Cosmographical ideas were narrow, confined as they were to the life of these societies. The first heaven was placed no farther off than the tops of the mountains, where the giants saw the lightning play: the lower world was no deeper than a ditch, and was only by degrees enlarged and sunk into the valleys as opposed to the sky, that is to say to the mountain-tops; the earth was identified with the limits of the cultivated fields. In the course oftime the sky, the object of contemplation from which auguries were drawn, was lifted to a greater height, and with it the gods and heroes who were attached to the planets and constellations; and thus arose poetical astronomy. Geographical knowledge extended no farther than the country inhabited by each nation; and this is the reason why peoples travelling into foreign and distant lands gave to the new cities and to the mountains, hills, passes, islands and promontories the same names which were borne by those of their native land. Asia or India was at first for the Greeks the eastern part of Greece itself, Europe or Hesperia its western, and Thrace or Scythia its northern district.
But we will not enter into further details; indeed we have omitted much already. It is not the detail that gives its value to Vico's picture of the heroic age. His etymologies, his mythical interpretations, the genesis and chronological succession of his gods, the genesis and succession of his phonetic, metrical and stylistic forms—each, taken by itself, may be contested; but taken as a whole they are rich with a truth which transcends the single propositions. This truth is the mighty effort to recall a form of humanity and society still doubtless living in surviving records and monuments, still recognisable here and there in a fragmentary form in various parts of the modern world; but for centuries, even in Vico's days, buried beneath a mass of irrelevant fancies, conventional types, and prejudices of every kind, which prevented its true characteristics from appearing.
The poet of primitive society was Homer: and if such was his character, he could not have enjoyed the profound wisdom, the delicate and lofty sense of morality, and the supreme knowledge of all the sublimest arts and sciences which ancient philosophers and writers fancied him to possess, and the common opinion of literary men and critics still attributed to him in the seventeenth century.
What an extravagant philosopher Homer would have been, if he had indeed been a philosopher: how miserably, had he set out to do so, would he have organised Greek civilisation! His Jupiter indicates force, brute force, as the standard of the respect due to him; his Minerva despoils Venus, knocks Mars down with a stone, strikes Diana and is in turn insulted by Mars; and both Venus and Mars are wounded by Diomed, a mere mortal. The heroes Achilles and Agamemnon exchange insults such as would hardly be used by servants in a comedy to-day: they call each other "dogs" and quarrel in the most uncivil manner for the possession of Briseis and Chryseis. Ferocious in their customs, they leave the bodies of their enemies to dogs and crows: intemperate in their pleasures, they drink to excess. Lofty intelligence, kindness of heart, balance of mind may be sought in vain in all their actions and sentiments. The fact is, these heroes show themselves men of the scantiest understanding, the wildestimagination, the most violent passions; boorish, barbarous, intractable, fierce, arrogant, defiant and obstinate in their resolves and at the same time flighty in the extreme, at the mercy of any new object that presents itself to their eyes. Here again, the most striking parallel may be found in the psychology of the peasant, who as may be seen every day embraces any reasonable motive proposed to him but owing to the weakness of his intellect soon abandons the idea he has been persuaded to adopt and slips naturally back to his first intention. In the same way the Homeric heroes sometimes acquiesce in the first word of opposition offered to them; sometimes at a sudden mournful recollection they burst into bitter lamentation in the midst of their anger: or else, if while in the greatest misery they meet with something pleasant, like Ulysses at the feast of Alcinous, they lose all memory of their sorrows and become completely cheerful; or else, when in a calm and peaceful state of mind, they take offence at a harmless word and flying into a blind passion threaten the speaker with a cruel death. Even the virtues which they possess in an eminent degree, their frankness, vigour, magnanimity and generosity, are tinged with this same character of unreflective passion.
