537 in his Laws names REGES ANNUOS [“yearly kings”],
just as there were two kings for life in Sparta, a republic which undoubt-
edly was aristocratic. These consuls, as everyone knows, were subject to
recall during the time of their rule (just as the Spartan kings were subject
to being corrected by the ephors and, at the end of their year of rule,
were subject to prosecution, which conforms to the fact that Spartan
kings were put to death by the ephors).
For this, there is a passage in Livy which demonstrates in one stroke both
that the Roman regime was aristocratic and that the liberty instituted
by Brutus was not popular—that is, the liberty of the people from the
lords—but was lordly—that is, the liberty of the lords from the Tarquin
tyrants. It is certain that Brutus would not have been able to do this if he
had not been offered the deed of the Roman Lucretia, which he wisely
seized; this occasion was clothed in all the sublime circumstances so as
to arouse the plebs against the tyrant Tarquinius, who had so badly gov-
erned the nobility that it was up to Brutus to refill the Senate depleted
by the deaths of so many senators because of Tarquinius Superbus.538 In
doing this he achieved, with wise counsel, two public advantages: both
the restrengthening of the order of nobles that was in decline and the
preserving of the favor of the plebs, for it was from the body of the plebs
that he must have culled many men (and perhaps the most ferocious of

535
  See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.1, 2.6, 2.7, and 4.1.
536
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.7.
537
 Cicero, De legibus 3.8.
538
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.10.
 282 The New Science

them who would have opposed reinstituting lordship) and made it so that
it was they who entered into the orders of the nobility and from whom
the city was composed, a city which was at that time completely divided
inter PATRES et PLEBEM539 [“between the Fathers and the plebs”].
665 Consider the initial course taken by the many varied and diverse
causes up until the age of Saturn, upon which we meditated herein. Con-
sider the subsequent course of their many varied and diverse effects in
the ancient Roman republic, which Bodin540 observes, and consider the
continuity and consistency by which those causes led to the effects that
Livy considers: see whether these are not worthy enough to establish
that the Roman regime was aristocratic and that the liberty instituted
by Brutus was lordly and only so as to hold on to their authority. If
they are not, then one needs to say that the Romans, a barbarous and
rude people, had to have a privilege from God which the Greeks could
not have had, a people of acuity and the greatest humanity who, as told
by Thucydides,541 knew nothing about their own antiquity up until the
Peloponnesian War, the most luminous time of Greece, as we observed
above in the Chronological Table [§101], where we demonstrated the
same for the Romans up until the time of the second Carthaginian War,
after which Livy claims to write Roman history with more certainty, and
yet plainly admits that he did not know about three circumstances most
worthy of consideration for that history, which were also observed in the
Chronological Table [§117].
However, were one in spite of all this to concede such a privilege to the
Romans, what remains is still an obscure memory, a confused image, and
as such one is not able to deny the reasoning we have done upon these
ancient Roman things.

Corollaries
concerning the heroism of the earliest peoples

666 But the heroic age of the earliest world which we are treating draws
us along by hard necessity to reason about the heroism of the earliest
peoples. This heroism—through Axioms proposed above542 and used
here and through the principles established here concerning heroic poli-
tics [§§582–598]—was a heroism quite different from that which was
a consequence of the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,543 which
the philosophers imagined, and which deceived the philologists. In de-
fining the three terms which we noted above [§663], “people,” “king,”
and “liberty,” the philologists took heroic peoples also to include the

539
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.23.1; 2.39.6.
540
  See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.1, 2.1, 5.4.
S 541
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2.
N 542
  See Axioms 3, 54, 55.
L 543
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128.
282
Book Two 283

plebeians, they took heroic kings to be monarchs, and they took he-
roic liberty to be popular. By contrast, the philosophers applied to this
heroism three of their genteel and learned ideas: first, the justice rea-
soned from the maxims of Socratic morals;544 second, the glory which
is fame for having done benefits for humankind;545 and, third, the desire
for immortality.
Hence, with these three errors and by these three ideas, they believed
that kings and other great personages in ancient times consecrated them-
selves and their families, as well as their entire patrimony and substance,
to making happy those who are unfortunate, who are always the major-
ity in cities and in nations.
Yet Achilles, who is the greatest of the Greek heroes, had three prop- 667
erties, as Homer tells us, which were completely at odds with those three
ideas of the philosophers.
And concerning justice, when Hector says that he intends to bury Achil-
les if he kills him in battle, Achilles ferociously responds, without reflect-
ing upon their equality of status or upon their common lot (the two
considerations which naturally induce men to recognize justice): “When
have men ever made pacts with lions, and when have wolves and lambs
ever agreed in their intentions?” Indeed, he responds: “If I kill you, I
will drag you naked tied to my chariot for three days around the walls
of Troy” (which he did), “and in the end give you to my hunting dogs to
eat.”546 He also would have done this if the unfortunate father of Hector,
Priam, had not come to him to ransom the corpse.
Concerning glory, on account of a private grievance—Agamemnon had
offended him by taking his Briseis—he called himself wronged by men
and gods, made an appeal to Jove to restore his honor, withdrew his men
from the allied army and his ships from the armada, and suffered Hector
to bring affliction upon the Greeks, and contrary to the dictates of the
devotion that one owes to one’s fatherland, Achilles makes a show of
avenging his own private wrong with the destruction of his entire nation;
indeed, he is not ashamed to rejoice to Patroclus at the slaughter which
Hector brings upon his Greeks, and to this same Patroclus, Achilles—
this man who carries in his heels the fate of Troy—says something much
worse, praying that all the Greeks and Trojans might die in the war and
that they alone survive.547
Concerning their third idea, asked by Ulysses in the underworld if he
wishes to stay there, Achilles responds that he would rather be alive and
the basest of slaves.548

544
  See the references to Socrates at §§102, 191, 424, 499.
545
  Compare to Cicero’s definition of gloria at Pro Marcello 8.26.
546
  Here Vico is collating passages from Iliad 22.258–265, 335–355, and 395–404.
547
  Here Vico is collating passages from Iliad 1.322–344, 353–354, 490–491, and
Iliad 16.77–79, 97–100.
548
 Homer, Odyssey 11.489–491.
 284 The New Science

Behold the hero of whom Homer sings with the invariable epithet
“blameless” to the Greek people as a model of heroism! If Homer prof-
its us by teaching and delighting at the same time, as poets ought to do,
then one cannot understand this epithet otherwise than in terms of a
man who is so arrogant that he would not allow, as we would say to-
day, a fly to pass before the tip of his nose; thus, Homer preaches the
virtue of punctiliousness, in which during the return to barbarism those
who engage in duels placed their entire morality. From this ethics came
the proud laws, the lofty duties, and the vengeful satisfactions of the
knights-errant of whom writers of romances sing.
668 In comparison with this, reflect upon the oath which Aristotle549 says
that the heroes swore against the plebs, to be their eternal enemies; re-
flect, subsequently, upon Roman history in the time of Roman virtue
(a time which Livy550 determines to be up until the Pyrrhic War and
to which he gives acclaim with the words nulla aeta virtutum feracior
[“no age was more fruitful in virtues”], a time which we, following Sal-
lust551 in Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei, extend from the expulsion of
the kings up until the second Carthaginian War); there is Brutus, who
consecrated his household along with his two sons to liberty; there is
Scaevola,552 who punishes his own right hand in fire for not knowing
how to kill Porsena, the Etruscan king, and by doing so terrifies Porsena
and puts him to flight; there is the Manilius, called The Imperious, who
because of a happy fault553 of military discipline (which was still success-
ful and inspired by the motives of valor and glory) cut off the head of
his own victorious son; there is Curtius,554 who casts himself, armed and
mounted, fatally into a trench; there are the Decii,555 father and son who
consecrate themselves to the safety of their armies; there are Fabricius
and Curius,556 who refuse Samnite gold beyond compare and a share in
rule offered by Pyrrhus; there is Atilius Regulus,557 who went to Carthage
and to a certain death of the most cruel kind so as to preserve the sanc-
tity of a Roman oath; what did any of these men do for the miserable
and unfortunate Roman plebs, what did they do other than oppress them
more with taxes in wartime, plunge them more deeply into an ocean of
usury, bury them at the bottom of private prisons where the nobles beat
their bared shoulders in the fashion of the basest slaves? And if someone
tried to lift up the plebs with some grain law or agrarian law, this order of

549
 Aristotle, Politics 5.9 (1310a9).
550
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.16.19.
551
  See Augustine, City of God 2.18, and Sallust, Histories 1.10.
552
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.12.
553
  The Italian is felice peccato, a deliberate echo (as Battistini notes) of felix
culpa, a phrase that appears in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil (“O happy fault
that merited such and so great a Redeemer”).
554
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 7.6.
555
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.9–10 and 10.28–29.
S 556
  On Fabricius and Curius, see Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 20 and 25.
N 557
  See Cicero, De officiis 3.99–100.
L
284
Book Two 285

heroes in the time of this Roman virtue would condemn and kill him as
a traitor; this is what came to pass (so as not to touch on all the others)
for Manilius Capitolinus, who had preserved the Capitoline from the fire
of the exceptionally brutal Senonic Gauls; this is what came to pass in
Sparta—that city of the heroes of Greece, just as Rome was that of the
heroes of the world—for the magnanimous king Agis because, when he
attempted to lessen the poverty of the plebs of Lacedaemon oppressed
by usury of the nobles, with one law erasing debts and with another law
attempted to lift up the plebs concerning testaments, he was, as stated in
another place [§592], strangled by the ephors; hence just as the valorous
Agis was the Manlius Capitolinus of Sparta, so Manlius Capitolinus was
the Agis of Rome and, on the mere suspicion of somewhat assisting the
impoverished and oppressed Roman plebs, was thrown down from the
Tarpeian Rock.
As a result, it was on account of this—namely, that the nobles of the ear-
liest peoples considered themselves heroes, that is, of a nature superior to
that of the plebeians, as was fully demonstrated above [§§197, 449, 560,
586, 606])—that they acted so badly in their governance of the impover-
ished multitudes of the nations.
For certainly Roman history will baffle any discerning reader who com-
bines the reports above. Where is the Roman virtue in the midst of such
great pride? Where is moderation in the midst of such great avarice?
Where is the tameness in the midst of such great savagery? Where is the
justice in the midst of such great inequality?
Hence, the principles that are able to satisfy someone in such great 669
wonder must necessarily be the following:

I. Subsequent to the wild education of the giants reasoned upon above 670
[§§369–371, 523–524], the education of children would be severe, harsh,
and cruel, as it was for the unlettered Lacedaemonians, who were the he-
roes of Greece558 and who would beat their sons in the Temple of Diana
within an inch of their lives (as a result of this they often fell dead, writh-
ing in pain under the blows of their fathers) in order to inure them to fear
of pain and death; this cyclopean paternal power remained for both the
Greeks and the Romans, permitting them to kill innocent infants newly
born. For now we make our young children our delight, which today
makes for all the refinement of our natures.

II. Wives were bought with heroic dowries, which remained later as a so- 671
lemnity in the nuptials of Roman priests, which were contracted coëmp-
tione et farre [“by mutual sale and spelt cakes”] and which was also, as
Tacitus559 tells us, the custom of the ancient Germans, which allows us to
deem the custom to be the same for all the early barbarous peoples. And

558
  See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 18.
559
 Tacitus, Germania 18.
 286 The New Science

wives were kept, as if by natural necessity, for the purpose of making

children: in other respects, they were treated as slaves. This is a custom of
nations to which many parts of our world conform, and to which almost
the whole of the New World does.

672 III. Sons acquired for and wives saved for their husbands and their fa-
thers, entirely the opposite of what is done today.

673 IV. Games and pleasures were tiring, for example, wrestling and racing
(hence, Homer560 gives Achilles the continuous epithet “swift-footed”).
They were also dangerous, for example, jousting and hunting wild beasts,
whence they were accustomed to hardening their strength and spirit and
to risking and scorning their lives.

674 V. They were completely lacking in understanding of luxury, daintiness,

and ease.

675 VI. Wars, like heroic antiquity, were completely beholden to religion,
which (for the reason that we have taken it as the first principle of this
science [§§333–335]) makes them all extremely atrocious.

676 VII. Slavery also had currency in heroic times, which came about as a
result of those wars, in which the defeated were considered men with-
out God, and so lost their natural liberty along with their civil liberty.
And here we have use for that Axiom posited above: “Natural liberty is
fiercer inasmuch as its goods are more properly connected to our bodies,
and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary
for life.”561
677 Because of all this, republics were naturally aristocratic—that is, repub-
lics of those who were naturally strongest—which closed off but to a
few noble Fathers all civil honors, and the public good was in the fam-
ily monarchies preserved by the fatherland; for the true fatherland, as
we have stated more fully elsewhere [§§584, 601], was the interests of a
few Fathers, because of which the citizens were naturally patricians. And
with such natures, such customs, such republics, such orders, and such
laws, the heroism of the earliest peoples will have currency. This heroism,
since the causes just enumerated are the complete opposites of those
which later produced the other two kinds of civil constitution which,
as we proved above [§292], are both human—namely the free popular
republics and, still more human, the monarchies—is now impossible, be-
cause of our civil nature.
For throughout the entire time of Roman popular liberty, only Cato of
Utica had a reputation for heroism, and this reputation remained the

560
  See Homer, Iliad 1.58, 84, 121, 148, 215, 364, 489.
S 561
  Axiom 94, quoted inexactly.
N
L
286
Book Two 287

guiding spirit of the aristocratic republic: after the fall of Pompey and
with Cato left as the head of the nobility, because he was not able to suf-
fer seeing his party humiliated by Caesar, Cato committed suicide.
During monarchies, the heroes are those who consecrate themselves to
the glory and greatness of their sovereigns.
Hence, one has to conclude that such a hero is desired by afflicted peo-
ples, reasoned about by philosophers, and imagined by poets. However,
civil nature, as we considered it in an Axiom,562 does not tend towards
this sort of benefit.
All the things about which we have reasoned here concerning the hero- 678
ism of the earliest peoples gains light and splendor from the Axioms pos-
ited above563 concerning Roman heroism, which will be common both
to the heroism of the Athenians in the times when, as Thucydides tells
us, they are governed by the most severe Areopagites, which, as we have
seen, was an aristocratic senate, and to the heroism of the Spartans, who
were a republic of the sons of Hercules—that is, of lords—as a thousand
proofs above have demonstrated [§592].

Epitomes
of poetic history

I.

This entire divine and heroic history of the theological poets was de- 679
scribed to us with much infelicity of expression in the myth of Cadmus.564
He kills the great serpent; he deforests the great ancient forest of the
Earth. He sows the teeth of this serpent; this is a fine metaphor, as was
stated above [§541], for the hard curved wood which prior to the dis-
covery of the use of iron must have served as the teeth of the earliest
ploughs, and with these, which are still called “teeth,” they ploughed the
earliest fields of the world. He casts a great stone—that is, the hard earth
that the clients, or familial servants, wished to plough for themselves,
as was explained above [§583]. Born from the furrows were armed men;
these represent the heroic contests over the first agrarian law in which,
as we stated [§584], the heroes emerged from their grounds—which is
to say that they were the lords of those grounds—and united in arms
against the plebeians. And they fought not among themselves but with
the clients rebelling against them. And the furrows signify those orders
in which they united and by which they formed and settled the first cities

562
  Axiom 80.
563
  Axioms 84–91.
564
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.1–130.
 288 The New Science

on the basis of arms, as is all stated above [§§338, 446, 563]. And Cadmus
changes into a serpent; thus does the authority of aristocratic senates
come into being, or, as the most ancient peoples of Latium would have
said, Cadmus fundus factus est565 [“Cadmus has become the ground”],
and, as the people of Greece said, Cadmus changed into a Draco, who
wrote laws in blood.566 All of this is that which above [§446] we promised
to make it possible to see, that the myth of Cadmus contains many cen-
turies of poetic history and is a great exemplar of the infant muteness in
which the world in its childhood toiled to express itself, which is one of
the seven great sources of the difficulty about myths that we will enumer-
ate below [§814].
This shows with how much felicity of expression Cadmus knew how
leave a history written in his common alphabetic letters, which he sup-
posedly brought to Greece from the Phoenicians!567
And Desiderius Erasmus (by a thousand inanities unworthy of a man
with such great erudition that he was called the “Christian Varro”) sug-
gests that it [the myth of Cadmus] contains the history of the letters
discovered by Cadmus.568
If this were so, then this brilliant history (the history of so great a
benefit to the nations as the discovery of letters which, because of its
brilliance, ought to have had the widest repute) was instead hidden by
Cadmus for humankind in Greece within the folds of this myth in ob-
scurity until the times of Erasmus, so as to keep secret from the com-
mon run one of the greatest discoveries of commonplace wisdom, that
it is from the “common run” [volgo] that such letters are called “com-
mon” [volgari].

II.

680 By contrast, with wondrous brevity and congruity Homer569 tells this
whole history, compressed into the hieroglyph left on the scepter of
Agamemnon. Vulcan made this scepter for Jove, for Jove with the first
lightning bolts after the Flood founded his regime over gods and men—
that is, the divine regimes in the familial state. Later, Jove gave the scepter
to Mercury, and it was the caduceus with which Mercury brings the first
agrarian law to the plebs; hence there came into being the heroic regimes
of the first cities. Here, Mercury gave the scepter to Pelops, Pelops gave

565
  See Cicero, Pro Balbo 8.19.
566
  See Plutarch, Life of Solon 17.
567
  For this claim, see Herodotus, Histories 5.58. Vico is here using the trope of
antiphrasis; his meaning is closer to “how little felicity of expression.”
568
  See Erasmus, De recta latini graecique sermonis pronunciatione, in Opera
S omnia emendatiora (Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1703), 1:927.
N 569
 Homer, Iliad 2.102–107.
L
288
Book Two 289

it to Thyestes, Thyestes to Atreus, and Atreus to Agamemnon, which is

the entire succession of the royal household of Argos.

III.

But this same Homer570 with greater fullness and explicitness tells us the 681
history of the world in his description of the shield of Achilles.

I. In the beginning, one sees on that shield heaven and earth, the sea, the 682
sun, the moon, the stars. This is the epoch of the creation of the world.

II. Later, there are two cities. In the first city, there are songs, wedding 683
hymns, nuptials. This is the epoch of the heroic families composed of
sons born of solemnized nuptials. In the second city, we see none of
these things. This is the epoch of the heroic families composed of ser-
vants who do not covenant except in natural marriages, lacking any of
the solemnity of the heroic nuptials in which heroes covenant.
Thus, both of these cities represent the state of nature—that is, the fa-
milial state—and it was exactly these two cities which Eumaeus,571 swine-
herd to Ulysses, recounts two fatherlands, both ruled by his father; in
them, the citizens had fully divided up their things—that is, had no share
in citizenship among the things they shared in common. Hence, the city
without wedding hymns is precisely the “other people,” as Telemachus
calls the plebs of Ithaca in an assembly;572 and Achilles, lamenting the
outrage done to him by Agamemnon, says that he has been treated as a
day laborer who has no share in governance.573

III. Later, in the city with nuptials, are seen parliaments, laws, judges, pen- 684
alties, which is exactly how the Roman patricians responded in the heroic
contests to the plebs, that nuptials and political power and the priesthood
(on which ultimately depends the science of the laws and, along with this,
judgments) were legitimately their own property, for the auspices which
made for the greatest solemnity of nuptials were their property. Hence,
VIRI [“men”] (which names in Latin what “heroes” does in Greek) is
what they called husbands of solemn marriages, magistrates, priests, and,
last of all, judges, as was stated in another place above [§657]. Thus, this
is the epoch of heroic cities, which arose out of the families composed of
servants with the most severe aristocratic constitution.

IV. The second city is besieged by arms, and each city loots the other in 685
turn in the earliest raids.

570
 Homer, Iliad 18.478–607.
571
 Homer, Odyssey 15.412–414.
572
  See Homer, Odyssey 2.12.
573
  See Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59.
 290 The New Science

And therein the city without nuptials—that is, the plebs of heroic cities—
becomes an entirely separate, enemy city. Here is wondrously confirmed
what we reasoned upon above [§638], that the earliest foreigners, the ear-
liest hostes [“enemies”], were the plebs of heroic peoples, against whom,
as we have many times learned from Aristotle574 [§§271, 588, 611, 638,
688], the heroes swore eternal enmity. Hence, later, separate cities, be-
cause they were foreigners to one another, practiced with heroic thievery
eternal enmity towards one another, as we reasoned above [§§636–637].

686 V. And, finally, one sees described on the shield the history of the arts of
humanity, starting during the epoch of families. For, first before all other
things, one sees the Father and king who decrees with his scepter that the
roasted oxen be divided among the harvesters. Next, one sees vineyards
planted, then flocks, shepherds, huts, and last of all are described dances.
This image so beautifully and truly lays out the order of human things:
first were discovered the arts pertaining to the necessary (so there is ag-
riculture giving bread first and then wine); and later were discovered the
arts pertaining to the advantageous (so, herding); and subsequently were
discovered the arts of pertaining to the comfortable (so, architecture for
cities); and finally the arts pertaining to the pleasurable (so, dances).

On Poetic Physics

687 Let us pass now to the other branch from the trunk of Poetic Meta-
physics, from which poetic wisdom branches off into Physics and subse-
quently into Cosmography, and from this into Astronomy, whose fruits
are Chronology and Geography. We will offer this second part of our
reasoning on Poetic Metaphysics, beginning with Physics.
688 The theological poets gave consideration to a physics for the world of
nations and, accordingly, defined Chaos575 as the confusion of the seeds
of humans in the state of the infamous sharing of women in common;
it was from this confusion that later physicists were given to think about
the confusion of seminal matter of the universe in nature, and to explain
this confusion they used the already discovered, and hence congruous,
term of the poets.
There was confusion in Chaos because none of the orders of humanity
were there. There was darkness because it was deprived of that civil light
by which the heroes were called brilliant.
They also imagined it as Orcus, a malformed monster who devours ev-
erything, for men in that infamous sharing did not have the form proper
to men and were sucked into nothingness because, owing to the uncer-

S 574
 Aristotle, Politics 5.9, 1310a9.
N 575
  See Hesiod, Theogony 211–232.
L
290
Book Two 291

tainty of their offspring, they left nothing of themselves. This Orcus was
later taken up by physicists as the primal matter of natural things, which,
unformed, is greedy for forms and devours all forms.
However, the poets also gave Chaos the monstrous form of Pan, the for-
est god who is the numinous presence of all satyrs, inhabiting not cities
but the woods; and who is a character to which are reduced the impious
men wandering through the great forest of the Earth, those who have
a human aspect, but profane and bestial customs. Later by forced al-
legories, as we will observe below [§910], philosophers deceived by the
word πᾶν [pan], which means in Greek “all,” took Pan to be the formed
universe.
The learned also believed that the poets had an understanding of primal
matter in the myth of Proteus, with whom Ulysses wrestles in Egypt,
Proteus in the water and Ulysses out of it; Ulysses is not able to take hold
of him, because he is always changing into new forms.576 However, such
sublimity of learning on their part was great gullishness and simplicity
on the part of the earliest men who, like children looking in a mirror and
trying to take hold of their reflections, believed, because of the various
modifications of their gestures and appearances, that there was a man in
the water who was changing into various forms.
Eventually, the heavens cast forth lightning bolts, and Jove gave be- 689
ginning to the world of men by putting in them the conatus577 that is
proper to freedom of the mind, just as by the motion that is proper to
bodies, which are agents of necessity, he gave a start to the world of
nature, insofar as what seems to be conatus in nature is the motion of
insensate bodies, as was stated above in the Method [§340].578
From such conatus came the civil light whose character was Apollo, and
in this light, there became distinct the civil beauty by which the heroes
were beauty, and whose character was Venus; later, physicists took this as
the beauty of nature, indeed, as all of formed nature, which is beautiful
and adorned with all sensible forms.
The world of the theological poets came from four sacred elements: 690
from the air where Jove casts lightning bolts; from the water of the
perennial springs whose numinous presence is Diana; from the fire by
which Vulcan cleared the forests; and from the cultivated earth—that
is, Cybele or Berecynthia. All four of these are the elements of divine

576
 Homer, Odyssey 4.450–459. As Battistini notes, the protagonist in this scene
is Menelaus, not Odysseus.
577
  On conatus, see the note at §340.
578
  Another translation, equally possible grammatically, would make the second
main clause’s subject “the world of nature,” rather than Jove: “Jove gave begin-
ning to the world of men by putting in them the conatus that is proper to free-
dom of the mind, just as the world of nature took its start by the motion that is
proper to bodies, which are necessary agents.”
 292 The New Science

ceremonies—that is, the auspices, fire, water, and spelt guarded by Vesta,
who as was stated above [§549] is the same as Cybele or Berecynthia. She
goes crowned by cultivated lands fortified by walls and accompanied by
villages which, because they are placed on high, are figured as towers
(hence, in Latin, extorris [“exiled”] is used as if it were from exterris).
With this crown is enclosed what is still called the orbis terrarum, which
is, properly speaking, the world of human beings.
Consequently, the physicists were later moved to meditate upon the four
elements from which the world of nature is composed.
691 These same theological poets gave to the elements and to countless
kinds of natures coming from the elements forms that were living and
sensate and, for the most part, human, and devised the many and var-
ied divinities upon which we reasoned above in the Poetic Metaphys-
ics [§375]. Hence came the congruity which allowed Plato to impose his
tenets about “mind” or “intelligence” so that Jove is the mind of ether,
Vulcan the mind of fire, and so on.
So much did the theological poets understand such intelligent sub-
stances, that up to Homer’s time they did not understand a human mind
which on the strength of reflection is opposed to the senses. On this there
are two golden passages in the Odyssey,579 where the mind is called either
a “sacred force” or a “hidden strength,” which are the same.

On the poetic physics concerning man—

that is, on heroic nature

692 However, the greatest and most important part of physics is the contem-
plation of the nature of man.
This is to contemplate how the authors of the gentile human race in a
certain way generated themselves and produced their own human form
in both of its two parts, namely, by terrifying religions and by horrific
paternal powers. By sacred ablutions, they brought forth [edussero] from
their gigantic bodies the form of our correct bodily statures; and by the
same household discipline they brought forth [edussero] from their bes-
tial spirits the form of our human spirits.580 All of this was reasoned
upon above in the Poetic Economics [§§520, 524], and this is the proper
place in which it must be repeated.
693 Now, the theological poets, under the aspect of a very rude physics,
saw in man these two metaphysical ideas, being and substance.

 Homer, Odyssey 18.34 and 18.60.

579

  Vico’s choice of the verb edussero (a form of educere) suggests a strong

580

connection between his thinking in this passage and his earlier claim at §520
S that educere and educare originally referred to the education of the soul and the
N education of the body.
L
292
Book Two 293

Certainly, the heroes of Latium used the word “being” in quite unrefined
terms to mean “eating”; this must have been the earliest significance of
the verb sum [“to be”], which was later used with the former and the
latter significance (this conforms with our rustics today using “he eats”
to say “he still lives”).581 For sum in its significance as “being” is most
abstract (in that it transcends all beings); most pervasive (in that it pen-
etrates through all beings); most pure (in that it circumscribed by none
of these beings).
They felt “substance” as if it meant “a thing which stands under and
sustains,” a thing resting in the heels, for a man stands on the base of his
feet. Hence, Achilles carried his fate in his heel, for there his fate rested—
that is, his lot in life and in death.582
The composite of the body they reduced to solids and liquids. 694
They declared as solids the viscera—that is, flesh—and so among the
Romans visceratio was used for the division that the priests made for the
people of the flesh of the sacrificial victims,583 so that by vesci they under-
stood “to nourish oneself ” in cases where the food was meat. They de-
clared as solids bones and joints, which they called artus (what they called
artus was derived from ars, which for the ancient people of Latium signi-
fied “bodily strength,” whence came artitus, “vigorous of person”; later,
ars was used for any composite of precepts which held fast some faculty
of the mind). They declared as solids the sinews, which, when the poets
were mute and spoke through objects, they took to mean “strength”;
and it was from the sinew called fides, in the sense of a “cord,” that they
used fides for “strength of the gods,” and from sinew or cord or strength
they later made the lute of Orpheus). In this correct sense, they located
strength in the sinews, given that they extend the muscles that need to
be extended for the use of one’s strength. And, finally, they declared as
solids marrow: also in a correct sense, they located the very bloom of
life in this marrow, whence the word medulla was used by a lover for the
woman he loved, and medullitus for that expression of ours, “with all
one’s heart” (and love, when it is great, is said to “burn the marrow”).
The liquids they reduced only to blood insofar as they also called neural
and spermatic substance “blood,” as is demonstrated in the use of the
poetic phrase, sanguine cretus584 [“born of blood”] to express “being en-
gendered”; they did this also in the correct sense, for such substance is
the very bloom of blood. And also, in a correct sense, they deemed blood
to be the juice in the tissue of which flesh is composed, whence in Latin
the word succiplenus585 [“full of sap”] retained the meaning of “fleshy,”
“steeped in good blood.”

581
 In a more recent expression, “you are what you eat.”
582
  See Apollodorus, Epitome 3.13.8.
583
  See Cicero, De officiis 2.16.55; Livy, Ab urbe condita 8.22.2.
584
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.191.
585
  See Terence, Eunuch 317.
 294 The New Science

695 As for the other part of the form proper to humans, the soul, the
theological poets located it in air (a word which is also used in Latin for
“soul”), and they deemed air to be the vehicle of life (retained in Latin in
the proper sense of the expression anima vivimus586 [“by breath we live”];
and in the poetic expressions, ferri ad vitales auras587 [“to approach the
living air”] for “to be born,” ducere vitales auras588 [“to draw in the living
air”] of “to live,” and vitam referri in auras [“to return life to the air”] for
“to die”; and in common Latin, the expressions animam ducere589 [“to
draw breath”] for “to live,” animam trahere590 [“to drag in a breath”] for
“to be in agony,” and animam efflare and animam emitter591 [“to emit
breath”] for “to die”), whence, perhaps, the physicists were moved to
place the world soul in air. And the theological poets, also in the correct
sense, put the life coursing in us within the blood coursing in us, in which
correct motion our life consists.
696 They must also, in the correct sense, have felt that spirit is the vehicle of
sensation, which Latin retains in the proper meaning of the expression
animo sentimus [“by the spirit we sense”]. And, also in the correct sense,
they made animus masculine and anima feminine,592 for the spirit works
upon the soul (it is the igneus vigor [“fiery strength”] of which Virgil593
speaks), and as a result the spirit must have its subject in the nerves and
in neural substance, and the soul in the veins and in the blood. And
so, the vehicle of the spirit is ether, and the vehicle of the soul is air, in
keeping with the proportion by which the animal spirits are as swift as
the vital spirits are slow; and just as the soul ministers to motion, so the
spirit ministers to conatus594 and, consequently, begins conatus (this is
the igneus vigor [“fiery strength”] of which Virgil spoke above). The theo-
logical poets sensed this, without understanding it, and Homer called it
a “sacred force” and a “hidden strength” and an “unknown god”595; the
peoples of both Greece and Latium, whenever they said or did a thing
the beginning of which they sensed was superior to themselves, said that
some god had willed a thing of this sort. This beginning was called by
those same peoples of Latium mens animi596 [“mind of the spirit”]. And
so, in their rude way, they understood that lofty truth which the natural
theology of the metaphysicians later demonstrated by virtue of invin-

586
 Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline 2.9.
587
 Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.857, 6.1227; Virgil, Aeneid 1.387.
588
  Vico’s source might be Virgil, Aeneid 1.387–388, which contains the expres-
sion carpere vitales auras.
589
 Cicero, De natura deorum 2.54.136.
590
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.6.8 and 4.12.11; Tacitus, Annals 1.42.4.
591
 Plautus, Persa 638, and Truculentus 876.
592
  On the animus/anima relation, compare Vico’s discussion at De antiquissima
5; see On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians p. 86[88].
593
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.730.
594
  On conatus, see the note at §340.
S 595
  See, for example, Homer, Odyssey 18.146.
N 596
  See Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.758; Catullus, Carmina 65.4.
L
294
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cible reasoning against the Epicureans, who want ideas to be the result
of bodies—namely, the truth that ideas come to man from God.
They understood generation in its proper fashion, and we do not 697
know if the learned who come later have been able to discover a bet-
ter one.
That fashion is entirely contained in the term concipere [“to conceive”],
used as if it were derived from concapere [“to take in”], which expresses
the natural tendency observed by physical forms (to this nowadays we
must add the weight of air demonstrated in our times) to incorporate
any neighboring objects, to overcome resistance, and to adapt and shape
those objects to their own form.
Decay they explained most wisely with the term corrumpi, which signifies 698
the breaking up of all the parts which compose a body in contrast to the
term sanum [“whole”], for life consists in all the parts remaining whole;
so they must have deemed disease to tend toward death, because of the
damage to the solidity of the body.
They reduced all the internal functions of the spirit to three parts of 699
the body: the head, the breast, and the heart.
And they declared all cognition to be in the head, and insofar as all their
cognition was imaginative, they located in the head memory, which in
Latin is called fantasia; and in the return to barbarous times, they used
the word fantasia for ingenuity and, in turn, called a “man of ingenuity”
an “imaginative man,” as we are told of Cola di Rienzo in the barbarous
Italian of a biography written by an author from our times. This biog-
raphy contains natures and customs most similar to those of the ancient
heroes about whom we are reasoning. This is a great argument for the
recurrence that, in natures and customs, the nations make.
However, imagination is nothing other than the resurfacing of remi-
niscences, and ingenuity is nothing other than laboring over the things
which have been recalled.
Now, because the human mind in the times about which we are reason-
ing has not been rendered subtle by the art of writing, nor been spiritu-
alized by any practice of counting or reckoning, nor made abstract by
the many abstract terms which abound in languages now, as was stated
above in the Method,597 it exercised all its strength in these three beauti-
ful faculties coming from the body; and all three faculties pertain to the
first operation of the mind whose regulative art is the art of topics, just
as the regulative art for the second operation of the mind is the art of
criticism, and just as the latter is the art of judgment, the former is the
art of invention, in conformity with what was stated in the final corollar-
ies of the Poetic Logic [§§495–498]. And just as invention of things natu-
rally comes first, judgment of them second, so it was convenient for the

597
  Or, more precisely, in the Poetic Metaphysics (§378).
 296 The New Science

infancy of the world to exercise itself in the first operation of the human
mind at a time when the world had need of discovering the necessities
and advantages of life, all of which were provided prior to the arrival of
the philosophers, as we will more fully demonstrate in the Discovery of
the True Homer.
Consequently, with reason the theological poets called Memory the
“mother of the Muses,” which we found above [§508] to be the arts of
humanity.
700 And in this part we cannot leave out an important observation of great
consequence to what was stated above in the Method [§338], that now
one is scarcely able to understand and completely unable to imagine how
these earliest men who founded gentile humanity would have thought:
their minds would belong so much to singulars and be so confined as to
deem every new facial expression as a new face, as we observed in the
myth of Proteus [§688], and to deem every new passion as another heart,
another breast, another spirit. Hence there are those poetic expressions
used not out of the necessity of counting, but on account of the nature
of human things which take a plural as its singular—such as in the ex-
pressions, ora, vultus, animi, pectora, corda.
701 They made the breast the seat of all the passions, under which in the cor-
rect sense they placed two kinds of leaven or principles: that is, the iras-
cible principle in the stomach insofar as it is there that, in rising to over-
come some evil pressing upon us, we are made to feel the bile contained
in the biliary vessels expanding because of the ventricle which, agitated
by the stomach’s peristaltic motion, presses upon them and spreads bile
in the stomach. They put the concupiscent principle598 for the most part
in the liver, whose office belongs to the blood, and the poets called these
praecordia, the organs where Titan implanted the signature passions
which arise in other animals. And they understood in these precursors
that concupiscence is the mother of all passions and that these passions
are with our humors.
702 They declared the heart to be the seat of all counsel, whence the heroes
agitabant, versabant, volutabunt corde curas [“would worry, turn, revolve
their concerns in their heart”], for they did not think about things to
be done except when shaken by passion, since they were stupid and in-
sensate. Consequently, in Latin, they called cordati those were wise, and
vecordes599 those were fools. And their resolutions they called sententiae,
for as they sensed, so they judged. Hence, heroic judgments were all true
in their form, although they were often false in their matter.

598
  For the distinction between the concupiscible and irascible powers of the
sensitive appetite, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1.81.2 and 1-2.23-25.
It is possible that Vico knew the distinction from Aquinas. More likely, he knew
it from later medieval and Renaissance authors (particularly Suarez) who use
S the same terminology, though often in the service of projects alien to Aquinas.
N 599
  See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.9.18.
L
296
Book Two 297

Corollary
on heroic sentences

Now because the earliest men of gentile humanity had minds no less 703
focused on singulars than the minds of beasts, for whom every new sen-
sation completely cancels out the old one (this is the reason that they
are not able to think synthetically or discursively), accordingly, all their
sentiments must have been singular to the one who sensed them. Hence,
that sublime sentence which Dionysius Longinus600 admires in the ode
of Sappho which Catullus later translated into Latin, where the lover in
the presence of the woman who is his beloved expresses himself with a
likeness:
Ille mi par esse deo videtur601
[“That one seems to me equal to a god”],

and yet the likeness falls short of sublimity of the highest rank; for the
sentence is not made singular to himself, as Terence does by saying:
Vitam deorum adepti sumus602
[“We have attained the life of gods”],

and yet this sentiment, although it is proper to the one speaking, nev-
ertheless, on account of the mannerism in Latin of using the first per-
son plural for the singular, still has the air of a common sentiment. By
contrast, the same poet in another comedy raises the same sentiment to
sublimity of the highest rank, when it is made singular and so proper to
the one sensing it:
Deus factus sum603
[“I am become a god”].

Accordingly, those abstract sentences belong to philosophers, for they 704

contain universals, and reflections upon these passions belong to false
and frigid poets.

Corollary
on heroic descriptions

Eventually, these earliest men reduced the external functions of the spirit 705
to the five senses of the body, senses still discerning, lively, and alert,
since they had little or no reason and were all robust imagination.

600
 Longinus, On the Sublime 10.2.
601
 Catullus, Carmina 51.1
602
 Terence, Self-Tormentor 693.
603
 Terence, The Mother-in-Law 843.
 298 The New Science

This is proved by the terms offered for the five senses.

706 They spoke of audire [“hearing”] as if it were haurire [“drawing in”], for
the ears drink in the air struck by other bodies. They spoke of cernere
oculis604 [“separating out by eye”] for seeing distinctly (hence, perhaps,
came the Italian verb “to sift” [scernere]), for the eyes are like a sieve
and the two pupils are like holes, and so just as lines of dust issue from a
sieve on their way to touching the earth, so lines of light issue from the
eyes through the pupils on their way to touching things which are seen
distinctly. It is this line of sight that was later reasoned upon by the Sto-
ics and was successfully demonstrated in our time by Descartes.605 And
they spoke of usurpare oculis606 [“capturing by eye”] for seeing in general,
as if one could possess the things being seen by seeing them. With the
verb tangere607 [“to touch”], they also spoke of stealing, for something is
taken away from bodies that are touched in the touching of them, as is
now more fully understood by more perceptive physicists. They spoke of
smelling as olfacere, as if one made the smells by smelling; this was later
by careful observation found to be true by natural philosophers, that the
sense makes what are called the sensible qualities; and, finally, they spoke
of tasting as sapere, and this verb is properly used for things which give
off a flavor, for in tasting one tests things for the flavor which is proper to
the thing. Hence, later by a beautiful metaphor “wisdom” [sapienza] was
the word for the use of things according to the uses they have in nature,
rather than those which opinion devises.
707 It is for this that one is given to admire divine providence, that at a time
when men had fallen into a bestial state, it gave us the senses as the
guardians of our bodies (senses that are wondrously keener in beasts
than they are in men), and so, because of their very nature, men had
the most discerning senses for preserving themselves; later, when they
entered the age of reflection, by which they could make use of counsel so
as to guard their bodies, the senses became less keen.
It is on account of all this that heroic descriptions, as we have them in
Homer, shine forth with such light and splendid clarity that they were
impossible to imitate, much less equal, for all later poets.

Corollary
on heroic customs

708 Because of such heroic natures furnished with such heroic senses, heroic
customs were similarly formed and established.

604
  See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.20.46.
605
  See Descartes, Optics 1.2.
606
 Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.301.
S 607
 Plautus, Aulularia 740; Terence, Adelphoe 178; Cicero, De lege agraria
N 2.25.67; Ad familiares 2.17.4.
L
298
Book Two 299

The heroes, on account of their still recent origins from giants, were to
the highest degree gullish and savage, as we had stated of the Patago-
nians, most restricted in their understanding, most capacious in their
imagination, and most violent in their passions. Because of this, they
must have been clumsy, crude, harsh, savage, arrogant, difficult, and
obstinate in their purposes, and at the same time most tractable when
presented with new and contrasting objects, just as we always observe
in stubborn rustics who yield to any rational motivation stated to them,
but because of their weakness in reflecting will return to their original
purpose as soon as the reason which moved them becomes unstuck from
their minds.
And, by this same deficiency of reflection, they were straightforward,
resentful, magnanimous, and generous; this is how Homer describes
Achilles, the greatest of all the heroes of Greece. From these examples
of heroic customs, Aristotle608 advances the precept in his Poetics that
the heroes whom tragedy takes as its subjects be neither the best nor the
worst, but that they be a mixture of great vices and great virtues. For that
heroism of virtue, which becomes complete in its best idea, belongs to
the philosophers, not the poets. And that heroism of gallantry belongs to
poets who came after Homer,609 who either devised myths of a new cast
or took myths which were originally grave and severe, as accorded with
the founders of nations, and altered, and eventually corrupted, them to
accord with the effeminate customs of later times.
A great proof of this, which as the same time must be a great canon for
the historical mythology upon which are reasoning, is Achilles. On ac-
count of Briseis being taken from him by Agamemnon, he makes such
a clamor that it fills heaven and Earth and yields material sufficient for
the entire Iliad from start to finish, and yet he does not show in the entire
Iliad even the slightest sense of amorous passion from being deprived
of her.610 And Menelaus, who on account of Helen moved all of Greece
against Troy, does not show throughout that entire long and great war
even the smallest sign of amorous distress or jealousy that she is being
enjoyed by Paris, who seized her from him.
All that has been stated in these three corollaries on heroic sentences, 709
descriptions, and customs pertains to the Discovery of the True Homer,
a discovery which will be made in the following book.611

608
 Aristotle, Poetics 13, 1453a7–12 and Poetics 15, 1454b8–14.
609
 In the Scienza nuova prima (§280), Vico explicitly names Moschus (fl. 150
BCE) and Anacreon (c. 582–485 BCE)
610
  Here Vico shows himself to be a pioneer of the thesis that emotions that are
often assumed to be universally present in human cultures (e.g., “amorous pas-
sion”) are not necessarily so. Rather, Vico implies, such emotions have a history;
they should not be taken for granted.
611
  For the sentences, see §§825, 828, 895. For the descriptions, see §§785, 827,
894. For the customs, see §786 and §829.
 300 The New Science

On Poetic Cosmography

710 Just as the theological poets posited as principles in physics the sub-
stances which they imagined were divine, so they described a cosmogra-
phy in agreement with this physics, positing a world formed of gods of
the heavens and gods of the underworld (called in Latin dii superi and
dii inferi) and of the gods positioned in between heaven and Earth (who
must have been the gods called at first in Latin medioxumi).612
711 The first place of this world they contemplated was the heavens, and
the heavenly things must have been for the Greeks the first μαθήματα
[mathēmata]—that is, “sublime things”—and must have been the first
θεωρήματα [theōrēmata]—that is, “divine things for contemplation.” The
word in Latin for the contemplation of these things was derived from
those regions of heaven called templa caeli, which the augurs designated
for taking the auspices, for divining from the trajectories of stars falling
at night (hence for Bochart613 the name Zoroastrian means “contempla-
tor of stars”).
712 There was for the first poets no heaven higher than the heights of the
mountains, where the giants because of the first lightning bolts of Jove
settled after their wild wandering: this is the heaven which reigned on
Earth and, subsequent to this starting point, made for great benefits for
humankind, as was fully explained above [§§64, 379].
Hence, they must have deemed that the heavens were the peaks of those
mountains, and from the acuity of these mountains the word in Latin,
caelum [“heaven”], came to be used also for a chisel, the instrument for
engraving in stone or metal; so too in exactly this way children imagine
that the mountains are columns which support the canopy of heaven; so
too Arabs have given these principles of cosmography in the Koran. Two
of these columns continued later as those “of Heracles,” as we will see
more fully below [§§726, 750] (the original word in Latin, columen, must
have been a prop or stay, and later came to be the rounded columns of
architecture). It was aloft in a canopy of this sort, says Thetis to Achilles
in Homer,614 that Jove along with the other gods went to feast on Mount
Atlas.
Thus, as we stated above [§399] when reasoning upon the giants, that
myth of war made by the giants on heaven and their piling up the high-
est mountains, Ossa on Pelion and Olympus on Ossa, so as to scale to
the heavens and to cast out the gods, this must have been invented after
Homer. For in the Iliad,615 certainly, he always tells of the gods situated

612
 Plautus, Cistellaria 6.11; Apuleius, De dogmata Platonis 1.11.204; Servius,
Commentary on Aeneid 3.134.
613
  On Bochart, see the note at §62.
S 614
 Homer, Iliad 1.423–424.
N 615
 Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484; 5.360, 387.
L
300
Book Two 301

on the peak of Mount Olympus, whereby it would suffice to shake Olym-

pus alone, so as to make the gods fall. Nor does this myth, although the
Odyssey refers to it, accord well with the Odyssey,616 for in that poem the
underworld is no deeper than a ditch, the place where Ulysses sees and
reasons with the heroes who have passed over to there. Hence, inasmuch
as the Homer of the Odyssey had a curtailed idea of the underworld, it is
necessary that he would have had a proportionally curtailed idea of the
heavens, conforming to the one held by the Homer who is author of the
Iliad; consequently, it is demonstrated that this myth is not from Homer,
as we promised to demonstrate above.
In this heaven, the gods at first reigned on Earth and consorted with 713
heroes, following the order of the natural theogony reasoned upon above
[§317], starting with Jove.
In this heaven, right was rendered on earth by Astraea, crowned in ears
of grain and additionally furnished with a balance, for the first human
justice was administered by the heroes for men with the first agrarian
law, as we have seen above [§§265, 597, 604], insofar as men sensed first,
weight, then measure, and, quite late, number, on which reason settled
last of all.617 Thus, Pythagoras, because he understood no things more
abstracted from bodies than numbers, posited the essence of the human
soul in number.618
Through this heaven, the heroes went riding on horseback, as does
Bellerophon on Pegasus,619 retained in Latin in the expression volitare
equo620 [“to fly by horse”] for “going riding on horseback.”
In this heaven, Juno whitens the Milky Way621 with milk, not with her
own, for she is sterile, but with that of the mothers of the families who
nursed legitimate offspring on account of those heroic nuptials whose
numinous presence was Juno.
In this heaven, the gods were carried on high in carts of poetic gold, for
whose grain it was called the golden age.
Within this heaven, wings were used, but not to fly or to signify swiftness
of ingenuity. Hence, they were the wings of Hymen, who is the same as
the heroic Love; of Astraea; of the Muses; of Pegasus; of Saturn; of

616
 Homer, Odyssey 11.36–43.
617
  On the necessarily abstract nature of number, see §642. For the triplet “mea-
sure, number, weight,” see Wisdom 11:21.
618
  See Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 8.1.25.
619
  See Hesiod, Theogony 319; Pindar, Olympiad 13.63; Apollodorus,
Epitome 2.3.2.
620
  Vico may be thinking of volare equo, as in Virgil, Aeneid 12.650–621
or of equites volitare, as in Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.239, and Tacitus,
Annals 15.58.2.
621
  On the “Milky Way,” see Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.9 and Pau-
sanias, Description of Greece 9.25.2.
 302 The New Science

Fame; of Mercury winged both on his temples and his heels, and whose
caduceus is winged, the one with which he brought from this heaven the
first agrarian law to the rebelling plebeians in the valleys, as was stated
above [§604]; of the dragon, Draco, for the Gorgon is also winged on
her temples, signifying neither ingenuity nor flight. So, it was in this
heaven that wings were used, but to signify heroic rights, all of which
are founded in their claim to the auspices, as was fully demonstrated
above [§488].
In this heaven, Prometheus steals fire from the sun, which the heroes
must have made with flint stone and applied to the thorny underbrush
dried out on the mountains by the burning summer sun.
From this heaven, Vulcan fell because of a kick from Jove.
From this heaven, Phaethon fell from the chariot of the sun.
From this heaven, the apple of discord fell. This myth has been com-
pletely explained above [§§579, 650–652].
And from this heaven must finally have fallen the ancilia, the shields sa-
cred to the Romans.
714 The first of the deities of the underworld which the theological po-
ets imagined was water, and the first water was that of the perennial
fountains which they called “Styx” and by which the gods swore, as was
stated above [§527]. Hence, perhaps, Plato622 opined that the center of the
earth was an abyss of waters.
Now, Homer623 in the contest of the gods makes Pluto fear that Nep-
tune will open up the earth with earthquakes and leave the underworld
exposed to men and gods. However, given that the abyss is in the deepest
entrails of the earth, earthquakes would have done the complete oppo-
site: the underworld would have been submerged and completely covered
over with water. This is what we had promised above [§634] to demon-
strate, that this allegory of Plato poorly accords with the myth.
On account of what has been stated, the earliest underworld must have
been no deeper than the spring of the fountains, and the earliest deities
of these fountains was believed to be Diana, of whom poetic history re-
counts as having three forms, for she was Diana in heaven, the huntress
Cynthia on Earth, and Proserpine in the underworld.
715 The idea of the underworld was extended by burial, whence the poets
call the grave “an underworld,” an expression also used in the Sacred
Books.624 As a result, the underworld was no deeper than a ditch, where

622
  See Plato, Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b.
623
 Homer, Iliad 20.57–65.
S 624
  See for example, Genesis 37:35, Numbers 16:30–33, Job 10:21–22, Proverbs
N 27:30, Ecclesiastes 12:5, Isaiah 14:15, Ezekiel 32:21.
L
302
Book Two 303

Ulysses in Homer625 sees the underworld and therein the souls of the
heroes having passed away. For in this underworld were imagined the
Elysian fields626 where, in connection with burial, the souls of the buried
enjoy eternal peace. And the Elysian fields are the blessed seat of the
gods, the Manes—that is, the good souls of the dead.
Later, the underworld had depth no greater than the height of a furrow: 716
this is where Ceres—that is, the same Proserpine who is the seed of the
grain—is abducted by the god Pluto, and stays there for six months, re-
turning later to see the light of the heavens. By this will later be explained
[§721] the golden bough with which Aeneas descends into the under-
world, which Virgil627 devised to give continuity to the heroic metaphor
of the golden apple, which we have found above [§§539, 540, 544, 546] to
be ears of grain.
Finally, the underworld was taken as the plains and valleys (opposed 717
to the heights of a heaven) situated in the mountains, where those scat-
tered in their infamous liaisons remained. Hence, the god of this un-
derworld is Erebus, called the son of Chaos—that is, the confusion of
human seed—and he is the father of civil night, of the night-darkening
family names, just as heaven is illuminated by the civil light by which the
heroes are called brilliant. In this underworld runs the river, Lethe—that
is, the river of oblivion—for such men left no name for themselves to
their posterity, just as Glory in heaven makes eternal the name of these
shining heroes.
Consequently, Mercury, as was stated above [§§604, 688] concerning his
character, carries into this underworld the agrarian law with his rod and
calls forth souls from the Orcus who devours all. This is the civil history
preserved by Virgil in those words,
. . . hac ille animas evocat Orco628
[“. . . with this he calls forth the souls from Orcus”].