The hero of heroes, Achilles, who bears on his shoulders the destinies of Troy, owing to a private wrong he had received from Agamemnon—a grave wrong, but an insufficient motive for the ruin of his country and his whole nation—condemned all the Greeks to defeat and destruction at the hands of Hector; and he only determined to aid them in order to assuage the personal grief caused by Hector's slaying his friend Patroclus. If only this extreme aloofness had been due to passion and jealousy! But though when Agamemnon deprived him of Briseis he made enough noise to fill heaven and earth and supply the plot of the entireIliad,yet he never in the whole course of the poem shows a spark of real love: just asMenelaus mustered the whole of Greece against Troy to avenge the rape of Helen but never suffers the least pang of jealousy against Paris who is enjoying her. So devoid is Achilles of common humanity, that when Hector wishes to arrange that the victor in the fight shall bury the vanquished, he forgets that they are equals in rank and that death levels all, and savagely answers: "When have men ever made a truce with lions, and when have wolves and lambs had the same wish?" and he adds, "If I slay thee, I will drag thee bound naked to my chariot round the walls of Troy three days" (as he actually did in the sequel) and finally, "I will give thee to my hounds to devour." And he would have carried out his threat, had not the unhappy father Priam come to him to ransom the corpse. But even in this deeply-moving interview, when he has received Priam in his tent after the latter has, escorted by Mercury, passed alone through the midst of the Greek camp, when he has welcomed him to his table, at a single involuntary word that falls from the lips of the unhappy old man as he bewails the loss of so valiant a son Achilles forgets the sacred law of hospitality; and, ignoring the full and complete trust which Priam had placed in him, untouched by the terrible misfortunes of such a king, by the respect due to a father and the veneration due to so old a man, without reflecting on the reversal of his fortunes, of all things the most apt to excite pity, flies into a bestial rage and shouts a threat that he "will cut off his head"! Death itself does not end his anger at the loss of Briseis, were it not that the beautiful and unhappy princess Polyxena, daughter of the once rich and powerful Priam and now a wretched slave, is sacrificed on his tomb, that the shade glutted with revenge may drink the last drop of her innocent blood; and in the lower world, when Ulysses asks him what state he prefers, Achilles answers that he "would rather be the commonest slave, but alive"! Such isthe hero whom Homer adorns with the permanent epithet of "without reproach" (ἀμύμων) and celebrates in the hearing of Greece as a pattern of heroic virtue. Such a hero, whose reasoning powers are concentrated in his spear-point, can only be classed with those self-satisfied persons of whom we say nowadays that they are too fine to breathe the common air.
If Homer's greatest characters are so discordant with our civilised nature, the similes which he uses are drawn from savage beasts and wild nature generally. If the life which he represents—a life of children in its intellectual futility, of women in its imaginative vigour, and of headstrong youths in the violence of its passion—and the tales of which theOdysseyis full, tales worthy of an old woman engaged in amusing children, prevent our attributing any esoteric wisdom to Homer, the striking success of these wild similes is certainly not characteristic of a mind tamed and civilised by philosophy of any sort. Nor could that truculent and savage style in which he describes the various sanguinary battles, the diverse and extravagantly bloodthirsty species of butchery which especially go to make the sublimity of theIliad,have originated in a mind humanised and softened by philosophy.
But who was Homer? What opinions as to him can we find in ancient writers, and what facts can we draw from his poems? An unprejudiced reader of theIliadandOdysseyis at every step aware of and baffled by extravagant and inconsistent statements. The life portrayed is inconsistent: it takes us now here, now there, over a long period of time; on the one hand we find Achilles the hero of force, on the other Ulysses the hero of wisdom: on the one hand, cruelty, barbarism, ferocity and brutality, on the other the luxury of Alcinous, the delights of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens and the pastimes of suitors who tempt and even win over the chaste Penelope. On the one hand we are shown boorishand uncivilised manners, on the other jewels, magnificent clothing, exquisite foods and the arts of sculpture in bas-relief and metal-founding; on the one hand a strictly heroic society, on the other some signs of popular liberty. This delicate life fits ill with the savage and cruel life which especially in theIliadis ascribed to the same heroes at the same time. To regard them thus as contemporaneous is an impossibility. From the customs of the Trojan period we have leapt abruptly into those of the time of Numa, to such an extent that "ne placidis coeant inmitia" we are compelled to suppose that the two poems were the work of many hands extending over many ages. The geographical allusions are equally inconsistent. These, no less, bring us into varied and distant physical surroundings. The scene of theIliadlies to the east of Greece, inclining to the northward: that of theOdysseyin the west, inclining to the southward. The language, again, is inconsistent. The confusion of dialects persists in spite of the revision of Aristarchus, and has been explained by the most extraordinary hypotheses, such as the theory that Homer drew the elements of his vocabulary from all the various Greek nationalities.
Passing from the poems to the traditions of their author, the lives of Homer by Herodotus (if Herodotus really wrote it) and Plutarch are valueless. The most elementary facts about Homer are unknown: it is precisely concerning the man whom they considered the greatest luminary of Greece that the ancients leave us most completely in the dark. We know neither Homer's date nor his birthplace: each one of the Greek peoples claimed him as their citizen. It is said indeed that he was poor and blind, but it is just these details which excite our suspicion, as our laughter is aroused by the argument of Longinus which makes theIliadthe work of his youth and theOdysseythat of his old age. It would be indeed remarkable if such knowledge were currentconcerning a man in whose case the two trifling details of time and place were unknown! Above all, criticism must ask how a single man could ever have composed two poems of such a length at a time when writing was not in existence: since the three inscriptions of heroic age, one of Amphitryon, another of Hippocoön and a third of Laomedon mentioned with an excess of good faith by Vossius are mere forgeries like those made by the strikers of false coins.
All these considerations led Vico to suspect that Homer himself was not a real person but one of those poetic characters to whom the ancient world ascribed long series of actions, works and events. If we try to conceive the Homeric poems not as the work of an individual but as two great storehouses of the manners and customs of earliest Greece, containing the history of its natural law and heroic period; if instead of a single poet we imagine a whole nation of poets, and instead of a single act of creation, a national poetry developing in the course of centuries, everything falls into its place and finds an explanation. The extravagance of the legends is explained by the fact that the composition of theIliadandOdysseyfalls in the third period of their existence. In the hands of the theological poets they were true and severe, by the heroic poets they were altered and corrupted, and in this corrupt state they were incorporated in the two poems. The variety of customs is explained if we consider the various periods of composition, and so also the "young Homer" and "old Homer," which are symbolic of the earlier and later periods of primitive Greece. The diversity of sites assigned to his birth and death and the variety of his dialects are accounted for by the fact that different peoples produced the lays. Finally, it is explained why every Greek people claimed him as a citizen, just because these peoples were themselves Homer; and why he was called blind and a beggar,because such were as a rule the singers who went about from fair to fair reciting their tales. Thus in order to be rightly understood Homer must lose himself in the crowd of Greek peoples and be considered an idea or heroic character; a type of the Greeks in so far as they narrated tales in ballad form. Thus facts which had only caused confusion and lacked plausibility in Homer as then understood became natural and necessary elements of the Homer now rediscovered. Above all, this latter Homer deserves the high praise of being the first of all historians of Greece known to us. In Homer we have a proof of the original identity of history and poetry, and a confirmation of Strabo's assertion that before Herodotus, before even Hecataeus of Miletus, the history of the Greek peoples was written by their poets. In two golden passages of theOdysseya man is praised for having told a story well and said to have "told it as a musician and a singer."
Vico did not undertake a detailed investigation into the way in which the Homeric poems were elaborated. He seems however to incline towards two chief poet-authors, one, a native of the east of Greece, towards the north, for theIliad,the other for theOdyssey,a native of the west towards the south: and by the title "Homer" he understands a composer and compiler of legends. But on the other hand, owing to the purely ideal meaning which this name has for him, we must not rule out the interpretation that the two Homers in their turn may be two streams of poetry and two groups of peoples or of popular singers. The historic figures whom Vico finds before him are the rhapsodes, men of the people who wandered independently about the fairs and festivals of the Greek cities reciting the songs of Homer. From the time of their primitive composition long ages elapsed before the Pisistratidae had them divided and arranged into two groups, theIliadand theOdyssey,a fact whichshows clearly that in their time only a confused mass of material was to be found, and decreed that they should henceforth be sung by the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea.