He calls the lives of lawless and bestial men from their wild state. This
state devours men in their entirety, for they leave nothing of themselves
to their posterity. Hence, later mages tried to work magic with wands in
the empty belief that with them they could raise the dead, and the Ro-
man praetor struck slaves on the shoulders with a staff and, in doing so,
made them become free, almost as if with this they made them return
from death to life.
And sorcerous mages use in their sorcery the wands which the wise
mages of Persian used for divining the auspices. Hence, divinity was at-
tributed to these wands, and they were considered by the nations as gods

625
 Homer, Odyssey 11.36–43.
626
 Homer, Odyssey 4.563–568 and Virgil, Aeneid 6.638–641.
627
 Virgil, Aeneid 6.137.
628
  See Virgil, Aeneid 4.242.
 304 The New Science

that could make miracles (as Trogus Pompeius629 makes certain for us in
the abridgement of his work by Justin).
718 This underworld is guarded by Cerberus,630 by the doglike practices of a
Venus lacking decent regard for others. And Cerberus is triple-throated—
that is, he has an enormous gullet, in keeping with three as a superlative,
as we more fully observed above in another place [§§491, 535]—and so,
like Orcus, he devours everything. And, when he emerges up onto the
earth, the sun turns backwards: when he enters in the heroic city, the civil
light of the heroes turns back to civil night.
719 At the bottom of this underworld runs the river Tartarus,631 where the
damned are tormented: Ixion turns his wheel, Sisyphus rolls his stone,
Tantalus dies of both hunger and thirst, a myth which was completely
explained above [§583]. And the river which tortures with thirst is the
same river where there is no contentment, which is what Acheron and
Phlegethon signify.632
To this underworld, mythologists ignorant of these things later ban-
ished Tityus and Prometheus. However, it was in heaven that they were
chained to a rock where their entrails were devoured by an eagle flying in
the mountains, the torment coming from superstition belonging to the
auspices, as we have explained above [§387].
720 All these myths, the philosophers later discovered to be most congru-
ous for meditating upon and explaining their moral and metaphysical
things. And this awakened Plato633 to understand three divine punish-
ments, which only the gods give and which men cannot give: the pun-
ishment of oblivion, the punishment of infamy, and the punishment of
remorse by which a guilty conscience torments us. And he understood
that it was through the via purgativa of the passions of the spirit which
torment men (which he understood by the underworld of the theologi-
cal poets) that one enters upon the via unitiva, along which the human
mind goes toward God by means of contemplation of the eternal divine
things (which he interprets to be what the theological poets understood
by their Elysian fields).
721 However, it was with ideas entirely different from these moral and
metaphysical ones (different insofar as the ideas which the theological
poets stated were political, as was naturally necessary for them to do as
the founders of nations) that the founders of gentile peoples descended
into the underworld.
To there descended the Orpheus, who founded the Greek nation; and
although forbidden in his departure from turning to look back, he did

629
  See Trogus Pompeius, Historiae philippicae 43.3.3.
630
  See Virgil, Aeneid 6.417.
S 631
  See Homer, Iliad 8.13–14; Virgil, Aeneid 6.577–579.
N 632
 Servius, Commentary on Aeneid 6.107.
L 633
  See Plato, Republic 10 (614a–621b) and Laws 10.12 (933e–934a).
304
Book Two 305

so turn and lost his wife, Eurydice, returning to the infamous sharing of
women in common.634
To there descended the Heracles of whom every nation recounts some
version as the one who founded it, and there he descended so as to free
Theseus, who founded Athens635 and who himself descended there so as
to lead out Proserpine—who, as we have stated, is the same as Ceres—so
as to bring back the seeds ripened into grain.
However, this descent is explained most fully of all later by Virgil, who
in the first six books of the Aeneid sings of the political hero and in the
second six sings of the military hero; and it is by his profound knowl-
edge [scienza] of heroic antiquity that he tells us that Aeneas made his
descent in keeping with the advice and guidance of the Cumean Sybil
[§§381, 464] (one of whom we have stated every gentile nation had, and
the names of twelve of whom have come down to us), meaning that he
descended as a result of divination, which is the commonplace wisdom
of gentile humanity. In keeping with a bloody religion, Aeneas—who is
pious in the piety professed by the most ancient heroes in the savagery
and brutality of the recent bestial origins which was demonstrated above
[§517]—sacrificed his associate, Misenus—that is, through that cruel
right which, we also stated above, is the right which the heroes held over
their earliest associates, upon which we also reasoned above [§558]; from
there he carries on into the ancient forest—that is, the earth everywhere
uncultivated and wooded. He throws a sleep-inducing morsel to Cer-
berus, who then falls asleep, just as Orpheus had put him to sleep with
the sound of his lyre—a lyre which, as we have shown above [§§523, 615],
was the laws—and just as Heracles bound him with the knot by which
he defeated Antaeus—that is, with the first agrarian law conforming to
what we have stated about it above [§§265–266, 597, 604]—and it was
on account of his insatiable hunger that Cerberus was devised as be-
ing triple-throated with a capacious gullet expressed by the superlative,
three, as was explained above [§§491, 535, 718]).
Thus Aeneas descends into the underworld, which we found [§716] was
originally no deeper than the height of a ditch; and he presents to Dis
(the god of heroic riches, of poetic gold, of harvest, the Dis who was the
same as Pluto, who abducted Proserpine, who was the same as the Ceres
who is the goddess of grain) the golden bough: here, the great poet636
takes the metaphor of the golden apple—which we found above [§§539,
540, 544, 546, 716] to be ears of grain—and transfers it to the golden
bough as the harvest. Where this bough is torn off, another comes in
its place,637 for no subsequent gathering of a harvest comes until a year
after the previous gathering has been made. And when the gods are so

634
  See Hyginus, Fables 164; Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.24; Pausa-
nias, Description of Greece 9.30.3.
635
 Hyginus, Fables 79; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.5.12.
636
  That is, Virgil.
637
  See Virgil, Aeneid 6.143–144.
 306 The New Science

pleased and so willing, the bough comes easily into the hand of the one
who seizes it, but otherwise there is no strength in the world which is able
to tear it off, for grain comes forth naturally where God wills; and where
God does not so will, there is no human industry which is able to gather
in its harvest. From there Aeneas carries on through the middle of the
underworld to the Elysian fields, for the heroes, by remaining settled in
the cultivated fields, later in death enjoyed with burial eternal peace, as
we have explained above [§529]. And from there Aeneas sees his ances-
tors and descendants, for it was with the religion of burial—which the
poets called “the underworld,” as was also seen above [§715], that they
founded the first genealogies from which history took its start, as was
also stated above [§529].
722 The earth of the theological poets was sensed as connected with the
guarding of boundaries, whence it has its name, “earth.” The heroic ori-
gin of this name is preserved in Latin by the term territorium, which sig-
nifies the district within which power is exercised; the Latin grammarians
are in error in believing that territorium is derived from the terrendo [“to
terrify”] of the lictors, that terror of the fasces by which they removed
the throng to make way for the magistrates. Instead, in the times in which
the term territorium came into being, there were not great throngs in
Rome (which, during two hundred and fifty years of rule, subdued more
than twenty peoples and extended their power no more than twenty
miles, as we heard stated above by Varro [§88]).
Therefore, the origin of this term is that these boundaries of the cul-
tivated fields out of which later arose civil powers that were guarded
by Vesta with bloody religions, as was seen above [§§549, 690]; here, we
found that the Latin Vesta is the same as the Greek Cybele or Berecyn-
thia, who is crowned with towers—that is, by lands on fortified sites.
From this crown, what is called the orbis terrarum started to form—that
is “the world of nations”—and later this was sphere was enlarged by the
cosmographers and called the orbis mundanus, and in one word, mundus,
is expressed the world of nature.
723 This poetic world was divided into three realms—that is, three
r­egions—first, that of Jove in the heavens; second, that of Saturn on
Earth; and third, that of Pluto in the underworld—and Pluto was called
Dis, the god of heroic riches, of the first gold, of grain, for the cultivated
fields make for the true riches of peoples.
724 Thus, the world of the theological poets was formed of four civil ele-
ments, which the physicists later took as natural elements, as was stated
more fully just above [§690]: these were the elements of Jove—that is,
air—and Vulcan—that is, fire—and Cybele—that is, earth—and the
underworld Diana—that is, water. For Neptune was recognized late by
the poets because, as was stated above [§634], the nations descended late
to the coasts. And the word Ocean was used for any sea of unlimited
S prospect, and land that it encircled was called an island, as Homer calls
N
L
306
Book Two 307

Aeolia the island surrounded by Ocean. It was from this Ocean that must
have come, as we will demonstrate just below [§742], the steeds of Rhesus
made pregnant by Zephyr, the Greek west wind, and must have been
born the horses of Achilles also made pregnant by Zephyr. Later, geog-
raphers observed that the whole Earth is encircled by seas like a great
island and called all the seas which encircle the Earth “the ocean.”
Finally, in this time, they started from the idea by which they called 725
any short incline a mundus (whereby the phrases in mundo est638 and in
proclivi est639 meant “it is easy”), and later they had the idea by which all
that by which a woman is cleaned [monda], refined, and put together was
called mundus muliebris640 [“feminine adornment”]. Later, they under-
stood that the Earth and heavens have a spherical shape in which every
part of a circumference inclines towards every other part, and that the
ocean bathes the Earth on every side, and that the whole is adorned with
countless, varied, diverse sensible forms; given all this, the universe was
called mundus, which conveys in a most beautiful and sublime metaphor
that by which nature adorns itself.

On Poetic Astronomy

This system of the world endured up until the time of Homer, where it 726
was somewhat further developed: in the Iliad, Homer641 always tells us
the gods dwell on Mount Olympus, and we have heard [§712] what he
makes Thetis, mother of Achilles, say to Achilles, that the gods went to
feast on Mount Atlas.642 Thus, the highest mountains of the Earth must
have been believed in the time of Homer to be columns which supported
the heavens, just as Abyla and Calpe on the Straits of Gibraltar contin-
ued to be called the Columns of Heracles, Heracles who succeeded Atlas
when he tired of supporting any more the heavens upon his shoulders.

An astronomical physico-
philological demonstration
of the uniformity of principles in all
the ancient gentile nations

However, as the undefined strength of the human mind developed a 727

great deal more and as contemplation of heavens with a view to taking

638
 Festus, De verborum significatu 2–3.
639
 Plautus, Asinaria 663; Terence, Andria 701.
640
 Festus, De verborum significatu 20–21.
641
 Homer, Iliad 1.18, 221–222, 425–426; 2.484; 5.360, 567.
642
 Homer, Iliad 1.423–424.
 308 The New Science

the auspices obliged peoples to observe the heavens at all times, the heav-
ens rose much higher in the minds of nations, and, with the heavens, the
gods and heroes rose much higher.
Here, we are aided in the discovery of a poetic astronomy by making
use of the following three pieces of erudition from philology. The first
is that astronomy came to be in the world from the Chaldean peoples;
the second is that the Phoenicians brought from the Chaldeans643 to
the Egyptians the practice of using the quadrant and the science of the
elevation of the polestar; the third is that the Phoenicians must have
accepted from these same Chaldeans gods who dwell in the stars, and
subsequently brought them to the Greeks.
These three pieces of erudition from philology should be composed with
the following two truths from philosophy: first, the civil truth that unless
nations are unbound from religion by the late stages of liberty (which do
not arrive unless they are in the late stages of decadence), they naturally
withhold accepting foreign divinities; second, the physical truth that, be-
cause of a trick of the eye, the planets seem larger to us than the stars.
728 Having posited these principles, let us state that among all gentile na-
tions, in the Near East, in Egypt, in Greece, and even, as we will see,
in Latium, astronomy came into being from commonplace origins that
were uniform: through a uniform allocation, the gods were elevated to
the planets and the heroes were assigned to constellations, for the planets
appear much larger than the stars. Hence, the Phoenicians found among
the Greeks an array of gods ready to revolve with the planets and an ar-
ray of heroes ready to compose constellations, and this facility was the
same for the Phoenicians as it was for the Greeks, who later discovered
gods and heroes among the peoples of Latium. And one is allowed to
say, based on these examples, that the Phoenicians found the same facil-
ity among the Egyptians as they did among the Greeks.
In this fashion, the heroes (along with the hieroglyphs signifying either
their rights or their insignia, as well as a good number of the greater
gods) were raised to the heavens as an array ready through learned as-
tronomy to give their names to heavenly bodies which previously did not
have names, to give form, as it were, to the matter of the stars—that is,
the constellations—as well as of the planets.
729 Thus, starting from a commonplace astronomy, the earliest peoples
wrote on the heavens the history of their gods, of their heroes. And there
was retained that eternal property that the matter worthy of history is
the memory of men filled with divinity and with heroism, the former on
account of their works of ingenuity and recondite wisdom, the latter on
account of their works of virtue and commonplace wisdom; so, poetic
history offered learned astronomers the motive to depict in the heavens
heroes and heroic hieroglyphs with one group of stars rather than an-
S
N 643
  See §§60, 474.
L
308
Book Two 309

other, with one part of the heavens rather than another, and to connect
the major gods with some planets rather than others (and the names of
these gods later came to be our names for these planets).
And, to speak about a thing pertaining more to the planets than to 730
the constellations, certainly Diana, the goddess of the modesty preserved
in nuptial couples, who lies completely silent all night with the sleeping
Endymion, was connected with the moon, which gives light at night.
Venus, the goddess of civil beauty, is connected with the most radiant,
gay, and beautiful planet of all.
Mercury, the divine herald clothed in civil light along with the many
wings—the hieroglyphic for nobility—in which he is adorned while
bringing the agrarian law to the rebelling clients, is located on a planet
which is so covered over by the rays of the sun that it is rarely seen.
Apollo, the god of that civil light whence the heroes are called “brilliant,”
is connected with the sun, source of natural light. Mars, so bloody, is
connected with a planet similar in color. Jove, king and father of gods
and men, is above all of them, but below Saturn, for as father of both
Jove and Time, Saturn takes a yearly orbit longer than the other planets;
as a result, wings poorly suit him if by forced allegory they mean to sig-
nify the quickness of time (given that Saturn takes a year that is much
slower than all the other planets), but he brought those wings to heaven
along with his scythe, which signifies not the reaping of the lives of men,
but the reaping of the harvests by which the heroes counted years, and
the wings signify the claims of the heroes over the cultivated fields.
Finally, the planets, going along with carts of gold—that is, the carts of
the grain—with which they went through heaven when heaven was on
Earth, now rotate in their assigned orbits.
Through all that upon which we have reasoned here, one has to say that 731
the dominion and influence which the stars and planets are believed to
have over sublunary objects was attributed to them from what prevailed
in both gods and heroes when they were on Earth.
So much does this influence depend on natural causes!

On Poetic Chronology

In conformity with this astronomy, the theological poets offered start- 732
ing points of their chronology. For Saturn, who was so called from satis
(from the Latin word meaning “sown ground”644) and who was called
Κρόνος [Kronos] among the Greeks (for whom χρόνος [chronos] means
“time”), gives us to understand that the earliest nations, which were com-
posed entirely of rustics, started their reckoning years with the harvest

644
  On the alleged derivation of Saturn from satis, see the note at §3.
 310 The New Science

they made in gathering grain, the only or, at least, the major thing over
which rustics travail all year. And at first mute, they must have reckoned
years by as many ears of grain or by as many straws or by making as
many gestures of reaping as were the years they meant to signify. Hence,
there are two passages in Virgil (more learned about heroic antiquity
than anyone else ever was), the first of which is infelicitous and, with a
mimetic art of the highest kind, expresses infelicitously with a contorted
order the infelicity of the earliest times in expressing themselves,
Post aliquot mea regna videns mirabor aristas645
[“After several ears of corn, I will look in wonder upon my regime”],

where post aliquot aristas means post aliquot annos [“after several years”];
the second passage is somewhat more explicit, saying
Tertia messis erat646
[“It was in the third harvest”],

just as even today rustics of Tuscany (a nation held in high esteem in all
of Italy for its reputation for speaking) instead of saying, for example,
“three years,” say “we have harvested three times.” And the Romans pre-
served this heroic history upon which we are reasoning here—that of sig-
nifying a poetic year with harvests—by giving the name annona [“grain
supply”] to those concerned with the surplus, principally, of grain.647
733 Consequently, we are told that Heracles was the founder of the Olym-
piads, the period of time which had currency among the Greeks, from
whom we have all that we do have from gentile antiquity. For he set fire
to the forests so as to reduce them to the fields for planting, from which
they gathered the harvest, by which they originally reckoned years. And
these games must have started with the Nemeans to celebrate the victory
brought back from the fire-spewing lion of Nemea, a lion which we have
interpreted above [§§3, 4, 540] as the great woods of the Earth. They
subsumed the Earth under the idea of the strongest animal (so much toil
was needed to domesticate it!). They gave it the name “lion,” and later
this name was transferred to the strongest of animals, as was reasoned
upon above in the section on the Beginnings of Gentile Coats of Arms.648
And the lion was assigned by the astronomers to the house in the zodiac
connected to the house of Astraea, crowned in ears of grain.
This is the cause of images of lions and images of the sun frequently be-
ing seen at Roman circuses, of the turning posts at those circuses—which
must have originally been turning posts made of grain—being seen

645
  See Virgil, Eclogues 1.69.
646
  See Ovid, Heroides 6.57.
647
 Voss, Etymologicon, p. 36.
S 648
  No section of the Scienza nuova bears this name. The reference is likely
N to §484.
L
310
Book Two 311

topped with eggs, of the circus itself being a lucus—that is, a clearing
which is the deforested eye, as was reasoned upon above in the section
on giants. It is here that the astronomers later affixed this significance
to the elliptical figure described by the sun in the yearly elliptical orbit
it makes. This significance would be more congruous with the egg that
Kneph carries in his mouth than the one that Manetho gives it, that the
egg signifies the genesis of the universe.
Therefore, it is with the natural theogony upon which we have rea- 734
soned herein above [§§69, 317, 489, 634] that we determine the temporal
course. In the times that correspond to the occasions of certain early
necessities or advantages of humankind, which everywhere took its start
from the religions, this course is the AGE OF GODS, which must have
lasted at least nine hundred years, starting from the various versions of
Jove among the gentile nations—that is, from the time when the heav-
ens cast forth lightning bolts after the Universal Flood. And the twelve
major gods imagined within this time, starting with Jove, are posited as
twelve smaller epochs and reduce poetic history to a temporal certainty.
So, for example, Deucalion, who mythical history tells us came imme-
diately after the Flood and the giants, founds the family with his wife,
Pyrrha, by means of marriage: he was born in the Greek imagination
during the age of Juno, goddess of solemnized nuptials. Hellenus649
founds the Greek language and, through his three sons, divides it up into
three dialects: he was born in the age of Apollo, god of song in whose
time poetic speech must have started in verse. Heracles undertakes the
great task of killing the Hydra or Nemean lion—that is, reducing the
earth to planted fields—and bringing back from Hesperia the golden
apples—that is, brings back the harvests, an enterprise worthy of history,
not pomegranates, a deed worthy of a dandy: he becomes distinct in the
age of Saturn, god of plantings. So too Perseus must have shined in the
age of Minerva—that is, during the birth of civil power—given that his
shield bears the head of Medusa, which is the shield of Minerva. And, fi-
nally, Orpheus must have been born after the age of Mercury: by singing
to the wild beasts of Greece of the strength of the gods of the auspices,
the science of which was held by the heroes, he established again the
Greek heroic nations and gave them their name, HEROIC TIMES, for
it was in such times that there were actually heroic contests of this sort;
hence, along with Orpheus flourished Linus, Amphion, Museus, and the
other poet-heroes; among them, Amphion raises with stones—that is,
with plebeians (Latin retains this association in using lapis [“stone”] to
mean a dull-witted person)650—the walls of Thebes three hundred years
after Cadmus had founded Thebes, exactly as it was three hundred years
after the founding of Rome that Appius, grandson of the decemvir, sang
to the Roman plebs (whom, as we stated in another place above [§§661,

649
  On Hellen, the son of Deucalion and mythical father of all the Greeks, see
Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.38.1, and Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7.2–3.
650
 Terence, The Self-Tormentor 831, 917.
 312 The New Science

681], AGITABAT CONNUBIA MORE FERARUM651 [“practiced mar-

riage in the manner of wild animals”], animals that are the wild beasts
of Orpheus) of the strength of the gods of the auspices, the science of
which was held by the nobles, and so reduced the plebs to duty and con-
firmed the Roman constitution as heroic.
735 Furthermore, here we must take note of the four species of anachro-
nism contained under the genus of events posited too early or too late.
The first is that of positing times that must have been filled with deeds
as void of them. So, it was during the age of the gods, as we have found,
that there were the origins of almost all the human civil things, and
yet the most learned Varro runs through this age as if it were a time of
darkness.652
The second is that of positing times which must have been void of deeds
as filled with them; so it was with the age of heroes, which ran for two
hundred years and was considered filled with deeds on the basis of the
false opinion that myths are to be discovered in the forges of the heroic
poets and, above all, of Homer, deeds which ought to be returned from
an age void of them to the age of the gods.
The third is that of positing times as a unit that ought to be kept sepa-
rate, so that within the lifetime of just one man, Orpheus, Greece does
not pass from wild beasts to the splendor of the Trojan War. This is the
monstrosity of chronology that we made it possible to see in the Annota-
tions on the Chronological Table [§79].
The fourth is that of positing times as separate which ought to be consid-
ered a unit: so, the Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy are thought to have
been conducted more than three hundred years after the wanderings of
the heroes, whereas it was by these very heroes that these colonies were
conducted with their wanderings and as a result of their wanderings.

Chronological canon
for giving the beginnings of universal
history, which must have begun its course prior
to the monarchy of Ninus, from which that
universal history is presumed to start

736 On the strength, therefore, of what we have called a natural theogony

(this has given what we have called a rational poetic chronology) and by
means of the discovery of the aforementioned kinds of anachronisms in

 Livy, Ab urbe condita 4.2.6.

651

  The threefold division of obscure, fabulous, and historical times comes from
652

S Varro’s lost work Antiquitates rerum divinarum, by way of Censorinus’s De die

N natali 21.1. Censorinus was a Roman grammarian of the third century CE.
L
312
Book Two 313

poetic history noted above, now we will establish the following canon for
chronology for giving the beginnings of universal history, which must
have begun its course prior to the monarchy of Ninus, from which that
universal history is presumed to start. At first, humankind was dispersed
because it was lost in the Great Forest of the Earth: this wild wandering
started in Mesopotamia, as we have postulated with discretion in the
Axioms,653 and for the impious race of Shem in Near Eastern Asia, ran
its course in only one hundred years, and for the two other races of Ham
and Japheth in the rest of the world, ran its course in two hundred years.
After this, because of the many religions of Jove which we proved above
[§§47, 193, 380] were spread after the Universal Flood throughout the
earliest gentile nations, the princes of nations started to settle, each in the
land where on account of fortune they were discovered to be dispersed,
the nine-hundred-year AGE OF THE GODS ran its course, at the end
of which, because they were dispersed throughout the Earth to search
for food and water, which are not found on the shores of the sea, the
nations that had all been founded inland must have descended to the
coasts, whence came to the Greek mind the idea of Neptune, whom we
found [§634] was the last of the twelve major divinities. Similarly, among
the peoples of Latium, nine hundred years ran their course from the age
of Saturn—that is, the golden age in Latium—to Ancus Marcius’s com-
ing down to the sea to take Ostia.654
Eventually, two hundred years ran their course, which the Greeks
counted the HEROIC AGE, starting with the corsair raids of King Mi-
nos, followed by the naval expedition that Jason made to Pontus, and
later by the Trojan War, and ending with the wandering of heroes up
until the return of Ulysses to Ithaca.
It was thus that Tyre, the capital of Phoenicia, must have been brought
from inland to the shore and, subsequently, more than a thousand years
after the flood, to an island near the Phoenician sea. And because Tyre
was celebrated prior to the heroic age of the Greeks for its seafaring and
for its colonies spread throughout the Mediterranean and even beyond
on the Ocean, this comes to be clear proof that the beginning of all
of humankind was in the Near East, and that the earliest nations were
spread throughout the remaining parts of the world by, first, the wild
wandering throughout the inland places of the Earth; second, the heroic
law by both land and sea; and, finally, the maritime trade of the Phoe-
nicians. These beginnings for the migrations of peoples, conforming
to what we proposed in an Axiom,655 seem more reasonable that those
which Wolfgang Lazius656 has imagined.

653
  Axioms 42 and 99.
654
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.33.9
655
  Axiom 100.
656
  Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565), physician and historiographer of Ferdinand
I, and author of De aliquot gentium migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, lin-
 314 The New Science

737 Now, on account of the uniform course that all the nations make,
which was proved above [§727] by the uniformity by which the gods
were raised to the stars, brought by the Phoenicians from the Near East
to Greece and to Egypt, one has to say that the reign of the Chaldeans
in the Near East must have run its course over just as much time; as a
result, it went from Zoroaster to Ninus, who founded the first monarchy
in the world—that is, the monarchy of Assyria—and, similarly, from
Hermes Trismegistus to Sesostris—that is, the Ramses in Tacitus,657
who founded a monarchy which was also quite great. And because
both were inland nations, they must have gone from divine governance
through heroic governance, and, subsequently, through popular liberty
to arrive at monarchy, which is the last form of human governance in
order for the Egyptian division of ages through which the world ran
its course prior to them to stand. For, as we will demonstrate below
[§§1006, 1008, 1104], monarchy cannot come to be except in the unre-
strained popular liberty to which the optimates come to subject their
power during civil wars; when later this power is divided up among
peoples into its least parts, the whole of it is easily claimed by those
who, with their partisanship for popular liberty, eventually emerge as
monarchs.
However, Phoenicia, because it was a maritime nation enriched by trade,
must have maintained itself in popular liberty—that is, the first form of
human governance.
738 Thus, with the understanding alone, without any need of memory
(which has nothing to do unless the senses supply it with what has been
done), it seems that we have given universal history its beginnings, both
for ancient Egypt and in the Near East, which is more ancient than
Egypt, and within the Near East, the beginnings of monarchy in Assyria.
Up until now, in absence of the course taken prior to this monarchy, with
the many and varied causes that go into the forming of monarchy as the
last of the three forms of civil governance, it has come into history fully
born at one stroke, like a frog born in a summer shower.
739 In this fashion, chronology comes to have certainty, in the progression
of customs and deeds by which humankind must proceed, for, through
an Axiom658 posited above, chronology has started its teaching where
its subject matter takes its start: from Κρόνος [Kronos] (from whom the
Greeks derived the word χρόνος [chronos], “time”), Saturn, who counts
the years in terms of harvests; and from Urania, who contemplates the
heavens with a view to taking the auguries; and from Zoroaster, who
contemplates the stars so as to offer oracles from the falling stars (these
were the first μαθήματα [mathēmata], the first θεωρήματα [theōrēmata],
the first sublime or divine things which the nations contemplated and

guarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis (first edition 1557).

S 657
 Tacitus, Annals 2.60.3.
N 658
  Axiom 106.
L
314
Book Two 315

observed, as was stated above [§§391, 477, 711]). And later with the as-
cent of Saturn into the seventh sphere, thenceforth Urania became the
contemplator of the planets and stars, and the Chaldeans, with the ad-
vantage of their boundless plains, became astronomers and astrologers,
measuring the motions and observing the aspects of these planets and
stars, and imagining their influence upon the bodies called “sublunary”
and also, though vacuously, upon the free wills of men. These sciences
retained the first names, which were given to them with complete pro-
priety: the name “astronomy”—that is, the science of the laws of the
stars—and the name “astrology”—that is, the science of the language
of the stars—both of which names signified “divination”; so, from those
aforementioned theorems came the term “theology,” the science of the
language of the gods in their oracles, auspices, and auguries. Hence,
eventually mathematics descended to measure the Earth, whose measure
could not have had certainty without demonstrated measurements of the
heavens; and the first and principal part of such measuring is shown by
the word proper to it, “geometry.”
Because, therefore, those two men do not take their start in their teach- 740
ing where the matter which they treat takes its start (for they start with
the astronomical year which, as was stated above,659 did not come into
being among nations for at least a thousand years and, besides, could
only have made certain for them the conjunctions and oppositions which
constellations and planets make in the heavens, but nothing about things
which take and run their course here on Earth, something upon which
the generous strength of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly is wasted), accordingly,
those two men whose ingenuity is a wonder to behold along with their
stupendous erudition—Joseph Justus Scaliger in his De emendatione
temporum and Denis Pétau in his De doctrina temporum660—because
they fail completely in taking the proper start, bear little fruit for the
beginnings and progress of a universal history.

On Poetic Geography

Now, finally, it remains for us to purify the other eye of poetic history— 741
that is, poetic geography. This purification is done through that prop-
erty of human nature which we counted as one of the Axioms,661 that
“whenever men have no true idea about things which are unfamiliar and
distant, or must explain them to others who have no such idea, they
describe them in terms of their similarity to things which are familiar
and nearby”; so, the corpus of poetic geography as a whole and in its

659
  The reference is to a passage that appears in the 1730 edition, but was de-
leted from the 1744 text.
660
  The work by Scaliger that Vico mentions was published in 1583. Pétau’s text
was published in 1627.
661
  Axiom 2, paraphrased (compare §122).
 316 The New Science

parts came into being from ideas as small as Greece itself,662 and because
the Greeks later went throughout the world, it came to be enlarged into
the larger form in which it remains depicted to us now. And the ancient
geographers were in agreement with the following truth (although later
they did not know how to make use of it), that ancient nations, in taking
themselves to foreign and distant lands, gave names native to themselves
to the cities, mountains, rivers, hills, straits, islands, and promontories.
742 Within Greece, therefore, came into being that part of the East called
Asia, or India; of the West called Europe, or Hesperia; of the North
called Thrace, or Scythia; of the South called Libya, or Mauretania.
Thus, they named the parts of the world after their names for the smaller
world of Greece on account of the likenesses that the Greeks observed
between the places they saw in the world and the ones they saw in Greece.
There is clear proof of this as the cardinal winds, which retain in their
geography the names that they certainly must have had in the first place
within Greece. As a result, the mares of Rhesus663 were impregnated on
the shores of Ocean—we will see [§753] that this is the word for any
sea of unlimited prospect—by Zephyr, the West Wind of Greece, and
also on the shores of Ocean (in the primary signification just stated) the
horses of Achilles must have been conceived by Zephyr; so too were the
mares of Erichthonius said by Aeneas to Achilles to have been impreg-
nated by Boreas, the North Wind of this same Greece.664
This truth about the cardinal winds is confirmed for us by the immense
extension given by the Greek mind (itself developing to an immense ex-
tent) to their Olympus, from the name in Homer’s time for the mountain
where the gods had their abode to the name for the starry heavens which
it continued to have for them.665
743 Given these beginnings for geography, the great peninsula situated
to the east of Greece continued to have the name Asia Minor since the
name “Asia” was transferred to the eastern part of the larger world,
which continued to be called Asia in an unqualified sense.
By contrast, Greece itself, from the perspective of being west of Asia,
was called “Europe”—the Europa whom Jove seized in changing himself
into a bull666—and later the name “Europe” was the great continent dis-
tinct from Asia which went all the way to the ocean in the West.
They called the western part of Greece “Hesperia,” where in the fourth
quarter of the horizon arose at night the star, Hesperus; later, they saw

662
  On the “restricted” character of ancient geography, compare Bacon, Redar-
gutio philosophorum (Works III, 564).
663
  See Homer, Iliad 10.435–437, 474–481.
664
 Homer, Iliad 16.149–151 and Iliad 20.221–225.
665
  See Virgil, Eclogues 6.86, Georgics 1.96, Aeneid 9.106; Ovid, Metamorphoses
S 1.212.
N 666
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.836–875.
L
316
Book Two 317

Italy in the same place, and called it “Hesperia Magna”; and eventually
Spain stood in the same place, and they called it “Hesperia Ultima.”
The Greeks of Italy, by contrast, from their perspective called the part
of Greece east of them across the sea “Ionia,” and the sea between these
two parts of Greece continued to be called the “Ionian Sea”; later, be-
cause it was similarly situated as an Asiatic Greece relative to a native
Greece, native Greeks called Asia Minor, from their perspective east of
them, “Ionia.” And, it is reasonable that it was out of this earlier Ionia
that Pythagoras came to Italy from the Samos which was one of the
islands over which Ulysses was lord; he did not come to Italy from the
Samos belonging to that later Ionia.667
It was from a Thrace which was native to Greece that Mars came, who 744
was certainly a Greek deity, and consequently it was from Thrace that
Orpheus must have come, the earliest of the Greek theological poets.
It was from a Greek Scythia that Anacharsis668 came, who left oracular 745
writings in Greece which must have been similar to the oracles of Zo-
roaster, which need to have originally been an oracular history; hence,
Anacharsis was accepted among the most ancient of the prophetic gods.
These oracles were later translated by imposture into the dogmas of phi-
losophy, just as the Orphic hymns were supposed to be made by Orpheus,
even though they, like the oracles of Zoroaster, have nothing poetic
about them and smell of the schools of Platonism and Pythagoreanism.
Accordingly, it was from this Scythia through a Hyperborea native to
Greece that the two famous oracles, those at Delphi and Dodona, must
have come to Greece, as we suspected in the Notes on the Chronological
Table [§100]. For Anacharsis was killed by his brother Caduidas, because
he tried to institute in Scythia—that is, among the Hyperboreans native
to Greece—humane orders by means of Greek laws. This shows how
much the barbarian philosophy of Van Heurn669 profited him: he did not
even know how to discover such laws for himself!
For these same reasons, consequently, Abaris must also have been a
Scythian (he is said to have written the Scythian oracles, and these ora-
cles can have been none other than the ones called above the oracles of
Anacharsis), and he wrote them in the same Scythia where Idanthyrsus,
who came a long time after, wrote with things themselves. Hence, one
is necessarily given to believe that they must have been written by some
impostor from some time after philosophy was introduced into Greece,
and consequently the oracles of Anacharsis, because of the vanity of the
learned, were accepted as oracles of a recondite wisdom, which have not
come down to us.

667
  See Homer, Iliad 2.634.
668
  Anacharsis, disciple of Solon, mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, Lives and
Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 1.8.
669
  See the note on Van Heurn at §44.
 318 The New Science

746 Zalmoxis was a Getaen (just as Mars was a Getaen) who (as Herodo-
tus670 relates) brought to the Greeks the dogma of the immortality of
the soul.
747 Thus, it was from a Greek India that Bacchus must have come trium-
phant from an Indian East, from some Greek land rich in poetic gold.
And Bacchus comes triumphant upon a chariot golden with grain,
whence he is the tamer of serpents and tigers, just as Heracles is a tamer
of hydras and lions, as was explained above [§§540, 543].
748 Certainly, the name “Morea” has been preserved up until our time as a
term for the Peloponnesus, which proves for us that Perseus, certainly a
Greek hero, made his expeditions within a Mauretania native to Greece,
for the Peloponnesus bears the same relation to Achaea as Africa does
to Europe.
Consequently, Herodotus understood so little of his own antiquities (for
this he is reproved by Thucydides671) that he tells us that Moreans at one
time were white: certainly, the Moreans were white in the Greece of his
time, which even today is called White Morea.
749 Thus, it must have been from the plague from this Mauretania that Aes-
culapius672 saved the island of Cos with his art, for if he had to save it
from a plague from Morocco, he would have had to save Cos from all the
plagues in the world.
750 It was in this Mauretania that Heracles must have shouldered the burden
of the heavens, which Atlas in his old age had grown weary of support-
ing; originally, he was called Atlas for Mount Athos, the stretch of land
dividing Macedonia and Thrace into which Xerxes673 later made a foray;
in that place between Greece and Thrace, there is a river which continues
to be called Atlas.674 Later, when it was observed that in the Strait of
Gibraltar, Mount Abyla and Mount Calpe divide Africa and Europe
by a similar strait of water, it was said that Heracles planted there the
columns which, as we stated above [§§712, 726], supported the heavens,
and the mountain in Africa near that place was called “Atlas.” And in
this fashion, one can make out some verisimilitude in the response which
in Homer675 Thetis makes to her son Achilles, that she is not able to
take his complaint to Jove because he had gone from Olympus with the
other gods to feast on Atlas; this response is based on the opinion, as
we observed above [§§4, 89, 399, 712]), that the gods had their abode on
the peaks of the highest mountains. And if they had been on the Mount

670
 Herodotus, Histories 4.94.
671
  See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.2.
672
  Actually, Hippocrates, as Vico himself states correctly at Scienza nuova
prima §448. For the plague story, see Pliny, Natural History 7.37.123.
673
 Herodotus, Histories 7.22–23.
S 674
  Named by Herodotus at Histories 4.49.
N 675
 Homer, Iliad 1.423–424.
L
318
Book Two 319

Atlas in Africa, it would be too difficult for anyone then to believe, since
Homer676 himself says that even the winged Mercury arrived only with
the greatest difficulty at the island of Calypso located in the Phoenician
Sea, and this island was much closer to Greece than the regime which is
nowadays called Morocco.
Thus, it must have been from a Greek Hesperia that Heracles brought 751
the golden apple to Attica; it was also there that the nymphs called the
Hesperides—that is, the daughters of Atlas—kept safe that golden apple.
Thus, the Eridanus where Phaethon fell must have been the Danube in 752
Greek Thrace, which flows into the Black Sea. Later, when the Greeks
observed that the Po is the other river in the world which, like the Dan-
ube, runs from west to east, they called the Po the “Eridanus,” and the
mythologists made Phaethon’s fall take place in Italy. However, it was
only the things from Greek heroic history, and not those of other na-
tions, which the Greeks fixed in the stars, among which is Eridanus.
Finally, the Greeks went as far as the Ocean, and there extended their 753
narrow idea of ocean to any sea which was of unlimited prospect (hence,
Homer677 said that Aeolia was girded by ocean), and along with this idea,
they extended the name of ocean, which now signifies the sea that en-
circles the Earth, which they believed was a great island; and there was
an enlarging of the power of Neptune, who from the abyss of waters,
which Plato678 places in the bowels of the Earth, makes earthquakes with
his great trident—the rude beginnings of this Poetic Physics that have
been explained by us above [§714]).
Such beginnings for geography can acquit Homer unconditionally of 754
the weighty errors that are wrongly imputed to him.

I. The lotus-eaters,679 who ate the bark of a plant called the “lotus,” must 755
have been much closer when Homer says that Ulysses made the journey
from Malea to the lotus-eaters in nine days: for if the lotus-eaters were,
as been said of them, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, it would be not only
difficult, but impossible to believe that Ulysses made this journey in nine
days; this is the error noted by Eratosthenes.680

II. The Laestrygones in Homer’s681 time must have had days longer than 756
other peoples within Greece itself, not longer than all the other people of

676
 Homer, Odyssey 5.46 and 55.
677
 Homer, Odyssey 10.3–4.
678
 See Phaedo 111e–112d and Timaeus 60e–61b.
679
  See Homer, Odyssey 9.80–84.
680
  Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 BCE), Greek mathematician, geographer, poet,
astronomer, and music theorist. Vico’s source, as Battistini notes, is Strabo,
Geography 1.2.17.
681
 Homer, Odyssey 10.80–86.
 320 The New Science

the Earth; this passage led Aratus682 to locate the Laestrygones under the
heading of Draco. Certainly Thucydides,683 who is a weighty and precise
writer, tells us about the Laestrygones in Sicily, who must have been the
northernmost people of that island.