It is however certainly not in the resolution, materially understood, of the individual Homer into a myth or poetic character that the importance of Vico's theory lies: and the same is perhaps the case with its truth. From the inconsistencies observed by him, and not always accurately observed (which are moreover unimportant, since the inaccuracies he notes might easily be balanced by the correct statements he omits), there was no strictly logical passage to the denial of the existence of an individual Homer, the principal author of one or both poems. These inconsistencies might serve to demonstrate that the poet or poets were working upon a rich fund of traditional material, of origin very various both as to time and place, and not regularly stratified according to origin, but having its strata confused and contorted. One or more poets, or even many poets and an able compiler of their lays, or a society of able compilers: these and similar hypotheses might equally well have been suggested, as happened later, and supported, as was later the case, by arguments neither more nor less cogent, because incapable of documentary proof. But underlying this resolution of Homer into a poetic character, as it underlay other resolutions made or attempted by Vico, lay the discovery of the long and laborious historical genesis through which the matter of these poems had passed, so that in this sense they might really be called a product of collaboration on the part of the whole Greek people. The substitution of a nation of Homers for a single Homer was only another case of mythology constructed according to the principles discovered by Vico himself: mythology which must be retranslated into scientific prose. In the same way Vico's analysis of the customs described in the Homericpoems may be, and is, not only here and there adulterated with a few inaccuracies, but is on the whole exaggerated and one-sided. Still, this analysis taken as a whole was a great advance and opened new paths to Homeric criticism. How could the stubborn illusion of the noble Homeric hero, a great lord and a good ruler, a shining example of all civil, military and domestic virtues, be dispelled except by setting against it the picture of a boorish Achilles, full of elemental passions, violent, stubborn, unreasoning, quick to a generous impulse but no less quick to outbursts of brutal wrath?
Vico's progress in artistic appreciation of the Homeric poetry was no less marked. The recognition that a sound and rational philosophy was not to be found in the poet Homer would, in the mouth of any other critic of the time, have amounted to a slur on the poet: as expressed by Vico and as the consequence of his new aesthetic ideas it was a compliment. The errors which intellectualism and neo-classical criticism discovered in Homer led the critics to repeat freely the saying of Horace that "good Homer nods at times": whereas Vico on the contrary exclaims "if he had not nodded so often he would never have been good!" (nisi ita saepe dormitasset, nunquam bonus fuisset Homerus). Homer was a great poet precisely because he was not a philosopher. He had a retentive memory, a strong imagination and a sublime mind; and neither the philosophies nor the arts of poetry and criticism which came after him could ever produce a poet at all like him. He was the only poet who could conceive heroic characters: his comparisons are incomparable, his speeches sublime, expressive of the individuality of the speaker, and created by the power of a vivid imagination: his diction is clear and splendid, his language composed entirely of similes, images and comparisons, and has none of those ideas of genus and species by which things are intellectually defined. Heis not delicate but grand, for delicacy is a small virtue and grandeur naturally despises small things: or even, just as a great and rushing torrent cannot help the turbidness of its water, and must perforce sweep rocks and trees with it in the violence of its course, so too in Homer we may find things of no value. But the torrent with all its impurities sweeps on its way superb and impetuous; and Homer in spite of and partly because of his ruggedness is for ever the father and prince of all sublime poets.
This new departure in Homeric criticism brought with it implicitly a complete revolution in the history of ancient literature. But on this subject Vico made only a few scattered remarks. He was no specialist: he did not write from a specialist's point of view, and too often when documentary evidence and thought were unable to solve a difficulty he solved it by means of his fancy, a faculty which was however in his case radiant with gleams of insight. Thus, the cyclic poets were not so called because of the circle of listeners in the centre of which they declaimed their poems, like the "Rinaldi" or ballad-singers whom Vico saw on the quay at Naples, and this circle had no connexion with thevilem patulumque orbemof Horace: but the observation that they differed little from these ballad-singers was sound. In the same way, we need not linger on his guesses at the dates of Homer and Hesiod, nor need we take literally his division of lyric poetry into three periods, namely those respectively of religious hymns, funeral chants for dead heroes and melic lyrics or "musical airs," the last including Pindar, and admired, flourishing as it did at the epoch of the "pompous virtue" of Greece, at the Olympic games where these poets sang. But still Vico has here put his finger on the difference between primitive and refined or cultured lyric poetry. The origin of tragedy he ascribes to the dithyramb or dramatic satire, of which no example has come down to us, and in rural customscompared by him to those which were still in evidence during his own lifetime in Campania at vintage season; and he notes the relation between tragedy and the epic. Tragedy had its rude beginnings at a time when the heroic spirit was already dead: it perfected itself by becoming subordinate to the Homeric poetry, deriving its inspiration from Homeric characters and avoiding original ones. The old comedy was closely related to tragedy. Like the latter it was derived from a chorus, and it preserved its archaic character in that it displayed living persons and real actions. The new comedy on the other hand was marked off by a profound change of spirit. Here the effects of philosophy were directly felt. Imaginative genera were superseded by intelligible and rational universals: and Menander and the other poets of the new comedy, living in the most humane period of Greek history, took their intelligible genera from human life and depicted them in their comedies, over which one feels that the breath of Socratic philosophy has passed. The persons of the new comedy were cast in a mould, and were not public but private characters: and as the chorus represents the public and argues about public affairs only, there is no room for it in the new comedy. About this time began the practice of inserting idealised heroes of perfect morals into poetry. Aristotle, remembering the strongly individualised characters of Homer, still maintained as a principle of poetic composition that the heroes of tragedy should be neither very good nor very bad, but rather a mixture of great virtues and great faults. But the poets of the late period, making use of the idea originated by philosophers, formed a "heroism of virtue": a heroism which may be called "gallant." Accordingly they either invented entirely new legends or else used old legends which had originally presented themselves to the founders of the nation in an appropriately stern and severe form, but softened them by adapting them to thesoftening of manners. Equally gallant is the "shepherd" of the Greek Bucolic poets, Bion and Moschus, "wasting away with the most delicate love," He makes the general observation on Greek and Latin literature, that the boundary between verse and prose was so strictly guarded on both sides that no ancient writer ever composed both orations and poems—a rule to which perhaps the only exception is the wretched verses (ridenda poemata) of Cicero: and Vico tried to explain this fact by the democratic habits which compelled orators studiously to avoid the cultivation of lofty and fanciful modes of expression, which would have puzzled the people and hindered their full and clear comprehension of the point at issue.
Vico does not treat Roman literature so fully as Greek, which provided him with much more primitive documents. But he detected certain analogies between the origins of Latin and Greek literature. The first poets and authors in the Latin language were the Salii, sacred poets; and this was natural in the beginning of a nation's culture; for in the primitive religious period the gods are the only object of praise. And just as the earliest fragments of Latin known to us, the remains of the hymns of the Salii, give an impression of hexameter verse, so the same metre is felt in the records of Romans who celebrated triumphs, such as the"duello magno dirimendo, regibus subiugandis"of Lucius Aemilius Regillus and the"fudit fugat prosternit maximas legiones"of Acilius Glabrio. The first Roman poets, too, sang true stories: this was the case with Livius Andronicus and his Romanid containing the annals of early Rome, and with Naevius, and later Ennius, who described the Punic wars. Satire also was levelled against real and for the most part notorious persons. The Romans however differed from the Greeks in advancing with a more measured step and not making the swift and abrupt transition from barbarismto effeminacy: so that they entirely lost the history of their gods (which Varro called the "obscure period" of Rome) and preserved their heroic history, extending down to the Publilian and Petelian laws, in common speech only. In its greatest manifestations the literature of Rome is the work of cultivated poets like Virgil, whom Vico admires for his profound knowledge of heroic antiquity, but says of him that so far as poetical power is concerned he is not to be compared with Homer; a verdict agreeing with that of Plutarch and Longinus, but in opposition to the view of neo-classical criticism. Another example of cultivated and reflective poetry is to be found in Horace, who like Pindar in the pompous period of Greece composed his odes at the most "ostentatious" epoch of Roman history, the Augustan age.