757 III. For the same reason, the Cimmerians had the longest nights of
all peoples in Greece, for they were situated in the northernmost part
of Greece, and accordingly, on account of their long nights, they were
said to inhabit a place near the underworld. Because of this, their name
was later transferred to the distant inhabitants of the Sea of Azov.
And, consequently, the people of Cumae, because they were situated
near the grotto of the Sybil, which led to the underworld, must have
been called Cimmerians, because it was believed they were similarly
situated. For it is not believable that Ulysses was sent by Circe and
that without any magic (for, as we observed above [§437], Mercury had
given him a secret antidote to the witchcraft of Circe), he went in a
single day to those Cimmerians who later remained near the Sea of
Azov in order to see the underworld, and that he returned that same
day from there to the Circeii, which is now called Mount Circello, near
Cumae.
758 With these same principles pertaining to Greek poetic geography, it is
possible to solve many great difficulties pertaining to the ancient history
of the East; there, peoples who originally must have been situated in the
Near East must have been taken to be far-off peoples, particularly those
in the North and the South.
759 For what we stated concerning poetic geography in Greece is found to be
the same for ancient geography in Latium.
Latium must have originally been quite confined in that for two hundred
and fifty years of rule, Rome subdued a good twenty peoples and did not
extend its power much more than twenty miles, as we stated above [§§88,
160, 722].
Italy was certainly limited by its borders with Cisalpine Gaul and Magna
Graecia, and it was only later because of Roman conquests that the
name extended to the range which endures to this day.
Thus, the Tyrrhenian Sea must have been rather small in the days when
Horatius Cocles alone stood against all the Etruscans on a bridge.684
Later, because of Roman victories, the name was extended further to
include the lower coast of Italy.
760 It was actually in this way and not otherwise that the earliest Pontus,
where Jason made his naval expedition, must have been the land nearest

682
  Aratus, Greek poet, c. 315–240 BCE.
S 683
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.2.1.
N 684
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.10.
L
320
Book Two 321

to Europe, from which it is divided by the strait called Propontis; this

land must have given its name to the Sea of Pontus, which was extended
later as far into Asia as where later Mithridates ruled. For we are told in
this same myth that Aeëtes, father of Medea, was born in Chalcis, a city
in Euboea, an island within Greece itself which is now called Negropont,
which must have given this first name to what is certainly still called the
Black Sea.
The earliest Crete must have been an island within that archipelago,
which is a labyrinth of islands, as we have explained above [§635]. And
only subsequently after Minos must have been renowned for his corsair
raids upon the Athenians did Crete later go to the island in the Mediter-
ranean, where it still remains.
Now (since we have been called back from Latium to Greece) those 761
vainglorious Greeks, while they went throughout the world, spread ev-
erywhere the fame of the Trojan War and the wanderings of the heroes,
not only Trojan heroes such as Antenor, Capys, and Aeneas, but also
Greek heroes such as Menelaus, Diomedes, and Ulysses.
They observed that there was spread throughout the world a charac-
ter representing the founders of nations similar to the character of the
Heracles of theirs called the Theban Heracles, of whom Varro counted
throughout ancient nations a good twenty versions, among which had
been that whom the Latins had called “the god Fidius.”
Thus, it came to pass that, on account of a vanity which the same as the
Egyptians (who said that their Jove Ammon was more ancient than all
the other versions of Jove in the world and that all the versions of Hera-
cles of the other nations took their name from their Egyptian Heracles,
in keeping with the two Axioms685 proposed above whereby they errone-
ously believed that they were older than all other nations in the world),
the Greeks made their Heracles go through every part of the Earth, pu-
rifying it of monsters, so as to bring only glory back home.
They observed that there was a poetic character representing shepherds 762
who spoke in verse, among whom was the Arcadian Evander.686 And
thus Evander went from Arcadia to Latium and there received within
his dwelling his native Heracles and there took Carmenta as his wife (a
name derived from carmi, “verses”), who in Latium discovered l­etters—
that is, the forms of the sounds called “articulated,” which are the matter
of verse.
And finally, to confirm all the things stated here, they observed these
poetic characters within Latium just as they had done, as we saw above
[§§593, 624], when they found their Curetes spread over Saturnia—that
is, ancient Italy—over Crete, and over Asia.

685
  Axioms 42 and 43.
686
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.5.2.
 322 The New Science

763 However, since these Greek words and ideas arrived in Latium dur-
ing that most primitive time when nations were closed off to foreign-
ers, during the times of Servius Tullius when Livy says that not even
the famous name of Pythagoras, much less the man himself, could have
passed through so many nations of such diverse languages and customs
to reach Rome. It was precisely with a view to this difficulty that we pos-
tulated above687 what we are inclined to think a necessary conjecture, that
on the shores of Latium there was some Greek city later buried in the
shadows of antiquity that taught the peoples of Latium letters, which,
as Tacitus688 tells us, were originally similar to the most ancient letters
of Greece. This is a strong argument for the people of Latium having
received Greek letters from the Greeks of Latium, not from those of
Magna Graecia, much less from Greeks across the sea, with whom they
had no acquaintance until the time of the war with Tarentum, which
later led to their war with Pyrrhus. For otherwise the people of Latium
would have used the later letters of Greece and not retained their earlier
letters derived from the ancient Greek ones.
764 Thus, the names of Heracles, Evander, and Aeneas entered into Latium
from Greece through the following customs of nations.
765 First, because in their barbarism nations love their native customs, even
as soon as they start to become more genteel, they delight in foreign
ways of speaking as much as in foreign wares and fashions; and, ac-
cordingly, in Latium, they exchanged their god Fidus for the Heracles
of the Greeks, and instead of the native oath, mediusfidius [“by Fidus”],
they introduced mehercule [“by Heracles”], edepol [“by Pollux”], mecas-
tor [“by Castor”].
766 Further, on account of the vanity that nations have, of which we have
spoken many times, they boast of well-reputed foreign origins, particu-
larly when they have some motive for believing in this from the times of
their barbarism. So, during the return to barbarism, Giovanni Villani
tells us that Fiesole had been founded by Atlas and that the Trojan king,
Priam, ruled in Germany, and similarly the people of Latium did not
wish to acknowledge Fidus, their true founder, in favor of Heracles, a
Greek founder, and wished to exchange the characters representing their
poet shepherds for the Arcadian Evander.
767 In the third place, when nations observe things belonging to foreigners
which they cannot explain with certain terms from their own native lan-
guage, they are necessarily better served by foreign terms.
768 Fourth and lastly, we add the property of early peoples upon which we
reasoned above in the Poetic Logic [§410], that of not knowing how to
abstract qualities belonging to a subject: since they do not know how to

S 687
  Axiom 103.
N 688
 Tacitus, Annals 11.14.4.
L
322
Book Two 323

abstract, they name a subject in terms of its qualities. We have arguments

for this which are quite certain in Latin turns of phrase.
The Romans knew nothing of things pertaining to luxury, but, given that 769
they observed such things in Tarentum, they called anyone “perfumed” a
“Tarentine.” They knew nothing of things pertaining to military strategy,
but, given that they observed such things in Carthage, they called them
punica artes [“Punic arts”].689 They knew nothing of things pertaining
to pomp, but, given that they observed such things in Capua, they said
supercilium campanicum690 [“Capuan aloofness”] for “pomp” or “pride.”
Thus, Numa and Ancus were “Sabines,” because they did not know how
to speak of the “religiosity” which marked the customs of the Sabines.
Thus, Servius Tullius was a “Greek” because they did not know how to
speak of “astuteness,” an idea that must have remained mute for them up
until later when they became familiar with Greeks in the defeated city of
which we just spoke. And he was a “servant,” because they did not know
how to speak of the “weakness” which relinquished bonitary domain
over the fields to plebeians by bringing them the first agrarian law, as was
demonstrated above [§§107, 420, 613, 640, 653]; for this, perhaps, he was
killed by the Fathers.691 For astuteness is a property which follows upon
weakness, customs which were unknown to Romans in their openness
and virtue.
In truth, it is a great affront which they make against Roman origins, and
which they do as an offense towards the wisdom of the Roman founder,
Romulus, when they hold that Rome did not have heroes in its body
politic for the creation of kings and, as a result, must have suffered to
be ruled by someone who was a base slave. Such is the honor given to
Romulus by those critics preoccupied with writers, similar to another
kind of honor given to the Romans which followed later—namely, that
after they had founded a great power in Latium and defended it against
the entirety of Etruscan power, they went searching like lawless barbar-
ians throughout Italy, Magna Graecia, and overseas in Greece for laws
by which to institute orders for their liberty (this was done to maintain
repute for the myth that the Law of the Twelve Tables came to Rome
from Athens).

Corollary
on Aeneas coming to Italy

With a view to all upon which we have reasoned here, one is able to 770
demonstrate the fashion in which Aeneas came to Italy and founded the
Roman people in Alba, to which the Romans traced their origins. There

689
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 25.39.1.
690
  See Cicero, De lege agraria 2.34.93.
691
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.48.3–4.
 324 The New Science

was a Greek city of this sort located on the shores of Latium that came
from a Greek city in Asia where Troy was; it was unknown to the Ro-
mans until they extended their conquests from inland down closer to
the sea, which they started to do after Ancus Marcius, the third Roman
king, and which began with Ostia, the coastal city which was so close to
Rome that when later Rome increased further, it made Ostia its port. It
was in the same fashion that Rome received into its protection both the
Arcadian peoples of Latium, who were refugees by land, and later those
Phrygian peoples, who were refugees by sea. And thus, by two anachro-
nisms did the Arcadians and the Phrygians seek safety within the asylum
of Romulus, the Arcadians in a time after Romulus and the Phrygians in
a time prior to him.
771 If such is not the way things went, then the origins of Rome from Aeneas
baffles and confounds all understanding, as we remarked in the Axiom692
stated above. As a result, so as not to be so baffled and confounded, the
learned, starting with Livy,693 have placed this origin among myths with-
out noticing, however, as we stated above in the Axioms,694 that myths
must have some public impetus for the truth.
For Evander was so powerful in Latium that he received Heracles into his
household five hundred years before the founding of Rome; and Aeneas
founded the royal house of Alba, which, through fourteen kings, grew to
such brilliance that it became the capital of Latium; and the Arcadians
and the Phrygians, who wandered for so many years, eventually repaired
to the asylum of Romulus! So how is it that shepherds from Arcadia in
the inland of Greece, who by nature have no knowledge about things per-
taining to the sea, drifted across the sea and penetrated into the middle
of Latium just when Ancus Marcius, the third king after Romulus, was
the first to lead a colony down to the sea nearby? How is it that they came
along with the scattered Phrygians not only two hundred years before the
time when, in the judgment of Livy, not even the name of Pythagoras, the
most celebrated man of Magna Graecia, could have passed from Croton
through the middle of so many nations so diverse in language and cus-
tom to arrive in Rome; but also four hundred years before the Tarentines
knew anything of Romans, who were already powerful in Italy?
772 However, it is also the case—as we have stated many times through
the Axiom695 posited above—that these folk traditions must have their
beginning in some great public impetus for the truth, since an entire na-
tion preserved them for such a long time. What then?
What needs to be stated is that some Greek city was on the shores of
Latium, like so many others that were and later remained on the shores
of the Tyrrhenian Sea. This city prior to the Law of the Twelve Tables

692
  Axiom 103.
693
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita pr.6.
S 694
  Axiom 16.
N 695
  Axiom 16.
L
324
Book Two 325

was defeated by the Romans and by the heroic right of barbarous vic-
tors was demolished, and the defeated were received in the condition
of socii to the heroes. And these Greeks, using poetic characters, called
those wandering inland lost in the forest “Arcadians”; and they called
those wandering overseas “Phrygians,” just as the Romans called those
defeated “received into the asylum of Romulus,” and put to lease—that
is, those in the condition of day laborers under the order of clientship
instituted by Romulus when he opened the asylum in the clearing for
those who fled there. It was upon those defeated and put to lease (whom
we place in the time between the expulsion of kings and the Law of the
Twelve Tables) that the Roman plebeians must have been a distinct class
because of the agrarian law of Servius Tullius, which permitted to them
bonitary domain over the fields, and when they contested beyond this,
Coriolanus tried, as was stated above [§§108, 654], to reduce to the day
laborers of Romulus. And later when the Greeks made a clamor every-
where about the Trojan War and the wandering of heroes and, especially
in Italy, the wandering of Aeneas (for they had previously observed in
Italy their own Heracles and Evander and Curetes in conformity with
what was stated above [§762]), it was in this fashion that at some point
these traditions in the hands of a barbarous people were altered and
corrupted. It was in this fashion, as we said, that Aeneas became the
founder of the Roman people of Latium. This is the same Aeneas who
Bochart696 tries to say never set foot in Italy, who Strabo697 says never left
Troy, and who Homer698 (who has more weight here) tells us died in Troy
and left his rule to descendants.
Thus, in two different ways, we see the vanity of nations, first, that
of the Greeks, who made such a clamor throughout the world about the
war in Troy, and second, that of the Romans in boasting of their famed
foreign origins: the Greeks imposed and the Romans eventually accepted
Aeneas as the founder of the Roman people.
This myth could not have come into being but from the time of the war 773
with Pyrrhus, when the Romans started to delight in the things of Greece,
for such is the custom that we observe celebrated by nations which have
had much experience with foreigners over a long period of time.

On the naming and describing

of heroic cities

Now, because the parts of geography are nomenclature and c­ horography— 774
that is, the naming and the description of places and, principally, of

696
  On Bochart, see the note at §62. According to Battistini, the reference is to
Bochart’s De quaestione num Aeneas numquam fuerit in Italia (1672).
697
 Strabo, Geography 13.1.53.
698
 Homer, Iliad 20.293–308.
 326 The New Science

c­ ities—for the completion of the Poetic Wisdom, it remains to reason

upon these things.
775 It was stated above [§525] that heroic cities were discovered to be founded
by providence in places which were strong locations, which the ancient
people of Latium during their age of gods must have called with the
divine term arae [“altars”] and must have also named arces [“citadels”]
as places strong by their location. For in the return to barbarous times,
lordships were first called rocce, “steep and rocky cliffs,” and later from
this rocche, and then eventually castella [“castles”]. The same was actu-
ally the case for the word arae, which must have extended to include the
entire district belonging to each heroic city, a district which was called,
as was observed above [§§546, 611, 722], ager in claims relative to its
borders with foreigners and called territorium in claims concerning its
jurisdiction over citizens.
All of this is in a golden passage in Tacitus,699 where he describes the ara
maxima [“the great altar”] of Heracles in Rome. Because it offers such
weighty proof for these principles, we record it here in its entirety. Igitur a
foro boario ubi aeneum bovis simulacrum adspicimus quia id genus anima-
lium ARATRO subditur sulcus designandi oppidi captus ut magnam Her-
culis ARAM complecteretur ARA HERCULIS erat [“Therefore, from
the oxen market where we see the statue of the bronze cow—because it
is this kind of animal which is yoked to the plough—begins a furrow-
ing designating the town so as to encompass the great altar of Heracles,
which was the altar of Heracles”]. There is also another golden passage
in Sallust,700 when he tells us of the famed altar of the Philaenus brothers,
which remained at the border between two powers, Carthage and Cyrene.
776 Altars of this sort are actually spread throughout all of ancient geogra-
phy. And, starting with Asia, Keller701 observes in his Ancient Geography
that all the cities of Syria had the word “are” either before or after the
proper name, whence Syria itself was called Aramea and Aramia.
However, in Greece, Theseus founded the city of Athens on the famed
Altar of the Unfortunates, deeming men “unfortunate” by the correct
idea—that is, those lawless and impious men—and from the quarrels be-
longing to that infamous sharing in common, these men had recourse to
the strongly situated lands of the strong, as we stated above [§§553–557],
themselves completely alone, weak, and needing all the goods held by
the pious men who produced humanity. Hence, in Greek, the word ἄρά
[ara] also means “oath,” for, as we also reasoned out above, upon these
earliest altars of gentile humanity were the earliest victims, called, as
we saw above [§§101, 517, 549], Saturni hostiae, the earliest ἀναθήματα
[anathēmata] who are translated in Latin as Diris devoti [“those pledged

699
 Tacitus, Annals 12.24.
700
 Sallust, The Jugurthine War 79.
S 701
  Christoph Keller (1638–1707), German philologist. The reference is to
N Keller’s Notitiae orbis antiqui (Leipzig, 1706), p. 459.
L
326
Book Two 327

to the Furies”]: these were the impious and violent men who dared to en-
ter into the ploughed lands of the strong to pursue of the weak, who fled
to escape from the violent (hence the verb “to escape,” means “to save
oneself ”), and those impious and violent men were consecrated to Vesta
and killed; this is retained in Latin in the use of the word supplicium
[“prayer”] to signify “penalty” and “sacrifice,” as it is used by Sallust702
among others. In these significations, Latin corresponds quite congru-
ously to Greek, in which the word ἄρά [ara], which, as was stated, means
votum [“oath”], but, in addition, signifies noxa—that is, an object which
has done damage—and also signifies the Dirae who are the Furies.703 It
is precisely they who are those earliest devoti of whom we speaking here
and about whom we will have more to say in Book Four [§957]—that is,
those consecrated to the Furies upon the earliest altars of gentile hu-
manity. As a result, the word hara, which retained the significance of a
“stable,” must have signified in ancient Latin a “victim.” From this word
is certainly derived the word haruspex [“soothsayer”], one who makes
divinations from the innards of victims killed upon altars.
And from what was stated above concerning the Great Altar of Hera- 777
cles, Romulus must have founded Rome upon an altar similar to that of
Theseus, within the asylum opened up in the clearing, for it is retained in
Latin that they never make mention of such a clearing or sacred wood
where there is not some altar raised to some divinity. As a result, when
Livy tells us above [§§17, 114, 160, 532, 561] in general terms that these
asylums were vetus urbes condentium consilium704 [“the age-old counsel
of founders of cities”], he discloses for us the reason why in ancient ge-
ography one reads of so many cities with the name “altar.” Hence, one
needs to admit that it was because of his knowledge of antiquity that
Cicero705 called the Senate the ara sociorum [“the altar of associates”],
insofar as it was to the Senate that the provinces took their official com-
plaints against governors who governed over them avariciously, therefore
recalling the origin of associates in those earliest socii in the world.
We have already demonstrated, then [§§775–776], that “altar” is a word 778
for the heroic cities in Asia and throughout Europe in Greece and Italy.
In Africa there remained according to Sallust706 the famed altar of the
Philaenus brothers mentioned just above. Returning to Europe, they
even today use the expression “altars of the Sicilians” for the cities in
northern Transylvania inhabited by the ancient nation of the Huns who,
along with the Hungarians and the Saxons, compose this province. In
Germany, one reads in Tacitus,707 there is an “altar of the Ubians.” In
Spain, the word “altar” also remains as the name for many cities.

702
 Sallust, On the Catiline Conspiracy 9.2.
703
 Virgil, Aeneid 4.473 and 12.869.
704
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
705
 Cicero, Against Verres 2.48.126.
706
 Sallust, The Jugurthine War 79.
707
 Tacitus, Annals 1.57.
 328 The New Science

However, in the Syrian language, the word ari means “lion.” And we
demonstrated above [§§561–563] in the natural theogony of the twelve
major divinities, that in Greek it was out of their defense of their altars
that the idea of MARS came into being, a divinity whom they called
῎Αρης [Arēs]. As a result, through the same idea of strength, in the return
to barbarous times, so many cities and noble houses bore the lion as their
insignia.
This word, uniform in its sound and significance for so many nations so
different and distant from one another in place, time, and custom, must
be whence the Latin word aratum [“plough”], the moldboard for which
is called urbs.708 And, consequently, from this word must have come the
Latin words arx [“citadel”] and arceo [“to enclose”], whence also ager
arcifinius was used by writers de limitibus agrorum [“for the boundaries
of fields”]; and from this word must come, in addition, the words arma
[“arms”] and arcus [“bow”], from the correct idea that strength reposes
in driving back harm and holding it at a distance.
779 And, behold, POETIC WISDOM has been demonstrated as justly
deserving two lofty and sovereign praises, the first of which has certainly
and constantly been attributed to it, that it founded the humankind of
gentile humanity; and those two forms of vanity, first that of the nations
and second that of the learned, the former with its ideas of empty mag-
nificence, the latter with its ideas of inopportune philosophical wisdom,
while wanting to affirm this about poetic wisdom, have instead denied
it. The other praise, for which, indeed, a folk tradition has come down
to us, is that the wisdom of the ancients made sages who, in the same
spirit, were equally great as philosophers and lawgivers and captains and
historians and orators and poets, whence that wisdom is so greatly de-
sired. However, in making them thus, they were more like precursors,
such as we have found in those myths in which, as wombs or matrices, is
discovered the precursor to all recondite wisdom; one can say that within
these myths, the nations have in a rude way709 and by the human senses
described the principles of this world of sciences, a world that later by
reasoning and by maxims has been clarified for us by the particular re-
flections of the learned. This accords with all that we had to demonstrate
in Book Two, that the theological poets were the sense, the philosophers
were the intellect of human wisdom.

 Varro, De lingua latina 5.143.

708

  The 1744 printed edition has “with the mind” (colla mente), clearly a typo-
709

S graphical error. The autograph has “in a rude way” (rozzamente), the reading
N typically reproduced by modern Italian editions.
L
328
 Book Three

On the Discovery

of

the True Homer1

1
  Book Three of the 1744 Scienza nuova is certainly the most comprehensive treatment
of Homer to appear in Vico. But Vico had considered the Homeric question earlier, par-
ticularly in a series of Dissertationes that he appended to the Diritto universale in 1722 as
a continuation of De constantia iurisprudentis 2.4, “Homer and His Two Poems” (Cristo-
folini 833–867). Portions of that text are well translated by John D. Schaeffer at BV 61–69.

329
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S
N
L
ii
Book Three 331

Although poetic wisdom was demonstrated in the preceding book to 780

have been the commonplace wisdom of the peoples of Greece (who
were, first, theological and, later, heroic poets), it ought necessarily to
follow that the wisdom of Homer would not be different in kind. Yet
Plato has left the opinion so deeply impressed upon us that Homer was
furnished with a sublime, recondite wisdom; hence all the other philoso-
phers have followed in his wake, and above all Plutarch,2 who labored
over this for an entire book. Therefore, we will herein offer a particular
examination of whether Homer ever was a philosopher (on which ques-
tion, Dionysius Longinus has also written an entire book mentioned by
Diogenes Laertius3 in his Life of Pyrrho).

On the Recondite Wisdom That

Has Been Opined about Homer
For let us concede what certainly must be granted, that Homer must 781
have gone along with the whole common sensibility and, accordingly,
the common customs of Greece in its barbarous times, for such common
sensibilities and such customs are matters proper to poets. And, accord-
ingly, let us concede that which he tells us, that they had esteem for the
gods in terms of their strength: so it was because of the supreme strength
of Jove that he tries to demonstrate in the myth of the Great Chain4 that
Jove himself is king over men and gods, as was observed above [§387].
On the basis of this commonplace, he makes it believable that Diomedes
wounded Venus and Mars with the help of Minerva,5 who in a contest
between gods disarms Venus and strikes Mars with a blow from a rock.6
This is the Minerva who in the common belief is the goddess of philoso-
phy! And such is the good use she makes of arms worthy of the wisdom
of Jove!
Let us concede his telling us of customs most brutal (customs which,
although contrary to what the authors of the natural law of the gentile
peoples7 have claimed to be eternal among nations, were then current
among the barbarous Greek peoples believed to have spread humanity
throughout the world): the custom of poisoning arrows (hence, Ulysses
accordingly goes to Ephyra to find poisonous herbs) and the custom of
not burying enemies killed in battle but leaving them unburied as food
for birds and dogs (hence at such great cost Priam ransoms the corpse of

2
  The reference is to the Pseudo-Plutarch’s De vita et poësi Homeri.
3
 In fact, the attribution of a book about Homer to Longinus occurs not in
Diogenes Laertius, but in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia once attrib-
uted to Suidas; see Suidas, Lexicon (entry on “Longinus”).
4
  See Homer, Iliad 8.18–27.
5
 Homer, Iliad 5.330–340, 855–861.
6
 Homer, Iliad 21.424–426.
7
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
 332 The New Science

Hector from Achilles, even though Achilles has bound that corpse naked
to his chariot and dragged it for three days around the walls of Troy).8
782 Yet, since the end of poetry is to domesticate the ferocity of the common
run, of whom the teachers are the poets, it did not belong to a man wise
about such sensibilities and customs so savage to arouse wonder in the
common run in order to delight in them, and with delight be even more
confirmed in them.
It would not belong to a wise man to arouse pleasure in the base com-
mon run at the baseness of the gods, much less of heroes: so one reads
that in a contest Mars insultingly calls Minerva a “dog fly”;9 Minerva
punches Diana;10 Achilles and Agamemnon—the former, the greatest of
the Greek heroes, the latter, the prince of the Greek league, and both
kings—insultingly call one another dogs, something rarely said by ser-
vants in the comedies of today.11
783 And what word, by God!,12 is more proper and deserved than “stupid-
ity” in describing the wisdom of Agamemnon, a leader who had to
be constrained by Achilles to do what he ought in restoring Chryseis
to Chryses her father, priest of Apollo, a god who for her abduction
made his revenge upon the Greek army with the cruelest of plagues?13
What other word for a leader who deemed himself put on the spot by
this, and believed that he could recover his honor by practicing a justice
which follows from a wisdom of this sort, who wrongfully took Briseis
from Achilles,14 who carried with him the fate of Troy (and as a result
of Achilles departing in disgust with his people and his ships, Hector
could do what wished to the remaining Greeks who had escaped the
plague)?
Behold, here is the Homer who up until now was believed to have in-
stituted the orders of Greek political life—that is, civil life—who starts
with a thread of this sort to weave the entire Iliad, whose principal actors
are such a leader, and Achilles is such a hero, as we made it possible to
see when we reasoned upon the Heroism of the Earliest Peoples! [§667].
Behold, here is the Homer whose skill in devising poetic characters is
beyond all telling, as we will make it possible to see herein [§§808–809],
but the greatest of which characters are so incongruous with our civil
human nature!
However, these characters are perfectly suited to heroic human nature in
its punctiliousness, as we stated above [§667].

8
 Homer, Iliad 22.335–355, 395–404.
9
 Homer, Iliad 21.394.
10
 Homer, Iliad 21.424–426.
11
 Homer, Iliad 1.225.
12
  See Vico’s comment on this oath at §482.
S 13
 Homer, Iliad 1.369–390.
N 14
 Homer, Iliad 1.184–187, 322–325.
L
332
Book Three 333

What ought we to say about the fact that he tells of his heroes (and above 784
all, the wise Ulysses) taking such delight in wine and, when they are af-
flicted, taking all their comfort in getting drunk?15
These are truly precepts for consolation, most worthy of a philosopher!
It makes Scaliger16 resentful that all the comparisons in Homer are taken 785
from wild beasts and other primitive things. However, one must concede
that this was necessary for Homer to make himself better understood by
the common run, which was wild and primitive. Nevertheless, as success-
ful as they are (his comparisons are incomparable), they certainly do not
belong to an ingenuity domesticated and civilized by some philosophy.
Nor could this truculence and savagery of style come into being from the
spirit of any humane and devout philosophy, a style with which Homer
describes so many, so varied, and bloody battles, so many, so different
fashions and kinds of killing, all so extravagantly cruel and making par-
ticularly for the sublimity of the Iliad as a whole.
The later constancy, which is established and confirmed by the study of 786
the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have devised gods and he-
roes who are so fickle. Some, even when they are in commotion and dis-
turbed, are quieted by the slightest impetus of some reason at odds with
this. Others, while they are boiling with violent wrath, upon remember-
ing some tearful thing, melt into bitter weeping17 (so during the return
to barbarism in Italy, at the end of which comes Dante—the Tuscan
Homer18 who sings of nothing other than history—one reads of Cola
di Rienzo, whose biography expounds vividly, as we stated above [§699],
the customs of the Greek heroes of which Homer tells us; when Cola
makes mention of the misfortune of the Roman state oppressed by the
powerful at that time, he and those present to his account break out into
outright tears). By contrast, others, when afflicted with extreme grief, if
some dainty thing presents itself (as when the feast of Alcinous presents
itself to the wise Ulysses19), completely forget their woes and devolve
one and all into gaiety. Others in complete repose and quiet, at the in-
nocent statement of another which does not go well with their present

15
 Homer, Odyssey 8.88–89.
16
  Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1594), 3.51.
17
  See, for example, Iliad 24.507–515.
18
  Though Vico’s praise for Dante as the “Tuscan Homer” is genuine, bear-
ing some comparison to Gravina’s 1708 Della ragion poetica, Vico denies that
Dante is as purely poetic as Homer. Despite living just after the height of Italy’s
barbarism, Dante is partly formed by abstract metaphysical study, which Vico
takes to be naturally opposed to poetry. “If he had known nothing of scholas-
tic thought or of Latin, he would have been a greater poet,” Vico claims in the
1725 version of the New Science (§314). The Homer/Dante parallel is further
weakened by Vico’s sense that, unlike Dante, the historical existence of Homer
is doubtful.
19
 Homer, Odyssey 8.199–201.
 334 The New Science

humor, become so resentful of it and fly into such a blind rage that they
threaten the speaker with an immediate and frightful death. This is what
Achilles20 does when he receives Priam in his tent, Priam (who at night,
with Mercury as his escort, goes through the middle of the Greek camp
completely alone and by himself so as to ransom, as we stated in an-
other place above [§§667, 781], the corpse of Hector); when Priam has
been admitted, Achilles makes dinner for him. And, on account of one
statement that he will not go along with, which fell inadvertently from
the mouth of an unfortunate father out of devotion to a child so brave,
Achilles forgets all the laws imagined about hospitality, holds himself
aloof from the trust which brought Priam alone and by himself, a trust
which Priam had in Achilles alone, moved in no way by the numerous,
weighty misfortunes of such a king, in no way by the devotion of such a
father, in no way by reverence for a man so old, restrained in no way by
a fortune common to all, which avails like no other thing in moving us
to compassion. Mounting in his bestial wrath, he thunders about want-
ing to cut off Priam’s head. At the same time, this Achilles is impiously
stubborn in not remitting a private offense done by Agamemnon (no
matter how weighty this was, it could not justly be avenged with the ruin
of his fatherland and all its nations), and it pleases him, as he carries
within him the fate of Troy, to see in ruin all the Greeks miserably beaten
by Hector21; neither devotion to the fatherland nor glory for his nation
move him to bring succor to them; he does finally bring succor, but only
to satisfy his private grief over Paris having killed Patroclus.22 And not
even in death is he placated over the taking of Briseis, until the unfortu-
nate and beautiful princess maid Polyxena, from the ruined household
of the once rich and powerful Priam, has become a wretched slave sac-
rificed before his tomb, and until his ashes, thirsting for vengeance, have
soaked up the last drop of her blood.23
And we will pass in complete silence over what cannot be understood,
how someone who had the sense of gravity and congruousness belong-
ing to the thought of a philosopher managed to discover the many myths
appropriate to old women dealing with children, with which Homer
crowded his other poem, the Odyssey.
787 Such customs—rude, base, ferocious, savage, unstable, irrational, and
irrationally stubborn, fickle, and foolish—can only belong—as we dem-
onstrated in Book Two in the Corollaries on the Heroic Nature [§§670–
677]—to men with a weakness of mind like children, a robustness of
imagination like women, and a boiling of passions like the most violent
young. Hence, one has to deny to Homer any recondite wisdom.

20
 Homer, Iliad 24.552–570.
21
 Homer, Iliad 24.552–570.
22
  This is a lapsus on the part of Vico, who presumably knows that Hector kills
Patroclus.
S 23
  The story of Polyxena does not appear in the Iliad. Instead, see Euripides,
N Hecuba 218, 521–582; Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.25.4; Ovid, Meta-
L morphoses 13.439–480.
334
Book Three 335

The things upon which we reason here are the matter from which doubts
started to arise, which imposed upon us the necessity of searching for the
TRUE HOMER.

On the Fatherland of Homer

Such was the recondite wisdom believed until now to belong to Homer. 788
Now, let us look into his fatherland, for which almost all the cities in
Greece were in contention. Indeed, there was no lack of those who
wished for him to be a Greek from Italy, and so as to make this determi-
nate, Leone Allacci in De patria Homeri toils in vain.24
However, because there has come down to us no writer more ancient than
Homer, as Josephus resolutely maintains against the grammarian Apion,25
and because writers also came a long time after him, it is necessitated by
our metaphysical art of criticism that to consider him an author of na-
tions (as he has been considered) and, based upon this, to discover the
truth about both the Homeric age and fatherland from Homer himself.
Certainly, concerning the Homer who is author of the Odyssey, we can 789
be sure that he was from the southwest of Greece from that golden pas-
sage26 where Alcinous, king of the Phaecia—today, Corfu—offers to
Ulysses as he tries to depart a ship well outfitted with his vassals; these
vassals, he says, are expert seamen who could take Ulysses if needed
as far as Euboea—today, Negropont. Euboea was said by those who
chanced to see it to be quite far away, as if it were the Ultima Thule of
the Greek world. From this passage it is evidently demonstrated that the
Homer of the Odyssey was other than the Homer who was author of the
Iliad. This is insofar as Euboea was not very far from Troy—that is, was
located in Asia in a place on the banks of the Hellespont, the narrow
strait on which today there are two fortresses called the Dardanelles, a
name which preserves even to this day its origin from the word “Darda-
nia,” which was the ancient territory of Troy.
And certainly there is in Seneca27 the celebrated question among
Greek grammarians about whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were by
the same author.
The contest among Greek cities, each vying for the honor of having 790
Homer as its citizen, came about because almost every one of them

24
  Leone Allacci (1586–1690), Greek scholar who was keeper of the Vatican
library. The reference is to Allaci’s De patria Homeri (1640).
25
  Josephus does not say that Homer is the oldest of all writers. Rather, he says
that “throughout the whole range of Greek literature no undisputed work is
found more ancient than the poetry of Homer” (Against Apion 1.2.12). Taken
without qualification, Vico’s claim would imply that Homer is older than Mo-
ses, against the presumed intention of Josephus.
26
 Homer, Odyssey 7.321–323.
27
  See Seneca’s essay “On the Shortness of Life” §13.
 336 The New Science

­ bserved in his poems words, phrases, and dialect belonging to the ver-
o
791 nacular language of each. What is stated here serves as the Discovery of
the True Homer.

On the Age of Homer

792 We can be sure about the age of Homer from the following authoritative
passages from his poems.

793 I. Achilles in the funeral for Patroclus allows one to see almost all the
kinds of games that were later celebrated in Greece at its most cultivated.28

794 II. Already discovered were the arts of casting in low relief and of en-
graving in metal, as is demonstrated among other things by the shield
of Achilles,29 which we observed above [§§681–686]. Painting had not
yet been discovered, for casting abstracts by means of some relief, and
engraving does the same by means of some depth, but painting abstracts
from surfaces absolutely, which is the most difficult labor of ingenu-
ity. Hence, neither Homer nor Moses ever mentions things which are
painted, an argument for their antiquity!30

795 III. The delights of the gardens of Alcinous, the magnificence of his
royal household, and the merriness of his feasts31 prove for us that the
Greeks already admired luxury and pomp.

796 IV. The Phoenicians were already bringing to the shores of Greece ivory,
purple dye, and that Arabic incense which is the scent of the grotto of
Venus;32 in addition, they brought linen more subtle than the dry skin
of an onion,33 embroidered clothes and, among the gifts of suitors to
regale Penelope, clothing composed of a fabric of such a refined and soft
texture that expanded in the fuller places and contracted in those more
slender.34 A discovery worthy of the softness of our times!

797 V. The coach in which Priam brings himself to Achilles is made of

cedar,35 and the scent of cedar perfumes the cave of Calypso;36 in this
there is a fine taste and sensibility, not intelligible to Roman pleasure

28
 Homer, Iliad 23.262–897.
29
 Homer, Iliad 18.478–607.
30
  The exclamation mark is present in both the 1744 printed edition and the
autograph, but not in modern Italian editions.
31
  For the gardens, see Odyssey 6.291–293 and 7.112–132; for the palace, see
Odyssey 8.82–111; for the banquets, see Odyssey 8.167–183.
32
 Homer, Odyssey 8.363.
33
 Homer, Odyssey 19.232–233.
S 34
 Homer, Odyssey 18.292–294.
N 35
 Homer, Iliad 24.266–274.
L 36
 Homer, Odyssey 5.59–61.
336
Book Three 337

when those under Nero and Heliogabalus were most mad for wasting
their substance on luxuries.

VI. There are described the most refined baths at Circe’s.37 798

VII. The servants of the suitors are beautiful, nimble, and blond-haired, 799
exactly the sort of amenity wished for by our present customs.

VIII. Men fondle their hair like women, for which Hector and Diomedes 800
reproach the effeminate Paris.38

IX. And, just as we are told that his heroes always ate roasted meat, the 801
food which is the simplest and plainest of all, for it needs nothing other
than coals (this custom was retained later in sacrifices, and the Romans
retained the word prosiicia for meat of victims roasted on altars and
then cut up to be shared with feasting guests), so later they roasted it
on spits like unconsecrated meat. So that when Achilles offers a meal
to Priam,39 he butchers a lamb, and Patroclus then roasts it, prepares
the table, and puts bread upon the table in baskets, for the heroes did
not celebrate banquets that were not also sacrifices in the days when
they themselves were priests. This is retained in Latin in epulae—that
is, the dainty banquets celebrated for the most part by the great—and
in epulum—a public feast given for the people—and in the sacred meals
in which banqueted those priests who were called epulones; accordingly,
Agamemnon himself kills two lambs40 with whose sacrifice are conse-
crated the terms of war with Priam. Such was the magnificence that
then went along with an idea which today seems to us to belong to a
butcher! Later must have come boiled meat, which besides fire needs
to have water, a kettle and, with these, a tripod (Virgil also makes his
heroes eat this way and makes them roast meat on spits).41 Eventually
come sauced foods, which need, besides all the things already stated,
sauces.
Now, to return to the heroic meals of Homer, granted that he describes
the most refined food of the Greek heroes to be grain mixed with cheese
and honey,42 nevertheless in two comparisons he makes use of fishing.43
And Ulysses,44 when he feigns poverty and begs alms from the suitors,
tells them that to hospitable kings—that is, to kings charitable to poor
wayfarers—the gods give the fishy seas—that is, seas abounding in the
fish which make for great refinement at meals.

37
 Homer, Odyssey 10.360–363.
38
 Homer, Iliad 3.55; 11.385.
39
 Homer, Iliad 24.621–627.
40
 Homer, Iliad 3.292–294.
41
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.212–213.
42
  See Homer, Iliad 11.631 and 631–640; Odyssey 10.234–235; 20.69.
43
  Actually, more than two. See Homer, Iliad 16.406–408; Odyssey, 5.51–53;
10.124; 12.251–254; 22.384–388.
44
 Homer, Odyssey 13.113.
 338 The New Science

802 X. Finally, and what is most important to our purpose, Homer seems to
have come at a time after the fall of the heroic law in Greece when they
had started to celebrate popular liberty, for heroes contract in marriages
with foreigners, and bastards come to be part of the succession of rule.45
And so the need must have come, for it was a long time previously that
Heracles was stained with the blood of the brute centaur, Nessus, and
consequently went mad and died—that is, as was explained in Book Two
[§658], brought an end to heroic law.
803 Therefore, concerning the age of Homer, since we do not intend to scorn
the authority of all these things which were observed and gathered from
his two poems, more so from the Iliad than from the Odyssey, which
Dionysius Longinus46 deems Homer to have composed as an old man,
we encourage the opinion of those who place him long after the Trojan
War, a period of time which runs the length of four hundred years, which
comes to be about the time of Numa.
And also, we believe that we are making them happy in not placing him
much later in a time nearer to us. For it was after the time of Numa that
they say Psammeticus opened Egypt to the Greeks, who, according to an
infinite number of passages, particularly in the Odyssey, had a long time
before opened Greece to trade with the Phoenicians,47 and the Greek
people grew used to delighting in the information related by the Phoeni-
cians no less than in their wares, as today Europeans do with informa-
tion from the Indies.
Hence, these two things are in agreement: first, that Homer never saw
Egypt and, second, that he tells us many things about Egypt and Libya
and Phoenicia and Asia and, above all, Italy and Sicily, on account of
the information which the Greeks had from the Phoenicians.
804 However, we do not yet spy how those many, refined customs are in
agreement with the equally many wild and savage customs about which
he tells us at the same time, particularly in the Iliad. As a result,
ne placidis coëant immitia48
[“lest harsher things grow together with milder”],

it would appear these two poems were for many ages and by many hands
labored over and directed.
805 Thus, by these things stated here about the fatherland and the age of the
one believed to be Homer up until now, our doubts advance in search of
the true Homer.

45
  See Homer, Odyssey 4.11.
46
 Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13.
47
  See Homer, Odyssey 4.81–83, 617–19, and 15.414–428.
S 48
 Horace, Ars poetica 12.
N
L
338
Book Three 339

On the Unaccountable
Faculty of Homer
for Heroic Poetry
However, besides the lack of philosophy in Homer, which we demon- 806
strated above, and besides the discoveries made about his fatherland and
age, which impose upon us doubts about whether perhaps he was not
actually a common man, we are encouraged to go further by the desper-
ate difficulty that Horace proposes in his Art of Poetry,49 the difficulty of
being able after Homer to devise tragic characters, or personae, of a new
cast. Today, this desperate difficulty is combined with another, that the
personae devised by New Comedy are also completely fictional (indeed,
the Athenians required by that that New Comedy appear in the theater
with personae which were completely fictional, and this was so success-
ful in Greek that dramatists in Latin, for all their haughtiness, despaired
of their competence to compete, as Fabius Quintilian said in his judg-
ment, cum Graecis de comoedia non contendimus50 [“we do not compete
with the Greeks in comedy”]).
To this difficulty from Horace we conjoin to others of wider scope. 807
First, how is it that Homer, who came earlier, was so inimitable a heroic
poet, while tragedy, which came into being later, had the rude start that
is known to everyone and that we will later herein [§§910–911] observe
more closely?
Second, how is it that Homer came before the philosophers and the arts
of poetry and criticism, and yet was the most sublime of all the sublime
poets, and how is it that after the discovery of philosophy and the arts
of poetry and criticism there was no poet who could come within a long
distance of keeping up with him?
However, even if we leave aside our two difficulties, the difficulty from
Horace combined with what we have stated about New Comedy ought
to have given some footing, in the research of Patrizzi, Scaliger, Castel-
vetro, and the other bold teachers of the art of poetry, for an investiga-
tion into the reason for this difference.
This reason can have no other foundation than upon the origins of 808
poetry discovered herein above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§376–384] and,
as a consequence, in the discovery of the poetic characters of which the
essence of this same poetry solely consists.
For New Comedy puts forward a treatment of the customs of our present
humanity. It is upon these customs that Socratic philosophy meditated.
There, from the general maxims of Socratic philosophy concerning hu-
man morality, the Greek poets were able because they were profoundly

49
 Horace, Ars poetica 128–130.
50
 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.10.38.
 340 The New Science

learned in this philosophy (as was Menander, in comparison with whom

Terence was called in Latin a “Menander by half ”51), were able, I say, to
devise certain brilliant exempla for ideal men, and by the light and splen-
dor of these were able to direct the common run, who are as teachable
by grasping strong examples as they are incapable of learning through
reasoned maxims.
Old Comedy took arguments, or true subjects, and placed them in a myth-
ical setting just as they were; so in one of these, the bad Aristophanes put
the very good Socrates into a mythical setting and ruined him.52
However, tragedy casts upon the stage heroic hatred, contempt, wrath,
and vengeance, which arise from sublime natures, and out of these na-
tures naturally come sentiments, words, and actions of a kind capable
of ferocity, crudity, and atrocity and whose trappings inspire wonder.
And all these things have the highest conformity with one another and
uniformity with their subject. Such labors are known to have been done
by the Greeks only in their heroic time, at the end of which Homer must
have come. It is demonstrated by our metaphysical art of criticism that
myths, which in their coming-into-being had correctness and propriety,
reached Homer distorted and incongruous, as one can observe in all the
reasoning herein above [§§512, 514, 515, 533, 569, 708] throughout the
entire Poetic Wisdom; these myths were originally true histories which
gradually were altered and corrupted, and it is thus corrupted that they
eventually came to Homer. Hence, he belongs to the third age of he-
roic poets and after the first, which invented these myths for use as true
narrations (this is the primary signification proper to the word μῦθος
[muthos], which the Greeks defined as a “true narration”). In the second
age, these myths were altered and corrupted. It is in the third that Homer
eventually received them thus corrupted.
809 However, to call ourselves back to what we proposed and to the rea-
son for the effect we have designated, Aristotle in his Poetics says that
only Homer knew how to invent poetic lies.53 For his poetic characters,
which were incomparable in the sublime congruity admired by Horace,54
were imaginative genera, as we defined these in the Poetic Metaphysics
[§381]; with these genera, the Greek peoples connected all the different
particulars pertaining to each genus. So, they connected with Achilles,
the subject of the Iliad, all the properties of heroic virtue—that is, re-
sentfulness, punctiliousness, wrath, implacability, and a violence that ar-
rogates all right to might (exactly the properties gathered by Horace55
when he describes this character). To Ulysses, the subject of the Odys-
sey, they connected all the properties of heroic wisdom—that is, atten-

51
  See Suetonius, Life of Terence.
52
  See Plato, Apology of Socrates 18b–d, 19a–c.
53
 Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19.
S 54
  See Horace, Ars poetica 129–130.
N 55
  See Horace, Ars poetica 120–122.
L
340
Book Three 341

tiveness, forbearance, dissimulation, duplicity, and a deception which

always preserves propriety in words and indifference in actions, whence
others drag themselves into error and deceive themselves. And to both
these characters they connected particular actions following from each
of the two genera, which were so conspicuous that the Greeks even in
their dullness and stupidity were able to direct and move themselves to-
wards noticing these genera and relating the particulars to their genus.
These two characters, because they had been formed by an entire nation,
could not have been devised except as naturally uniform (and it is only
in a uniformity agreeable to the common sense of an entire nation that
consists the decorum—that is, the beauty and grace—of a myth), and
because they were devised by the strongest of imaginations, they could
not have been devised except as sublime.56 Because of this, there remain
two properties eternal to poetry: first, the sublime in poetry must always
become united with popular sensibility; and, second, the people from
whose earlier labors come these poetic characters cannot later look upon
human customs otherwise but in terms of the conspicuous characters so
brilliant and exemplary.

Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery

of the True Homer
With the things thus far established, we combine the following philo- 810
sophical proofs.

I. There is the proof which above was numbered among the Axioms,57 811
that men naturally tend to preserve in collective memory the orders and
laws which hold them within their societies.

II. There is the truth understood by Castelvetro,58 that first history must 812
come into being, then poetry, for history is a simple declaration of truth,
but poetry is, moreover, an imitation of it, and this man, otherwise most
acute, did not know how to make use of this truth to discover the true
beginnings of poetry by combining it with the philosophical proof that
we posit as Proof III:

III. namely, that because there were certainly poets prior to common- 813
place historians, the earliest history must have been poetic.

56
  As Battistini observes, whereas Burke strongly opposes the sublime against
the beautiful (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), Vico tends to preserve their connection, without
simply identifying them.
57
  Axiom 45.
58
 Castelvetro, Poetics of Aristotle 1. Compare Aristotle’s claim that poetry is
more philosophic than history, since its statements are about universals and not
just singulars (Poetics 9, 1451b37).
 342 The New Science

814 IV. There is the proof that myths in their coming-into-being were true
and strict narrations (hence μῦθος [muthos], myth, was defined as a true
narration, as we stated in many places above [§§401, 403, 808]). At first,
they came into being as quite disturbing and, accordingly, were later
considered improper and thus altered, so that subsequently they were
considered improbable, then obscure, then scandalous, and in the end
unbelievable. These are seven sources of difficulty with myths that can
easily be encountered in the whole of Book Two.

815 V. And, as was demonstrated in the same Book [§§512, 514, 515, 533,
569, 708], Homer received them thus marred and corrupted.

816 VI. There is the proof that poetic characters, in which the essence of
myth consists, came into being from a necessity of nature, being inca-
pable of abstracting the forms and properties of subjects, and conse-
quently these characters must have been the manner of thinking for en-
tire peoples placed under this natural necessity in the time of the greatest
barbarism; it is an eternal property of this manner of thinking always to
enlarge ideas of particulars, on which there is a fine passage in the ethical
writings of Aristotle,59 where he reflects that men of limited ideas make
a maxim out of every particular. The reason for this saying must be that
the human mind is indefinite, but it cannot pay homage to its near-divine
nature when it is narrowed by the robustness of the senses, except by
enlarging those particulars with the imagination. Hence was it, perhaps,
that later in Greek and Latin poets alike the images of both gods and
heroes appear greater than those of men. And in the return to barbarous
times, paintings particularly of the eternal Father, of Jesus Christ, and
of the Virgin Mary are exceedingly great in size.

817 VII. Because barbarians lack the ability to reflect, an ability which when
ill-used is the mother of mendacity, the earliest Latin heroic poets sang
true histories—that is, sing of the wars of Rome—and in the return to
barbarous times, on account of a barbarism whose nature is of this sort,
the Latin poets—Gunther, William of Apulia, and others—sang of
nothing other than history, and the writers of romances in these same
times believed that they were writing true histories. Hence, Boiardo and
Aristo, who came in times illuminated by the philosophers, took the sub-
jects of their poems from the history of Bishop Turpin of Paris.
And it is through this same barbarous nature which, on account of a
deficiency of reflection, does not know how to feign (hence that nature
is naturally truthful, open, trusting, generous, and magnanimous) that
Dante, although he was learned in the loftiest recondite knowledge
[scienza],60 for all that in his Comedy put on display true persons and
represented the true deeds of those who had passed away, and accord-

S 59
 In fact, Aristotle’s Rhetoric 2.21.
N 60
  See the note on Dante at §786.
L
342
Book Three 343

ingly gave to his poem the title Comedy, for it was the Old Comedy of
Greeks, as was stated above [§808], that placed true persons in a mythical
setting. And Dante was similar in this to the Homer of the Iliad (whom
Dionysius Longinus61 calls entirely “dramatic”—that is, mimetic—just
as the Homer of the Odyssey was entirely “narrative”). And Francesco
Petrarch, although he was most learned, also offered Latin poems about
the second Carthaginian War, and in his Triumphs in Tuscan, which
has the marks of heroic poetry, he makes nothing but a collection of
histories.
And from here arises a luminous proof that the earliest myths were his-
tories. For satire spoke ill of persons who were not only true but also
quite well-known; tragedy takes for its arguments the personae of poetic
history; Old Comedy places in a mythical setting renowned and living
personae; New Comedy, born in times of discerning reflection, eventu-
ally devised personae who were completely fictional (just as in Italian
New Comedy did not return until the start of the century so wondrously
learned, the Cinquecento). Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there ever
devised a fictional persona who was the protagonist of a tragedy, and
the taste of the common run is weighty confirmation of this for us, taste
which does not want musical drama, whose arguments are always tragic,
unless they are taken from history, but it tolerates fictional arguments in
comedy, for since they are private, and, accordingly, unknown, they are
believed to be true.

VIII. Since poetic characters62 were such, their poetic allegories, as was 818
demonstrated above throughout the Poetic Wisdom [§483], by necessity
must have contained only historical meanings belonging to the earliest
times of Greece.

IX. There is the proof that these histories must have naturally preserved 819
the memory of communities of people—through the first philosophical
proof63 mentioned above [§811], that in the childhood of nations, they
must have had wondrously strong memories. And this was not without
divine providence, for up until the time of Homer, and for some time
after that, writing as commonly regarded had not yet been discovered,
as we have learned in many places above [§§66, 429, 440, 788], from Jo-
sephus in opposition to Apion. In such human need, the peoples, who
were almost entirely body and almost entirely without reflection, had
the most vivid senses for sensing particulars, the strongest imagination
for apprehending and enlarging them, the most acute ingenuity for relat-
ing them to their imaginative genera, and the most robust memory for
retaining them. These faculties do belong, it is true, to the mind, but
they set their roots in the body and take their life from the body. Hence,

61
 Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13.
62
  For other passages about “poetic characters,” see §§381, 416, 429, 562.
63
  See also Axiom 50.
 344 The New Science

memory is the same faculty as imagination, which consequently is called

“memory” in Latin (so that in Terence64 one finds the word memorabile
used to signify “a thing that can be imagined,” and in common Latin, the
word comminisci means “to devise,”65 which is proper to the imagination,
whence the word commentum66 for an invented fiction—and, in addition,
“imagination” is taken for ingenuity) as in the return to barbarous times
the expression “imaginative man” was used to signify a “man of ingenu-
ity” (as was said of Cola di Rienzo by an author contemporary to him
who wrote his biography). And thus, it has three different aspects: it is
memory when it remembers things; imagination when it alters or coun-
terfeits them; ingenuity when it gives them compass and puts them into
a congruous and settled order. This is the cause for the theological poets
calling Memory the “mother of the Muses.”

820 X. Accordingly, the poets must have been the earliest historians of na-
tions, and it is here that Castelvetro did not know how to make use of
this statement to discover the true origins of poetry; he and all the others
who have reasoned upon this from Aristotle and Plato on down could
have easily noticed that all gentile histories have mythical beginnings, as
was proposed above in the Axioms67 and was demonstrated in the Poetic
Wisdom [§384].

821 XI. There is the proof that the nature of poetry68 determines that it is an
impossible thing for someone to be equally sublime as both a poet and a
metaphysician. For metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses; the
poetic faculty must immerse the entire body in the senses. Metaphysics
rises up to universals; the poetic faculty must dive deep into particulars.

822 XII. There is the proof on the strength of the Axiom posited above,69
that one can come to any faculty which one does not have naturally by
industry, but improvement by way of industry is completely denied to
someone who does not already have that faculty by nature; the art of
poetry and the art of criticism serve to make our ingenuity cultivated,
not great, for refinement is a minor virtue, and greatness naturally scorns
all things which are small; indeed, just as a raging torrent cannot but
carry with it turbid waters and roll stones and tree trunks along in the
violence of its course, so these things are the base expressions found so
often in Homer.

64
 Terence, Andria 625.
65
 Cicero, De natura deorum 2.29; Livy, Ab urbe condita 26.27.9.
66
 Terence, Andria 225; Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.19.5.
67
  Axiom 46.
68
  Ragion poetica, literally “poetic reason”—a likely allusion to Della ragion
poetica (1708) by Neapolitan jurist Gianvincenzo Gravina, with whom Vico was
personally acquainted and mentions in his autobiography (Battistini 44).
S 69
  Axiom 51.
N
L
344
Book Three 345

XIII. However, these expressions do not make Homer any less the father 823
and prince of all the sublime poets.

XIV. For we have learned [§809] that Aristotle deemed the lies of Homer 824
to be incomparable, which is the same as Horace deeming that his char-
acters are inimitable.

XV. His is a sublimity reaching to the heavens in his poetic sentences, 825
which we have demonstrated in the Corollaries on Heroic Nature in
Book Two [§§703, 704]) must be conceived of true passions, or that they
made themselves truly felt on the strength of a burning imagination; ac-
cordingly, they must have been individual to those who felt them. Hence,
we defined maxims on life, because they are general, as the sentences of
philosophers; and reflections upon the passions similarly belong to false
and frigid poets.

XVI. The poetic comparisons in Homer taken from savage and wild 826
things are, as we observed above [§785], certainly incomparable.

XVII. The atrocity of Homeric battles and deaths, as we also saw above 827
[§785], make for all that inspires wonder in the Iliad.

XVIII. However, such sentences, such comparisons, such descriptions, 828

we also proved [§785], could not have been natural to a calm, genteel,
gentle philosopher.

XIX. There is the proof that the customs of the Homeric heroes are 829
those of children in terms of their fickleness of mind, of women in terms
of their robustness of imagination, of violent youth in terms of the roil-
ing fervor of their wrath, as we have demonstrated above [§§708, 787]),
and consequently it is impossible for them to be devised so naturally and
so successfully by a philosopher.

XX. There is the proof that what is inept and incongruous was, as was 830
also proved herein above,70 an effect of the misfortune of the Greek peo-
ples of having to toil to express themselves in the extreme poverty that
language had while it was being formed.

XXI. And even if these poems contained within them the most sublime 831
mysteries of recondite wisdom (we have demonstrated in the Poetic Wis-
dom [§384], that they certainly did not contain this), their sound could
not have been conceived by the direct, orderly, and weighty mind agree-
able to a philosopher.

  For the ineptitudes, see §822; for the indecencies, see §§781–782; for the pov-
70

erty of language, see §§456–460.

 346 The New Science

832 XXII. There is the proof that heroic speech, as was seen above in Book
Two in the Origins of Language [§§431, 435, 438], was a speech of like-
nesses, images, comparisons, born from the lack of genera and species
(which are needed to define things in terms of their properties) and, con-
sequently, born through a natural necessity common to entire peoples.

833 XXIII. There is the proof that through natural necessity, as was also
stated in Book Two [§§449, 463–465, 468–471], the earliest nations spoke
in heroic verse. In this also one is given to admire providence, that at a
time in which the characters of writing as commonly regarded had not
yet been found, the nations spoke in verse so that by meter and rhythm
they could more easily preserve the collective memory of their familial
and civil histories.

834 XXIV. And such myths, such sentences, such customs, such speech, such
verse were all called heroic and had currency in times which history has
allocated to the heroes, as was more fully demonstrated above in the
Poetic Wisdom [§§634–661].

835 XXV. Therefore, all the aforesaid were properties of entire peoples and,
consequently, common to all the particular men of such peoples.

836 XXVI. We deny, however, on account of that very nature from which
came all the aforesaid properties, by which Homer was the greatest of
poets, that he was ever a philosopher.

837 XXVII. In addition, we demonstrated above in the Poetic Wisdom

[§§361–363, 515] that the meanings of the recondite wisdom of the phi-
losophers, which came later, were imposed upon the Homeric myths.

838 XXVII. However, just as recondite wisdom is not for any but a few par-
ticular men, so we have seen above [§809] that the decorum of heroic
poetic characters (in which consists the complete essence of heroic myth)
cannot be pursued today by men most learned in the philosophies, or the
arts of poetry and criticism. It is for this decorum that Aristotle gives
Homer the privilege of being incomparable in his lies, which is the same
as the privilege that Horace gave to Homer, of being inimitable in his
characters.71

Philological Proofs for the Discovery

of the True Homer

839 To this great number of philosophical proofs, made in large part on the
strength of a metaphysical art of criticism of the authors of gentile na-
S
N 71
  See Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19, and Horace, Ars poetica 129–130.
L
346
Book Three 347

tions (among whom we number Homer insofar as we certainly have no

profane writer more ancient than him, as Josephus the Jew72 resolutely
maintains), we now add the following philological proofs.

I. There is the proof that all ancient profane histories have mythical 840
beginnings.

II. There is the proof that barbarian peoples closed off from all other 841
nations in the world, such as the ancient Germans and the peoples of
the Americas, are discovered to preserve in verse the beginnings of their
histories, conforming to what was seen above [§470].

III. There is the proof that Roman history starts with the writings of 842
the poets.

IV. There is the proof that in the return to barbarous times, Latin poets 843
wrote these histories.

V. There is the proof that Manetho, high priest of Egypt, translated the 844
most ancient history of Egypt written with hieroglyphs into a sublime
natural theology.

VI. And in the Poetic Wisdom [§515] we demonstrated that this was what 845
the Greek philosophers did to the most ancient history of Greece told
in myths.

VII. Hence, above in the Poetic Wisdom [§§384–403], we were obliged to 846
take a path which was the reverse of the one taken by Manetho, one mov-
ing away from a mystical sense given to these myths and reestablishing the
historical sense belonging to them. The naturalness and facility with which
we have done this, without force, circumvention, or distortion, proves that
the historical allegories which these myths contain are proper to them.

VIII. This is a weighty proof of what Strabo73 affirms in a golden pas- 847
sage: that prior to Herodotus, or rather prior to Hecataeus of Miletus,
the history of the Greek peoples was written by the poets.

IX. And in Book Two [§§464–472] we demonstrated that the earliest writ- 848
ers of nations, ancient as well as modern,74 were poets.

X. There are two golden passages in the Odyssey75 where, in trying to give 849
acclaim to someone who has spoken well about history, it is said that he

72
  Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.2.12.
73
 Strabo, Geography 1.2.6.
74
  Here “modern” simply means “post-ancient.”
75
  For one passage, see Homer, Odyssey 11.368. For the other, Battistini sug-
gests that Vico may have in mind Odyssey 8.487–498.
 348 The New Science

has recounted that history like a musician or singer. That is, they must
have been exactly the same as those who were their rhapsodists, com-
mon men who each preserved some part of the collective memory of the
books of Homeric poetry.

850 XI. There is the proof that Homer left none of his poems in writing (as
many times we have noted [§§66, 429, 440, 819] that Flavius Josephus the
Jew resolutely states against Apion the Greek grammarian).

851 XII. There is the proof that the rhapsodists went to the fairs and festivals
throughout the cities of Greece, each singing some part of the books of
Homer.

852 XIII. There is the proof that it was from the origin of their name in the
two words of which it was composed that the rhapsodists were “stitchers
of songs,” songs which must certainly have been gathered by none other
than their own peoples; similarly, they also meant for the word ὅμηρος
to be derived from ὁμού [homou]—simul [“at the same time”]—and from
εἴρειν [eirein]—connectere [“to bind together”]—whence the word means
a “surety” insofar as it is something which binds together a creditor and
debtor, an origin which is farfetched and forced when applied to a surety,
but is easily and properly applied to our Homer as someone who binds
together, or composes, myths.

853 XIV. There is the proof that the Pisistratids, tyrants of Athens, divided
and disposed, or rather made others divide and dispose, the poetry of
Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hence one understands the extent
to which prior to this that poetry must have been a confused mass of
things, since there is an infinite difference that can be observed between
the style of the one Homeric poem and the other.

854 XV. There is the proof that the same Pisistratids instituted the orders by
which, from that point on, the rhapsodists sang them at the Panathe-
naic festivals, as Cicero writes in his De natura deorum76 and Aelian,77 on
which he is followed by Scheffer.

855 XVI. However, the Pisistratids were expelled from Athens a few years
before the Tarquins were expelled from Rome. As a result, since Homer
has been placed in the time of Numa, as we proved above [§803], a long
age must have later run its course in which the rhapsodists continued to
preserve collective memory of Homer’s poems. This tradition takes all
credibility away from the other tradition that it was Aristarchus78 who in
the time of the Pisistratids had made the redaction, division, and order-
ing of the poems of Homer, for this could not have been done without

76
 In fact, Plato’s Hipparchus 228b.
S 77
 Aelian, Variae historiae 8.2, cited by Scaliger at Poetices libri septem 1.41.
N 78
  Aristarchus of Samos (216–144 BCE), ancient Greek mathematician and
L astronomer, and pioneer of heliocentrism.
348
Book Three 349

writing as commonly regarded, and so after such writing there would

be no need for rhapsodists to sing through the parts of the poems from
memory.

XVII. As a result, as for Hesiod (who left his works in writing): given 856
that we have no authority that he was preserved in collective memory
by rhapsodists (as Homer was) and in spite of the chronologists who in
their fruitless diligence placed him thirty years prior to Homer, he must
have come after the Pisistratids.79
Not unlike the Homeric rhapsodists were those Cyclic Poets, who pre-
served all of Greek mythical history from its beginning with the gods
up until the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. These poets, so called from the
word κύκλος [kuklos], could not have been other than idiotic men who
sang myths to common peoples gathered into a circle around them at fes-
tivals. This is exactly the circle which Horace in his Art of Poetry calls the
vilem patulumque orbem80 [“the base and wide circle”]; on this Dacier81
would not be satisfied with commentators who say that by this Horace
meant to say “long episodes.” And perhaps Dacier’s reason for not being
satisfied is this, namely, that it is not necessarily the case that an episode
must also be base insofar as it is long: consider, for example, the episodes
of Rinaldo’s delighting in Armida in the enchanted garden and of the
old shepherd reasoning with Erminia: granted, both are long, but not on
account of this base, for the former is ornate, the latter is delicate and
refined, and both are noble.82
However, with this expression, Horace,83 after he gave tragic poets the
advice that they take their arguments from the poems of Homer, came
up against the difficulty that in this fashion they would not be poets be-
cause their myths would have been invented by Homer.
And yet Horace responds to them that the epic myths of Homer will
become tragic myths, if they will stay with three pieces of advice. The
first is that they not make the idle paraphrases, which we observe even
today when men read Orlando Furioso or Orlando Inamorato or some
other romance in verse to a base and wide circle made up of do-nothing
people at feasts, and, after having recited each stanza, explain it with
more words in prose; the second is that they not make of themselves
faithful translators; the third and last piece of advice is that they not
make of themselves servile imitators. Instead, following the customs that
Homer attributes to his heroes, they make issue from these same customs

79
 In making Homer older than Hesiod, Vico reverses his earlier stance, for
which see Scienza nuova prima §§310, 443, and De constantia iurisprudentis 2.1
(Cristofolini 389[4], BV 48).
80
  See Horace, Ars poetica 132.
81
  André Dacier (1651–1722), French translator of (and commentator on)
Horace’s Ars poetica. As Battistini observes, Vico almost certainly did not read
Dacier’s original French notes, but a translation of those notes into Latin.
82
  See Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered 16.9–17 and 7.8–13.
83
 Horace, Ars poetica 128–135.
 350 The New Science

new sentiments, new speeches, new actions conforming with them, and
thus upon the same subjects they will make themselves into new Ho-
meric poets.
Thus, in this same Art of Poetry, the same Horace84 calls a “cyclic poet”
a roadway or festival poet.
Authors of this sort are ordinarily read as those called κύκλιοι [kuk-
lioi] and ἐγκύκλιοι [enkuklioi], and the collection of their work is called
κύκλος ἐπικός [kuklos epikos], κύκλια ἔπη [kuklia epē], ποίημα ἐγκύκλικον
[poiēma enkuklikon], and sometimes without any addition of words, just
κύκλος [kuklos] (as Gerald Langbaine85 observes in his preface to Dio-
nysius Longinus).
As a result, it is in this manner that Hesiod, who contains all the myths
of the gods, is able to be before Homer.86

857 XVIII. It is for this reason that the same must be said of Hippocrates,
who left works no longer written in verse but in prose, works so numerous
and so lengthy that they could not have been naturally preserved by col-
lective memory. Hence, he is to be placed around the time of Herodotus.

858 XIX. It is on account of all this that Voss87 with too much good faith be-
lieved he had refuted Josephus with those heroic inscriptions—first, that of
Amphitryon, second, that of Hippocoon, and, third, that of Laomedon—
impostures similar to those made even in our day by those who make
counterfeit medals; Marten Schoock supports Josephus against Voss.

859 XX. To this we add that Homer never makes mention of Greek common
alphabetic letters, and the letter written by Proetus to Eureia to trap Bel-
lerophon is said, as we have observed in another place above [§433], to
have been written in σήματα [sēmata].

860 XXI. There is the proof that when Aristarchus emended the Homeric
poems, they still retained many variations in dialect, many incongrui-
ties in speech, which must have been idiomatic to different peoples of
Greece, and also much metrical license.

861 XXII. The fatherland of Homer is not known, as was noted above
[§§788–789].

84
 Horace, Ars poetica 136.
85
  Gerard Langbaine (1608–1658), English philologist who taught at Oxford
(where he was the Provost of Queen’s College). Langbaine translated and com-
mented on Longinus’s On the Sublime in 1636.
86
  Vico’s thinking about the relation between Homer and Hesiod poses a special
challenge to interpreters. This section’s conclusion stands in apparent contra-
diction to its beginning, as well as what Vico claims elsewhere about Homer’s
S priority to Hesiod (Chronological Table and §97), even as it seems to receive
N some support at §901.
L 87
  See G. J. Voss, Aristarchus sive de arte grammatica libri septem 1.10.
350
Book Three 351

XXIII. Almost all the peoples of Greece laid claim to him as their citi- 862
zen, as was also observed above [§790].

XXIV. Above [§789] have been drawn strong conjectures that the Homer 863
of the Odyssey was from southwest of Greece, and that the Homer of the
Iliad was from northeast of Greece.

XXV. Not even the age of Homer is known by anyone. 864

XXVI. The opinions about this are so numerous and so varied that he is 865
placed, at one extreme, in the time of the Trojan War and, at the other
extreme, in the time of Numa.

XXVII. Dionysius Longinus,88 unable to dissimulate about the great di- 866
versity of style between the two poems, says that Homer composed the
Iliad when he was young and later composed the Odyssey when he was
old. Such are the particulars truly known about someone who is un-
known to us in the two things most relevant to his history, namely, his
time and place, about which we have been left in the dark when told of
this great light of Greece!89

XXVIII. This should remove all faith in Herodotus or whoever is the 867
author of that Life of Homer,90 which recounts enough fine, varied, and
minute things that they fill an entire volume; it should remove all faith in
the Life of Homer written by Plutarch91 who, because he was a philoso-
pher, spoke with greater sobriety.

XXIX. However, perhaps Longinus formed his conjecture because 868

Homer explains in the Iliad the wrath and arrogance of Achilles, which
are the property of the young, and in the Odyssey tells of the duplicity
and caution of Ulysses, which are the customs of the old.

XXX. There is also a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he took 869
his name from this blindness, which in Ionian dialect means “blind.”92

XXXI. And Homer himself tells of blind poets who sing at the feasts of the 870
great, such as the blind poet who sings at the feast which Alcinous gives for
Ulysses93 and also the other blind poet who sings at the feast of the suitors.

88
 Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13.
89
  The exclamation mark is present in both the 1744 printed edition and the
autograph, but not in modern Italian editions.
90
  The author of this text, though not known, does not seem to have been
Herodotus, despite the claim of its opening lines. Scholars conventionally refer
to the unknown author as the Pseudo-Herodotus.
91
  That is, the Pseudo-Plutarch.
92
 Earlier (at §852) Vico proposes an interestingly different explanation of the
name “Homer.”
93
 Homer, Odyssey 8.63–64.
 352 The New Science

871 XXXII. And it is a property of human nature that those who are blind
have memories whose strength is a wonder.94

872 XXXIII. And, finally, there is the proof that he was poor and that he
went through the marketplaces of Greece singing his own poems.

Discovery of the True Homer

873 Now, when men of the most acute ingenuity and excellence in learning
and erudition read all these things upon which we have reasoned and
which are told to us by others about Homer and his poems in the first
edition of The New Science, they suspected (although not because it was
a point we had voluntarily or purposefully made, inasmuch as it was not
even something upon which we had reflected since we were without the
method by which this science is now reasoned) that the Homer believed
in up until now was not the true Homer. All these things, I say, draw us
to affirm that what has come to pass with Homer is exactly the same as
what has come to pass with the Trojan War: although it offers a famous
epoch in history, more perceptive critics have judged that it was a war
that never happened in the world.
And certainly, as with the Trojan War, so too with Homer, if there were
not certain great vestiges that are his poems, we would have to say from
such difficulties that Homer was an ideal poet, who was not a particular
man in nature.
However, the many great difficulties, together with the poems as they
have come down to us, seem to force us to affirm something in the
middle: that this Homer was an idea—that is, a heroic character of the
Greek people, inasmuch as they told their histories in song.95

The lack of congruity and the lack of

verisimilitude belonging to the Homer
believed in up until now becomes, with the
Homer herein discovered,
agreeableness and necessity

874 On account of a discovery of this sort, all the things in both the speeches
and the narrative which were lacking in congruity and verisimilitude in

94
  For this ancient commonplace, see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.117.
95
  The “true Homer” thus emerges as a poetic character. Vico’s answer to what
later comes to be known as the “Homer question” is unintelligible apart from
S the theory of poetic characters he develops earlier in The New Science, particu-
N larly at §209 and §381.
L
352
Book Three 353

the Homer believed in up until now, become in the Homer herein discov-
ered entirely agreeable and necessary.
And, in the first place, the very things left to us that are most especially
uncertain compel us to say:

I. That the peoples of Greece so contested his fatherland and almost 875
all wanted him to be their citizen, because these peoples of Greece were
Homer.

II. That there was such variation of opinion concerning his age, because 876
this Homer truly lived on the lips and in the collective memory of these
peoples of Greece from the Trojan War down to the times of Numa,
which made for a span of time of four hundred and sixty years.

III. And the blindness and 877

IV. the poverty of Homer belonged to the rhapsodists who, since they 878
were blind (hence each of them was called omèro), had strong memo-
ries and who, since they were poor, sustained their lives by going to sing
throughout the cities of Greece the Homeric poems, of which they were
the authors, for they were part of those peoples who had composed with
them their histories.

V. Thus, a young Homer composed the Iliad, when Greece itself was 879
young and, consequently, burned with sublime passions such as arro-
gance, wrath, and vengeance—passions that suffer no dissimulation and
love generosity—and admired Achilles for his heroic strength. However,
an old Homer later composed the Odyssey, when Greece had somewhat
cooled its spirit with reflection. This reflection is the mother of foresight,
whence Greece admired Ulysses as a hero of wisdom.
As a result, in the time of the young Homer, the peoples of Greece took
pleasure in crudity, baseness, ferocity, savagery, atrocity. In the times of
the old Homer, they delighted in the luxuries of Alcinous, the delicacies
of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens, the pastimes
of the suitors, and not just the attempts on the chaste Penelope, but even
the siege of and battle for her. No one time period, it seemed to us above
[§§803–804], can be composed of all of these customs.
This difficulty was so potent that the divine Plato,96 so as to solve it,
claimed that Homer had foreseen by inspiration these nauseating, mor-
bid, dissolute customs.
However, he thus made Homer a foolish institutor of the orders of
Greek civilization. For even if he condemned them as corrupt and deca-
dent customs, he would still have taught customs which must have come

96
  Compare Plato, Ion 534b–d.
 354 The New Science

long after the ordering of the Greek nations and so would have taught
them with a view to accelerating the natural course made by the human
things and hastening the Greeks towards their corruption.

880 VI. In this fashion, it is demonstrated that the Homer who is author of
the Iliad had preceded by many years the Homer who is author of the
Odyssey.

881 VII. It is demonstrated that the former Homer was from southwest of
Greece and sang of the Trojan War waged in his country. And the latter
Homer was from northeast of Greece and sang of a Ulysses who ruled
in that part of Greece.

882 VIII. Thus, Homer is lost in the crowd of the peoples of Greece and is
vindicated of all the charges made against him by critics, and particu-
larly of charges of:

883 IX. vile sentences,

884 X. base customs,

885 XI. crude comparisons,

886 XII. idiomatic expressions,

887 XIII. metrical license,

888 XIV. inconsistent variations in dialect, and

889 XV. having made men into gods and gods into men [§890] (Dionysius
Longinus97 did not trust himself to uphold these myths except with sup-
port of philosophical allegories, which is to say that as they sounded
when sung to the Greeks, they could not have produced the glory of one
who had instituted the orders of Greek civilization; this is the same diffi-
culty which we made against Orpheus being the founder of the humanity
of Greece in the Annotations on the Chronology Table [§§80–81], recur-
ring in the case of Homer).
890 However, all the aforesaid properties, and particularly the last, were
properties of the Greek peoples themselves who, at their founding,
as was demonstrated in the Natural Theogony above [§§69, 489, 634],
made their gods to have such piety, religiosity, chastity, fortitude, jus-
tice, and magnanimity as they had themselves; and, later, with the turn-
ing of many years, with their myths becoming obscure, and with their
customs becoming corrupt, they deemed, as we reasoned at length in
the Poetic Wisdom [§§512, 514, 515, 533, 569, 708], their gods to be
S
N 97
  Compare Longinus, On the Sublime 9.7.
L
354
Book Three 355

­dissolute—through the Axiom proposed above98 that men naturally

bend obscure or doubtful laws to their own passion and advantage, for
they fear that gods who are opposite in their customs will be opposed
to their prayers.

XVI. However, all the more justly do those two great privileges belong to 891
Homer (these actually are one privilege) that Homer alone knows how
to devise, according to Aristotle,99 poetic conceits and, according to Hor-
ace, poetic characters. Hence, Horace100 confesses that he himself is no
poet, for he is unable or does not know how to observe what he calls
colores operum [“the shading of the work”], which sounds like what Ar-
istotle calls “poetic conceits” (so in Plautus101 one reads obtinere colorem
in the sense of “giving voice to conceit which from every perspective has
the appearance of truth,” which a good myth must do).
However, beyond these two, come all the other privileges given to him by 892
teachers of the art of poetry; Homer is incomparable in:

XVII. his wild and savage comparisons, 893

XVIII. his crude and atrocious descriptions of battle and death, 894

XIX. those sentences of his filled with sublime passions, and 895

XX. in his expression, filled with clarity102 and brilliance. 896

All these were properties of the heroic age of the Greeks, during which
and on account of which Homer was an incomparable poet, for in an age
of vigorous memory, robust imagination, and sublime ingenuity, he was
at no point a philosopher.

XXI. Hence, neither philosophies nor the arts of poetry and criticism, 897
which came later, would make a poet who could even come within strik-
ing distance of Homer.
And what is more, he makes certain claim to the three immortal eulogies 898
given to him:

XXII. first, that it was he who instituted the orders of the Greek ­polity— 899
that is, Greek civility;

XXIII. second, that he was the father of all the other poets; and 900

98
  Axiom 54.
99
 Aristotle, Poetics 24, 1460a18–19.
100
 Horace, Ars poetica 86–87.
101
 Plautus, Miles gloriosus 186.
102
  Evidenza, a technical term from the rhetorical tradition, meaning something
like “vividness” or “brightness” (Greek enargeia).
 356 The New Science

901 XXIV. third, that he was the source of all the Greek philosophies. None
of these eulogies could have been given to the Homer believed in up
until now.
Not the first because, starting from the times of Deucalion and Pyrrha,
Homer comes one thousand, eight hundred years after Greek civiliza-
tion started to be founded by marriages—this was demonstrated through
the whole course of the Poetic Wisdom [§§523, 724] which founded that
civilization.
Not the second, because the theological poets certainly flourished prior
to Homer—that is, Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Musaeus, and others—
and among them, the chronologists have placed Hesiod and made him
come thirty years prior to Homer. Cicero in his Brutus103 affirms that
there were other heroic poets prior to Homer, and Eusebius104 in his
Preparation for the Gospel names Philammon, Thamyris, Demodocus,
Epimenides, Aristaeus, and others.
Not, finally, the third insofar as—this we have demonstrated at length
and fully in the Poetic Wisdom [§§361–363, 515]—the philosophers did
not discover their philosophies in the Homeric myths, but thrust them
upon those myths. But poetic wisdom itself, through its myths, gave the
philosophers occasions for meditating upon their lofty truths, and addi-
tionally gave them the resources for explicating those truths, conforming
to what we promised at the beginning of Book Two and have made it
possible to see throughout the whole of that book.

The poems of Homer are found to be the

two great treasure houses
of the natural law of the
gentile peoples of Greece

902 But, above all, on account of this discovery, we add the following most
fulgent praise:

903 XXV. Homer was the earliest historian from all of gentile antiquity to
reach us.

904 XXVI. Hence, his poems, as we shall observe [§915], ought subsequently
to rise to the lofty reputation of being the two great treasure houses of
customs for ancient Greece.
For the same fate has come to pass for the poems of Homer as came to
pass for the Law of the Twelve Tables: since the latter were believed to be
laws which Solon gave to the Athenians and which subsequently came to

S 103
 Cicero, Epistulae ad Brutum 18.71.
N 104
 Eusebius, Preparatio evangelica 10.11.
L
356
Book Three 357

the Romans, we have considered the history of natural law of the heroic
gentile peoples of Latium to be hidden up until now; similarly, because
these poems have been believed to issue from the labor of one particular
man, a rare and supreme poet, we have considered the history of the
natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece to be hidden up until now.

A rational history of dramatic

and lyric poetry

We have already demonstrated above [§808] that there were three ages 905
of poetry prior to Homer: first, the age of theological poets, who them-
selves were heroes and sang true and severe myths; second, the age of
heroic poets, who altered and corrupted those myths; third, the age of
Homer, who received those altered and corrupted myths.
Now, the same metaphysical art of criticism that was applied to the his-
tory of the most obscure antiquity—that is, the art of explaining the
ideas which the most ancient nations proceeded to make naturally—can
illuminate and distinguish the history of dramatic and lyric poetry, on
which the philologists have written too obscurely and confusedly.
These philologists have placed Amphion among the lyric poets, a most 906
ancient poet from heroic times; they say that he invented the dithyramb
and, with this, the chorus, that he introduced satyrs singing in verse, and
that the dithyramb was a chorus led as a company singing verses made
in praise of Bacchus.
They say that, during the time of lyric poetry, distinguished tragic poets
flourished, and Diogenes Laertius105 affirms that the earliest tragedy was
represented by the chorus alone.
They say that Aeschylus106 was the first tragic poet, and Pausanias re-
counts that he was commanded by Bacchus to write tragedies (although
Horace tells us that Thespis was the author of the genre in the passage
of the Ars poetica107 which starts the treatment of tragedy with the satyr
drama and says that Thespis introduced satire upon carts used at harvest
time). They say that later came Sophocles, whom Palaemon108 said was
the “Homer of the tragic poets,” and that Euripides finally brought trag-
edy to its completion, whom Aristotle109 calls τραγικώτατον [tragikōtaton,
“most tragic”].

105
  Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 3.56.
106
  On Aeschylus, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.66; Pausanias, Descrip-
tion of Greece 1.21.2.
107
 Horace, Ars poetica 275–277.
108
  That is, Polemon, the successor of Xenocrates as head of the Academy. See
Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 4.20.
109
 Aristotle, Poetics 13, 1453a28–29.
 358 The New Science

They say that during this same age came Aristophanes, who invented Old
Comedy and opened the path to New Comedy (a path that Menander110
later walked down) by means of his comedy entitled The Clouds, which
brought Socrates to his ruin.
Later, some among them placed Hippocrates in the time of tragic poetry;
others placed him in the time of lyric poetry.
But Sophocles and Euripides lived somewhat before the time of the Law
of the Twelve Tables, and the lyric poets came even later, which seems to
upset the chronology placing Hippocrates in the time of the Seven Sages
of Greece.
907 For this difficulty to be solved, one must say that there were two kinds
of tragic poet and, in addition, two kinds of lyric poet.
908 The older lyric poets must have been, first, the authors of hymns in
praise of the gods, hymns of the kind which are called Homeric hymns,
composed in heroic verse. Later, there must have been poets of that lyric
in which Achilles sings on a lyre the praises of heroes who have passed
away.111 Similarly, among the people of Latium, the earliest poets were
the authors of Salian verse, which were hymns sung at festivals for the
gods by priests called “Salii” (perhaps so called from the verb saltare [“to
dance”], just as a company of dancers introduced the first chorus among
the Greeks), and fragments of this poetry are the most ancient memori-
als of the Latin language to reach us (they have the air of heroic verse, as
we observed above [§469]). And all of this is agreeable to the beginnings
of humanity among the nations—that is, in its earliest times, which were
religious—which must have praised nothing but the gods (just as in the
more recent return to barbarous times this religious custom returned,
and the priests who alone were literate in that time composed nothing
but the poetry of sacred hymns). Later, in heroic times, they must have
admired and celebrated nothing but the strong deeds of the heroes, such
as those which Achilles sang.
Thus, Amphion of Methymna must have been this sort of sacred lyric
poet, one who, in addition, was the author of the dithyramb, and the
dithyramb was the earliest precursor of tragedy composed in heroic verse,
the earliest kind of verse sung by the Greeks, as was demonstrated above
[§§449, 463]; so, the dithyramb of Amphion was the earliest satire, the sa-
tyr drama from which Horace112 takes his start in reasoning about tragedy.
909 The new lyric poets were the melic poets whose prince is Pindar; they
wrote in a verse which in our Italian speech would be called arie per

110
 Menander (342–290 BCE), Athenian dramatist who admired Euripides.
His plays were popular in antiquity but few of them are known to us, except in
fragments.
S 111
 Homer, Iliad 9.186–189.
N 112
 Horace, Ars poetica 220–229.
L
358
Book Three 359

musica [“arias set to music”], and this sort of verse must have come after
iambic verse, which is the kind of verse that, as was demonstrated above
[§463], was commonly spoken by the Greeks after heroic verse.
Thus, Pindar came during times of the pomp of virtue in a Greece in
admiration of the Olympic games, during which the lyric poets sang.
Similarly, Horace came during the most fulgent times of Rome—that
is, the times under Augustus. And melic poetry came to the Italian lan-
guage during the most tender and gentle times.
Later, the tragic and comic poets ran their course within the following 910
limits. Thespis in one part of Greece and Amphion in another during
harvest time gave the beginnings of satyr drama—that is, the Old Trag-
edy with satyrs as actors, who in their rudeness and simplicity, must have
discovered the earliest masks by clothing their feet, shins, and thighs
with the skins of goats, which they must have had on hand, and painted
their faces and breasts with the dregs of wine, and armed their foreheads
with horns (because of which, perhaps, even now wine harvesters are
among us commonly called “horned”). And so, it could be true that Bac-
chus, god of the wine harvest, did command Aeschylus to compose trag-
edies.113 And all of this is agreeable with the times when the heroes said
that the plebs were monsters having two natures—namely, the nature
of men and goats, as was more fully demonstrated above [§§567, 649,
654, 688]. Thus, there is strength in the conjecture, first, that it is from
this mask that tragedy took its name rather than from the goat given as
a prize to the one who victorious in making this sort of verse (a prize
called a τράγος [tragos] which Horace reflects upon, without making any
use of it later, and also calls base114); and, second, that tragedy takes its
start from this chorus of satyrs. And satire preserved the following eter-
nal property which it had from when it came into being, that of speaking
basely and injuriously, for the rustics in their rude masks upon carts car-
rying grapes held the license held even today by the wine harvesters of
our prosperous Campania—the so-called abode of Bacchus—the license
to speak basely about the lords.
Consequently, one can understand how little truth there was in the
learned later thrusting their philosophical mythology onto the myth of
Pan (they say that the myth signified the universe because Pan’s name
signifies πᾶν [pan], “all”), how little truth there was in the hairy lower
parts of Pan meaning the Earth, his breast and ruddy face denoting the
element of fire, and his horns signifying the sun and moon.
By contrast, the Romans have preserved for us an historical mythology
in their term satyra, which, according to Festus,115 was a dish consist-
ing of various kinds of food (hence, later, came the expression lex per

113
  See Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.21.2.
114
 Horace, Ars poetica 220.
115
  Sextus Pompeius Festus, second-century-CE grammarian and author of De
verborum significatu.
 360 The New Science

satyram for a law containing different types of things); and similarly,

in the satyr drama upon which we are here reasoning, Horace116 relates
to us (since not a single one of them comes down to us from either the
peoples of Latium or of Greece) that different kinds of persons made an
appearance: gods, heroes, kings, artisans, and slaves. For the satire that
remained among the Romans did not treat diverse subjects, but instead
assigned each poem its own argument.
911 Later, Aeschylus brought Old to Middle Tragedy, namely, a tragedy
of satyr dramas with human masks translating the dithyramb of Am-
phion, which was a chorus of satyrs, into a chorus of men. And this
Middle Tragedy must have been the beginning of Old Comedy, where
great figures were placed in a mythical setting and so a chorus was still
appropriate.
Later came Sophocles, first, and Euripides afterwards, who left us trag-
edy in its final form. And with Aristophanes Old Comedy came to an
end, on account of the scandal following from his figure of Socrates.
And Menander left us New Comedy, which labors over private and ficti-
tious figures who, because they are private, can be fictitious and still be
believable as true, as we reasoned above [§§806, 808]; hence, the chorus
must have no longer came on stage, because the chorus is a public figure
which reasons only upon public things.
912 In this fashion, the satyr drama came to be composed in the heroic verse
later preserved in Latin, for the earliest peoples spoke in heroic verse and
later spoken in iambic verse. And, accordingly, tragedy was naturally
composed in iambic verse, and in comedy this was done out of empty
observance of the example of tragedy, at a time when the Greek peoples
were already speaking in prose.
And iambic verse is certainly agreeable to tragedy, insofar as it is a verse
born for venting wrath which proceeds by way of what Horace called the
“swift foot,” as was suggested in an Axiom above;117 similarly, they say
commonly that Archilochus invented iambics for venting his own wrath
against Lycambes, who was not willing to give his daughter in marriage,
and that he did so with such bitterness that daughter and father were
reduced to hanging themselves from despair.118 This must be the history
of the heroic contest over connubium, in which uprising plebeians must
have hanged the nobles along with their daughters.
913 From here came that monstrosity in the art of poetry, that the same
verse, in its violence, speed, and excitement, is agreeable both to a poetry
as great as tragedy (Plato deemed it to be greater than epic119) and to
a poetry as refined as comedy, and that the same meter proper, as was

116
 Horace, Ars poetica 227.
117
  See Axiom 62 and Horace, Ars poetica 252.
S 118
  This legend is reported at Horace, Epode 6.13.
N 119
  Compare Plato, Republic 3, 394b–c.
L
360
Book Three 361

stated, for venting wrath and rage, in which tragedy must break forth
with great atrocity, is equally good for the jests, games, and tender loves
which make for all the pleasantness and delightfulness of comedy.
These terms, “lyric” and “tragic” poetry, when they are not defined, 914
make for Hippocrates being placed around the time of the Seven Sages,
someone who ought to be placed around the time of Herodotus, because
he came at a time when for the most part they still spoke in myths (so his
own biography is colored with myths, and Herodotus tells his histories
for the most part through myths); and not only had speaking in prose
been introduced, but also writing in the common alphabetic characters
(in which Herodotus wrote his histories, and Hippocrates wrote on medi-
cine in the many works which are left to us, as was stated in another place
above [§§98, 857, 906]).
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 Book Four

On the Course

That the Nations Make

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S
N
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Book Four 365

The principles pertaining to this science were established in Book One, 915
and the origins of all the divine and human things of gentile humanity
were researched and discovered in the Poetic Wisdom of Book Two; in
Book Three, the poems of Homer were discovered to be the two great
treasure houses of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece, just
as the Law of the Twelve Tables had already been discovered to be the
weightiest of testimony about the natural law of the gentile peoples of
Latium. On the strength of all this and with illumination from both
philosophy and philology, as a consequence of the Axioms1 concerning
an ideal eternal history, we now add to this in the present Book Four
THE COURSE THAT THE NATIONS MAKE, proceeding in all their
great variety and with such different customs with a consistent unifor-
mity based upon the division of time into the THREE AGES which the
Egyptians said had run their course in the world prior to them, the ages
of GODS, of HEROES, and of MEN. For based upon this division, the
nations will be seen to be sustained by a consistent and uninterrupted
order of causes and effects, always proceeding in the nations from three
kinds of natures, and from these three natures come three kinds of cus-
toms, and from these customs are observed three kinds of natural law
for gentile peoples, and as a consequence of these laws, are instituted the
kinds of order for civil constitutions, or republics. And so as men who
have come into human society might communicate to one another all
these aforesaid kinds of most important things, they form three kinds of
language and as many kinds of character; and so as to justify them, there
are three kinds of jurisprudence assisted by three kinds of authority and
as many kinds of reason in as many kinds of judgment; these kinds of
jurisprudence enjoy currency through three sects of time professed over
the whole course of the life of nations.
These specific threefold unities, along with many others to follow that
will also be enumerated in Book Four, all come to a head in one general
unity—that is, the unity of the religion of a divine providence, which is
the unity of spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations.
Because we have reasoned upon these things above in a diffuse way, here
we will demonstrate the order of their course.

Three Kinds of Natures

The first nature, on account of the strong deception of an imagination 916
which is most robust when reason is at its weakest, was a poetic or cre-
ative nature, which we might be permitted to call a divine nature in that
it gave to each body the being of substances animated by gods, and gave
each body this being from its own idea. This was the nature of the theo-
logical poets, who were the most ancient wise men in all the gentile na-
tions at a time when all the gentile nations were founded upon beliefs
held by each one of the nations about its own gods.

  Axioms 13, 68, 95, 96.

1
 366 The New Science

In addition, it was a savage and brutal nature, but on account of that same
straying of the imagination, they feared the terrifying gods whom they
themselves had devised. And because of this, there remained two eternal
properties, first, that religion is the only means powerful enough to bridle
the savagery of peoples and, second, that religions go well when those who
preside over them are the same ones who have inner reverence for them.2
917 The second nature was a heroic nature believed by the heroes themselves
to be of divine origin, for in believing that everything was done by gods,
they considered themselves to be the sons of Jove, as they had been en-
gendered by the auspices of Jove. Natural nobility for them rested in a
correct sense upon this heroism insofar as they themselves belonged to
the human species, and it was on account of this belonging that they were
princes of the human race. They vaunted this natural nobility over those
who, so as to save themselves from the strife of that infamous bestial
sharing of things in common, repaired later to the asylums of those he-
roes. Since they came there without gods, they were considered beasts—
thus have we reasoned upon both natures above [§§449, 508, 553–561].
918 The third nature was a human nature, intelligent and, consequently,
modest, kind, and reasonable, a nature which recognizes as law con-
science, reason, and duty.

Three Kinds of Customs

919 The first customs were completely filled with religion and devotion,
the customs we are told of Deucalion and Pyrrha3 coming just after
the Flood.
920 The second customs were wrathful and punctiliousness, the customs we
are told Achilles had.
921 The third customs were dutiful, taught to each by one’s own point of
departure for the duties of civil life.

Three Kinds of Natural Law

922 The first law was divine, for they believed both themselves and their
things to exist entirely by reason of the gods, based on the opinion that
the gods were everything, or made everything.
923 The second law was heroic—that is, a law of force, but one held back by
religion, which alone can keep force within the bounds of duty, where
there no human laws or none strong enough to restrain it.

S 2
  Compare Hobbes, Leviathan 12: “the failing of virtue in the pastors maketh
N faith fail in the people.”
L 3
  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.365–380.
366
Book Four 367

Accordingly, providence has disposed that the earliest gentile peoples, by

nature ferocious, were persuaded by a religion of this sort, so that they
would naturally acquiesce to force and to deem, since they were not yet
capable of reason, that reason lies in the fortune with a view to which
they took counsel in divination of the auspices.
This law of force is the law of Achilles, who put all of reason in the point
of his spear.
The third law is the human law dictated by human reason fully developed. 924

Three Kinds of Governance

The first governance was divine, what the Greeks would call “theocracy,” 925
in which men believed that each thing was decreed by the gods; this was
the age of oracles, which are the most ancient of the things that we read
about in history.
The second was heroic, or aristocratic, governance, which is as much as 926
to say “governance by the optimates”—in the sense of those with the
greatest strength—and in Greek this was also called “governance by
the Heraclids,” or those who came from the race of Heracles—in the
sense of “nobles”—who were spread throughout all of ancient Greece
and later remained in Sparta; also in Greek this was called “governance
by the Curetes,” which the Greeks observed in Saturnia—that is, an-
cient Italy—and in Crete and in Asia; and, subsequently, “governance
by the Quirites” among the Romans—that is, governance by priests
armed in public assembly. In this governance, on account of their dis-
tinguishing a nature that is more noble because, as was stated above
[§449], it is believed to be of divine origin, all civil rights were enclosed
within the ruling orders of these same heroes, and to the plebeians,
reputed to be of bestial origin, they permitted only the uses of life and
natural liberty.
The third was human governance in which, on account of the equality of 927
that intelligent nature which is the nature proper to man, all were equal
under the laws insofar as all are born free in their cities: such is the case
in popular liberty, where all or the majority comprise the just strength
of the city, and in monarchy, where monarchs make all equally subject
to their laws. And since monarchs are the only ones who have at hand
armed force, they are the only ones distinguished in civil nature.

Three Kinds of Languages

Three kinds of languages. 928

Of these, the first was a divine language in thought expressed through 929
mute religious actions—that is, through divine ceremonies—whence
 368 The New Science

there remains in the Roman civil code l­egitimating actions4 by which

they paid homage to everything done which pertained to their civil ad-
vantage. This language fits in with religion on account of that eternal
property: that for them reverence was more important than reasoning
(this was necessary in those earliest times when gentiles did not yet know
how to speak articulately).
930 The second was expressed through the heroic devices by which coats of
arms speak, a kind of speech, as we stated above [§487], that remained
in military discipline.
931 The third was expressed through speech, the language used by all nations
today to articulate themselves.

Three Kinds of Characters

932 Three kinds of characters.

933 Of these, the first were divine characters which, in the proper sense, were
called “hieroglyphics.” About these we have proved above [§487] that at
their beginnings they were used by all the nations. And there were certain
imaginative universals naturally dictated by an innate property of the
human mind to delight in uniformity—this we posited in an Axiom.5
This they could not do by abstractions made through genera; it was done
by the imagination through portrayals, and under these poetic universals
they subsumed all the particular species pertaining to the genus (so, un-
der Jove they subsumed all the things pertaining to the auspices, under
Juno all the things pertaining to nuptials, et cetera).
934 The second kind were heroic characters, which were also imaginative
universals under which they subsumed various species of things pertain-
ing to heroism (so, under Achilles all the deeds of a strong warrior, under
Ulysses, all the counsels of a wise man).
These imaginative genera, because the human mind later advanced to
abstract forms and properties from subject matter, passed on into in-
telligible genera, whence later came the philosophers, from whom the
authors of New Comedy, who arrived in the times of Greece’s great-
est humanity, took intelligible genera pertaining to human customs and
from them made portrayals in their comedies.
935 Finally, they invented common alphabetic characters, accompanied in
their progress by the vernacular languages. Given that the vernacular
languages are composed of words which are the genera, so to speak,
of all the particulars which had previously been spoken by the heroic
languages (so, to take the example adduced above [§460], the heroic
phrase “the blood in my heart boils” was made into the expression “I
S
N   A technical term in Roman law; see Papinian, Digest 50.17.17.
4

L   Axiom 47.
5

368
Book Four 369

am angry”), thus, out of one hundred and twenty thousand hieroglyphic

characters (the number of characters still used today, for example, by the
Chinese), they made a few letters under which they subsumed like gen-
era one hundred and twenty thousand words (of which the vernacular
articulated Chinese language is composed). This invention is certainly
labor for a mind that has to be greater than human (hence, we learned
above [§428] from Bernard von Mallinckrodt and Ingewald Eling that
they believed it to be a divine invention). And a common sense open to
wonder is what easily moved nations to believe that men excelling in di-
vinity had invented letters of this sort (so the Illyrians believed of St. Je-
rome, the Slavs believed of St. Cyril, et cetera, which conforms with the
observation and reasoning of Angelo Rocca6 in his Biblioteca Vaticana,
a book in which the authors of letters that are called “common” [volgari]
are depicted alongside the alphabets they invented). These opinions are
convicted of manifest falsity by a single question: why did these divine
men not teach their own alphabets? This is an objection we made above
[§§430, 649] about Cadmus: he brought letters to Greece from Phoenicia,
and yet the Greeks later used letters whose form was quite different from
that of the Phoenicians.
We stated above [§443] that over such languages and such letters, the 936
commoners were lords, whence both the languages and the characters
are called “common” [volgari].
Because they are lords over both these languages and letters, free peoples
ought to be lords over their laws, for they give those laws the meanings
that the powerful are drawn to observe, even if they are not willing, as
was noted in the Axioms.7
It is naturally forbidden to monarchs to deprive peoples of this lordship.
However, it is this same nature of human civil things which forbids that
this lordship is separable from peoples that makes for the greater part of
the power of these monarchs, for they are able to decree the royal laws,
by which the powerful must abide, according to the senses given to them
by their peoples.
Through this lordship over common alphabetic letters and vernacular
languages, it is necessarily through the order of civil nature that free
popular republics must precede monarchies.

Three Kinds of Jurisprudence

Three kinds of jurisprudence—that is, wisdom. 937

The first was a divine wisdom called, as we saw above [§381], mystical the- 938
ology, which means “the science of divine speaking” or u ­ nderstanding

6
  Angelo Rocca (1545–1620), founder of the Angelica Library at Rome, and
editor of the printed version of the Vulgate.
7
  Axiom 92.
 370 The New Science

the divine mysteries of divination; thus, it was a knowledge [scienza] in

divination of the auspices and a commonplace wisdom whose wise men
were the theological poets, the earliest wise men of gentile humanity;
from this mystical theology they were called mystae, which the knowl-
edgeable Horace8 renders “interpreters of the gods.” As a result, to this
earliest jurisprudence belonged interpretari in its primary and proper
usage, as if they were saying interpatrari, “to enter into the company
of the Fathers” (this is what the gods were originally called, as was ob-
served above [§448]), which Dante calls indiarsi, “to enter into the mind
of God.”9 And this jurisprudence deems the just to be only in the solem-
nities of divine ceremonies, whence the Romans came to have such great
superstition about their legitimating acts, and in their laws, they retained
the phrases iustae nuptiae and iustum testamentum for “solemnized” nup-
tials and testaments.
939 The second was the heroic jurisprudence of caution around propriety in
the certain use of words—that is, the wisdom of Ulysses who in Homer
always speaks so discerningly that, in his pursuit of the advantage he
intends, he always preserves propriety in his use of words.
Hence, the entire reputation of the ancient Roman jurists consists in
their cavere10 [“being cautious”]. And their de iure respondere11 [“re-
sponding according to the law”] was also nothing other than their cau-
tioning those who had to try their claims in court to present to the prae-
tors the actual circumstances in such a way that they would plainly fall
under formulas for actions so that the praetor would not be able to deny
them their claim.
Thus, in the return to barbarous times, the entire reputation of the
learned was founded in their being cautious concerning contracts and
last wills and in their knowing how to formulate legal claims and articles,
which was exactly the cavere and the de iure respondere of the Roman
jurists.
940 The third is the human jurisprudence, which has regard for the truth
about the deeds themselves, and from kindness makes the legal code
bend to all which equity in cases requires. This is the jurisprudence cel-
ebrated in free popular republics and, even more so, under monarchies,
both of which are human governments.
941 As a result, divine and heroic jurisprudence took hold of the certain in
the times when the nations were rude; human jurisprudence has regard
for the true in the times when these same nations are enlightened. And

8
 Horace, Ars poetica 391.
9
  See Dante, Paradiso 4.28.
10
  As Battistini observes, cavere is a juridical term; see Cicero, De officiis
S 2.19.65; Pro Murena 9.19.
N 11
  For this phrase, see Cicero, De legibus 1.4.12 and 2.12.29.
L
370
Book Four 371

all of this is a consequence of the definitions of the certain and the true,
and of the Axioms12 posited about them in the Elements.

Three Kinds of Authority

There were three kinds of authority. Of these, the first is a divine au- 942
thority of which no account can be demanded from providence. The
s­econd—heroic authority—rests entirely upon the solemnizing formulae
of the laws. The third—human authority—rests upon the experienced
persons of singular prudence in things pertaining to action and of sub-
lime wisdom in intelligible things.
These three kinds of authority, used by jurisprudence along the 943
course that the nations make, follow the three sorts of authority senates
have, which change along the same course of nations. Of these, the first 944
authority over domain (which remains in the use of the word autores for
those from whom we have some claim to a domain, and this domain in
the Law of the Twelve Tables is always called auctoritas). This authority
had its source in the divine governance from the familial state, in which
divine authority must have belonged to the gods, for it was believed in
the correct sense that all that is belonged to the gods.
It was fitting that later, in heroic aristocracies where the senate is com-
posed (as they are composed in our times) of lords, such authority be-
longed to those regnant senates.
Hence, the heroic senates gave their approval to what had been previ-
ously treated by the people. As Livy13 says, EIUS QUOD POPULUS
IUSSISSET DEINDE PATRES FIERENT AUCTORES [“whatever
the people first proposed, the Fathers would subsequently have author-
ity”], and yet this was not during the interregnum of Romulus, as history
tells us, but from times at the end of the aristocracy in which citizenship
had been shared in common with the plebs, as was reasoned upon above
[§§110, 598]. This order, as the same Livy14 says, saepe spectabat ad vim,
“often threatened revolt,” such that if the people wanted to come out on
top, it had, for example, to nominate consuls to whom the Senate was
inclined, exactly as is the case when people under monarchies nominate
magistrates.
After the laws of Publilius Philo, by which it was declared that the Ro- 945
man people were the free and absolute lord over civil power, as was stated
above [§§26, 38, 104, 112, 113], the authority of the Senate was tutelary,
conformable to the approval which tutors give to transactions in their
treatment of wards who are lords over their patrimony, an ­authority called

12
  Axioms 19, 111, 113.
13
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.17.9.
14
  Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.9.6.
 372 The New Science

auctoritas tutorum [“tutorial authority”]. The Senate granted this author-

ity to the people in those formulations of laws conceived previously in
the Senate; it was with these formulations, conformable to the authority
which tutors grant to their wards, that the Senate was present to people
(present in the great assemblies, present in the act of decreeing those laws
if the people wished to decree them); otherwise, it would “antiquate” and
probaret antiqua [“give their approval to the older way”]—which is to say
that the people would declare that it did not wish anything new. All of
this was so that the people in its decreeing of laws would not, on account
of its own infirm counsel, do some public harm and so that, consequently,
in its decreeing of laws, it would be regulated by the Senate. Hence, the
formulations of laws that were brought by the Senate to the people for it
to decree were defined by the knowledgeable Cicero15 as perscriptae auc-
toritates [“authorization in writing”], which is not the personal authority
such as tutors have when by their presence they give approval to the ac-
tions done by their wards, but rather an authority articulated at length in
writing (as the verb perscribere suggests) and distinct from formulations
for actions which are written per notas [“with abbreviations”], not intel-
ligible to the people. This was the order instituted by the Publilian law:
thenceforth, the authority of the Senate (to say it as Livy16 relates it to
us) VALERET IN INCERTUM COMITIORUM EVENTUM [“would
prevail while the vote of the assembly was undetermined”].
946 Eventually, republics of popular liberty passed over to monarchies, and
the third kind of authority followed, authority from trust, or a reputa-
tion for wisdom, and, accordingly, the authority of counsel, for which
the jurists under the emperors were called auctores. And such authority
must be the authority belonging to senates under monarchs, who have
complete and absolute liberty to follow or not to follow the counsels of
their senates.

Three Kinds of Reason

947 There are three kinds of reason.

948 The first: the divine reason of which God alone has understanding and
which is known to men only inasmuch as it has been revealed by God,
first to the Hebrews and later to Christians, through internal mental
speech (for such are the words used by a God who is all mind), but also
with the external speech from the prophets as well as from Jesus Christ
to the apostles, and by them it was made apparent to the Church; for the
gentiles, it was revealed through auspices, through oracles and through
physical signs believed to be divine prescriptions because they were be-
lieved to come from gods whom the gentiles believed to be composed

S 15
 Cicero, Ad familiares 1.2.4.
N 16
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.17.10.
L
372
Book Four 373

of physical bodies. As a result, for a God who is all reason, reason and
authority are the same thing; hence, in good theology, divine authority
has the same place as that of reason.
Here, one may admire providence, which in the earliest times when men
of gentile humanity did not understand reason—that this, above all, was
the case in the familial state—it permitted them to stray into the error of
holding the authority of the auspices in place of reason, and by believing
in the divine counsel of these auspices, they governed themselves through
that eternal property, that when men do not see reason in human things,
and even more so if they see reason opposed to them, they acquiesce to
the inscrutable counsels hidden in the abyss of divine providence.
The second was reason of state,17 called by the Romans CIVILIS AE- 949
QUITAS [“civil equity”], defined by Ulpian above in the Axioms18 as
reasoning not naturally familiar to all men, but to those few with practi-
cal experience in governance who know how to see what belongs to the
preservation of humankind. In this, the heroic senates were naturally
wise, and the Roman Senate was wisest of all in the times of not only
aristocratic liberty, when the plebs were still excluded from the treatment
of public things, but also popular liberty for the entire time that the peo-
ple in acting publicly made itself regulated by the Senate—that is, for the
entire time up until the Gracchi.

Corollary
on the wisdom of the ancient Romans in matters of state

Here a problem arises, which seems difficult to solve. How was it that in 950
the rude times of Rome, the Romans were supremely wise in matters of
state and in their enlightened times Ulpian says in his day only a few un-
derstood matters of state, those with practical experience in governance?
It is on account of the same natural cause which produced the heroism
of the earliest peoples that the ancient Romans, who were the heroes of
the world, themselves had a natural regard for civil equity, which was
extremely scrupulous about the words by which they gave voice to their
laws; and by this superstitious observance of their words, they made a
path for their laws that went straight past everything as it actually hap-
pened, even when the resulting laws were severe, harsh, cruel, just as to-
day, on account of what was stated more fully above [§§38, 321–322], just
as today we have the practice of “reason of state.” And so civil equity
naturally places everything under that law, queen over all the others, con-
ceived by Cicero19 with a gravity equal to the subject matter: SUPREMA

17
  See the note at §320 on “reason of state,” as well as §950 and §953 below.
18
  Axiom 110.
19
 Cicero, De legibus 3.3.8.
 374 The New Science

LEX POPULI SALUS ESTO [“let the safety of the people be the su-
preme law”].
For in heroic times when the state was aristocratic, the heroes, as was
proved more fully above [§584], held privately a large share of the pub-
lic advantage—that is, familial monarchies preserved for them by the
fatherland—and since such great particular interests were preserved for
them by the republic, they naturally subordinated their minor private
interests to it. Hence, they were naturally not only magnanimous in de-
fending the public good that is the good of the state, but also wise in
offering counsel on matters of state. And this was the lofty counsel of
divine providence, for these Fathers (those sons of Polyphemus in their
primitive life observed above [§§296, 338, 522, 629] by Homer and Plato)
without such a private interest so greatly identified with the public inter-
est could not otherwise have been induced to pay homage to civil life, as
was reflected upon above [§584] in another place.
951 By contrast, it is during humane times that states become either free
and popular or monarchical, for in the first state, citizens make decrees
about a public good that is portioned out into as many small parts as
there are citizens making up the people that gives the decrees; and in
the second state, subjects are commanded to attend to their own private
interests and to leave concern for the public interest to the sovereign
prince. Add to this the natural causes which produce these forms of
state. They are completely contrary to the causes which produce hero-
ism: as we demonstrated above [§§670–673], they are an affection for
ease, a tenderness toward children, love of women, and a desire for life.
On account of all this, men today naturally incline to attend to the ul-
timate circumstance of what happens, in order to render equal their
private advantages; this is the AEQUUM BONUM given consideration
by the third kind of reason upon which we are here reasoning, what is
called “natural reason” and what the jurists come to name AEQUITAS
NATURALIS, the only kind of reason of which a multitude are capa-
ble. For a multitude gives consideration to minor instigations that bear
upon justice, which rewards the kind of legal cases concerned with what
has happened to individuals; and in monarchies, they need a few who
are wise in matters of state so as to give counsel according to civil equity
during public emergencies in cabinets, and a great many jurists wise in
a private jurisprudence professing natural equity, so as to administer
justice to peoples.

Corollary
Foundational history of Roman law

952 The things reasoned upon here concerning the three kinds of reason can
S be the foundations for establishing the history of Roman law.
N
L
374
Book Four 375

For governance must conform to the nature of the men being governed,
as was proposed above in an Axiom,20 for it is from the nature of the men
governed that such governance emerges, as was demonstrated by these
principles above [§§925–927]. And, accordingly, the laws must be admin-
istered in conformity with the form of governance, and because of this,
they ought to be interpreted in conformity with this form. This is what it
seems that no one has done among all the jurists and legal interpreters:
they have strayed into the same error in which previously historians of
things pertaining to Rome strayed; they tell us of laws decreed at various
times in the Roman republic, but they give no notice to the relationship
which those laws must have to the changes in constitution through which
the republic passes. Hence, the actual deeds emerge so stripped of the
causes proper to them, the causes which must have naturally produced
them, that Jean Bodin,21 equally erudite as a jurist and a political theo-
rist, argues for the things done by the ancient Romans during the period
of liberty which historians falsely tell us was popular that they were the
effects of an aristocratic republic conformable to the actual liberty dis-
covered here.
On account of all this, we would ask all those who embellish about the
history of Roman law: why did the oldest jurisprudence practice such
rigor with a view to the Law of the Twelve Tables; why did jurisprudence
of the middle period, starting with the edicts of the praetors, practice a
reasoning that was kinder and yet still respectful of those laws; why did
the new jurisprudence, without even the veil of some regard for those
laws, take up a generous profession of natural equity? In response, these
embellishers, so as to offer some account, give one which is a grave of-
fense against Roman generosity when they say that the rigor, the solem-
nity, the scrupulousness, the subtleness with words, and, finally, their
secrecy about these laws was an imposture done by the nobles so as to
keep in their own hands the laws which made for the better part of power
in the city.
Instead, practices of this sort were so far from being some imposture 953
that they actually were customs which emerged from the nature of those
nobles, a nature which along with those customs produced the constitu-
tion that naturally dictated these practices and no others.
For during the times of the extreme savagery of those belonging to the
earliest humankind, since religion was the only means powerful enough
to domesticate them, providence, as was seen above [§629], disposed men
to live under divine governance and laws that were sacred to rule every-
where, which is to say laws which were arcana and kept secret from the
commoners; these laws came so naturally to men in the familial state,
because they were guarded by mute languages that articulated them

20
  Axiom 69.
21
  See Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.6.
 376 The New Science

with the consecrated solemnities which remained as legitimating acts.

And these solemnities were believed by the simpleminded to be as much
needed for one of them to be certain of the willingness and efficacy of
another when they were sharing common advantage, as today with the
intelligence now natural to us, it is enough for certainty to have a simple
word or even some bare sign.
Later, when human governance succeeded aristocratic civil constitutions
and that governance naturally preserved paying homage to religious
customs, they continued because of that religion to guard the laws as
arcana and as secret, for such arcana were the soul which gave life to an
aristocratic republic. And because of this religion, they gave the severe
observance to the laws, which is the rigor of civil equity, preserved prin-
cipally by aristocracies.
Later, since there arrived popular republics which are naturally open,
generous, and magnanimous and since decrees must be issued by a mul-
titude which we have demonstrated [§951] naturally understands natural
equity, there arrived at the same pace the languages and letters that are
called “common” [volgari]; over them, as we stated above [§443, 936], the
multitude has lordship, and with them they decreed and wrote down laws
and naturally proceeded to make public what was secret—that is, the ius
latens [“hidden law” which Pomponius22 tells us the plebs would suffer
no longer (hence their wish that the laws be written down on tables af-
ter common alphabetic letters had arrived in Rome from Greece, as was
stated above [§763]).
This order to the human civil things was eventually found arranged for
monarchical constitutions in which monarchs wish to administer the
laws according to natural equity and, consequently, conformable with
what the multitude understands; accordingly, in the legal code, they
make the powerful equal to the weak (this only a monarchy can do).
And civil equity, or “reason of state,” was understood by a few wise in
public reason and was preserved, in keeping with its eternal property, as
an arcana within cabinets.

Three Kinds of Judgments

954 The kinds of judgments were three.

955 The first were divine judgments during the so-called state of nature—
that is, the familial state—when there was no civil power from laws and
the paterfamilias appealed to the gods about the harm which was done
to him (this was the earliest and proper sense of the expression implorare
deorum fidem23 [“to implore the faith of the gods”]). They called upon the

S 22
  Digest 1.2.2.3 and 6.
N 23
 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.6.13.
L
376
Book Four 377

gods as witnesses to their claims (this was the earliest and proper sense
of the expression deos obtestari [“call upon the gods as witnesses”]). And
such accusations and defenses were, by a property native to the term, the
earliest orations in the world (so in Latin the term oratio continued to
be used for “accusation” and “defense,” for which there are fine passages
in Plautus and Terence;24 and the Law of the Twelve Tables preserved
two golden passages, first, FURTO ORARE [“to plead about theft”] is
used for agere [“to bring suit”] and, second, PACTO ORARE [“to plead
concerning a contract”], not the adornare on Lipsius’s reading,25 is used
for excipere [“to stipulate”]). As a result, because of these orations, they
continued in Latin to call oratores those who made set speeches on cases
in court.26
Such appeals to the gods were originally made by gentile peoples, so
simple and rude in their credulity that they were heard by gods whom
they imagined resided on the peaks of mountains—so Homer27 tells us
that they were on Mount Olympus, and Tacitus28 writes of a war between
the Hermunduri and the Chatti because of their superstition that no-
where by the gods except on the peaks of high mountains preces morta-
lium nusquam propius audiri [“were the prayers of mortals more properly
heard”].
The claims established in these divine judgments were themselves con- 956
sidered gods since these were times during which gentile peoples imag-
ined that all things were gods:29 so, Lar represented the household
domain; the Dii Hospitales represented one’s claim to shelter; the Dii
Penates, paternal power; Deus Genius, the right to marriage; Deus Ter-
minus, the domain of one’s farm; Dii Manes, one’s claim to burial. A
golden vestige of this claim to burial remains in the Law of the Twelve
Tables, IUS DEORUM MANIUM30 [“the laws belonging to the Dii
Manes”].
After such orations—that is, such beseeching and imploring—and after 957
such callings for gods as witnesses came the act of cursing the criminals
themselves; hence, among the Greeks, certainly in Argos, there were tem-
ples dedicated to such cursing. And those accursed were called αναθήματα
(or, as we say, “excommunicated”) and oaths were taken against them

24
 Plautus, Asinaria 113; Epidicus 355. Terence, Andria 141 and 407.
25
  Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), Flemish humanist philosopher and philologist.
The reference is to Leges regiae et leges decemvirales studiose collectae (Opera
omnia, p. 281).
26
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 416.
27
 Homer, Iliad 1.18.
28
 Tacitus, Annals 13.57.1.
29
  “Gentile peoples imagined that all things were gods”—as distinct from first
imagining them to be nondivine, but subsequently speaking about them as if
they were divine, clothing their prosaic perceptions in mythical garb. See the
note at §384 distinguishing Vico’s position from euhemerism.
30
  See Cicero, De legibus 2.9.22.
 378 The New Science

(this was the earliest sense of the expression nuncupare vota [“to pro-
nounce an oath”], which signified making solemnized oaths—that is,
oaths consecrated with formulaic expressions), and those accursed were
consecrated to the Furies (they were the true diris devoti [“those pledged
to the Furies”]) and then were killed (so the Scythians, as we observed
above [§§100, 516], fixed a knife in the earth, gave adoration to it as a
god, and then killed a man with it; and in Latin, they used the verb mact-
are for such killing, which remained a sacred term used during sacrifices,
whence they continue to use mattar in Spanish and ammazzare in Italian
as verbs meaning “to kill”; and we saw above [§776] that in Greek, the
word αρά continued to mean a “harmful object,” an “oath” and a Fury,
and that in Latin, the word ara meant both “altar” and “victim”).
Consequently, there remained among all nations some kind of excom-
munication (Caesar31 left a quite developed memorial to the version of
this among the Gauls; among the Romans, they retained the interdict
against fire and water reasoned upon above [§§371, 610]; many of these
consecrations passed over into the Law of the Twelve Tables: someone
who had violated a tribune of the plebs was “consecrated to Jove”; an
impious son was “consecrated to the gods for the Fathers”; someone
who set fire on another’s grain and was so burned alive was “consecrated
to Ceres”). One sees that the cruelty of these punishments is similar, as
was stated in the Axioms,32 to the brutality of the most brutal witches
and that their victims must have been those whom above [§§191, 517,
549, 776] Plautus33 called Saturni hostiae [“victims of Saturn”]!
958 Along with these judgments practiced privately, peoples went forth to
wage wars that were called pura et pia bella34 [“pure and pious wars”];
such wars were waged pro aris et focis, for civil things both public and
private, from the perspective under which all human things were re-
garded as divine: hence, all wars in heroic times were religious wars. For
heralds, in denouncing the city to which they were sent, called the gods
out of the city and consecrated their enemies to the gods. Hence, kings
over whom the Romans triumphed were presented to Jove Feretrius on
the Capitoline and then killed,35 in keeping with the example of the im-
pious and violent men who were the earliest enemies and the earliest
victims consecrated by Vesta on the earliest altars in the world; and cap-
tured peoples were considered to be men without gods, in keeping with
the example of the earliest familial servants. Hence, slaves, as if they
were inanimate things, were called mancipia [“possessions”] in the Ro-
man language and in Roman jurisprudence they had loco rerum [“the
status of things”].

31
 Caesar, De bello gallico 6.13.
32
  Axiom 40.
33
  See the note on Plautus at §191.
34
  Livy speaks of iusta ac pia bella; see Ab urbe condita 3.25.3, 9.8.7, 39.36.12,
S 42.47.9.
N 35
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 9.12.3; 10.44.8.
L
378
Book Four 379

Corollary
on duels and reprisals

As a result, there was one kind of divine judgment in the barbarism of 959
nations, duels, which must have come into being most anciently under
governance by the gods and must have been conducted for a long time
within heroic republics; concerning these heroic republics, we related in
the Axioms36 a golden passage from Aristotle37 in his Politics, where he
says that they did not have judiciary laws for punishing damages or cor-
recting private violence. This (based on the false opinion held up until
now owing to the vanity of the learned about the philosophical heroism
of the earliest peoples, which followed from the unaccountable wisdom
of the ancients38) has not been believed until now.
Certainly, among the Romans, they were late to introduce—and only then 960
by a praetor—the interdict Unde vi [“On force”], and the civil actions De vi
bonorum raptorum [“Concerning the use of force with stolen goods”] and
Quod metus caussa [“Action whose cause is duress”], as was stated in an-
other place [§638]. And throughout the later recourse to barbarism, private
reprisals lasted down to the times of Bartolus,39 which must have been the
same as the “condictions” and “private actions” of the ancient Romans,
for condicere, according to Festus, meant “to denounce.” As a result, the
paterfamilias was required to make a denunciation to someone who had
unjustly taken what was his that it be restored before he could make use
of reprisals. Hence, such formal denunciations remained as a solemnity in
personal actions, something that Ulrich Zasius40 acutely understood.
However, duels contained real judgments, which, insofar as they were 961
made in re presenti [“in the moment”], have no need of a formal de-
nunciation. Hence, they remained in the vindicae [“interim ownership”]
in which one took a gleba, or clod, from the wrongful possessor with a
feigned show of force which Aulus Gellius41 calls festucaria, “of straw”
(derived from the true force made in earlier times for which it must have
been called vindicate) and must have taken that clod to the judge in order
to say of it, AIO HUNC FUNDUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRI-
TIUM [“I declare this ground to be mine by the law of the Quirites”].
Consequently, those who write that duels were introduced on account of
a lack of proofs write falsely; instead, they ought to write that it was on
account of a lack of judiciary laws.

36
  Axiom 85.
37
 Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.
38
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128.
39
  Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–1357), Italian jurist and author of Tractatus
de repressalis (1354).
40
  Ulrich Zasius (1461–1535), German jurist and humanist, friend of Erasmus,
initial supporter and eventual opponent of Luther.
41
  Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 20.10.10.
 380 The New Science

For certainly Frotho, king of Denmark, decreed that all contested mat-
ters be concluded by means of combat, and so he forbade their being
ended by legitimate judgments. Because their matters were not con-
cluded with legitimate judgments, the laws of the Lombards, Salians,
English, Burgundians, Normans, Danes, and Germans are filled with
duels. On account of this Cujas42 in his On Feuds says the following:
Et hoc genere purgationis diu usi sunt Christiani tam in civilibus quam in
criminalibus caussis re omni duello commissa [“Christians have long used
this kind of cleansing in both civil and criminal cases, settling everything
with duels”].
Because of this, there remain in Germany those who are called Ritter
who profess a knowledge [scienza] of duels, and who oblige all those
given to duels to tell the truth; for if duels permitted witnesses and, con-
sequently, judges were to intervene, they would turn into either criminal
or civil judgments.
962 This has not been believed of the earlier barbarism that duels were prac-
ticed, because no memory of it has come down to us.
However, we do not know how to understand how the sons of Poly-
phemus, in whom Plato recognizes the most ancient paterfamilias in the
state of nature, could have suffered to be harmed, to say nothing of suf-
fering humanely.
Certainly, Aristotle43 has said in the Axioms44 that in the most an-
cient republics, to say nothing of the familial state before cities, they
did not have laws for correcting damages or punishing offenses when
citizens committed private transgressions against one another, as we
demonstrated above [§960] was the case in ancient Rome; and accord-
ingly, Aristotle also claims in the Axioms that this is the custom of
barbarous peoples, for as was suggested in the Axioms, peoples are
barbarous at their start because they have not yet been domesticated
by laws.
963 However, there are two great vestiges of these duels—one in Greek his-
tory, the other in Roman history—that peoples must have started wars,
called in ancient Latin duella, with combat between the particular men
who had been offended, even if they were kings and watched by both
their peoples hoping to see the offence publically defended or avenged.
Thus, for example, the Trojan War started with combat between Menel-
aus and Paris45 because the former considered the latter the one who ab-
ducted his wife, and because this combat remained indecisive, it followed
that Greeks and Trojans waged war upon each other. And we noticed
above [§641] that the same custom for the nations of Latium in the war

42
  Jacques Cujas (1520–1590), French jurist. The reference is to De feudis 1.
43
 Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.
S 44
  Axiom 85.
N 45
 Homer, Iliad 3.344–382.
L
380
Book Four 381

between the Romans and the Albans, which was completely ended by the
combat between the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, one of whom
must have abducted Horatia.
In armed judgments of this sort, they deemed right to be in the fortune
of the victor. This was the counsel of divine providence so that, among
gentile peoples who were barbarous and whose reasoning was far too
limited to understand right, wars would not breed further wars and they
would have some idea of justice or injustice from men whom the gods
were for or against: so, the gentiles scorned even the saintly Job who
from his regal fortune fell insofar as God was against him. And during
the return to barbarous times, accordingly, the defeated party, even if he
was just, barbarously had his right hand cut off.
From customs of this sort observed by peoples in the private realm, there 964
emerged what moral theologians call the external justice of wars, whence
nations might repose in the certainty of their powers.
Thus, the auspices which founded the paternal monarchical power of
the Fathers in the familial state and which arranged and preserved aris-
tocratic rule in heroic cities and which, when shared in common with
the plebs of those peoples, produced free republics (as is so plainly re-
counted to us in Roman history) eventually legitimated with the fortune
of arms the conquests of those successful at conquering.
All this can come to pass in no other way than from an innate concept of
providence, which nations universally have, to which they must conform
when they see the just afflicted and the wicked prosper, as was stated in
another place in the Idea of the Work [§27].
The second judgments, because of their recent origin from divine 965
judgments, were observed with extreme scrupulousness for words, a scru-
pulousness which must have retained from the previous divine judgments
the name religio verborum [“religious regard for words”], conformable
with divine things being universally conceived in terms of consecrated
formulae, even the smallest letter of which cannot be altered, whence
for ancient formulae for actions it was said qui cadit virgula caussa ca-
dit [“he who misses a comma loses the case”]. This was the natural law
of heroic gentile peoples naturally observed in ancient Roman jurispru-
dence. And such were the fari of the praetor—that is, “an unalterable
pronouncement”—so called from the dies fasti, “the days” on which the
praetor offered a legal reckoning; because only the heroes took part in
such reckonings of this in heroic aristocracies, they must have been the
FAS DEORUM [“divine law”] of times in which, as we explained above
[§449], the heroes named themselves gods (it was from here that later the
word fatum was used for the ineluctable order of causes which produces
the things of nature). For such would be God’s way of speaking. Hence,
perhaps comes the sense of the Italian verb ordinare, which, and espe-
cially when reasoning about laws, means “to give commands that neces-
sarily must be followed.”
 382 The New Science

966 On account of this order, which, when reasoning about judgments, sig-
nifies the solemn formulae for action which dictated the cruel and base
punishment against the renowned defendant Horatius, the duumvirs
were not able to acquit him, even if he had been found innocent, and (as
Livy46 recounts) the people to whom he appealed acquitted him magis
admiratione virtutis quam iure caussae [“more from admiration for his
virtue than from the justice of his case”].
And this ordering of judgments was needed during the times of Achilles,
who rested all right upon strength, on account of that property of the
powerful (this Plautus47 describes in a way consistent with his grace: pac-
tum non pactum, non pactum pactum [“an agreement is no agreement, no
agreement is an agreement”]). In these cases, promises are not always in
accord with the wishes of the arrogant, and the arrogant do not always
wish to fulfill their promises.
Thus, so that they do not break out in suing, strife, and killing, it was the
counsel of providence that they would naturally hold in opining about
justice that their right was such and as extensive as explicated in solemn
verbal formulae. Hence, the reputation of ancient Roman jurisprudence
and of the older scholars in our own times stood upon taking precau-
tions for their clients.
This natural law of the heroic gentile peoples afforded Plautus the plots
for many of his comedies: lowlifes are unjustly defrauded by the trickery
of young men in love with their slaves because, although they acted inno-
cently, they are found guilty under some legal formula. And not only can
they not bring the fraud to trial with some legal action, but one of them
reimburses the deceptive young man for the price of the sale of the slave;
another begs a different young man to be content with half the penalty
incurred for unproven theft; another flees the city out of fear that he will
be convicted of corrupting another young man’s slave.
This is how much in the times of Plautus natural equity ruled in making
judgments!
967 Not only was this strict law naturally observed among men, but because
of their nature, men also believed that it was observed by the gods them-
selves in their oaths; so, Homer48 tells us that Juno makes an oath to Jove
(who not only witnesses the oath, but also judges it) that she had not so-
licited Neptune to set a storm in motion against the Trojans insofar as she
did it through the god Somnus as her intermediary, and Jove remains sat-
isfied with this. Thus, Mercury feigning to be Sosia swears to the one who
truly is Sosia that if he is tricking Sosia, then Mercury may turn against
him. And yet it is not credible that Plautus in his Amphitryon49 was try-

46
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.12.
47
 Plautus, Aulularia 260.
S 48
 Homer, Iliad 14.354–360, 15.36–44.
N 49
 Plautus, Amphitryon 392.
L
382
Book Four 383

ing to introduce gods who would teach the people in the theater how to
make false oaths. And it is even less credible for Scipio Africanus and for
the Laelius who was called the “Roman Socrates,” the two wisest princes
of the Roman republic with whom Terence is said to have composed his
comedies. Yet Terence50 in his Lady of Andros devises one Davus, who is
made to place a baby in front of the door of Simo but uses the hands of
Mysis to do it, so that if it comes to pass that he is asked about it by his
master, he could in good conscience deny that he had put the baby there.
But what is the weightiest of proofs is that in Athens, a city of discerning 968
and intelligent men, in response to the verse by Euripides51 which Cicero
renders in Latin,
iuravi lingua, mentem iniuratam habui
[“The tongue swore, but I kept my mind unsworn”],

the spectators in the theatre roared in disgust, for they naturally tended
toward the opinion that UTI LINGUA NUNCUPASSIT, ITA IUS
ESTO [“as the tongue declares, so goes what is lawful”], as is decreed in
the Law of the Twelve Tables. How far the unfortunate Agamemnon was
able to absolve himself of his rash oath, because of which he consecrated
and killed his innocent and pious daughter Iphigenia! Hence can one un-
derstand why Lucretius,52 because he did not recognize providence, could
make about the deed of Agamemnon the impious exclamation,
tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!
[“such are the evils religion enjoins!”],

as we proposed above in the Axioms.53

Finally, we affix to what we have proposed the following reasoning upon 969
two things from Roman jurisprudence and history that are certain. First,
it was in later times that Gallus Aquilius54 introduced the civil action De
dolo [“On Fraud”]; second, Augustus granted to judges a register for
resolving cases of those who had been tricked or seduced.55
Because they were inured to this custom in peace, nations later in war, 970
when they were defeated, depending on the terms of the surrender, either
endured unfortunate oppression or engaged in fortunate mockery before
the anger of the victors.
Unfortunate oppression is what the Carthaginians endured when they 971
accepted from the Romans peace terms which would make for the safety

50
 Terence, Andria 722–730.
51
  See Euripides, Hippolytus 612; Cicero, De officiis 3.29.108.
52
 Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.101.
53
  Axiom 40.
54
  Aquilius Gallus, consul in 66 BCE, orator and distinguished jurist, friend of
Cicero.
55
  See Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Augustus 33.
 384 The New Science

of their lives, their city, and their substance: they understood by the term
“city” its buildings (which in Latin is called urbs), but for city, the Ro-
mans used the term civitas which signifies the “community of citizens”;
so when the Romans later executed the peace terms and decreed that
the Carthaginians abandon their city situated on the seashore and retire
inland, they refused to obey and, newly armed for their defense, were
declared by the Romans rebels; by heroic right in war, the Romans took
Carthage barbarously and set fire to it.56
The Carthaginians would not acquiesce to the peace terms offered by the
Romans, which they had not understood in contracting them (for they
had previously become intelligent, partly through an African acuity,
partly through maritime business which makes nations more discerning).
But the Romans hardly considered the war to be unjust. Although there
are a few who deem that the Romans started to wage unjust wars with
their war against Numantia, which was brought to an end by Scipio Af-
ricanus himself, everyone agrees that their unjust wars had their begin-
ning during the later one against Corinth.
972 However, something from the return to barbarous times better confirms
what we have proposed. Emperor Conrad III offered to Weinsberg,
whose resistance had been fomented by his rival for the empire, as terms
for its surrender that only the women could come out safely, bringing
with them as much as they could carry upon their back. At that point,
the pious women of Weinsberg came carrying their children, spouses,
and parents, and the victorious emperor stood at the city gate in the very
act of enjoying the fruits of his victory, naturally a moment wont to be
insolent; and yet he did not hearken to that wrath which is terrifying in
magnates and must be cause for mourning when born of obstacles made
in the face of those acquiring and preserving their sovereignty. Standing
at the head of his army girded with swords drawn and lances poised to
make a slaughter of the men of Weinsberg, he looked and suffered all of
them to pass safely before him, the one who had intended to put all of
them to the sword.
This is how much the natural law of human reason articulated by Gro-
tius, Selden, and Pufendorf ran its course through every time period in
every nation!
973 What has been reasoned upon up until now, and all that will be reasoned
upon later, emerges from those definitions that we proposed above in the
Axioms57 concerning the true and the certain with regard to laws and
pacts. And they emerge because it is as natural during barbarous times
to observe right belonging to the strict use of words—what is properly
called FAS GENTIUM58 [“the law of peoples”]—as it is natural during
humane times to deem right to belong to the kind use of equal advan-

S 56
  Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.6.
N 57
  Axioms 111, 113, 114.
L 58
  For this expression, see Tacitus, Annals 1.42.2.
384
Book Four 385

tage in equal cases—what is properly called FAS NATURAE [“the law

of nature”], that immutable law of human rationality, which is the true
and proper nature of man.
The third judgments were extraordinary judgments, in which the 974
truth behind the deeds is lord, and these judgments in accordance with
the dictates of conscience, for each are kindly succored by laws in what-
ever is demanded by equal advantage for equal cases. They are endowed
with the natural modesty, which is the offspring of understanding, and
consequently guaranteed by good faith, which is the child of humanity.
This is in agreement with the openness belonging to popular republics
and even more so with the generosity belonging to monarchies, where
the monarchs in these judgments are ostentatious about being above the
law and subject only to their conscience and to God.
And from these judgments, practiced in modern times for peace, the three
systems of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf have arisen for war. Having
observed in these systems many errors and defects, Father Nicola Con-
cina59 has meditated upon a system more in conformity with good phi-
losophy and more advantageous to human society so that, for the glory
of Italy, he teaches this system to this day as a professor at the illustrious
University of Padua along with metaphysics, of which he is the first chair.

Three Sects of Times

All the aforesaid things were practices throughout three sects of times. 975
Of these, the first were times belonging to the religious, who had cur- 976
rency under divine governance.
The second were times belonging to the punctilious like Achilles, who in 977
the return to barbarous times were those who fought duels.
The third were times belonging to the civil—that is, the modest—during 978
the times of the natural law of the gentile peoples for which Ulpian60
offers specificity in his definition by adding the word “human”: IUS NA-
TURALE GENTIUM HUMANARUM [“the natural law of human gen-
tile peoples”]. Hence, for those writing in Latin under the emperors, what
ought to be done by subjects is called officium civile61 [“civil duty”], and
any breach of the duty taken in the interpretation of the laws as contrary
to natural equity is called incivile [“uncivil”]. And this is the final sect of
times for Roman jurisprudence, starting in the times of popular liberty:
hence, at first, the praetors, so as to accommodate Roman nature, cus-
toms, and governance which had changed, were required to sweeten the
severity and soften the rigidity of the Law of the Twelve Tables decreed

59
  Nicola Concina (1694–1762), Dominican priest and professor of metaphysics
at Padua, and correspondent of Vico from 1733.
60
  Digest 2.14.7.1.
61
  On the officium civile, compare Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 2.4.27.
 386 The New Science

during what was natural for heroic times in Rome; later, the emperors
were required to strip away the veils with which the praetors had covered
the laws and to display natural equity, with all the openness and gener-
osity agreeable to the gentleness to which the nations were accustomed.
979 Accordingly, the jurists justify, as one can observe, by appeal to the “sect
of their times” whatever their reasoning is concerning the just. For these
sects are proper to Roman jurisprudence, and with respect to them, the
Romans were in agreement with all the other nations of the world; they
were the sects taught by divine providence (the Roman jurists established
this as the principle of the natural law of the gentile peoples), not the sects
of the philosophers (which some erudite interpreters of the Roman legal
code have imposed upon it by force, as was stated above in the Axioms62).
And the emperors themselves, when they wished to offer reasons for
their laws or other orders given by them, stated that they were led in
doing whatever they did by the “sect of their time,” as is gathered in the
passages of Barnabé Brisson63 in his De formulis Romanorum. They did
this insofar as the customs of the age are the school for princes: so, Taci-
tus64 uses the term “age” in naming the decadent sect of his times when
he says corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur [“the age is called to cor-
rupt and be corrupted”], whereas today we would use the word “mode.”

Additional Proofs
Treating the Properties of
Heroic Aristocracies

980 So constant and continuous and orderly a succession of human civil

things, within the chain of such and so varied causes and effects ob-
served in the course which nations make, ought to constrain our minds
to accept the truth of these principles. However, so as not to leave any
place for doubt, we will add to them an explanation of other civil phe-
nomena that cannot be explained except in terms of the discovery that
was made above [§§582–598], the discovery of heroic republics.

On Guardianship Over Boundaries

981 This is because the two greatest of the eternal properties of aristocratic
republics are, as was stated above [§586], their two kinds of guardianship,
first, that over boundaries and, second, that over orders.

62
  Axioms 104 and 114.
63
  Barnabé Brisson (1531–1591), French humanist jurist.
S 64
 Tacitus, Germania 19.3. Vico quotes this passage in a letter from 1726 to Es-
N perti, suggesting that the age of Tacitus is an age “quite similar to our own”—
L that is, “delicate and showy” (Battistini 322–323).
386
Book Four 387

Guardianship over boundaries started to be observed, as was seen 982

above [§§434, 486, 550], with the sanguinary religions under divine gov-
ernance. For they had to place limits on the fields in order to remedy
the infamous sharing of things in common in the bestial state, and
with these limits were settled the boundaries, first, of families, later of
clans, or households, then of peoples, and finally of nations. Hence,
each of the giants, as Polyphemus says to Ulysses,65 stayed with his wife
and children in his cave lest one might meddle in the things belonging
to another, thus preserving what they were wont to do in their recent
brutal origin. And they savagely killed those who entered within their
boundaries, as Polyphemus tried to do to Ulysses and his compan-
ions; it is in this giant, as has been stated many times [§§296, 338, 522,
629, 950, 962], that Plato66 saw the Fathers in the familial state. Hence,
we demonstrated above [§632], was derived the longstanding custom
of cities regarding one another from the perspective of being eternal
enemies.
So much for the smooth division of the fields of which the jurist Hermo-
genianus tells, accepted on good faith by all the interpreters of the Ro-
man legal code! And it is from this early, most ancient beginning of hu-
man things, the place where the subject matter itself starts, that it would
be reasonable to start also the doctrine teaching de rerum divisione et
acquirendo earum domino [“on the division of things and the acquisition
of domain over them”].
This guardianship over boundaries is naturally observed in aristocratic
republics, which, as the political theorists have noted, are not made
through conquest.
Instead, after the infamous sharing of things in common dissipated and
peoples were well settled upon their boundaries, there came popular
­republics—which made for the expansion of empire—and, eventually,
the monarchies that are even better for this expansion.
This and nothing else must be the cause for the Law of the Twelve 983
Tables not recognizing simple possession, and in heroic times it was usu-
caption that served to solemnize the natural handing over of property,
as the best interpreters read in the definition called dominii adiectio, the
addition of civil domain to some previous natural acquisition.
However, during times of popular liberty, there later came the praetors,
and they assisted with simple possession by means of their interdicts;
and usucaption started to be dominii adeptio, a way of acquiring civil
domain from the very beginning. And whereas, at first, cases concerning
possession did not actually appear in court (for the praetor recognized
such cases through the extrajudicial proceedings stated above [§638]),
today the legal judgments that are most certain are the ones called
“possessory.”

65
 Homer, Odyssey 9.112–115.
66
 Plato, Laws 3.2–4, 678c–681e.
 388 The New Science

984 Hence, in Rome, largely during popular liberty and completely under the
monarchy, there fell away from distinctions among bonitary, quiritary,
optimal, and, eventually, civil domain; originally, these terms conveyed
meanings quite different from their present meanings. The first, natural
domain, was preserved by continuous, physical possession. The second,
a domain which could be legally vindicated, was current among the ple-
beians, communicated to them by the nobles with the Law of the Twelve
Tables; however, for legal vindication, a plebeian was required to call
upon the noble as “author” because of whom he had the domain, as was
fully demonstrated above [§§603, 621]. The third, domain free from any
encumbrance, public as well as private, had currency among the patri-
cians themselves prior to the ordering of the census which was the basis
of popular liberty, as was stated above [§620]. The fourth and last, the
domain which the city itself had, is now called “eminent” domain.
The distinction between optimal and quiritary domain was obscure
even during those times of popular liberty such that jurists of the final
period of jurisprudence took no countenance of it. But under mon-
archy, the domain which is called bonitary (born of simple natural
handing over of property) and so-called quiritary domain (born of
­mancipation—or civil transfer) were actually confused by Justinian67
in the institution of De nudo iure Quiritium tollendo and De usucapione
transformanda. And the well-known distinction between things which
were mancipi [“transferable”] and things which were nec mancipi [“non-
transferable”] was completely abolished. And they retained “civil do-
main” in the sense of domain amenable to the legal process of vindica-
tion, and optimal domain in the sense of domain not subject to any
private encumbrance.

On Guardianship Over Orders

985 Guardianship over orders started in times of divine governance because

of jealousy—hence we saw above [§513] a jealous Juno, the goddess of
solemn marriages—for the sake of proving at that time the certainty of
families against the nefarious sharing of women in common.
This guardianship is the natural property of aristocratic republics
which wish for kinship ties, succession, and, consequently, wealth (and,
through all these, power) to remain within the noble order. Hence, testa-
mentary laws came late to the nations: so, Tacitus68 tells us that among
the ancient Germans there was no testamentary law; this is why King
Agis, when he tried to introduce them into Sparta, was actually strangled
by the ephors, guardians of the liberty of the Lacedaemonian lords, as
was stated in another place [§§592, 668].

S 67
 Justinian, Institutes 7.25.1; 7.31.1.
N 68
 Tacitus, Germania 20.
L
388
Book Four 389

Consequently, one can understand with what great discernment the

embellishers on the Law of the Twelve Tables assigned to the eleventh
table the title AUSPICIA INCOMMUNICATA PLEBI SUNTO69 [“The
auspices will not be communicated to the plebs”]: on these originally
depended all legal claims in both the public and private realms, which
were all preserved in the noble order; the private ones were claims to
nuptials, paternal power, direct kinship, paternal kinship, tribal kinship,
legal succession, disposing by testament and to guardianship, as was
reasoned upon above [§§110, 598]. As a result, after having in the first
tables established, by giving a common share of all these legal claims to
the plebs, the laws proper to a popular republic (particularly by giving a
common share in the testamentary law), they later, with a single article in
the eleventh table, gave it a completely aristocratic form.
However, in their great confusion of things, they also say something
which, although it is mere divination, is true, that the last two tables trans-
ferred into laws some of the ancient customs of those Romans, a state-
ment which verifies that the ancient Roman constitution was aristocratic.
Now, to return to what we proposed, after humankind had everywhere 986
been settled by the solemnity of marriage, there came popular republics
and, much later, monarchies. Within these, by means of intermarrying
with the plebs of the people and of testamentary succession, the orders
of the nobility were disturbed, and, consequently, their wealth gradually
proceeded to leave the noble households. For it has been fully demon-
strated above [§§110, 513, 527, 598] that the Roman plebeians contracted
natural marriages up until Year 309 of Rome, when the patricians finally
shared the connubium—that is, the right to contract solemnized nuptials.
Nor in that miserable state, which was almost that of the basest slaves (as
Roman history also recounts for us) could they have made any pretense
to intermarrying with those nobles. This is one of the most important
things which led us to state in the first edition of this work70 that, if we
do not offer these beginnings to Roman jurisprudence, then Roman his-
tory is more unbelievable than the mythical history of the Greeks told to
us up until now, for we did not know of the latter what it was trying to
say, but in Roman history we sensed that that it was completely contrary
to the order of human desires that the most miserable men would make
pretense, first, to nobility in the contest over connubium, later, to honors
by their seeking a common share in the consulate, and, finally, to wealth
with the last pretense of being made priests. Whereas, it is the case by an
eternal and common civil nature that men first desire wealth, after this,
honors, and, last of all, nobility.
Hence, by necessity, one has to say that because the nobles had con- 987
veyed to the plebeians certain domain over the fields with the Law of the

69
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 6.41.6 and 10.8.9.
70
 See Scienza nuova prima §§109, 598, 657.
 390 The New Science

Twelve Tables—which we demonstrated above [§§109, 598, 657] was the

second agrarian law in the world—and because the plebeians were still
foreigners (for it is possible to concede this domain to foreigners), by ex-
perience the plebeians actually perceived that they were not able to leave
the field intestate to their kin, because they did not contract solemnized
nuptials among themselves and so did not have direct kinship, paternal
kinship, or tribal kinship, much less disposal of the fields by testament,
not being citizens. No wonder, given that these men had little or no un-
derstanding, as is proved by the Furian, Voconian, and Falcidian laws,
inasmuch as all of them were plebiscites; and they needed all three to
affirm eventually with the Falcidian the desired advantage, namely, that
estates not be absorbed by bequests. Accordingly, because they perceived
that, upon the deaths of plebeians that came to pass within three years
of the Law of the Twelve Tables, the fields assigned to them returned in
this way to the nobles, they made pretense with the connubium to citizen-
ship, as was reasoned upon above [§598].
However, the grammarians, confused by all the political theorists,
imagined that Rome had been founded by Romulus with the constitu-
tion which cities now have, not knowing that the plebs of heroic cities
were for many centuries considered to be foreigners and, consequently,
contracted natural marriages among themselves. And, accordingly, the
grammarians have not noticed that there was as much an actual as there
was a verbal incongruity in taking the Latin expression from history, ple-
bei tentarunt CONNUBIA PATRUM [“the plebs held the nuptials of the
Fathers”] as if it meant cum patribus [“with the Fathers”] (for the mar-
riage laws do speak in this way—for example, patruus non habet cum fra-
tris filia connubium [“an uncle will not hold connubium with the daughter
of his brother”], as was stated above [§598]). If they had noticed this,
they would certainly have understood that the plebeians did not make
pretense to the right of intermarrying with the nobles, but of contracting
solemnized nuptials, which was the right of the nobles.
988 Consequently, if one considers the legal successions—that is, the decrees
of the Law of the Twelve Tables that the paterfamilias be succeeded in
the first place by their own and, lacking these, by paternal kin and, fail-
ing that, by tribal kin—the Law of the Twelve Tables seem like a Roman
Salic law, a law which one can also observe in Germany in their earliest
times: hence, one can conjecture that the same was the case for other na-
tions early in the return to barbarism and that it eventually remained in
France and, outside of France, in Savoy. This law of legal succession is
later called by Baldus71 (in congruity with what we have proposed) IUS
GENTIUM GALLORUM [“the law of the Gallic gentes”]. The same can
be done for that Roman law on legal succession by paternal and tribal
kinship: one can reasonably call it IUS GENTIUM ROMANORUM

71
  Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), medieval Italian jurist born in Perugia,
S student of Bartolus de Saxoferrato. See Baldus, Commentaria in primam Digesti
N veteris patrem 1.9, cited by Bodin in Six Books on the Commonwealth 6.5.
L
390
Book Four 391

[“the law of the Roman gentes”], and by adding to gentes the adjective
HEROICARUM [“heroic”] and by more congruously using ROMA-
NUM [“Roman”] to modify ius, it would be exactly the same as the IUS
QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM [“law of the Roman Quirites”]—this we
proved herein above [§595] has been the natural law common to all heroic
gentes).
And the things we have said concerning the Salic law, that it excludes 989
women from succession in regimes, are not, as it might seem, overturned
by the fact that Tanaquil, a woman, governed the Roman regime. For
that was said as a heroic phrase for a king who, weak in spirit, made
himself ruled by the wily Servius Tullius, who invaded the Roman regime
with the favor of the plebs, to whom he had conveyed the first agrarian
law, as was demonstrated above [§§107, 604, 613, 620, 640, 653, 769].
Corresponding to what happened to Tanaquil, in the same manner of
heroic speech that recurred during the return to barbarous times, Pope
John was called a woman72 (it was to counter this myth that Leone Allaci
wrote an entire book73), for he showed great weakness in falling before
Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, as was revealed by Baronio
and, after him, by Sponde.74
With a difficulty of this sort thus resolved, we can say in the same manner 990
that, at first, the expression IUS QUIRITIUM ROMANORUM meant
IUS NATURALE GENTIUM HEROICARUM ROMANARUM, in the
same way that the law current in free republics and, even more so, under
monarchies was called by Ulpian75 (when he defined it by giving weight
to the words) IUS NATURALE GENTIUM HUMANARUM. And on
account of all this, it seems that the title of the Institutes should be read
not as DE IURE NATURALI, GENTIUM, ET CIVILI but rather DE
IURE NATURALI GENTIUM CIVILI (taking out, along with Her-
mann Vulteius,76 not only the comma between the words naturali and
gentium—for which Ulpian supplies the HUMANARUM that follows
GENTIUM—but also the conjunction et, which comes before the word
civili).
For the Romans must have attended to a law which was their own since,
from its introduction in the age of Saturn, they had preserved it, first,
with their customs and, later, with their laws, just as Varro77 in his great
work Rerum divinarum et humanarum treats Roman things as having al-
together native origins, mixed with nothing foreign.

72
  A reference to the much-disputed legend of “Pope Joan.”
73
  Leone Allaci, Confutatio fabulae de Ioanna papissa, ex monumentis graecis
(1645).
74
  The reference is to two church historians: Cesare Baronio (1536–1607) and
Henri de Sponde (1568–1643).
75
  Digest 2.14.7.1.
76
  Hermann Vultejus (1565–1634), German jurist.
77
  See Augustine, City of God 6.4.
 392 The New Science

991 Now, to return to legal succession in heroic Rome, we are strongly im-
pelled in many ways to doubt that in ancient Roman times daughters
enjoyed legal succession when women generally did not. For we are no
way impelled to believe the heroic Fathers had the slightest sense of ten-
derness; rather, in many ways, we are greatly impelled to believe the com-
plete opposite.
For the Law of the Twelve Tables called for someone related by paternal
kinship, even someone seven degrees removed, to exclude a son found to
be mancipated from legally succeeding his father. And the paterfamilias
held the sovereign law of life and death over his sons and, consequently,
held despotic domain over the possessions of his sons. This same pater-
familias contracted intermarrying for his sons in order to bring women
into his household worthy of that household; the history of this is told
to us in the verb spondere, which in its proper sense means “to promise
another,”78 whence came the word sponsalia [“betrothal”].79 The paterfa-
milias considered adoptions as good as nuptials for strengthening failing
families by means of bringing in an adopted outsider as a son-in-law. He
considered mancipating his sons a way of punishing or penalizing them;
he had no understanding of legitimizing illegitimate sons, for only con-
cubines were freed or foreign women, with whom one did not in heroic
times contract in solemn marriages, lest the nobility of the children de-
grade from that of the grandfather. Testaments, for any frivolous reason
or for none at all, were annulled or broken or followed to no effect, so
that legitimate succession could run its course.
To this extent, the paterfamilias was naturally blinded by the brilliance
of his name in the private realm, and thereby naturally enflamed to
pursue the glory of the name he shared in common with others, Rome!
All these customs are proper to aristocratic republics—that is, heroic
­republics—all of which have the property of making for the heroism of
the earliest peoples.
992 And worthy of reflection is that most incongruous error, taken up by
those erudite embellishers of the Law of the Twelve Tables, who try to
have them brought from Athens to Rome: for the whole time before that
law brought in testamentary and legitimate successions, inheritance in-
testate from the Roman paterfamilias must have fallen under the kind of
things called res nullius.
However, providence disposed, lest the world should fall back into that
infamous sharing of things in common, that certainty of a domain
would be preserved by and through the very form of the aristocratic
republics. Hence, these legitimate successions must have naturally been
celebrated by all the earliest nations prior to any understanding of tes-
taments, which are proper to popular republics and, even more so, to

S 78
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.46.8–9.
N 79
  See Voss, Etymologicon, p. 564.
L
392
Book Four 393

monarchies, as Tacitus80 plainly tells us was the case for the ancient
Germans—a passage which allows us to understand that the same cus-
tom belonged to all the earliest barbarous peoples. Hence, we conjec-
tured above [§988] that the Salic law, which was certainly celebrated in
Germany, had been universally observed by nations in the time of the
second barbarism.
But the jurists of the final kind of jurisprudence believed (owing to 993
that source of countless errors noted in this work, that of judging un-
familiar things of the earliest times in terms of things from more recent
times) that the Law of the Twelve Tables called for the daughters in fami-
lies to inherit from fathers who died intestate because of the word SUUS
[“one’s own”], on the assumption that the masculine gender of the word
includes women as well.
However, heroic jurisprudence (upon which in this book we have rea-
soned so much) takes the words of laws as having the sense most proper
to them, so that the word SUUS does not signify anything other than
the son of the family. Of this, we are convinced by the invincible proof
of the legal formula providing for the education of posthumous children
introduced some centuries later by Gallus Aquilius,81 which conceives of
the children with the expression SI QUIS NATUS NATAVE ERIT [“if
there be a male or female born”], lest there be doubt later that the term
NATUS should be understood in the restricted sense.
Hence, on account of ignorance of these things, Justinian82 in his Insti-
tutes says that the Law of the Twelve Tables, with the term ADGNATUS
[“paternal kin”], called for application to male and female kin alike, but
that later jurisprudence of the middle period made these laws more rigid,
restricting them to sisters of the same blood. What must have come to
pass is the complete opposite of this: first, the term SUUS, applied to
those called daughters because they belonged to the same family and,
later, the term ADGNATUS, applied to those called daughters because
they were sisters of the same blood. Here it was by good luck that this
came to be called jurisprudence of the “middle” period, because starting
from these cases softens the rigor of the Law of the Twelve Tables, which
came after the oldest form of jurisprudence that guarded over words
with extreme scrupulousness, as has been fully stated above [§§938–940]
for both forms of jurisprudence.
But when public power had passed from the nobles to the people, 994
because the plebs put all their strength, all their wealth, all their power
in having many children, tenderness from blood ties started to be felt:
previously, the plebs of heroic cities must not have felt this, for the
children were begotten to be made into slaves for the nobles; and the

80
 Tacitus, Germania 20.
81
  Aquilius Gallus, consul in 66 BCE, orator and distinguished jurist, friend of
Cicero.
82
 Justinian, Institutes 2.3.2.
 394 The New Science

plebs were in a position to generate at a time when they would pro-

duce ­offspring in the spring season, so that those offspring would be
born not only healthy, but also hardy. From the spring season, they
were called vernae [“slaves”], according to the Latin etymologists, from
which the “vernacular” languages are named, as was stated above
[§§443, 556]. And mothers must have hated rather than loved them,
since from them they felt only the pain of bearing them and only the
trouble of nursing them, without taking any pleasure in their advan-
tage for the mothers’ lives.
However, as much as the multitude of plebs endangered aristocratic re-
publics, which belong, and say they belong, to the few, they aggrandized
popular republics and, even more so, monarchies; hence, imperial laws
make for such favor toward women on account of the dangers and pains
of childbirth. Consequently, it was after the times of popular liberty that
the praetors started to give consideration to rights from blood ties and
give regard to them with the possession bonorum [“of goods”]. They
started to repair with their remedies the faults and deficiencies of testa-
ments, so as to promote the popular sharing of wealth, which alone is
admired by the common run.
995 Finally came the emperors who, overshadowed by the splendor of
nobility, gave themselves to promoting the claims of a human nature
common to both the plebeians and the nobles, starting with Augus-
tus who applied himself to protecting trusteeships (through this, prior
to Augustus, goods passed to those incapable of inheritance, but only
when the heirs bearing this responsibility were exacting in its execu-
tion) and gave them such assistance that in his own lifetime they bore
necessity in legal claims that constrained heirs to give effect to those
claims.
There followed many senatorial decrees by which maternal kinship
emerged as an order equal to paternal kinship, until Justinian came
along and abolished the distinction between legacies and trusteeships,
blurred the distinction in the inherited portions established in the Falcid-
ian and Trebellian laws, minimized the distinction between testaments
and codicils, and ab intestato made paternal and maternal kin all but
equal. And the last Roman laws are so profuse in their favor of last tes-
taments that, whereas in older times they were vitiated on the slightest
pretext, now they must always be interpreted in a manner more in sup-
port of its inclination.
996 On account of the humanity of the times (in which popular republics
love their sons and monarchies wish for fathers devoted to a love of their
sons), because the cyclopean right which the paterfamilias had over the
person of their sons had fallen away, and so that this right of their pos-
sessions would also fall away, the emperors introduced, first, peculium
castrense [“assets from military service”] so as to encourage them toward
S warfare; then, they extended this to peculium quasi castrense [“assets
N
L
394
Book Four 395

from quasi-military service”] so as to encourage them toward military

bureaucracy; and, finally, so as to make content those sons who were
neither soldiers nor clerks, they introduced the peculium adventicium
[“extrinsic assets”].
They abolished the effectiveness of paternal power in adoptions, which
were no longer kept restricted to a few direct kin. They universally ap-
proved of formal adoptions, somewhat difficult in cases where a citizen
who was a paterfamilias became subject to another paterfamilias. They
gave mancipation the reputation of being a benefit rather than a penalty.
They gave the full force of solemnized nuptials to legitimations decreed
under subsequens matrimonium [“subsequent marriages”].
However, above all, because that imperium paternum [“power of fathers”]
seemed to lessen their majesty, they were disposed to call it patria potesta
[“paternal power”] on the basis of their own example, one introduced by
the great discernment of Augustus who, so as not to arouse the jealousy
of the people, who might then try to take some part of his power, took
for himself the title of “tribunal power”—that is, the power to protect
Roman liberty. While the tribunes of the plebs had actual power, they
never held public power [imperio] in the republic (as in the time of Au-
gustus himself, when a tribune of the plebs ordered Labeo to appear be-
fore him, this prince of one of the two sects of Roman jurists reasonably
refused to obey, for the tribunes of the plebs never held public power).83
As a result, neither the grammarians nor the political theorists nor the
jurists have observed why, in the contest over sharing the consulate with
the plebs, the patricians (so as to content the plebs without prejudicing
themselves by sharing any part of their public power) made a way out
for themselves by creating the military tribunes, some of whom were no-
bles, some of whom were plebeians CUM CONSULARI POTESTATE
[“with consular power”], as one always reads in history, not cum imperio
consulari [“with consular public power”], which one never reads. Hence 997
the free Roman republic was conceived in its entirety with that dictum
divided into three parts: SENATUS AUCTORITAS POPULI IMPE-
RIUM TRIBUNORUM PLEBIS POTESTAS [“the authority of the
Senate, the public power of the people, the power of the tribunes of the
plebs”]. And these two terms are retained in the laws with that elegance
native to them: imperium is a word used for more significant magistrates,
such as consuls and praetors, and extending to those able to condemn
others to death; potestas is a word used of less significant magistrates,
such as aedile, and modica coercitione continetur [“involved more limited
coercion”].
Finally, the Roman princes, when their clemency toward humanity was 998
fully developed, took to favoring slaves. And they restrained the cruelty
of lords against their unfortunate slaves. They amplified the effects of

83
  See Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.12.3–4.
 396 The New Science

manumission and restricted the solemnities surrounding it. And citizen-

ship, which at first was given only to important foreigners who had mer-
ited it from the Roman people, was granted to anyone born in Rome,
even someone whose father was a slave, as long as his mother was free
either by birth or enfranchisement. It was because of this sort of free
birth in the city that the NATURAL LAW was previously called the
natural law of the GENTES—or noble households—because during he-
roic times all constitutions were aristocratic republics (to which this law
was proper, as was reasoned upon above [§§553–557]), and later came
popular republics, in which the entire nation is lord over public power,
and, subsequently, monarchies, in which monarchs represent the entire
nations subject to them, and so this natural law was retained in the ex-
pression NATURAL LAW OF THE NATIONS.

On Guardianship Over Laws

999 Guardianship over orders carries in its train guardianship over magis-
tracies and priesthoods and, consequently, guardianship over the laws
and the science of their interpretation. Hence it is that one reads in Ro-
man history, in the times in which there was an aristocratic republic, that
within the senatorial order (which then belonged entirely to the nobles)
were kept enclosed connubium, the consulate, and the priesthoods, and
that within the college of pontiffs (to which none were admitted except
the patricians), as is the case with all other heroic nations, the science
of the laws was guarded as sacred, or secret (which mean the same).
This endured among the Romans for one hundred years after the Law
of the Twelve Tables, as the jurist Pomponius tells us, and the word VIRI
[“men”] retained in those times the same meaning in Latin which the
word “heroes” had in Greek, and they used this term to name solem-
nized husbands, magistrates, priests, and judges, as was stated in another
place [§657].
But here we will be reasoning upon guardianship over laws, since it was
the greatest property of the heroic aristocracies, and so was the last to be
shared by the patricians with the plebs.
1000 This guardianship was scrupulously observed during divine times; as
a result, the observance of divine laws is called “religion,” an observance
continued by all later forms of governance, in which divine laws must be
observed in keeping with certain unalterable formulae of consecrated
words and solemn ceremonies. There was no greater property of aristo-
cratic republics than this guardianship over the laws.
Accordingly, Athens (and, on the example of Athens, almost all the cit-
ies of Greece) proceeded quickly to popular liberty on account of what
the Spartans (who were an aristocratic republic) said about the Athe-
S nians, that the laws in Athens were many and written down, and the laws
N in Sparta were few and thus observed.
L
396
Book Four 397

The Romans during the aristocratic constitution were the most inflexible 1001
guardians of the Law of the Twelve Tables, as was seen above [§952]; as
such, their laws were called by Tacitus84 FINIS OMNIS AEQUI IURIS
[“the summation of all equitable law”]. For, after these laws that were
deemed sufficient to make liberty equal (and this must have been de-
creed after the decemvirs, even though, in the manner of ancient peoples
thinking in poetic characters, the laws were named after them, as has
been demonstrated [§§422, 638, 957, 960]), there were no or very few
later consular legal decrees pertaining to private law. And, similarly,
on account of this, they were called by Livy85 FONS OMNIS AEQUI
IURIS [“the source of all equitable law”]; for they were the source of all
interpretation.
The Roman plebs decreed laws in the same fashion as the Athenian plebs:
all their laws were singular because they were not capable of universal
laws. Sulla, who was head of the noble party, somewhat repaired this
disorder when he defeated Marius, who was head of the plebeian party,
with quaestiones perpetuae [“standing investigative commissions”], but
when he stepped down from the dictatorship, they returned no less than
before to multiplying laws which (as Tacitus86 tells us) were singular. And
it is this multitude of laws, as the political theorists have noted, which
is the quickest path for arriving at a monarchy. Accordingly, to establish
a monarchy, Augustus made a great number of laws, and subsequent
princes used the Senate above all to make senatorial decrees pertaining
to private legal claims.
Nevertheless, during those same times of popular liberty, they guarded
with such severity the formulae for legal actions that all the eloquence
of Crassus, whom Cicero87 called the Roman Demosthenes, was needed
to show that an expressed pupillary substitution contained an implied
and vulgar one; and all the eloquence of Cicero88 was needed to fight for
an “R” missing from the legal formula, because of which letter Sextus
Aebutius made pretense to holding on to the farm of Aulus Caecina.
Finally, after Constantine had completely abolished the formulae, it
reached the point that every particular impetus to equity made for the
waning of the laws. So great is the docility of human minds, under hu-
man forms of governance, for recognizing natural equity.
Thus, starting from that article in the Law of the Twelve Tables entitled
PRIVILEGIA NE IRROGANTO [“privileges shall not be imposed”],
observed in the Roman aristocracy by the numerous singular laws made,
as was stated, during popular liberty, it reached a point under the mon-
archy where the princes did nothing but concede privileges, and there is

84
  See Tacitus, Annals 3.27.1.
85
  Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.34.6.
86
 Tacitus, Annals 3.27.3.
87
  See Cicero, Epistulae ad Brutum 36.138.
88
 Cicero, Pro Caecina 17–18, 49–52.
 398 The New Science

nothing that better conforms with natural equity than privileges, when
they are granted in connection with merit. Indeed, all the exceptions to-
day given to the laws can truly be said to be privileges that are dictated
by the particular merits of the actual case, which draw them beyond the
common disposition of the laws.
1002 Consequently, we believe it came to pass that during the crudeness of the
recourse to barbarism, the nations lost recognition of the Roman laws,
so much so that in France there were grave penalties, and in Spain there
was even death, for anyone who cited any such law in his own case. Cer-
tainly, in Italy, while the nobles took it as a disgrace to direct their affairs
by Roman laws and professed to be subject to those of the Lombards,
the plebeians who only slowly became unused to their customs continued
to practice some aspects of Roman law on the strength of what is cus-
tomary. This is why laws in Latin, the Justinian corpus and other laws,
became buried in the West and why laws in Greek, the Basilica and other
laws, became buried in the East.
However, later with the rebirth of monarchies and the reintroduction of
popular liberty, Roman law comprised in the books of Justinian was so
universally accepted that Grotius89 affirms that it is today a natural law
for the peoples of Europe.
1003 Yet there is much to admire of Roman gravity and wisdom that, in spite
of these changes in the constitution, the praetors and jurists were zeal-
ous to move as little and as slowly as possible away from the proper
sense of the words of the Law of the Twelve Tables. This, perhaps, is
the principal reason why the Roman Empire grew so great and endured
so long, for in spite of the changes in its constitution, it was solicitous
of holding as firmly as possible to its beginnings, which were the same
as those of this world of nations (as all the political theorists agree that
there is no better counsel than this for constitutions enduring and grow-
ing great).
Thus, the same cause that produced among the Romans the wisest juris-
prudence in the world, upon which we have reasoned above [§§950–951],
made them the greatest power in the world. It is this cause of Roman
greatness which Polybius founds too generally upon the religion of the
nobles,90 which Machiavelli, by contrast, founds upon the magnanim-
ity of the plebs,91 and which Plutarch,92 envious of Roman virtue and
wisdom, founds upon their fortune in his book De fortuna Romanorum,
to which, in a different and less direct way, Torquato Tasso93 wrote his
generous Reply.

89
 Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena §53.
90
  See Polybius, Histories 1.3.7; 1.64.9; 18.11.4.
91
  See Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 2.1.
92
 Plutarch, Opera moralia 44.
S 93
  Torquato Tasso, Risposta di Roma a Plutarco nella quale reprova la sua opin-
N ione della fortuna de’ romani e della fortuna o della virtù d’Alessandro (1588).
L
398
Book Four 399

Additional Proofs Taken from the

Moderating Which Happens of the
Subsequent Constitutions of
Republics Because of the Prior Ways
of Governing
All the things stated in Book Four provide evidence to demonstrate that, 1004
for the entire life which nations live, they follow a course in keeping with
the order with the three kinds of republics—that is, civil constitutions—
and no more, and that all three kinds stand upon the first—that is, divine
governance—and taking their start from divine governance, through the
Axioms94 posited above as principles of the ideal eternal history, they
must run through this series of human things: first in the republics of op-
timates, next in free popular republics, and finally under the monarchies.
Hence, Tacitus,95 although he does not look at them in this order, says,
as we noted in the Idea of the Work [§29], that besides these three forms
of public constitution ordered by the nature of peoples, others that by
human contrivance are mixtures of these three are more to be desired
from the heavens than they are capable of being achieved, and even if by
chance they do hold for a time, they are not long-lasting.
However, so as not to leave any doubts about this being the natural suc-
cession of political, or civil, constitutions, it will be discovered that, fol-
lowing this succession, there are republics which are naturally mixed and
that in them one form is not mixed with another (such a constitution
would be a monstrosity) but a subsequent form is mixed with the prior
way of governing. This mixture is founded upon the above Axiom96 that
when men change, they retain for some time an impression of what they
were previously wont to do.
Accordingly, we say that as the earliest gentile Fathers came out of their 1005
bestial life and into a human one, in religious times in the state of nature
under divine governance, they retained much of the savagery and brutal-
ity of their recent origins; hence, Plato97 recognized in the Polyphemus of
Homer the earliest paterfamilias in the world. Thus, during the forming of
the earliest aristocratic republics, they retained intact the sovereign private
power which the paterfamilias has in the state of nature, and because, on
account of their supreme arrogance, none of them was obliged to cede to
another (for they were all equal), by forming an aristocracy they subjected
themselves to the sovereign public power of their ruling orders. Hence, the
lofty domain which each paterfamilias had in the private realm proceeded
to make for the composition of a lofty and superior domain which the
senate itself had in the public realm, since it was from the sovereign private

94
  Axioms 65–68.
95
 Tacitus, Annals 4.33.1.
96
  Axiom 71.
97
 Plato, Laws 3.2–4, 678c–681e.
 400 The New Science

power which they held over their families that these same Fathers com-
posed the sovereign public power of their orders. Except in this fashion,
it is impossible to understand otherwise how cities were composed from
families, cities which, accordingly, must have come into being as aristo-
cratic republics, naturally mixed with sovereign family power.
1006 Meanwhile, the Fathers preserved the authority belonging to this do-
main with their ruling orders, until the plebs of these heroic peoples were
brought by laws from these same Fathers to have a common share in
certain domain over the fields, in connubium, in positions of power, in
priesthoods and, with the priesthoods, also in the science of the laws; the
republics remained aristocratic, but later the plebs of these heroic cities
became more numerous and inured to war, putting fear to the Fathers,
who in these republics of the few must themselves have been few, and the
plebs, assisted by their strength in numbers, started to decree laws unau-
thorized by the senate, and so the republic changed and became popular
rather than aristocratic. For none of them could have lived, even for a
moment, with two supreme legislative powers without any distinction
between them of subjects, times, and territories, concerning which, dur-
ing which, and within which they would decree the laws. So, the dictator
Philo accordingly declared with the Publilian law that the Roman repub-
lic was by its nature actually a popular republic.
In the midst of such change, so that the authority pertaining to domain
might retain what it could of its changed form, it naturally became a
tutelary authority, just as the power that the Fathers held over their ado-
lescent children, upon their deaths, became the authority that a tutor has
over another. Through this authority, free people (who were the masters
of public power, but, like adolescents who possessed rule, were still weak
in counsel about public matters) made for themselves to be governed by
senators who were like tutors, and so free republics were naturally aris-
tocratic in governance.
However, later, the powerful within these popular republics ordered this
public counsel toward the private interests from which came their power,
and free peoples, for the sake of private advantages, made for their own
seduction by the powerful to subject their public liberty to the ambition of
the powerful; and with the divisions into parties, factions, civil wars tending
to the destruction of these nations, the form of monarchy was introduced.

On the eternal and natural

royal law through
which nations come to rest
under monarchies

S 1007 This monarchical form was introduced in keeping with the eternal and
N natural royal law sensed by all the nations which recognize Augustus to
L
400
Book Four 401

be the founder of monarchy among the Romans; this law is not clear
to interpreters of the Roman legal code, all of whom are preoccupied
with the myth of the royal law of Tribonian (of which he plainly con-
fesses he is the author in his Institutes98 and at another point attributes
it to Ulpian in his Pandects).99 However, it is well understood by the Ro-
man jurists, who knew well the natural law of the gentile peoples, and
it was in keeping with this sound understanding that Pomponius, in his
brief history of Roman law, when reasoning about this royal law, left
for us in writing the following expression: REBUS IPSIS DICTANTI-
BUS REGNA CONDITA100 [“regimes are founded by the dictates of the
things themselves”].
This natural royal law is conceived in terms of the following natural for- 1008
mulation of eternal advantage: given that, in free republics, all guard
their own private interests and make public arms serve those interests
(even though this tends toward the destruction of their nations); in order
that these nations might be preserved, there arises a single man (such as
Augustus among the Romans) who by force of arms takes upon himself
all the public concerns and leaves his subjects to care for their own pri-
vate things, along with such concern for public things, and as much of
it as he qua monarch permits to them. And thus are peoples saved, who
would otherwise proceed toward their own destruction.
The commonly learned agree with this truth when they say that univer-
sitates sub rege habentur loco privatorum [“under kings corporate enti-
ties have the status of private persons”], for the majority of citizens no
longer have any concern for the public good; Tacitus,101 someone ex-
ceedingly wise about the natural law of the gentile peoples,102 signals in
his Annals that this unfolds within the family of the Caesars in keeping
with the following order of human civil ideas. As the end of Augustus
approached, pauci bona libertatis incassum disserere [“a few conversed
without effect about the goods coming from liberty”]; when Tiberius
came, omnes principis iussa adspectare [“everyone looked expectantly
to the prince for their orders”]; under the three Caesars after him, first
came incuria [“indifference”] and finally ignorantia reipublicae tanquam
alienae [“ignorance of the republic, which at that point was so foreign to
them”].103 Hence, when the citizens have become foreigners in their own
nation, it is necessary for a monarch to support and to represent this na-
tion in his own person.
Now, because in free republics the people must be partisans of someone
powerful if he is to bring in a monarchy, monarchies are by nature a form

98
  Institutes 1.2.6; Codex 1.17.1.7.
99
  Digest 1.4.1.pr.
100
  An inexact rendering of a passage found at Digest 1.2.2.11.
101
 Tacitus, Annals 1.4.
102
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
103
  Compare Tacitus, Histories 1.1.
 402 The New Science

of popular governance. First, this is by laws with which monarchs en-

deavor to make all their subjects equal. Then, this is through that prop-
erty of monarchies by which sovereigns, in humiliating the powerful,
keep the multitude free and secure from the powerful oppressing them.
Later, this is through that other property of monarchies by which sov-
ereigns maintain a multitude satisfied and content with the sustenance
needed to live and the benefits of natural liberty. And, finally, this is by
the privileges granted by monarchies either to entire orders, which we
call the “privileges of liberty,” or to particular persons by promoting
men of extraordinary merit to civil honors outside of the ordinary—that
is, by singular decrees dictated by natural equity. Hence, monarchy best
conforms to a human nature where reason is most developed, as was
stated in another place [§927].

Refutation of the principles

of a political teaching
based upon the system of Jean Bodin

1009 At this point in our reasoning, one can understand how much Jean
Bodin scientifically establishes the principles of this political teaching!104
He disposes the forms of civil constitution in keeping with an order of
this sort: first, there were monarchies; then, having passed through tyr-
anny, there were free and popular constitutions; and, finally, there came
the aristocracies.
There would be enough at this point to refute him fully with the natu-
ral succession of political forms, especially given what has been dem-
onstrated in this book by the countless proofs based in what is actually
the case.
However, it pleases us ad exuberantiam [“with a view to abundance”]
to refute him in terms of what is impossible and absurd in his position.
1010 That man, certainly, agrees with us in this truth: that the cities are com-
posed from families.105 However, in addition, by a common error re-
proved above [§§552, 582–585], he believed that these were families only
with children.
Now, how, we ask of him, could monarchies arise from such families?
1011 There are two means: either force or fraud.106

104
  Modern Italian editions do not reproduce the exclamation point here.
Both the autograph and the 1744 printed edition, however, clearly attest its
­presence—a sign of the “exuberant” character of Vico’s polemic against Bodin.
105
  See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.1 and 1.2.
S 106
  Compare Machiavelli, Prince 7, and Discourses on Livy 2.13, as well as the
N locus classicus in Cicero, De officiis 1.13.
L
402
Book Four 403

How could one paterfamilias subdue others through force? For if during 1012
the free republics (for Bodin, these came after tyrannies), each paterfa-
milias consecrated himself and his family to a fatherland preserving their
families (and for Bodin each paterfamilias had already been domesti-
cated by monarchy), must one not, then, deem that such a paterfamilias,
still a Polyphemus recently emerged from his origins in the most fero-
cious and bestial of liberties, would actually rather be killed along with
his entire family than suffer inequality?107
And could he subdue them through the fraud adopted by those who af- 1013
fect rule over others by seducing them with liberty or power or wealth?
How by liberty, if in the familial state all the Fathers were sovereigns?
How by power, if it is the nature of the sons of Polyphemus to abide
alone in their caves and care for their own families, and not to meddle
with what belongs to others (as they are wont to do because of their re-
cent brutal origins)? How by wealth, if in the simplicity and parsimony
of those earliest times wealth was completely unintelligible to them?
The difficulty grows immeasurably greater in that, during the earliest 1014
barbarous times, there were no fortresses, and heroic cities composed of
these families were for a long time without walls (as Thucydides108 above
[§§76, 645] made certain). And in the midst of jealousies within the state
(which were most deadly during heroic aristocracies, as we stated above
[§513]), Valerius Publicola109 came to be suspected of tyranny for having
built a house on high, and so as to justify himself, he dismantled what he
had made in one night, and the next day made the lictors lay his consular
fasces at the feet of the people. The custom of cities being without walls
endured longest among nations that were the most ferocious; as a result,
one reads that in Germany Henry the Fowler was the first who started
to induce peoples living in the villages in which they were spread out to
practice city life and to surround cities with walls.
So much for the earliest founders of cities being men describing with
a plough the walls and gates of a city (gates which the Latin etymolo-
gists110 say were so called from the expression a portando arato [“by lift-
ing the plough”] because they lifted the plough up high wherever they
wanted an opening for a gate)!
Consequently, because of, on the one hand, the ferocity of barbarous
times and, on the other, the scant security of royal palaces, in the court
of Spain there were over eighty royal killings in sixty years, such that
the fathers of the Council of Elvira, one of the oldest in the Latin
church, condemned this wickedness, frequently doing so under penalty
of excommunication.

107
  For a similar argument, see Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium 8.5.4.
108
 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.2.3.
109
  Publius Valerius, consul from 475 to 460 BCE. For the anecdote, see Livy,
Ab urbe condita 2.7.
110
  See Varro, De lingua latina 5.32.142 and Voss, Etymologicon, p. 465.
 404 The New Science

1015 However, the difficulty rises to infinity, if we posit families of children

only. Then, whether by force or by fraud, the children had to be instru-
ments of the ambition of others, and either betrayed or killed their own
fathers. As a result, the earliest state would not have been a monarchy
but an impious and wicked tyranny; so did those young nobles in Rome
conspire against their own fathers in favor of the tyrant Tarquin,111 on
account of the hatred they had for the rigid laws (laws as proper to aris-
tocratic republics as benign laws are proper to popular republics, clement
laws are to kingdoms, and dissolute laws are to tyrannies), and those
young men who conspired at this made a trial of it at the expense of their
own lives: two of them, the sons of Brutus, were both decapitated,112 a
penalty dictated by their father himself.
So much for Roman rule being monarchical and the liberty ordered by
Brutus being a popular liberty!
1016 On account of these many great difficulties, Bodin and all the other po-
litical theorists ought to acknowledge that families were monarchical in
the familial state, which has been demonstrated herein, and that they
were families composed not only of children, but also of familial ser-
vants (from whom the families were principally called, and they were
found herein [§556] to be the precursors of the slaves who came about
later when cities waged wars). And in this fashion, free men and slaves
are the matter of which republics are composed. Bodin does posit these
as the matter of the republics, but he cannot account with his presup-
positions for how this can be so.
1017 On account of this great difficulty, it inspires wonder in Bodin113 himself,
reckoning with his presuppositions for how free men and servants can be
the matter of which republics are composed, that people of his own na-
tion were called the “Franks,” and yet were observed in their earliest times
to have been treated as the basest of slaves. This is because on account
of his own presuppositions he is not able to see that nations were made
complete by adding those released from the knot of the Petelian law.
As a result, the Franks who inspire wonder in Bodin are the same as
the same rustic vassals who inspire wonder in Hotman114—those called
homines [“men”] because, as has been demonstrated in this book [§§559,
597], they comprised the plebs of the earliest peoples who belonged to
the heroes.
These multitudes, as has also been demonstrated [§1006], drew the ar-
istocracies toward popular liberty and, eventually, to monarchies. And
they did this on the strength of the vernacular language in which were
conceived the laws for both of these final constitutions, as was reasoned

111
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.3.
112
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.5.
S 113
  See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5.
N 114
 Hotman, De verbis feudalibus commentarius, p. 764.
L
404
Book Four 405

upon above [§953]. Hence, in Latin they called this common language
vernacula [“the vernacular”] insofar as it came from the word for those
who were slaves because they were born with a household—this is what
the word verna means—rather than made so during war, and we have
demonstrated above [§§443, 556, 994] that there were such slaves among
all the ancient nations from the time of the familial state. Also because
of this, the Greeks no longer called themselves “Achaeans” (hence
Homer115 calls heroes “sons of the Achaeans”) but instead called them-
selves Hellenes, after the Hellenus who gave the vernacular Greek lan-
guage its start, exactly as the sons of Israel no longer called themselves
that as they had in early times, but instead continued to call themselves
the “Hebrew people” after Heber, whom the Fathers meant to be the one
who propagated the sacred language.116
This is how much Bodin, and all the others who write on political theory,
saw that luminous truth demonstrated throughout this work and par-
ticularly from the evidence of Roman history, that it was the plebs of
peoples who always and for all nations changed the constitution from
aristocratic to popular and from popular to monarchical. And as the
plebs are the ones who founded the vernacular languages, as has been
fully proved in the Origins of Languages [§443], so they are the ones who
have given nations their names, as has just been seen!
So it is that the ancient Franks, Bodin’s wonder notwithstanding, gave
their name to his France.
Finally, the aristocratic constitutions within our present experience are 1018
very few and are remainders from times of more recent barbarism—that
is, Venice, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy, Ragusa in Dalmatia and Nurem-
berg in Germany—while the others were popular constitutions governed
aristocratically.
Hence, again, Bodin (whose own presuppositions mean that the Roman
regime was monarchical and, after the expulsion of the tyrants, mean
that popular liberty was introduced into Rome) does not see that dur-
ing the earliest times of a free Rome there emerge effects which do not
conform with the design from his principles because they are proper to
an aristocratic republic and, as we observed above [§663], so as to emerge
honorably from this, at first he says that Rome had a constitution which
was popular but governance which was aristocratic; but then, strongly
constrained by the truth, in another place he confesses with gross incon-
sistency that it was the constitution and not just the governance which
was aristocratic.
These errors leading political theory astray are born because, as we ob- 1019
served above in a different place [§§105, 663, 666], the following three
words have not been defined: “people,” “regime,” and “liberty”: so, it has

115
 Homer, Iliad 1.162, 237, 240, 276, 368, 392.
116
  See Augustine, City of God 16.11 and 18.39.
 406 The New Science

been believed that the earliest peoples were composed of both plebeian
and noble citizens, even though from a thousand proofs herein [§597]
it has been found that there were only noble citizens. So, it has been
believed that liberty in ancient Rome was for the people—namely, a lib-
erty freeing the people from the lords—whereas it has been found herein
to be liberty for the lords—namely, a liberty freeing the lords from the
tyranny of the Tarquins. Hence, they erected statues to those who killed
these tyrants, because they killed them for the sake of the orders of those
regnant senates.
Kings, during the ferocity of the earliest peoples and during the scant
security afforded by royal palaces, were aristocrats: the two in Sparta
were kings for life, a republic which was beyond doubt aristocratic, as
has been demonstrated herein [§§423, 592, 664, 668, 1000]; and later
there were two annual consuls in Rome (whom Cicero117 in his Laws calls
REGES ANNUOS [“annual kings”]). After this order was made by Ju-
nius Brutus (as Livy118 plainly reveals), Roman rule was not changed
in any way relative to royal power; as we observed above [§§106, 664],
during their rule, these annual kings made appeals to the people, and,
after it was done, they were required to render to the people an account
of the rule administered by them; in reflecting on this, we said that dur-
ing heroic times, one king would every day expel another from his seat
(as Thucydides says to us). And we put this together with the return to
barbarism, in which one reads that the thing most uncertain and vari-
able was the fortune of rule; we pondered [§645] upon Tacitus119 (who in
the propriety and energy in the words themselves endeavors to give his
prescriptions) starting his Annals with the words urbem Romam principio
reges HABUERE [“the city of Rome at its beginning had kings”], which
is the weakest of the three kinds of possession made out by the jurists
when they use the words habere [“to have”], tenere [“to hold”], and pos-
sidere [“to possess”]; and he uses the word URBEM—which, properly
speaking, means the buildings of a city—in order to signify a possession
preserving to itself only the physical; he does not say civitatem—that
is, the community of citizens whose spirit, as a whole or as a majority,
makes for public reason.

Final Proofs Which Confirm That

This Is the Course of Nations

1020 There are other proofs from the suitability of effects to the causes as-
signed to them in this science in its principles for confirming the natural
course made during the life of nations; the majority of them are scat-

117
 Cicero, De legibus 3.8.
S 118
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.1.7.
N 119
 Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.
L
406
Book Four 407

tered above and stated without any order, but here, within this natural
succession of human civil things, they will be unified and disposed.
Accordingly, penalties during familial times were most cruel, inas- 1021
much as they are the punishment of the sons of Polyphemus (it was in
this familial state that Apollo flayed Marsyas alive120). And they con-
tinued into aristocratic republics (hence, Perseus with his shield, as we
explained above [§§423, 542, 616], turns to stone those who look upon
it; and the Greek word for punishments, παραδείγματα [paradeigmata],
is used in the same sense as the Latin word exempla, in the sense of
“exemplary punishments”); and in the return to barbarism, the death
penalty, as we also observed above, was called “ordinary.”121 Hence, the
laws in Sparta, a republic demonstrated by us with so many proofs to be
aristocratic, which were judged primitive and crude by both Plato and
Aristotle,122 required the illustrious King Agis to be actually strangled by
the ephors;123 and the laws in Rome, while it had an aristocratic consti-
tution, meant that the renowned Horatius, although victorious, had to
be beaten naked with a rod and subsequently hanged upon a wretched
tree—both examples were stated above for other purposes.124 Because
of the Law of the Twelve Tables, they condemned to be burned alive
those who had set fire to another’s grain; condemned to be torn from
the Tarpeian Rock those who bore false witness; and condemned to be
dismembered alive those who defaulted on debts; this last penalty Tul-
lus Hostilius did not spare Metius Fufetius, king of Alba, his peer who
had failed to keep faith in their alliance, and Romulus himself, prior to
this, had been dismembered by the Fathers simply on suspicion of this
condition.125 This is what we say to those who suggest that such penalties
were never practiced in Rome.
The milder penalties practiced in popular republics came later, when de- 1022
crees are given by the multitude, which, because it is made up by the
weak, is naturally inclined to compassion. And these were the penal-
ties of which Horatius was acquitted, that renowned defendant who in
a heroic rage killed his sister whom he had seen weeping over the pub-
lic’s good fortune, acquitted by Roman people magis admiratione virtu-
tis quam iure caussae [“more from admiration for his virtue than from
the justness of his case”] (according to the elegant phrasing of Livy126
observed above in another place [§966]). And just as in the mildness of

120
  For the myth of Marsyas and Apollo, see (among other sources) Diodorus
Siculus, Historical Library 3.58–59; Pliny, Natural History 16.89; Ovid, Meta-
morphoses 6.382–400.
121
  This observation does not in fact appear in the present text. A similar pas-
sage can be found at Scienza nuova prima §438.
122
  See Plato, Laws 1.6, 630d, and Aristotle, Politics 2.9, 1271b and 7.2, 1324b.
123
  See Plutarch, Life of Agis 19–20.
124
  On Agis, see §§592, 668, 985; on Horatius, see §§268, 500, 521, 662, 966.
125
  See Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.28 and 1.16.4.
126
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.12
 408 The New Science

popular liberty we heard, a little while ago [§1021], Plato and Aristotle
reprehending the laws of Sparta during the time of freedom in Athens,
so does Cicero127 cry out against the inhumanity and cruelty of bringing
the charge of treason against the Roman Rabirius, a private citizen and
knight.
Finally came the monarchies, in which princes enjoy hearing of them-
selves the gracious title “clement.”
1023 Accordingly, because of barbarous wars in heroic times that ruined de-
feated cities, those who surrendered were turned into herds of day labor-
ers who were scattered throughout the countryside to cultivate the fields
of the victorious people—these, as we reasoned above [§§560, 595], were
the heroic inland colonies—and consequently, on account of their magna-
nimity, popular republics, as long as they were regulated by their senates,
took from the defeated the natural law of heroic peoples and left them
completely free to benefit from the natural law of humane peoples (as Ul-
pian128 calls it); hence, with the extension of conquests, they restricted to
Roman citizens all claims to what was later called propriae civium Romano-
rum [“things proper to Roman citizens”]—that is, nuptials, paternal power,
direct kinship, paternal kinship, tribal kinship, quiritary or civil domain,
mancipation, usucaption, stipulation, testament, tutelary rights, and in-
heritance; and prior to their subjection, free nations must have claimed all
of these as civil rights of their own. Finally came the monarchies, which
tried under Antonius Pius to make the entire Roman world into a single
Rome, for it is a wish proper to great monarchies that the entire world be
made into a single city (so Alexander the Great used to say that the entire
world was his city, and his phalanx was fortress to that city).129
Hence, the natural law of the nations, promoted by the Roman praetors
in the provinces, came at the end of a long age to give laws domestically
to the Romans themselves. The heroic law that the Romans held over
the provinces went by the wayside, for the monarchs want to make all
their subjects equal with their laws; and Roman jurisprudence (which in
heroic times paid homage entirely to the Law of the Twelve Tables and,
later in the time of Cicero, as he relates in his book De legibus,130 had
started to subsume its practice under the edicts of the Roman praetors)
eventually, from the Emperor Hadrian onward, was entirely preoccupied
with the Perpetual Edict,131 which was composed and ordered by Salvius
Julianus almost entirely from provincial edicts.

127
 Cicero, Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo 4, 11, and 13.
128
 Compare Digest 2.14.7.1.
129
  The source is De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute 1, attributed to Plu-
tarch. But the pairing with Caracalla suggests (as Battistini notes) that Vico’s
source is Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.6.
130
 Cicero, De legibus 1.5.17.
131
 The Edictum perpetuum, a revision of the Edictum praetoris, was composed
S and decreed under the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). See Eutropius, Brevia-
N rium ab Urbe condita 8.17.
L
408
Book Four 409

So, from the small districts agreeable to a well-governed aristocratic 1024

republic, and by way of the later conquests to which a free republic is
well disposed, eventually came monarchies, which have beauty and mag-
nificence to the extent that they are great.
So, from deadly suspicions of aristocracies and by way of the roil- 1025
ing of popular republics, the nations finally came to repose under
monarchies.
However, it pleases us to demonstrate how this physical and compos- 1026
ite order of human civil things can be in agreement with the order of
numbers, things that are abstract and most simple.
Civil things started with the governance of the one with familial mon-
archies; then, they passed over to the governance of the few with heroic
aristocracies; they advanced forward to the governance of the many and
of all in popular republics, in which all or the majority make for public
reason; finally, they return to governance of the one in civil monarchies.
And one cannot understand a division within the nature of numbers
more adequate than the one in keeping with the order of one, few, many,
and all; and, in keeping with the few, many, and all, each retaining ac-
cording to its kind a rational unity (since numbers consist of indivisibles,
as Aristotle132 has said) and once that which is all has been surpassed,
there must be a return to the one, and so all of humanity is contained
between familial and civil monarchy.

Corollary
Ancient Roman law was a serious poem,
and ancient jurisprudence was a severe poetry,
within which are found the earliest roughed-out features
of a legal metaphysics;
and how for the Greeks philosophy came from the laws

There are a good many effects that are quite great, particularly in Roman 1027
jurisprudence, whose causes cannot be found elsewhere than in these
same principles, and above all these effects accord with the Axiom133 that
insofar as men are naturally inclined to pursue the true and, by their
affection for it, attain the certain when they cannot pursue the true:
consequently, mancipations started literally with a hand [vera mano] as
a way of speaking about “true strength” [vera forza], for “strength” is
abstract whereas a “hand” is sensible. And the hand among all nations
signifies “power”; hence come the Greek words cheirothesiai [“those
upon whom hands are placed”] and cheirotoniai [“those for whom hands
are raised”]—the former being those who were elected when hands were

132
 Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.9, 1085b.
133
  Axiom 9.
 410 The New Science

placed upon the heads of those chosen for power, the latter being those
who were given approval after being elected when hands were raised for
them—solemnities that were proper to mute times and conform to the
return to barbarous times when similar approval was given to kings who
were chosen.
Thus, this true mancipation was literally an occupation, that earliest and
great natural source for all domain; Romans continued to use the word
in war, and so slaves from war were called mancipia, and booty and con-
quests in war were called res mancipi because those defeated in these Ro-
man conquests became res nec mancipi. This shows how far mancipation
came into being within the walls of a single city, Rome, as a mode of
acquiring civil domain in the private transactions of these same Romans!
1028 Conforming with this true mancipation, there came in its train a true
usucaption—namely, the acquisition of domain, which is the meaning of
capio, “to take”—by means of true use (the term usus in Latin can mean
“possession”). And so possession was originally exercised by continu-
ously and physically holding onto the thing that was possessed; as a re-
sult, possessio must have come from a sort of porro sessio [“taking a seat
going forward”] (it was on account of this continuous act of sitting—or
remaining settled—that homes in Latin were called sedes [“seats”]) and
did not come from pedum positio [“taking a stand”], as Latin etymolo-
gists say, for the praetors gave their assistance and maintained with their
edicts the former, not the latter, sense of possession. It is from the Greek
word for such possession, θέσις, that Theseus must have had his name,
and not from his fine posture, as the Greek etymologists say, for the men
of Attica founded Athens by remaining settled there for a long time. This
is the usucaption that legitimizes states among all nations.
1029 Again, in the heroic republics of Aristotle,134 which had no laws for re-
dressing private damages, we saw above [§269] that redress was made
with true strength (such were the first duels or private wars in the world),
and “condictions” were private reprisals, which in the recourse to barba-
rism lasted down to the times of Bartolus.135
1030 Insofar as the ferocity of these times started to be domesticated, as
violence in the private realm started to be prohibited by judiciary laws,
as strength in the private realm proceeded to be unified into the public
strength called “civil power,” the earliest peoples, poets by nature, must
have naturally imitated the true strength which they had previously used
so as to preserve their rights and claims. And so, they made a myth out
of natural mancipation and made from it a solemn act of civil tradition
(which is represented with the sign of a contrived knot to imitate the
chain by which Jove had enchained the giants to those earliest empty

 Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.

134

S   Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–1357), Italian jurist and author of Tractatus

135

N de repressalis (1354).
L
410
Book Four 411

lands and by which, later, those peoples enchained their clients—that

is, their familial servants). This mythical mancipation was celebrated in
all their civil advantages with the legitimating actions, which must have
been the solemnizing ceremonies of peoples who were still mute. Later,
when speech came to take on an articulated form, so as to be certain of
the goodwill of another in their contracts with each other, they tried to
invest their pacts, which were acts signifying that knot, with solemnizing
words, in which they conceived certain and precise stipulations. And later
at war they conceived in similar terms the laws which make for terms
with a defeated city; these were called “peace terms” from the word pa-
cio, which is the same as the word pactum [“pact”]. A great vestige of this
remains in the formula with which they conceived the terms of surrender
with Collatia; as Livy136 relates it, the pact was actually a contract of re-
ceivership made by means of questions and answers; hence, with perfect
propriety, those who surrendered were called recepti [“those received”],
which conforms with what the Roman herald137 said to those speaking
on behalf of Collatia: ET EGO RECIPIO [“And I receive you”].
So much for stipulations in heroic times only being made with Roman
citizens! And so much for the good sense of those who believed that Tar-
quinius Priscus, with the formula by which Collatia surrendered, ordered
for nations how they had to make a surrender!
In this fashion, the law of the heroic gentes of Latium remained fixed 1031
in the famous article of the Law of the Twelve Tables, conceived in the
following terms: SI QUIS NEXUM FACIET MANCIPIUMQUE UTI
LINGUA NUNCUPASSIT ITA IUS ESTO [“if anyone shall make bond
or conveyance, as he has declared with tongue, so shall it be law”]. This
is the great source of all ancient Roman law, and anyone who compares
Roman with Attic law must confess that this article did not arrive in
Rome from Athens.
Usucaption, at first taking physical possession, proceeded later to be- 1032
come, with contrived possession, the spirit of holding on to something.
In the same way, heroic redress was mythologized with a merely con-
trived strength, and heroic reprisals passed on later to being personal
actions, preserving the solemnity of denouncing those who were debtors.
The childhood of the world had use of no other counsel, given that chil-
dren, as was proposed in an Axiom,138 excel in the power to imitate truth
of which they are capable, in which consists the faculty of poetry, which
is nothing other than imitation.
Thus, they brought into the piazza as many masks as there were 1033
personae—persona, properly speaking, means nothing other than

136
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.38.2.
137
  In fact, the formula was pronounced by Tarquinius Priscus, rather than by
the heralds.
138
  Axiom 52.
 412 The New Science

“mask”—and as many masks as there were names, which, during times

of mute speech made up of real words,139 must have been familial insig-
nia, by which, it has been discovered, the peoples of the Americas distin-
guish their families, as was stated above [§559]; and behind the mask—
or persona—of the paterfamilias was hidden all his children and all his
servants, and behind a real name—that is, the household insignia—were
hidden all his direct kin and all those from the same tribal household;
hence, we saw Ajax, tower of the Greeks, and Horatius, standing alone
on a bridge against all the Etruscans, and in the return to barbarism
we encounter forty Norman heroes expelling from Salerno the entire
army of Saracens. And consequently, there was a belief in the amazing
strength of the paladins—that is, the sovereign princes—of France, who
are still so called in Germany, above all with Count Roland, later called
Orlando.
The reason for this comes from the principles of poetry found above
[§§34, 209, 501, 934], that the authors of Roman law during an age not
able to understand intelligible universals made imaginative universals;
just as later, poets brought personages and masks into the theater by
art, in the same way that these earlier poets had brought “names” and
1034 “personae” into the forum by nature. For persona must not have been de-
rived from personare, which means “to resonate everywhere”: there was
no need in the small theaters of those early cities (at a time, according
to Horace,140 when the people who were spectators were so few that they
could easily be counted) to use masks for the voice to resonate enough
to fill the entire theater (besides, the length of the second syllable is in-
congruous with that of sono, which is short). Instead, it must have been
derived from personari, a verb which we conjecture must have meant “to
dress in the pelts of wild beasts,” something which only heroes were al-
lowed to do. Its companion verb obsonari remains for us, which must
have originally meant “to feed upon the flesh from wild hunts,” which
must have been the “first rich feasts,” Virgil’s141 exact description of the
feasts of his heroes.
Hence, the first rich spoils must have been the pelts of wild beasts killed
and brought back by the heroes in the first wars that they waged against
wild beasts so as to defend themselves and their families, as was reasoned
upon above [§536]; the poets clothe their heroes in such pelts and, above
all, Heracles in the pelt of a lion.
And it is because of this origin for the verb personari, we conjecture,
that Italians use the word “personage” for a man of lofty station who is
representative of greatness.
1035 Through these same principles, because they could not understand ab-
stract forms, they instead imagined physical forms and imagined them

139
  On “real words,” compare Bacon, De augmentis scientarum 6.1 (Works I,
S p. 651).
N 140
 Horace, Ars poetica 205–206.
L 141
 Virgil, Aeneid 1.209–213, 3.224.
412
Book Four 413

as having their animate nature. And they contrived Inheritance as the

mistress of inherited wealth, and they envisioned her in her entirety in
each particular thing from an inheritance, in exactly the same way that
they would call the glebe or clod taken from a farm to a judge by the
legal formula for redress: HUNC FUNDUM [“this ground”]. And thus,
if they did not understand, they at least sensed in a rude way that rights
are indivisible.
In conformity with such natures, ancient jurisprudence was entirely po- 1036
etic. It devised as done what has not been done; as not done what has
been done; as born what has not yet been born; as dead what is living, as
dead living during a pending inheritance. It introduced so many empty
masks without a subject, which are called the iura imaginaria, “rights
mythologized by imagination.”142 And it rested its entire reputation on
finding myths of the sort which might offer gravity as a servant of the
laws and justification as a minister to deeds. As a result, all the legal
fictions of ancient jurisprudence were masked truths, and the legal for-
mulae by which they spoke legal decrees (by their circumscribing limits
with a certain number and a certain kind of words, no more, no less, no
different) were called carmina, which, we learned above [§500], were what
Livy said dictated the punishments against Horatius. This becomes con-
firmed by a golden passage of Plautus143 in his Comedy of Asses, where
Diabolus says that the parasite is a great poet because he knows best how
to discover the cautionary measures, or formulae, which we just saw were
called carmina.
As a result, all of ancient Roman law was a serious poem that the Ro- 1037
mans presented in the forum, and ancient jurisprudence was a strict po-
etry. It is quite congruent with our purposes that Justinian in the proem
to his Institutes calls upon ANTIQUI IURIS FABULAS [“the myths of
ancient law”]: these words must have been derived from some ancient
jurist who understood the things upon which we are here reasoning,
even though Justinian makes mocking use of them. In contrast to that
mocking, it was from these myths that Roman jurisprudence evoked
its principles, as has been demonstrated herein. And from these masks,
which were used in such dramatic myths that were both true and severe
(these masks were called PERSONAE), Roman jurisprudence derived
the earliest origins of its teaching de iure personarum [“on the rights of
persons”].
But the arrival of the human times of popular republics was the start 1038
of the intellect’s appearance in great assemblies; and the abstract and
universal claims reasoned out by the intellect were thenceforth said con-
sistere in INTELLECTU IURIS144 [“to consist in an understanding of
the law”]—that is, in an understanding of the will of the lawgiver who

142
 Vico’s translation of iura imaginaria.
143
 Plautus, Asinaria 746–748.
144
  Compare Papinian, Digest 5.3.50, as well as the fuller account at Scienza
nuova prima §193.
 414 The New Science

articulated in his laws a will named IUS, which itself was the will of
the citizens who held a uniform idea of a common rational advantage;
this must have been understood as being spiritual in its nature, for all
those rights exercised upon bodies but not themselves physical (called
nuda iuris, “right stripped of all physicality”) were said in intellectu iuris
consistere.
Therefore, because these rights are modes of spiritual substance, they are
indivisible and, consequently, also eternal, for corruption is nothing but
the division of something into parts.
1039 The interpreters of the Roman legal code have rested the entire reputa-
tion of this legal metaphysics on their consideration of the indivisibil-
ity of rights in accordance with the famous treatment of the subject,
De dividuis et individuis. However, they have not given consideration to
what is no less important, that is, their eternity. This they ought also to
have noticed in the following two rules of that legal code which they es-
tablished. The first established that cessante fine legis, cessat lex [“when
the goal of a law ceases, the law ceases”]; here, they did not say cessante
ratione [“when the reasoning on a law ceases . . .”], for the goal of laws
is equal advantage in all cases, which can be lacking, but the reasoning
on laws is a bringing of laws into conformity with what was actually
done, a deed dressed in such circumstances as deeds are always dressed,
and so, when it is alive, reasoning on law is ruler over such activity. The
second rule is that tempus non est modus constituendi vel dissolvendi iuris
[“the mode for the constitution or dissolution of a right in not tempo-
ral”], for time cannot start or end what is eternal, and in usucaption
and prescription time neither produces nor brings to an end to rights,
but rather is proof that the one who holds them intends to relinquish
them; so, for example, to say that usufruct has ended is not to say that
the right has ended, but that it is taken back from its servitude to its
original freedom.
From this come the following two very important corollaries. The first
is that since rights are eternal in their intelligibility, that is, as ideals, and
since men are temporal, these rights can come to men from nowhere but
from God. The second is that all the countless, varied, and diverse rights
which have been, are, and will be in the world are the various, diverse
modifications of the power of the first man who was the prince of hu-
mankind and of the domain which he held over all the earth.
1040 Now, given that the laws certainly came first and the philosophers
came after, it is necessarily the case that Socrates, from having observed
that the Athenian citizens in decreeing laws moved toward unity in an
idea conformable with an equal advantage common to all parties, started
to sketch intelligible genera, that is, universals abstracted by means of
an induction which gathers together particulars in their uniformity and
comes to compose a genus in that the particulars are uniform with one
S another.
N
L
414
Book Four 415

Plato,145 from having reflected on how in these public assemblies the 1041
minds of particular men, each one passionately bent on his own ad-
vantage, conform themselves to a dispassionate idea of common
­advantage—that is, as they say, that “men tend to be partisan to their
own private interests, but share a will toward justice in common”146—
and so he ascended to a meditation upon the intelligible ideas of cre-
ated minds about what is best, ideas that are distinct from those created
minds and that can only be in God. He ascended to form the philosoph-
ical hero147 who commands the passions at his pleasure. Hence, Aristo- 1042
tle148 later left to us that divine definition of good law, that it is a “will
separated from the passions”—which is to say that it is a heroic will. He
understood justice as a ruler whose seat is this heroic spirit and which
issues decrees to all the other virtues, for he had observed a legal jus-
tice149 whose seat is sovereign civil power and which decrees prudence in
the senate, fortitude in the army, moderation in festive celebrations, and
two particular kinds of justice, both distributive justice in the treasury
and commutative justice, for the most part, in the forum, commutative
justice using arithmetic proportion, distributive justice using geomet-
ric proportion;150 and he must have taken note of distributive justice
because of the census, which is the basis of popular republics in that
it distributes honor and penalties by geometrical proportion according
to the patrimonies of citizens. For prior to the census, they understood
only arithmetic proportion: hence, Astraea—heroic j­ustice—was de-
picted for us holding a balance, and hence, in the Law of the Twelve Ta-
bles, all the penalties (penalties which today philosophers, moral theo-
logians, and writers learned de iure public [“on public law”] say must be
dispensed by distributive justice in keeping with geometric proportion)
we read that all these penalties invoked duplio [“double”] in cases of
pecuniary harm and talio [“like for like”] in cases of physical harm.
And because the talion penalty was discovered by Rhadamanthus, it
was on this merit that he was made judge of the underworld, where he
distributes certain penalties. The talion penalty is said by Aristotle in
his Ethics to have been discovered by Pythagoras,151 who is the founder
of a nation in Magna Graecia whose nobles were called Pythagoreans,
as we have observed above [§427]; this discovery would have been a dis-
grace to the Pythagoras who came later, the sublime philosopher and
mathematician.

145
  See Plato, Parmenides 129b–e; Republic 4, 433a–b.
146
  This “saying” seems to be a maxim of Vico’s own devising, as Battistini sug-
gests. Similar language appears at Scienza nuova prima §9.
147
  On the “philosophical hero,” compare Vico’s description to Plato, Laws 7.3,
792c–d and Laws 8.7, 840c.
148
 Aristotle, Politics 3.16, 1287a32: “law is reason without passion.”
149
  For the distinction between legal justice and natural justice, see Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics 5.1, 1129b27.
150
  See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.4, 1131b25–1132b20.
151
  Compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, 1132b21.
 416 The New Science

1043 One can conclude from all this that it was from the piazza of Athens
that came such principles of metaphysics, of logic, of morals. And it
was from the prescription which Solon gave to the Athenians, NOSCE
TE IPSUM [“know thyself ”], that came—as we reasoned above [§§416,
424] in one of the corollaries in the Poetic Logic—popular republics; and
from popular republics came laws, and from laws came philosophers;
and so Solon, who was wise in commonplace wisdom, was believed to
be wise in a recondite wisdom. Let this be a piece of a history of phi-
losophy which is told philosophically and the last of many reproaches
made in this book against Polybius,152 who said that if there were only
philosophers in the world, there would be no need for religion: if there
had been no religion and, consequently, no republics, there would have
actually been no philosophers, and if the human things had not been led
in this direction by divine providence, there would have been no idea of
either science or virtue.
1044 Now, returning to what we proposed so as to conclude the argument
upon which we are reasoning, from these human times onward, during
which arrived popular republics and, later, monarchies, it came to be
understood that legal cause (at first understood in terms of the precau-
tionary formulae consisting of proper and precise words such that such
causes were originally called cavissae, derived from the word for “taking
precaution,” which was later retained in the contracted word caussae153)
was actually the legal affair itself—that is, some business contracted with
others; such affairs—or business—today are solemnized by pacts, which
are agreed upon in the act of contracting in order to produce some trans-
action, and in the case of contracts which are valid titles for the transfer
of domain, they solemnized the natural handing over of property so as
to enact this passing of property from one person to another. And it is
only in the case of contracts that are completed, as they say, by word of
mouth—that is, by stipulations—that a case would have that older prop-
erty of “taking precaution.” The things stated here illuminate even fur-
ther the principles posited above [§§570–578] pertaining to obligations,
which are born of contracts and pacts.
1045 In sum, since man, properly speaking, is only mind, body, and speech,
and since speech somehow stands midway between mind and body,154
what is CERTAIN concerning justice takes its start in mute times with
the certainty of bodily signs; later, with the discovery of so-called ar-
ticulate speech, it carries over to certain ideas—that is, spoken formulae;
finally, when our human reason is fully developed, to proceed to its ter-
minus in what is TRUE in our ideas concerning justice, as determined by
reasoning about the ultimate circumstances for what was done: this is a

152
  On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179.
153
  Compare Voss, Etymologicon, pp. 141–142, who arrives at the same
conclusion.
S 154
  As Mazzotta observes, the claim that speech links mind and body is a clear
N echo of Dante; see De vulgari eloquentia 1.3.
L
416
Book Four 417

formula unformed by any particular form which the very learned Varro
calls the FORMULAM NATURAE155 [“formula of nature”], which, in
the fashion of light, of itself informs in all the ultimate and detailed
particulars of their surfaces, the opaque surfaces of what was done with
the light shed upon those surfaces, just as all of this was discussed in the
Elements.156

155
  Drawn from Augustine, City of God 4.31. See also De uno Proloquium (Cris-
tofolini 33[24]), where Vico says explicitly that he came across the passage from
Varro while reading Augustine’s text, which he mentions by name.
156
  See particularly Axioms 111 and 113.
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On the Recurrence

Of Human Things During the

Resurgence That the Nations Make

419
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Book Five 421

In countless passages scattered throughout this entire work on countless 1046

subjects, we have up until now observed a congruity inspiring wonder be-
tween the earlier period of barbarous times and the return to barbarous
times;1 so, one can easily understand that there is a recurrence of human
things during the resurgence that the nations make.
However, so as better to confirm this, it pleases us in this final book to
give a particular place to this argument so as to clarify in a better light
this second time of barbarism (which has lain in greater darkness than
the first time of barbarism, even though the first time was called by Mar-
cus Terentius Varro, so learned about antiquities, “the Dark Time” in his
distinguishing of different times); and so as to demonstrate how a God
called “Best” and “Greatest” has made the counsels of his providence
which give direction to the human things of all nations to serve the inef-
fable decrees of his grace.
This is because after providence by superhuman means made clear 1047
and firm the truth of the Christian religion2 (with the virtue of martyrs
pitted against the power of Rome and with the doctrine of the Church
Fathers and miracles pitted against the empty wisdom of Greece3) and
because, later, after there arose armed nations who would combat ev-
erywhere the true divinity of the author of the Christian religion, provi-
dence permitted a new order of humanity among the nations to come
into being, so that, following the natural course of these same human
things, this religion would be firmly established.
It is by such eternal counsel that providence brought back times which 1048
were truly divine, times in which there were Catholic kings everywhere
to defend the Christian religion of which they were the protectors, kings
dressed in the dalmatics of deacons and consecrating their royal persons
(hence is preserved the title, “Sacred Royal Majesty”). They took upon
themselves dignities belonging to ecclesiastics (so, we are told by Sym-
phorien Champier4 in his Genealogy of the Kings of France that Hugh
Capet5 took the title of “Count and Abbot” of Paris, and Paradin6 in

1
  Vico’s Italian speaks of i tempi barbari ritornati, literally “the returned barbar-
ian times,” corresponding to what we now think of as “medieval” times.
2
  The 1730 version of the Scienza nuova contains a section within the Poetic
Logic titled “Demonstration of the Truth of the Christian Religion.” In 1744
Vico replaces that section with another one that preserves much of the 1730 sec-
tion’s content, but drops the reference to the “Christian Religion” and changes
the title (§§456–472).
3
  A possible allusion to 1 Corinthians 1.18–2.5 on wisdom, or Colossians 2.8 on
philosophy and empty deceit.
4
  Symphorien Champier (1472–1539), doctor of Charles VIII and Louis XIII,
object of Rabelais’s satire in Gargantua and Pantagruel.
5
  Hugh Capet (c. 941–996), first king of the Franks of the House of Capet from
987 until his death.
6
  Guillaume Paradin de Cuiseaux (1510–1590), author of Annales de Bourgogne
(1566).
 422 The New Science

his Annals of Burgundy observes in the oldest documents that princes

in France commonly had taken the title of “Duke and Abbot,” that is,
“Count and Abbot”).
It is thus that the first Christian kings were founders of military religious
orders,7 by which they reestablished in their realms the Christian Catho-
lic religion pitted against Aryans (by whom, Saint Jerome8 says, almost
the entire Christian world was infected) and against the Saracens and a
great number of other infidels.
1049 At this point, they truly returned to what were called the pura et pia
bella [“pure and pious wars”],9 belonging to heroic peoples. Hence, all
Christian powers still support with their crowns the cross raised up upon
a globe, which they had once unfurled on banners when they waged the
wars called the Crusades.
1050 Also inspiring wonder is the recurrence of human civil things during
this return to barbarous times: ancient heralds, in declaring war, evo-
cabant deos [“would call forth the gods”] out of the city against which
they were declaring war, with an elegant formula full of splendor that
is preserved for us in Macrobius;10 hence, they believed that defeated
peoples remained bereft of gods and, consequently, bereft of auspices;
this is the first principle for everything upon which we have reasoned in
this work [§§14, 487], that on account of the heroic law of victory, the
defeated retained none of their claims to civil rights, either public or
private, because, as we have fully proved above [§§110, 525, 598], prin-
cipally from Roman history, all of these during heroic times were de-
pendent upon divine auspices; this was all contained in the formula for
the heroic surrender which Tarquinius Priscus used in the surrender of
Collatia, that peoples surrendering debebant DIVINIA ET HUMANA
OMNIA11 [“owed all that is divine and human”] to the peoples who are
victors.
So too, the more recent barbarians, in taking a city, gave their attention
first and foremost to scouting for, finding and carrying away from the
city famous repositories or reliquaries for saints; hence it was that peo-
ples in those times were quite careful to bury or hide them, and, accord-
ingly, these are everywhere observed to be in the innermost and deepest
places in churches. Here is the cause of almost all the removals of the
bodies of saints coming to pass during those times. And the following

7
  Literally, “they founded armed religions” (fondarono religioni armate). In view
of the reference to the Arians (here and less directly at §1047), we translate as
“military religious orders,” following a suggestion of Giuseppe Mazzotta. The
phrase may also be an allusion to Machiavelli: “all the armed prophets con-
quered, and the unarmed ones were ruined” (Prince 6).
8
  See Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians 19.
9
  See note to §958.
S 10
 Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.9.2, 3.9.6.
N 11
  Compare Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.38.2.
L
422
Book Five 423

vestige of this remains: defeated peoples must ransom all the bells of the
city taken from the victorious generals.
Moreover, because the fifth century was the start of the flooding12 of 1051
so many barbarous nations into Europe, and also into Africa and Asia,
and because the conquering peoples were not able to understand the de-
feated, it came to pass, on account of the barbarism of the enemies of
the Catholic religion, that in that Iron Age one can find no writing in
the vernacular languages proper to those times, not Italian or French or
Spanish or even German (Aventinus13 in his Annals of Bavaria suggests
that they did not start to write documents in German until the times of
Frederick of Swabia, and others suggest it was not until the times of
Emperor Rudolf of Austria, as was stated in another place [§435]). And
amongst all the aforesaid nations, we find only writing in a barbarous
Latin, a language understood by a few nobles who were also ecclesiastics.
Hence, all that remained, one would imagine, during all those unfortu-
nate centuries was for nations to return to speaking a mute language
among themselves.
On account of this scarcity of common alphabetic letters, there must
have everywhere been a return to the hieroglyphic writing with tribal
devices, which for establishing certain domain, as was reasoned upon
above [§§483–488], signified rights of lordship mostly over households,
tombs, fields, and flocks.
They returned to certain kinds of divine judgments, which were called 1052
“canonical purgations.” In the earlier barbaric times, as we demonstrated
above [§§959–964], one species of these judgments was duels, which were
not, however, acknowledged by canon law.
They returned to heroic pillaging, and we saw above [§636] that just as 1053
the heroes had counted it an honor to be called “thief,” so later a title for
lords was that of “corsair.”
They returned to heroic reprisals, which, as we observed above [§960], 1054
endured up until the time of Bartolus, and this because the wars during 1055
more recent times of barbarism were, like the earlier times, all religious
wars, as we saw above [§§562, 958, 1049].
They returned to heroic slavery, which endured for a long time even
among those Christian nations. For during those times when duels were
the custom, victors believed that the defeated had no god, as was stated
above [§§958, 1050], when we were reasoning upon duels. And so, the vic-
tors considered them nothing more than beasts. This sensibility in n
­ ations

12
  As Battistini observes, the “flooding” mentioned here can be compared to the
“inundations” at §§20, 300, 466.
13
  “Aventinus” is a pseudonym for Giovanni Tourmayer (1477–1534), teacher
of Greek and mathematics, and author of the text which Vico mentions, the
Annalium Boiorum libri septem (1534), 6.9.4 (p. 675 of a 1710 edition reprinted
at Leipzig).
 424 The New Science

is preserved everywhere today among the Christians and the Turks: the
term Turk means “dog” (hence, when Christians desire or are obliged to
treat Turks with civility, they called them “Muslims,” which means “true
believers”) and the Turks, by contrast, call Christians “swine”; and, con-
sequently both practice heroic slavery in their wars (although Christians
do so with greater mildness).
1056 Inspiring the most wonder of all, in relation to the recurrence that hu-
man things make, is that in those divine times, they started again those
earlier asylums from the ancient world, within which (we heard above
[§§17, 114, 160, 532, 561, 777] from Livy14) were founded all the earliest
cities.
For because of the currency everywhere of violence, plunder, killing on
account of the extreme ferocity and savagery of those most barbarous
centuries and because, as was stated in the Axioms,15 there was no effica-
cious means for holding in check men unleashed from all human laws
other than the divine laws dictated by religion, men naturally, out of fear
of being oppressed or destroyed, took themselves to the bishops and ab-
bots of those violent centuries as more mild relative to such barbarism
and put themselves, their families, and their patrimonies under the pro-
tection of those bishops and abbots and were received by them: submis-
sion and protection, these are the principal constituents of fealties.
Hence it is that in Germany, which must have been the most savage and
ferocious of all the other nations of Europe, there were almost more
ecclesiastical sovereigns, whether bishops or abbots, than there were
secular sovereigns, and, as was stated [§1048], in France all the sovereign
princes had the title of either Count and Abbot or Duke and Abbot.
Consequently, in Europe the number of the many cities, lands, and
castles observed with the names of saints is boundless. For in either
raised or hidden places, small churches were opened to hear Mass or
to perform the other offices of devotion decreed by our religion; these
churches can be defined as the natural asylums for Christians in those
times, who built their dwellings there next to them. Hence, everywhere
we observe that the oldest things from this second period of barbarism
are the small churches, for the most part in ruins, but still in places of
this sort.
An illuminating example of all this would be our own Abbey of San
Lorenzo of Aversa, which was incorporated into the Abbey of San Lo-
renzo of Capua: in Campania, Samnium, Apulia, and Old Calabria, and
from the Volturno River to the Gulf of Taranto, this abbey governed
110 churches, either by itself or through abbots and monks subject to it,
and the abbots of San Lorenzo were barons for almost all the aforemen-
tioned places.

S 14
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.8.5.
N 15
  Axiom 31.
L
424
Book Five 425

The recurrence nations make in

accordance with the eternal
nature of fealties; and,
consequently, the recurrence
of ancient Roman law in
feudal law

These divine times were succeeded by certain heroic times, through the 1057
return of a certain distinction between, as it were, different natures,
heroic and human nature; out of this distinction comes the cause of
what is a source of wonder for Hotman,16 that the term used for rustic
vassals in language of feudalism is “men.” Two other terms must have
originally come from this one, hominium and homagium, which have the
same meaning; Helmodius17 suggests, according to Cujas,18 that the word
­hominium—as if to say hominis dominium [“domain over a man”]—is
more elegant than homagium—as if to say the hominis agium [“agency
over a man”]—which leads a man, or vassal, wherever the baron wishes;
and those with erudition about feudalism translate this latter barbarous
term into its corresponding equivalent into an entirely classical Latin as
obsequium, which originally was the readiness a man had to follow the
hero wherever he led in order to cultivate the hero’s fields, and implicit in
the term19 obsequium is the fealty that a vassal owes to the baron. This is
inasmuch as obsequium means at the same time both the “homage” and
“fealty” to which they must swear during the investiture of a fief. And
obsequium for the ancient Romans never parted company from what was
retained by the Romans in the expression opera militaris,20 and what our
feudalists call militare servitium, that by which the Roman plebeians for
a long time served the nobles at their own expense during war, as Roman
history above [§§559, 618] made certain. And eventually, the work of this
obsequium remained for the liberti—that is, those enfranchised by their
patrons—to do (work which had its start, as we observed above [§§110,
114, 160, 532, 561, 613] in Roman history, in the times when Romulus
founded Rome upon clienteles, where we found protections granted to
country day laborers from the one who received them in his asylum; and
these clienteles from ancient history, as we indicated in the Axioms,21
cannot be explained more properly than as fealties). So, erudite feudal-
ists render the barbarous term, feudum, with the elegant Latin term,
clientele.

16
 Hotman, De verbis feudalibus, p. 764.
17
  Helmodius, German historian of the twelfth century and author of Historia
sclavorum.
18
 Cujas, De feudis 2, p. 1178.
19
  Literally, “eminently contains” (contiene eminentemente). “Eminent contain-
ment” is an important concept in medieval philosophy and appears in Des-
cartes’s arguments for the existence of God at Mediations 3 (AT 41).
20
 Hotman, Disputatio de Feudis, vol. 2, col. 857.
21
  Axiom 82.
 426 The New Science

1058 And we are plainly convinced that these are the beginnings of things by
the origins of those terms, opera [“work”] and servitium [“service”]. For
opera, by the meaning native to it, is the toil of a day laborer from the
country; consequently, for the Latin word operarius, Italian says gior-
naliere [“day laborer”], and it is like such a worker, or day laborer, who
does not have the privileges of a citizen, that Achilles complains of being
treated by Agamemnon when Agamemnon injured him by taking his
Briseis.22
Consequently, also in Latin, they retain the expression greges operarum
[“herd of works”], and, similarly, even greges servorum23 [“herd of ser-
vants”], for at first these workers and later also slaves were reputed by
the heroes to be beasts who pasci gregatim [“pastured in herds”]; so,
Homer24 always names the heroes by their perpetual epithet, “shepherd
of peoples,” and it was only later that there were shepherds of flocks and
herdsmen. This is confirmed by the Greek word νόμος [nomos] (which
means both “law” and “pasture,” as was observed above [§607]), for the
first agrarian law accorded to the familial servants subsistence on the
lands assigned to them by the heroes, and this subsistence was called
“pasture” because it is proper to beasts, just as the subsistence proper to
men is called “food.”
1059 This property of pasturing those first flocks in the world must have be-
longed to Apollo, whom we found [§533] to be the god of civil light—
that is, of nobility—where mythical history tells us that he was a shep-
herd at Amphrysus,25 just as Paris was a shepherd, someone who was
certainly Trojan royalty; so, the paterfamilias (called by Homer26 a king)
decrees with his scepter that the roasted ox be divided among the har-
vesters in his depiction on the shield of Achilles, where above [§686] we
have made it possible to see the history of the world and, fixed therein,
the familial epoch. For it is proper to our shepherds not to pasture, but
to guide and to guard flocks and herds, but in earlier times they could
not have introduced this kind of shepherding until after the borders of
cities were somewhat more secure, because raiding still had currency in
heroic times. And this must be the cause of bucolic, or pastoral, poetry
arriving during the most humane times, in Greek with Theocritus, in
Latin with Virgil, and in Italian with Sannazaro.27
1060 The term servitum proves the recurrence of these same things in the
more recent period of barbarism, whose opposite in this relationship,

22
 Homer, Iliad 9.648 and 16.59.
23
  Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni 3.3.25.
24
  See, for example, the description of Diomedes at Iliad 11.370 and Achilles at
Iliad 16.2.
25
  Compare Apollodorus, Epitome 3.10.4.
26
 Homer, Iliad 18.556.
S 27
  Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), Neapolitan poet, humanist, and author of
N epigrams. Vico likely has in mind his Arcadia, published in Naples in 1504.
L
426
Book Five 427

the baron, is called senior, in the sense in which signore [“lord”] is under-
stood.28 As a result, the ancient Franks must have been those “servants
born within the household” at which Bodin29 wonders and, in general,
they are discovered above [§1017] to be the same as those whom the an-
cient Romans called vernae (because of these vernae, they called “the
vernacular” the common languages introduced by the commoners, who
we found above [§597] were the plebs of heroic cities, just as poetic lan-
guage was introduced by the heroes, that is, by the nobles in the earliest
republics).
This obsequium of those enfranchised (after the power of barons had 1061
later been dispersed and so diffused among the people during civil wars
in which the powerful have to depend upon the people, and after the
power of the barons had consequently been reunified in the persons of
monarchical kings) carried over into what is called obsequium principis
(which Tacitus30 remarks is what is owed by subjects to monarchs).
By contrast, on account of the belief in two natures, one heroic and
the other human, feudal lords were called “barons,” in the same sense
in which we found above [§§657, 684] that they were called “heroes” in
poetic Greek and viri [“men”] in ancient Latin (this is retained in the use
of the Spanish word baron,31 for a man, in contrast to vassals who, on
account of their weakness, were called “women” in the heroic sense that
we demonstrated above [§§78, 989]).
In addition to what we have just reasoned upon, the word for barons, 1062
“lords” [signori], could only have come from the Latin word seniores
[“elders”], for it was they who must have composed the first public par-
liaments of the new regimes of Europe, exactly as Romulus must have
used the word senatus for the public council, which naturally must have
been composed of the older of the nobility; and just as it was from these
men (who were, and thus were called, patres [“fathers”]) that must have
come the word patroni, those who granted slaves their freedom, so from
them must have come the Italian word padroni, meaning those who are
“protectors.” This term padroni retains the full propriety and elegance
of its Latin term, just as its opposite, “rustic vassals,” corresponds with
equal propriety and elegance to the Latin term clientes (those whom,
as was explained above [§§107, 420, 597, 619], Servius Tullius admitted
into the fealties by instituting the order of the census). These fealties
of this sort were only a quick step away in the progression from the
clienteles of Romulus, as was proved fully above [§§106, 263, 613]. And
it is exactly those who were thus enfranchised who gave their name to
the French nation, as was stated in the reply to Bodin in the preceding
book [§1017].

28
  See Hotman, pp. 799–800.
29
  Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5.
30
  Compare Tacitus, Annals 1.43, 3.75, 6.37.
31
  More precisely (as Battistini observes), varon.
 428 The New Science

1063 In this fashion, the fealties came back, emerging from the eternal spring
dictated for them in the Axioms,32 where we indicated the benefits that
can be expected within civil nature; hence, the erudite feudalists in Latin
called these fealties, with full propriety and elegance, beneficia. This is
something that Hotman observes without making use of it: that the vic-
tors held for themselves the cultivated fields of those they conquered and
granted to those impoverished by defeat the uncultivated fields to sustain
themselves. And the fealties of that earlier world, discovered in Book
Two, are found again here. And yet they started again (through what
must have been their nature, as we reasoned upon above [§§106, 1057])
from the personal rustic fealties that we found to have originally been the
clienteles of Romulus, clienteles that we observed in the Axioms33 to have
been spread throughout the entire ancient world of peoples. During the
splendor of Roman popular liberty, these heroic clienteles carried over
into the following custom: the plebeians in their togas took themselves
in the morning to pay court to the great lords and offered in their greet-
ing, AVE REX [“Hail, King”], the title belonging to ancient heroes; they
went with these lords to the forum and went back with them at night to
their households. And the lords, conforming to the ancient heroes called
“shepherds of the people,” offered them an evening meal.
1064 Such personal vassals must have been among the ancient Romans the
earliest vades [“bondsmen”], and they retained this term later for those
who were defendants, obliged to follow in person the plaintiffs into the
courtroom, an obligation that was called vadimonium. Through our Ori-
gins of the Latin Language,34 it is shown that this term vades must have
been derived from vas, the Greek word for which is βάς [bas] and the
barbarian word for which is was, whence later came wassus and, eventu-
ally, vassallus.
Vassals of this kind abound even today in the frigid North, which re-
tains also a great deal of barbarism, above all in Poland, where they
are called kmiets, and are a kind of slave, entire families of whom are
gambled away by paladins as they must pass in service from one patron
to another. These vassals must be those who are enchained through their
ears and who by chains of poetic gold, that is, by grain coming from his
mouth, are led by the Gallic Heracles wherever he wishes.
1065 Consequently, these carried over into real rustic fealties. They came to
these by the first agrarian law, which we found among the Romans to
be that which Servius Tullius established with the order of the census;
this permitted to the plebeians, as we discovered [§107], bonitary domain
over the fields to which they were assigned by the nobles under certain
burdens, not only personal as previously, but also real; these must have
been the first mancipes [“renters”], and they retained this term later for

32
  Axioms 80–81.
S 33
  Axiom 82.
N 34
  Scienza nuova prima §369.
L
428
Book Five 429

those under obligation to the treasury for real estate. Of this same kind
must have been those defeated, to whom, as Hotman just said, the vic-
tors granted the uncultivated fields from their conquests to sustain them-
selves: so too the Antaneuses returned and were tied to the land by the
Greek Heracles, and so too those bound by the god Fidius—that is, the
Roman Heracles—those whom, we found above [§§602, 658, 761, 766],
were eventually unbound by the Petelian law.
These bondsmen of the Petelian law, through the things upon which we 1066
reasoned above [§§26, 115, 658, 1017], by which it is proper to them to
have fallen into bondage, explain perfectly why it must have been that
vassals were originally called “lieges”35—that is, because they were
bound by this knot—and they are now defined by the feudalists as those
who must recognize as friends or enemies those who are friends or en-
emies of their lord. This is exactly the oath which the ancient German
vassals offered to their princes in Tacitus36 in order to serve them in their
glory, as we learned in another place [§559].
These vassals, when these fealties attained the splendor of civil sover-
eignty, were defeated kings similar to those to whom the Roman people,
with that solemn formula recounted in Roman history, REGNA DONO
DABAT37 [“granted rule as a favor”]—that is to say, beneficio dabat
[“granted it as a benefit”]—and they became allies of the Roman peo-
ple by the kind of alliance which in Latin is called a foedus inaequale38
[“contract between unequals”] and were called royal friends of the Ro-
man people in the sense in which the emperors called noble courtiers
their friends; this unequal alliance was nothing other than the investi-
ture of a sovereign fealty conceived with the following formula left to us
by Livy himself, that such an allied king SERVARET MAIESTATEM
POPULI ROMANI39 [“must be in service of the majesty of the Roman
people”], exactly as the jurist Paulus says that the praetor renders justice
servata maiestatem populi Romani [“by serving the majesty of the Ro-
man ­people”]—that is, affirms those whose claims the laws grants, denies
those whose claims the laws deny.40 As a result, such allied kings were
lords over sovereign fealties subject to a greater sovereignty. Because
of this, there was a return in Europe of a common sense that the title
“YOUR MAJESTY” was mostly held by great kings who were lords of
great kingdoms and numerous provinces.
Along with such rustic fealties, from which these things started, there 1067
was a return of the emphyteusis41 by which the great ancient forest of the

35
  Compare the definition of Hotman, Disputatio de Feudis, vol. 2, col. 819.
36
 Tacitus, Germania 14.2.
37
 Sallust, The Jugurthine War 5.
38
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 35.46.10.
39
 Livy, Ab urbe condita 38.11.2.
40
  Digest 49.15.7.
41
  On the emphyteusis, see the note at §489.
 430 The New Science

Earth was cultivated. Hence there is still retained in Italian the laudemio,
which means both what a vassal pays to the lord and what the emphyteu-
ticary pays directly to his patron.
1068 There was a return of ancient Roman clienteles called commendations,42
which we made it possible to see. Hence, vassals were called in Latin by
erudite feudalists, with elegance and propriety, clientes, and those feal-
ties were called clientelae.
1069 There was a return of the census of the kind established as an order
by Servius Tullius; by this census, the Roman plebeians were required
for a long time to serve the nobles in war at their own expense. As a
result, those vassals now called angarii and perangarii were in antiquity
the Roman assidui, whom we found above [§618] suis assibus militabant
[“served in the military at their own expense”]; and up until the Petelian
law, which unbound the Roman plebs from the bond of feudal law, held
legal claim of private incarceration over plebeians who were debtors.
1070 There was a return of precaria43 [“conditional tenancies”], which must
originally have been lands given by lords at the entreaty of the poor so
as to be able to sustain themselves by cultivating those lands. It is exactly
this kind of possession that the Law of the Twelve Tables in no place
recognizes, as has been demonstrated above [§638].
1071 And because barbarism with its violence undermines the faith needed
for commerce and leaves peoples with other concerns other than fulfill-
ing the things they need to do relative to the natural life, and because
all rent had to be paid in what are called the natural fruits, accordingly
there were also during those times the libellus for transfers of real estate;
the advantage of these must have been, as was stated in another place
[§571], that some had an abundance of one kind of fruit from their fields
of which others had a lack, and accordingly they could exchange with
one another.
1072 There was a return of mancipations, by which the vassal placed his hands
in the hands of his lord, signifying his faith and subjection; hence, the
rustic vassals, as we stated just above [§§433, 1064], through the census
of Servius Tullius were the first mancipes of the Romans. And along with
mancipation there was a return of the distinction between things which
are mancipi [“transferable”] and things which are nec mancipi [“non-
transferable”], for feudal bodies are nec mancipi—or inalienable—for the
vassal and are mancipi for the lord (exactly as Roman provincial grounds
were nec mancipi for the provinces and mancipi for the Romans).
In the act of mancipation, there was a return of stipulations with in-
festucations or investitures, which we demonstrated above [§569] are
the same.

S 42
  Hotman, p. 750.
N 43
  Hotman, pp. 788–789.
L
430
Book Five 431

Along with stipulations, there was a return of what we observed above

[§§569, 939, 1044] in ancient Roman jurisprudence were originally and
properly called cavissae, which later were retained in the contracted word
caussae. In the second period of barbarism, these were guarantees [cau-
tele], a word coming from the same Latin origin, and the solemnizing of
these pacts and contracts was called homologare44 from the men [uomini],
from whom we say above herein [§1057] are derived the terms hominium
and homagium insofar as all contracts in those times must have been
feudal contracts.
Thus, along with guarantees, there was a return of pacts guaranteed in
the act of mancipation, what are called stipulati by the Roman jurists (so
called, we found above [§569], from the stipula [“stalk”] which sheathes
[veste] the grain), and so it was in this same sense that the learned dur-
ing this period of barbarism derived the expression pacta vestita, from
these investitures, also called “infestucations.” And for pacts that were
not guaranteed, ancient and medieval writers both used the same term
with the same meaning, patti nudi.
There was a return of two kinds of domain, direct domain and useful 1073
domain, which evenly correspond to the quiritary and bonitary domain
of the ancient Romans.
And direct domain came into being first, just as among the Romans
quiritary domain was born first, which we found [§§109, 601, 984] had its
start in domain over the lands which the nobles granted to the plebeians;
if possession of these lands was lost, the plebeians were required to make
a trial for the legal vindication in the formula, AIO HUNC FUNDUM
MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I declare this ground to be
mine by the law of the Quirites”]. As we demonstrated above [§§603, 621],
such a vindication was in this sense a commendation [laudazione] for the
entire order of nobles, who during the Roman aristocratic republic made
up the city itself, for they considered the nobles to be the authorities in
the cases of civil domain by which the plebeians were able to vindicate
their claims over those grounds. Such domain in the Law of the Twelve
Tables was always called AUCTORITAS, because of the authority of
domain held by the regnant senate over the Roman grounds at large,
grounds over which later the people, in connection with popular liberty,
held sovereign public power, as was reasoned upon above [§§386, 944].
Upon this authority in the second period of barbarism, as with count- 1074
less other things in this work, we shed light by means of earlier ancient
periods: such is the greater darkness of that second period relative to the
first!45 There do remain, however, three clear traces of this later authority
in three terms from feudalism.

  Hotman, p. 765.
44

  Why should the second period of barbarism be darker than the first? Vico
45

seems to think that in comparison to Greek and Roman historians (particularly

 432 The New Science

First, there is the “direct” of direct domain, which confirms that this
legal action was originally authorized directly by a patron.
Next, there is the laudemio, a term for the payment made for a fief, which
must have been done as a commendation [laudazione] of authority, as we
have stated [§621].
Finally, there is laudo, a term which must have originally signified a judi-
cial sentence in cases of this kind, later retained in the judgments which
were called “arbitrations.” For such judicial decisions seemed to end
amicably in comparison with judgments pursuant to matters over leas-
able property [allodi] (which Budé46 opines were thus called as if to say
allaudi, in the same way that laude in Italian becomes lode), for, at first, in
such matters lords must have looked to the arms of duels for a judgment,
as has been demonstrated above [§961]. This custom has endured even
into my own age in the kingdom of Naples, where barons vindicated
with duels, not civil judgments, incursions made by other barons within
their feudal territories.
And just as with the quiritary domain of the ancient Romans, so the
direct domain of the older medieval barbarians eventually retained its
significance in the domain that produces real civil actions.
1075 And this offers an illuminating place for contemplation in the recurrence
that the nations make, as well as the recurrence that the later sort of Ro-
man jurist makes in that later sort of man of learning during the recent
barbarism.47 Just as the former had already in their later age lost sight of
ancient Roman law, as we have made it possible to see above in a thou-
sand proofs, so too the latter in their own later age lost sight of older
feudal law.
Accordingly, the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code resolutely
deny that these two kinds of domain from barbarism were known by Ro-
man law: they attend to the difference in the sound of the words and so
fail to understand the identity of the things themselves.
1076 There was a return of goods ex iure optimo [“held by supreme right”] in
those goods which erudite feudalists define as allodial goods free from
any encumbrance, public or private; such goods are comparable to the
few households which Cicero48 observes remaining in his time in Rome
that were ex iure optimo. Nevertheless, just as goods of this sort went
unnoticed in later Roman legislation, so too such allodial goods are ac-
tually nowhere to be found.

Thucydides and Tacitus), medieval chroniclers possessed little of the critical

sensibility.
46
  Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), French jurist. The reference is to Annotationes
in Pandectas (1508), vol. 2, p. 270.
47
  This is a reference to Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1313–1357) and his school,
S sometimes known as the “commentators” or the “postglossators.”
N 48
 Cicero, De haruspicum responso 7.14; De lege agraria 3.2.7.
L
432
Book Five 433

And just as with the previous Roman estates held ex iure optimo, so too
the later allodial goods returned as real estate free from any private real
encumbrance, but subject to public encumbrance. For there was a return
of the fashion in which those goods manifested themselves, which was
the transformation of the census established as an order by Servius Tul-
lius into the census founding the Roman treasury, in the fashion that was
discovered above [§619].
As a result, the allodial and feudal goods, the most general distinction
made for the things covered by feudal law, were originally distinguished
in that feudal goods tended to require the commendation of a lord,
whereas allodial goods did not. Without these principles, all the learned
feudalists should be at a loss as to how these allodial goods, which they
render in Latin along with Cicero as bona ex iure optimo,49 came to be
called GOODS OF THE DISTAFF, goods which in their proper signifi-
cance, as was stated above [§657], belonged to the law of the strongest
and were enfeebled by no extraneous encumbrance, not even public ones,
goods which, as we also stated above, were those of the Fathers in the
familial state, lasting long into the earliest cities, goods which those Fa-
thers had acquired by the labors of Heracles.
This difficulty, through these same principles, is easily resolved with
this same HERACLES, who, when HE WAS SPINNING, became the
SERVANT OF IOLE and OF OMPHALE, that is, the heroes became
effeminate when they ceded their heroic claims to plebeians, whom the
heroes considered to be women in comparison with themselves (consid-
ering and calling themselves VIRI, as was explained above [§657, 684,
1061]) and when they suffered their goods to be subject to the treasury
of the census, which is the basis of popular republics and is later found
to be congruous with establishing the monarchies.
Thus, through this older feudal law of which later times lost sight, there 1077
is a return of grounds held ex iure quiritium [“by quiritary right”], which,
as we explained [§§595, 624], was the right belonging to those Romans
armed with lances in the public assembly who were called quires; because
of them was conceived the formula in vindications, AIO HUNC FUN-
DUM MEUM ESSE EX IURE QUIRITIUM [“I declare this ground
to be mine by the law of the Quirites”], which is, as was stated [§627],
a commendation of the authority of the Roman heroic city; so too,
in the second period of barbarism, feudal goods were called GOODS
OF THE LANCE and tended to the commendation of the authority
of lords. These were distinguished from the later allodial goods called
GOODS OF THE DISTAFF, those with which a debased Heracles does
his spinning, a servant to women. Hence, we offered above the heroic
origin for the motto inscribed on the French royal coat of arms, LILIA
NON NENT [“lilies do not spin”],50 that in that kingdom there is no

49
  Hotman, p. 739.
50
  See the note at §657.
 434 The New Science

succession for women. For there was a return of those laws of clan suc-
cession in the Law of the Twelve Tables, the law which we found to be
IUS GENTIUM ROMANORUM and which we learned from Baldus
that the Salic law was called IUS GENTIUM GALLORUM; this Salic
law was certainly celebrated throughout Germany and so must have been
observed throughout all the other nations of the earlier barbarism in
Europe, although it was later restricted to France and Savoy.
1078 Finally, there was a return of the armed courts which we found above
[§§25, 593–595, 624, 762, 926] to be the heroic assemblies held under
arms, called Assemblies of the Curetes by the Greeks, of the Quirites
by the Romans. And the earliest parliaments of the kingdoms of Eu-
rope were parliaments of barons, similar to the way in which in France
they were parliaments of peers: just as French history plainly tells us that
originally kings were the heads of the parliament, and that the kings cre-
ated peers of the court who in their status as commissioners judged cases
(hence, later, they continued to be called dukes and peers of France), so
too Cicero51 says that the earliest Roman court conveyed over the life of
a citizen was that in which Tullus Hostilius created the duumvirs who in
their status as commissioners (to say it in the formula which Livy draws
upon) IN HORATIUM PERDUELLIONEM DICERENT52 [“charged
1079 Horatius with treason”] because he had killed his sister. For in the sever-
ity of those heroic times, the murder of any citizen when, as has been fully
demonstrated above [§597], cities were composed only of heroes was con-
sidered a hostile act against the fatherland, which is exactly what perdull-
lio is, and any such murder was called a parricidum [“patricide”] because
it was done to a Father—that is, to a noble—since we saw above [§597]
that in those times Rome was divided into the Fathers and the plebs.
Consequently, from Romulus up until Tullus Hostilius, there was no
prosecution of the killing of a noble, because the nobles must have been
attentive not to commit such offenses, instead using duels, upon which
we reasoned above [§963]. And because in the case of Horatius there was
no one who could privately avenge Horatia with a duel, Tullus Hostilius
instituted, for the first time, orders for judgments.
Alternatively, the murder of a plebeian was either done by the patron
himself (and so by someone who could not be prosecuted) or done by
someone else who would make up for the patron’s loss, since the one
murdered was his servant. Such is still the custom in Poland, Lithuania,
Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.53
However, the erudite interpreters of the Roman legal code do not see
this difficulty because they rely on the empty opinion that the golden
age was an age of innocence, just as the political theorists, for the same
reason, have relied on that statement of Aristotle54 that in ancient repub-

51
 Cicero, Pro Milone 3, 7.
S 52
  An inexact reference to Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.26.5.
N 53
  Compare Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 1.5.
L 54
 Aristotle, Politics 2.8, 1268b.
434
Book Five 435

lics there were no laws for private injuries and offenses. Hence, Tacitus,
Sallust, and other authors55 who are otherwise most acute when telling
us about the origins of republics and laws offer an account of the earliest
state prior to the civil state in which men, from the beginning, led lives
like so many Adams in a state of innocence.
However, it was only after they came into cities that these “men,” who inspire
such wonder in Hotman—and from whom comes the natural law of the
gentile peoples whom Ulpian calls HUMANARUM [“humane ­peoples”]—
that the murder of some man was called homicidium [“homicide”].
Now, it was in parliaments of this sort that they must have discussed 1080
feudal cases concerning the feudal rights, feudal succession, or feudal
devolution by crime or default; after these cases were confirmed many
times in rendering such judgments, they became the feudal custom; this
custom is older than any other in Europe and attests to the natural law
of the gentile peoples56 being born from such feudal human customs, as
was fully proved above [§§599–618].
Finally, just as in the sentence to which Horatius was condemned, the 1081
king Tullus permitted the defendant to appeal to the people, which still
consisted only of nobles, as was demonstrated above [§§500, 662], be-
cause with regnant senates there was no other remedy for a defendant
than recourse to that same senate; so too, and not otherwise, the nobles
during the return to barbarous times must have made a practice of in-
voking the kings themselves in their parliaments (as for example, the
kings of France who originally were the heads of parliament57).
There is a great vestige of these heroic parliaments preserved in the Sacred 1082
Council of Naples, whose presiding officer has the title “Sacred Royal
Majesty”: on the one hand, its councilors are named milites [“soldiers”]58
and have the status of commissioners (for in the second period of barba-
rism, only the nobles were soldiers, and the plebeians served them in war,
just as in the first period of barbarism we observed [§§559, 1033] in Homer
and in Roman history); on the other hand, for its sentences, there was no
appeal other than one invoking the judgement of the tribunal itself.
From all the things here enumerated, one has to conclude that rule every- 1083
where was aristocratic, not by constitution but by governance, just as in
the frigid North, Poland still is today and just as Sweden and Denmark
were 150 years ago, and that with time, if there are no extraordinary
causes to impede its natural course, Poland will arrive at perfect monar-
chy. This is so true that Bodin himself goes even further and says that his 1084
own French regime during the Merovingian and Carolingian lines was
aristocratic not just in terms of governance (as we say), but in terms of
constitution.

55
  See Tacitus, Annals 3.26.1; Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline 2.
56
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
57
  See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.1.
58
  In fact, the councilors were called “senatores,” as Battistini observes.
 436 The New Science

Now, here we would ask of Bodin: how did the French regime become
the perfect monarchy that it is now? Was it perhaps on account of some
royal law by which the paladins of France divested themselves of power
and conferred it upon kings of the Capetian line? Perhaps, if Bodin had
recourse to the myth of royal law devised by Tribonian by which the Ro-
man people divested itself of its sovereign power and conferred it upon
Octavius Augustus, something revealed as a myth simply by reading the
first pages of the Annals of Tacitus,59 in which he tells of the final things
done by Augustus to give legitimacy in his own person to having started
a Roman monarchy, something that all nations sensed had started with
Augustus. Or was it perhaps because France was conquered by the armed
forces of one of the Capetians? And yet all the histories hold themselves
aloof from any such misfortune.
Therefore, Bodin (and, along with Bodin, all the political theorists and
all the jurists who have written de iure public) must give recognition to
that eternal and natural royal law by which the free power in a constitu-
tion, because it is free, must be actuated. As a result, to the extent that
the optimates relent, a people must be invigorated with a view to be-
coming free; and to the extent that a free people relents, a king must be
invigorated with a view to becoming monarch.
On account of this, just as the natural law of the philosophers, or that
of the moral theologians, is the law of reason, so the natural law of the
gentile peoples is the natural law of advantage and strength, which, as
the jurists say, nations come to celebrate USU EXIGENTE HUMAN-
ISQUE NECESSITATIBUS EXPOSTULANTIBUS60 [“as usage re-
quires and as human necessities demand”].
1085 It is by these many beautiful and elegant expressions from ancient Roman
jurisprudence (by which the erudite feudalists have actually mitigated and
could mitigate even further the barbarism of feudal doctrine insofar as
it has been demonstrated herein that the ideas in what is most proper to
them already agree) that Oldendorf61 and all the others with him can come
to understand that if feudal law was born from the sparks of barbarians
setting fire to Roman law, then Roman law was born from the sparks of a
fealties celebrated in the first period of barbarism in Latium. From these
fealties have come into being all the republics of the world. And just as we
have demonstrated this above [§§599–618] in reasoning about these earliest
republics, particularly in the Poetic Politics, so too in Book Five, in keeping
with what we promised in the Idea of the Work [§25], we have discovered
the origins of the new European regimes in the eternal nature of fealties.
1086 But finally, the way was opened in the universities of Italy for the
study and teaching of the Roman laws contained in the books of Justin-
ian, laws that were conceived in terms of the natural law of humane gen-

59
 Tacitus, Annals 1.1.1.
S 60
 Ulpian, Digest 1.2.2 (but “expostulantibus” does not appear in the passage).
N 61
  Amburgo Johann Oldendorp (1480–1567), German jurist and follower of
L Luther.
436
Book Five 437

tile peoples, and minds that were more developed and acted with greater
understanding dedicated themselves to the cultivation of a jurisprudence
of natural equity which holds those who are and are not nobles to be
equal in the civil code, since they are equal in human nature. And so, just
as in Rome Tiberius Coruncanius started to teach the laws publicly, the
arcana started to slip out of the hands of the nobles, and little by little
their power weakened, so this is exactly what came to pass for the nobles
in the European regimes: they had been ruled by aristocratic governance
and went on to be free republics and the most complete monarchies.
These two forms of constitution, because both tend towards human gov- 1087
ernance, conveniently change from one to the other. But to return from
them to an aristocratic constitution is almost an impossibility in civil
nature. So much so that Dion of Syracuse, even though he belonged to
the royal household and had cast out a monstrous prince, that is, Diony-
sius, tyrant of Syracuse, even though he was so endowed with the beauty
of civil virtue that he was worthy of the friendship of the divine Plato,
because he attempted to reinstitute the orders of an aristocratic consti-
tution, he was barbarously killed. And the Pythagoreans—that is, the
nobles of Magna Graecia, as we explained above [§427]—for their same
attempt were all cut into pieces, and the few who saved themselves in a
stronghold were burned alive by the multitude.62 For plebeian men, once
they recognize that they are equal in nature to the nobles, naturally will
not suffer to be unequal in the civil code, an equality that they pursue
either in free republics or under the monarchies.
Hence, in the present humanity of nations, the few aristocratic repub-
lics that remain among us kept the multitude at the same time dutiful
and content, with a manifold, diligent care and with discerning and wise
provisions.

A depiction of the world of nations,

ancient and modern,
with observations conforming
to the design
of the principles of this science

This course of the human civil things was not taken by Carthage, Capua, 1088
or Numantia, three cities because of which Rome feared for its empire
over the world. For the Carthaginians were forestalled by their native Af-
rican acuity, sharpened even more by maritime commerce; the Capuans
were forestalled by the mildness of the climate and by the abundance of
fortunate Campania; finally, the Numantians because they were in the
early flourishing of their heroism when they were oppressed by a Roman
power commanded by Scipio Africanus, victor over Carthage and as-
sisted by the strength of the world.

62
  For this episode, see Polybius, Histories 2.39.
 438 The New Science

However, the Romans, because they were forestalled by none of these

things, journeyed at the correct pace, making for the rule of providence
by way of commonplace wisdom; and journeying through all three
forms of civil constitution according to their natural order, as the many
proofs in this book have demonstrated, they remained in each until one
form was naturally succeeded by another. And they were guardians of
aristocracy until the Publilian and Petelian laws; they were guardians
of popular liberty until the time of Augustus; they were guardians of
monarchy as long as they were humanly able to resist the internal and
external causes of the destruction of that form of constitution.
1089 Today, a completed humanity seems to be spread throughout all the
nations. Given that great monarchies rule over this world of peoples, if
there are yet some barbarous peoples, the cause is that their monarchies
have remained under the commonplace wisdom of imaginary and sav-
age religions, and this is compounded in some monarchies by the uneven
nature of the nations subjected to them.
1090 Taking our lead from the frigid North, the czar of Muscovy, although
Christian, is lord over men with sluggish minds.
The khan of Tartary has dominion over a people as soft as the ancient
Seres were, who used to make up the bulk of his great empire but are now
part of the Chinese empire.
The negus of Ethiopia and the powerful kings of Fez and Morocco reign
over peoples quite weak and spread out.
1091 However, in the middle of the temperate zone, where men are born more
even-natured, starting with the Far East, the emperor of Japan pays
homage to a humanity similar to that of the Romans during the time of
the Carthaginian Wars; because of this, he resembles them in the feroc-
ity of his armed forces and, as learned travelers have observed, he has in
his language an air similar to the Latin; and on account of an imaginary
religion, quite terrifying and savage and with horrible gods, all of whom
bearing deadly arms, he retains much of the heroic nature, for mission-
ary fathers who have gone there relate that the greatest difficulty which
they have encountered in converting these peoples to Christianity is that
the nobles cannot be persuaded that the plebeians have the same human
nature as they have.
The emperor of the Chinese, because he reigns by a mild religion and
cultivates letters, is most humane.
And the emperor of the Indies is more humane than not, and for the
most part uses the arts of peace.
The Persian and the Turk have mixed the mildness of the Near East
over which they are lords with the rude doctrine of their religion, and so
S the Turks in particular have tempered arrogance with magnificence, with
N pomp, with liberality, and with gratitude.
L
438
Book Five 439

But in Europe, where celebrated everywhere is the Christian religion 1092

which teaches an idea of God infinitely pure and perfect and decrees
charity for all of humankind, there are great monarchies most humane
in their customs. For those located in the frigid North—in Sweden
and Denmark until 150 years ago and even until today in Poland and
­England—seem, in spite of having a monarchical constitution, still to
be aristocratic in their governance. But if they are not impeded from the
natural course of things by extraordinary causes, they will arrive at the
most complete monarchies.
There are observed a greater number of popular monarchies in this part
of the world alone, because of its cultivation of science, than are in all
the other three together.
Indeed, on account of the recurrence of the same public advantages and
necessities, there has been a renewal of the form of the Aetolian and
Achaean republican leagues. And just as the latter was understood by
the Greeks as a necessity for their security against the great power of the
Romans, so the Swiss cantons and the united provinces, or states, of Hol-
land have instituted two aristocratic orders from many free popular cit-
ies, and these orders stand united in perpetual league in peace and in war.
And the bulk of the German empire is a system of many free cities and
sovereign princes whose leader is the emperor, and in acting with regard
to the state of that empire, the system is governed aristocratically.63
And here one must observe that sovereign powers united in leagues, 1093
whether perpetual or temporary, come of themselves to form an aristo-
cratic constitution into which enters that suspicious anxiety which is the
property of aristocracies, as was demonstrated above [§1025].
Hence, since this is the last form of civil constitution (for it is not pos-
sible to understand a constitution in civil nature that would be superior
to aristocracies of this sort), this same form must have been the first,
and we have demonstrated by so many proofs in this work that this first
form was an aristocracy of Fathers, sovereign kings in their own families
and united in ruling orders in the earliest cities. For this is the nature
of principles, that they give the first things their start and bring the last
things to their end.
Now, to return to what we have proposed, today in Europe, there are 1094
no more than five aristocracies—namely, Venice, Genoa, Lucca in Italy;
Ragusa in Dalmatia; and Nuremberg in Germany—and almost all of
them lie within narrow borders.
However, Christian Europe everywhere shines with such great humanity
that there is an abundance of all the goods by which human life is able
to flourish, not just those which make ease for the body, but also those
which please both the mind and the spirit.

63
  See Bodin, Six Books of the Republic 2.5.
 440 The New Science

And all that in the strength of the Christian religion, which teaches a
truth so sublime that it accepts into its service the most learned of gentile
philosophy and cultivates three languages as its own: Hebrew, the most
ancient in the world; Greek, the most refined; and Latin, the most grand.
As a result, the Christian religion is also, for human ends, better than all
others in the world. For it unifies a wisdom decreed to us with a wisdom
reasoned out on the strength of the doctrines culled from the best phi-
losophers and erudition cultivated from the best philologists.
1095 Finally, taking passage over the ocean to the New World, the peoples of
the Americas would now be running this course taken by human things
if they had not been discovered by the Europeans.
1096 Now, in keeping with this recurrence of human civil things upon
which Book Five in particular has reasoned, reflect upon the parallels
drawn throughout this whole work on a great number of subjects be-
tween earlier and more recent times for nations both ancient and mod-
ern. You will have fully articulated the history of legislation and of deeds
which is not particular to the Romans or to the Greeks, but one based
upon identity in the substance by which it is understood and upon di-
versity in the modes by which it is articulated;64 you will have the ideal
history of eternal legislation based on which the deeds of all nations run
their course in their emergence, progress, maturity, decadence, and end, a
course run even if it were the case (but it is certainly false) that from one
time to the next, infinite worlds came to be from eternity.65
Hence, we could do no less than to give this work the invidious66 title,
THE NEW SCIENCE, for it was too great an injustice to defraud it of
its right and claim to a universal argument, inasmuch as that argument
CONCERNS THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS and
has that property which every science perfected in its idea has, a property
explicated by Seneca67 in the vastness of the following expression: pusilla
res hic mundus est, nisi id, quod quaerit, omnis mundus habeat [“the world
is but a paltry thing unless it holds what all the world seeks”].

64
  Here Vico’s language is unmistakably Spinozistic, recalling Ethics 1. See, for
example, P15: “except for substance and its modes there is nothing” (Curley, A
Spinoza Reader, p. 94); P28: “there is nothing except substance and its modes,
and modes are nothing but affections of God’s attributes” (p. 103).
65
  An allusion to Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De l’infinito universo et mondi,
published in Venice in 1584.
66
  Vico’s use of the term invidioso is intriguing, if not puzzling. Some light may
be shed by a comparison to Dante, Paradiso 10.136–138: essa è luce etterna di
Sigieri, / che, leggendo nel Vico de li Strami, / silogizzò invidïosi veri (“It is the
eternal light of Siger, / Who, instructing in the Street of Straw, / demonstrated
enviable truths”). See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The
Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
S 1999), pp. 24–25.
N 67
 Seneca, Natural Questions 7.30.5–6. Seneca’s Latin actually reads: Pusilla res
L mundus est, nisi in illo quod quaerat omnis aetas habeat.
440
 Conclusion

of the Work

Concerning an Eternal Natural

Republic, Best in Each of the

Kinds of Republic Ordered by

Divine Providence

441
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S
N
L
ii
Conclusion 443

Therefore, let us conclude this work with Plato,1 who makes a fourth 1097
kind of republic in which honorable and good men would be supreme
lords: this would be a true, natural republic.
Such a republic as Plato understood it was conducted by providence in
such a way from the earliest start of the nations that men, stronger be-
cause of their gigantic stature, must have wandered over the peaks of
mountains as do wild beasts that are stronger by nature, and with the
first lightning bolts after the Universal Flood, they took themselves un-
der the earth into caves in the mountains and subjected themselves to
one superior in strength, which they imagined as Jove. And being all as-
tonishment, as well as arrogance and savagery, they humbled themselves
before a divinity. And one can understand no other counsel than the
one in this order of human things, a counsel by which divine providence
worked to settle them in their bestial wandering within the great forest of
the earth so as to introduce the order of human civil things.
For at that time a state was formed out of republics which were, so 1098
to speak, monastic, that is, out of solitary sovereigns under the gover-
nance of the Best and Greatest One whom they themselves devised, and
in whom they believed, from the flashing of those lightning bolts; in the
midst of these lightning bolts shone forth to them that true light of a
God who governs men. Hence, later all the human advantages given to
them, and all the aids tending to their human necessities, they imagined
to be gods and, as such, feared and revered them.
Consequently, caught between the strong restraint of a terrifying super-
stition2 and the stinging goad of bestial lust (both of these must have
been most violent in such men) because they sensed the heavens in an
aspect terrifying to them and, accordingly, impeding them in the prac-
tices belonging to Venus, they must have kept their impetus to the bodily
movements of lust subject to conatus,3 and thus they started practicing a
human freedom which keeps in check the movements of concupiscence
and gives them a different direction; since this freedom does not come
from the body whence comes concupiscence, it must come from the mind
and, consequently, is properly human. Those men turned in the direc-
tion of seizing women by force, by nature shy and reluctant, dragging
them into their caves and, so as to have intercourse with them, remain-
ing settled with them in continuous, lifetime companionship. And so,
with these first couplings that were human—that is, couplings that were
chaste and religious—they afforded a beginning to marriage, through
which they make certain children with certain wives and so become

1
  Vico’s source for this attribution to Plato seems to be an Italian translation of
Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic. The most relevant Platonic text is Republic
8, 544a. For the reference to “supreme lords,” compare Aristotle, Politics 4.8,
1293b.
2
  Compare Virgil, Aeneid 6.506, 7.466, 9.60; Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.728.
3
  See the note at §340 on conatus.
 444 The New Science

c­ ertain fathers, and they founded the families, which they governed with
a familial cyclopean power over their children and their wives proper to
such savage and arrogant natures, so that with the later rise of the cities,
men were found to be well disposed to fearing civil power.
Thus did providence institute the order of certain domestic republics
in the form of monarchies under fathers who in that state were princes,
best in terms of sex, age, and virtue. The fathers in this state—this is
what ought to be called the state of nature, the one which is the same
as the familial state—must have formed the first natural orders as men
of piety, chastity, and fortitude: they had settled on their lands so as
to defend themselves and their families, they were no longer able to es-
cape by fleeing, as they had done previously in their wild wanderings,
but were required to kill the wild beasts that attacked them; and so as
to sustain themselves along with their families, they no longer wandered
in search of food, but tamed the lands and sowed grain. All this to save
humankind.
1099 At the end of a long age, there were other men cast forth by the force of
their own evil, evil caused for them by that infamous sharing in common
of things and women. By that sharing they remained dispersed through-
out the plains and the valleys in great numbers, men who were impious
because they did not fear God, who were impudent because of inter-
course in the manner of the bestial Venus, who were profane because
of that same intercourse with their mothers and daughters; they were
weak, astray, and alone, and after being pursued over a lifetime by vio-
lent men hardened by strife born from the same infamous sharing, they
repaired at a run to the asylums of the Fathers, and the Fathers who
received them into their protection came with clienteles to increase their
familial regimes based on those familial servants. And they developed re-
publics based on orders belonging to those who were naturally superior
because of a virtue that was certainly heroic: they were superior because
of their piety in worshiping a divinity (although it was divinity multi-
plied and divided by them, in their small enlightenment, into gods, gods
formed in accordance with their varied apprehensions, as was deduced
and confirmed by Diodorus Siculus4 and more clearly by Eusebius in his
Preparation for the Gospel5 and by Saint Cyril of Alexandria in his book
against Julian the Apostate) and, furnished with this piety, they were
superior because of their prudence in taking counsel from the auspices
of the gods; they were superior because of their temperance in having
intercourse chastely with only one woman taken under divine auspices in
continuous, lifetime companionship; they were superior because of their
fortitude in killing wild beasts, taming the lands; and they were superior
because of their magnanimity in succoring the weak and giving aid to
those in danger; these were by nature Herculean republics in which those
of piety, wisdom, chastity, fortitude, and magnanimity might defeat the

S   Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 4.210b.

4

N  Eusebius, De preparatione evangelica 2.2.

5

L
444
Conclusion 445

proud and defend the weak, which is excellence with regard to the form
of civil governance.
However, eventually, the paterfamilias, bequeathed through religion and 1100
virtue a greatness by the toils of his clients, abused the legislation per-
taining to protection, which made for harsh governance, and departed
from the natural order which is the order of justice; at that point, the
clients in families rebelled.
However, because human society is without order, which is as much as
to say that, without God, it cannot sustain itself even for a moment,
providence naturally led the paterfamilias to unite with those belonging
to him into orders against those rebelling and, so as to pacify those re-
belling with the first agrarian law in the world, to permit them bonitary
domain over the fields while keeping optimal domain—that is, familial
sovereignty—for themselves. Hence the first cities came into being upon
the regnant orders of nobles. And for want of a natural order conform-
ing to what was then the state of nature—that is, status determined by
kind, sex, age, and virtue—providence made a civil order come into be-
ing, along with the coming-into-being of these cities (and, first of all,
one that is closest to nature, with a view to the nobility of the human
species), and human beings could not be deemed noble in this state of
things, except by the nobility that stems from human propagation with
wives taken under divine auspices. And so, it was through heroism that
the nobles reigned over the plebeians who did not covenant in marriage
with solemnities of this sort. And since this ended the divine regimes
by which families were governed by means of divine auspices and since
those heroes were now required to reign on the strength of the form of
heroic governance itself, the principal basis of such republics was a reli-
gion guarded with those same heroic orders, and it was through this reli-
gion that all rights and all claims to civil life belonged only to the heroes.
However, because this nobility had become a gift of fortune, providence
made for the emergence, among the nobles, of an order of the Fathers of
families, who were naturally more worthy on account of their age. And
among those in this order, providence made for the coming-into-being
of those who, as kings, were more spirited and more hardened, and who
ought to be made leaders by the others, so that they might settle into
orders so as to resist and to terrorize rebelling clients.
However, with the revolving of years, the human mind developed a great 1101
deal, and the plebs of the peoples believed otherwise about the emptiness
of such heroism and came to understand themselves as having a human
nature equal with that of the nobles; hence, they even tried for entrance
into the civil orders of the city. Since it would be the case that at the end
of that age the people ought to be sovereign, providence permitted that
prior to this, the plebs would long strive with the nobles over piety and
religion in heroic contests by which the nobles were required to share
the auspices with the plebeians—and this tended towards their sharing
 446 The New Science

all the claims of civil life, public and private, because they deemed these
to be dependent upon the auspices. And so, it was their very concern for
piety and the same affect of religion that led the people to be sovereign in
the city; in this respect, the Roman people surpassed all other peoples in
the world and, accordingly, were as a people lord over that world.
In this fashion, as the natural order merged more and more into those
civil orders, the popular republics came into being. In these republics,
since everything was reduced to lot or balance, so that neither chance nor
fate would reign therein, providence instituted that the order of the cen-
sus would be the rule for honors. And thus, the industrious and not the
idle, the frugal and not the prodigal, the provident and not the shiftless,
the magnanimous and not the faint of heart—in a word, those enriched
by some virtue or by some image of virtue and not those impoverished
by their many knavish vices—were deemed best for governance.
It was from such republics of this sort—entire peoples who wish in com-
mon for justice and so decree just laws, laws that are just because they are
universally good (which Aristotle6 divinely defines as “a will without pas-
sion” and thus a heroic will in command of the passions)—that philoso-
phy emerged, with a mandate, because of the form of these republics, not
only to form heroes, but also, for the forming of these heroes, to take an
interest in the truth. Providence instituted these orders so that, since vir-
tuous actions were no longer done through a religious sensibility as they
previously had been done, philosophy would make virtue intelligible in
terms of its ideal, and on the strength of reflecting upon this idea, even
men who did not have virtue would at least be ashamed of their vices
(this alone can keep peoples trained to act badly to their duty). And
from the philosophies, providence permitted eloquence to arise, so that
by the very form of the popular republics where good laws are decreed,
such eloquence should be impassioned by a justice that would inflame
the people to decree good laws from these ideals of virtue. This is the
eloquence that we resolutely determine to have flourished in Rome in the
times of Scipio Africanus, in whose age civil wisdom and military valor
both happily established Rome upon the ruins of Carthage as the impe-
rial power of the world, which must have necessarily brought in its train
an eloquence hardy and most wise.
1102 However, even as popular constitutions became corrupted, so too did
the philosophies, which fell into skepticism, as learned fools gave them-
selves over to calumniating the truth. Consequently, there came into be-
ing a false eloquence, prepared equally to defend either of the opposing
sides of a case. Thus arrived the misuse of eloquence, as in Rome (at a
time when citizens were no longer content to make riches the basis of
orders, but tried to make them the basis of power) did the tribunes of the
plebs, like a furious wind upon the sea, stir up civil wars in their repub-
lics and send them into total disorder. And so, they made for a fall from
S
N 6
 Aristotle, Politics 3.16, 1287a32: “law is reason without passion.”
L
446
Conclusion 447

complete liberty into complete tyranny, the worst tyranny of all being
anarchy—that is, the unchecked liberty of free peoples.
Against this great malady of cities, providence works with one of three 1103
great remedies, in keeping with the order of human civil things.
This is because, first, providence disposes them to discover one who, like 1104
Augustus, will arise from within these peoples to establish a monarchy.
And, given that all the orders and all the laws previously discovered for
liberty are no longer strong enough to regulate them and to keep them
in check, he has to take in hand all these orders and all these laws by the
force of arms. And, by contrast, the very form of a monarchical consti-
tution restricts the will of the monarch, whose public power [imperio]
is otherwise infinite, to stay within the natural order of keeping their
peoples content and satisfied with their republics and with their natural
liberty. Without the generality of peoples being thus satisfied and con-
tent, a monarchical constitution is neither long-lasting nor secure.
Second, if providence does not find a remedy of this sort from within, it 1105
goes in search of one from without, and given that such peoples are so
corrupted that they have already become slaves by their nature to their
unchecked passions (slaves to luxury, to refinement, to avarice, to envy,
to pride, and to ostentation) and given that through the pleasures of a
dissolute life they returned to all the vices proper to the basest of slaves
(so that they are liars, rogues, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and con-
trivers), given all this, they become also slaves by the natural law of the
gentile peoples,7 which comes from the nature of nations, and come to
be subjects of better nations who have conquered them with arms, and
because of this are preserved by being reduced to provinces. Indeed, here
shine forth the two great lights of the natural order, first, that those who
cannot govern themselves are left to be governed by others who can; sec-
ond, that the world is always governed by those who are better by nature.
However, if a people is rotting in a final stage of civil malady and neither 1106
assents to a native monarch nor comes to be conquered and preserved
from without by a better nation, then providence works against this ex-
treme evil with the following extreme remedy. Given that such a people
become accustomed to thinking in a fashion no different from beasts—
each thinking of his own particular advantage—and given that such a
people in the last stage of refinement or, to put it better, arrogance, is
inclined to resent and lash out at whatever trifle happens to displease it,
in the fashion of wild beasts, thus, no matter how great the throng or
press of their bodies, they live like brutal beasts in an extreme solitude of
spirit and will, with not even two of them being able to agree, while each
of them pursues his own pleasure and caprice. Through all this, and by
stubborn factionalism and hopeless civil wars, they go on to make forests
out of their cities and lairs of men out of these forests; in this fashion,

7
  On the “natural law of the gentile peoples,” see the note at §141.
 448 The New Science

over long centuries of barbarism, they come to corrode the misbegotten

subtleties of malice-filled ingenuity, which by the barbarism of reflec-
tion8 has turned them into wild beasts more brutal than those in the
earlier barbarism of the senses. For the latter reveals a noble savagery,
against which another can put up a defense, take flight, or be on guard.
But the former, with a base savagery surrounded by blandishments and
embraces, plots against the lives and the fortunes of those who are one’s
own confidants and friends.
Accordingly, when providence works upon peoples given to reflective
malice of this sort, with its final remedy they are so stunned and stupe-
fied that they no longer sense ease, refinement, pleasure, and ostentation,
but only the necessary advantages of life. And with the small number of
men who in the end remain, and with the abundance of things necessary
for life itself, they naturally become agreeable. And through a return to
that earlier simplicity of the earlier world of peoples, they are religious,
truthful, and faithful, and thus there is a return among them of the piety,
faith, and truth, which are the natural foundations of justice and the
graces and beauties of the eternal order of God.
1107 With this simple and clear observation made concerning the things
pertaining to all of humankind, even if nothing else came down to us
from the philosophers, historians, grammarians, and jurists, one could
certainly say that this is the great city of the nations founded and gov-
erned by God.
This is because they have raised to the heavens, with their eternal praises
of wise lawgivers, those like Solon, Lycurgus, and the decemvirs, insofar
as up until now it has been opined that by their good orders and good
laws they founded those three most luminous cities shining forever in
their greater beauty and their greater civil virtues—that is, Sparta, Ath-
ens, and Rome—and yet these cities were of brief duration and limited
extent relative to the universality of peoples. They were ordered with
such orders and settled with such laws that, even in their very corruption,
they take on those forms of constitution by which alone it is possible
everywhere to be preserved and to endure consistently. And should we
not declare this to be the counsel of a superhuman wisdom? Should we
not say of a counsel that rules and conducts not with the force of laws
(whose force Dio said above in the Axioms9 was similar to that of a
tyrant) but by making use of the very customs of men, whose customs
are so free from any force that in them men pay homage to their own

8
  “The barbarism of reflection” is one of the better-known themes in Vico. It
bears comparison both to Rousseau’s claim about the inverse relation of science
and virtue and to Nietzsche’s thinking about “decadence.”
9
  Axiom 104. The reference is to Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–115 CE), Greek orator,
writer, philosopher, and historian of the Roman Empire. The passage Vico cites
S is from Discourse 76, “On Custom,” though its direct source (as Battistini notes)
N is almost certainly Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic.
L
448
Conclusion 449

nature (whence the same Dio said that customs are similar to a king in
that kings give decrees by pleasing—that is, rules and conducts divinely)?
For men, indeed, have themselves made this world of nations: this was 1108
the incontestable first principle of this science, given that we despaired
of discovering it from the philosophers and philologists. However, this
world, without doubt, has issued from a mind which is often different
from, at times at odds with, and always superior to the particular ends
which those men have proposed, and it has made these restricted ends
into means to serve fuller ends which always work to preserve the human
race on this earth.
Men intend to have intercourse in bestial lust and to abandon their off-
spring, and in the process make the chastity of marriage from which the
families arise. Fathers intend to exercise intemperate paternal power over
their clients, from which the cities arise. The regnant orders of nobles
intend to abuse the lordly liberty they have over the plebeians and end
up being enslaved to the laws that make for popular liberty. Free peoples
intend to loosen the restraints of their laws and arrive at subjection to
monarchs. Monarchs intend to debase their subjects in all the vices of
dissoluteness that render monarchs secure and dispose their subjects to
endure enslavement to stronger nations. The nations intend to disperse
themselves, and those left behind go on to save themselves in their soli-
tude and from there, like a phoenix, rise anew.
That which did all this was, indeed, mind, for men did it with understand-
ing. It was not fate, for men did it with choice. It was not chance, for there
was a consistency in what men did which gave rise to the same things.
Therefore, Epicurus, who is given to chance, is refuted by what men 1109
actually do, and with him his followers Hobbes and Machiavelli. Also
refuted by what men actually do is Zeno, and with him Spinoza. On
the contrary, what men actually do establishes in favor for the political
philosophers, whose prince is the divine Plato, who establishes that the
human things are ruled by providence.10
Hence, Cicero11 was in the right when he was unable to reason with At-
ticus about the laws, unless Atticus were to quit being an Epicurean and
concede from the first that providence rules the human things. Pufendorf
did not give recognition to providence among his hypotheses; Selden
merely assumed it; and Grotius set it aside.
However, the Roman jurists established it as the first principle of the
natural law of the gentile peoples.

10
  The assertion of a superficial opposition that conceals a deeper connection
between the Stoics (“fate”) and the Epicureans (“chance”), joined to the claim
that Plato and providence constitute an alternative superior to both, is found
near the beginning (§12) of the first version of The New Science. Another varia-
tion of the theme occurs in the Autobiography.
11
  Vico’s interpretation of Cicero, De legibus 1.7.21.
 450 The New Science

For in this work it has been fully demonstrated that the earliest gover-
nance in the world had as its entire form a religion based on providence,
and the familial state rested on this religion alone. Passing on from there
to heroic civil, or aristocratic, governance, that religion must have been
its principal basis of stability. Subsequently advancing on to popular
governance, this same religion served as a means for such governance
coming to pass. Settling at last upon monarchical governance, this reli-
gion must have been the shield of princes.
Hence, when religion is lost for a people, nothing remains for them to
live in society: no shield for defending themselves; no means for taking
counsel; no basis that must support them; no form for them actually to
be in the world.
1110 Consequently, let Bayle see if there can actually be nations in the world
without some knowledge of God! And let Polybius see how much truth
there may be in his statement that if there were philosophers in the
world, there would have been no need in the world for religions.12 For
it is by religions alone that the peoples do virtuous works through their
senses, by which men are efficaciously moved to perform them, while the
maxims reasoned by the philosophers concerning virtue serve only for
an eloquence good for kindling the senses to do the duties of the virtues.
This is the essential difference between our Christian religion (which is
true) and all the others (which are false): in our religion, divine grace
makes for virtuous works with a view to an infinite and eternal good that
cannot fall under the senses, and as a consequence, it is with a view to
this that the mind moves the senses to virtuous actions; whereas in false
religions, they have proposed for themselves finite and transitory goods,
in this life as in the next, where they expect a blessedness consisting of
physical pleasures, and accordingly the senses must draw the mind to-
wards doing virtuous works.
1111 By contrast, providence (through the order of civil things upon which
this book has reasoned) makes itself plainly sensible to us with three
sentiments: first, wonder; second, the veneration, which until now all the
learned have had for the unaccountable wisdom of the ancients;13 and,
third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek after and obtain
this wisdom; for there were three actual lights from God’s divinity which
gave rise to the three aforementioned beautiful and correct sentiments,
which are later perverted by the vanity of the learned, together with the
vanity of nations, as we proposed above in the first Axioms14 and which
have been reproved throughout this entire book. These correct and beau-

12
  On the attribution of this claim to Polybius, see the note at §179. Modern
Italian editions end this sentence with an exclamation point, but one does not
appear in either the autograph or the edition printed in 1744.
13
  On the “unaccountable wisdom of the ancients,” see the note at §128.
S 14
  Axioms 3 and 4.
N
L
450
Conclusion 451

tiful sentiments are that all the learned admire, venerate, and desire to be
united with the infinite wisdom of God.
In sum, on account of everything that has been reasoned upon in this 1112
work, one is given finally to conclude that this science brings as insepa-
rable from it the study of piety and that if one is not pious, one cannot
in truth be wise.