The Biblical literature would have given Vico materials of great value for the study of primitive poetry; and he actually did move a few steps towards it when he observed that poetry was the primitive language of all nations "including the Hebrews"; and that Moses made no use of the esoteric wisdom of the Egyptian priests and wrote his history "in a style which has much in common with that of Homer and often surpasses him in sublimity of expression." But Vico drops the subject at once, as if he instinctively guessed what might come of treating the Pentateuch as he had done theIliad,and Moses like Homer. So he prefers to wax enthusiastic over the phrase in which God describes himself to Moses"Ego sum qui sum,"to which he ascribes a metaphysical profundity only attained by the Greeks when Plato conceived God as toon,and unknown to the Latins down to the latest period, for the wordensis not pure Latin but belongs to debased Latin. Or he contents himself with emphatically pointing out that at a time when Greece was under the sway of a superstitious and natural law, God gave to his people a code "so full of weight as regards the dogmas ofdivinity and so full of humanity as regards the practice of justice, that not even in the humanest period of Greek history could a Plato have conceived or an Aristides executed it"; a code "whose ten chief enactments contain an eternal and universal justice founded upon the excellent conception of a purified human nature, and are capable of forming by habituation a character such as the maxims of the greatest philosophers could only with great difficulty form by ratiocination; whence Theophrastus called the Hebrews philosophers by nature." The success that attended the "will to believe" was all the more striking if as we suspect Vico had read the abhorred Spinoza'sTractatus Theologico-politicus,where the Hebrew prophets, while their "piety" is recognised, are said to be entirely devoid of "sublime thoughts." Spinoza maintains that they only taught "very simple things which any one could easily discover, and adorned these with a style and supported them by reasons most calculated to move the mind of the multitude to devotion towards God"; and that the laws revealed by God to Moses were "nothing but the laws of the particular government of the Jews": and he sets out to examine the text of the Bible and the problem of the authenticity of the Pentateuch and the respective authors of its various books. We might almost venture to say that it was Spinoza's Biblical criticism that suggested to Vico his criticism of the composition and spirit of the Homeric poems; but that the latter, after passing in this way from sacred to profane history, from Moses to Homer, set his face stubbornly against the opposite transition from Homer to Moses, from profane history to sacred.
Heroic society in the period of youthful vigour above described contains within itself, rigorously repressed, and in fact made into a support, the element of opposition; the slaves, clients or vassals, that is to say the plebs. But this element little by little succeeds in detaching itself from and opposing itself to the society, engaging it in a continual and undisguised conflict, so as by degrees to overthrow this old society and give life and form to a new society of which it is itself the material: a democratic society, the popular republic. Vico believes this process to be uniform in all peoples; but since references to histories other than that of Rome are either absent or very vague (he hardly mentions the origin of the Athenian democracy) the description of this process appears in the pages of the New Science as a fragment of Roman history, or as we should nowadays call it the social history of Rome.
Vico's guesses about the population and primitive culture of Italy are of no great importance. The subject belongs rather to archaeology and ethnography than to history, and Vico did not make a special study of it. In theDe antiquissima sapientia Italorumhe had provided the origins of Rome with a basis in an Italian civilisation of high antiquity, earlier than the Greek and derivedfrom Egypt, which the Romans absorbed in a manner agreeing with their character; by rejecting, that is to say, its theoretical hypotheses while taking over their practical results, just as they adopted from the Etruscans their tragic religion and their art of tactics, and as they later adopted laws from Athens and Sparta. In this way their ignorance and savagery remained unchanged, and hence they spoke the language of philosophers without being philosophical. In his later writings Vico still for a time maintained the priority and independence of the earliest Italian civilisation as regards that of Greece, and considered Pythagoras less as the founder than as the student of Italian wisdom. Finally, however, he seems to have given up this view, just as he definitely abandoned that which explained the origins of Roman religion, language, customs and law by the imitation of foreign peoples and "frankly confessed that he had been in error here" owing to the example of Plato'sCratylus.What conditions brought about the rise of Rome Vico does not precisely say. He is certain that if Rome and the world did not begin together, at least the foundation of Rome was a new beginning. The point of departure which he assumes is the asylum of Romulus, consisting of the "families" of fathers who gave their hospitality to wanderers and made them intofamuli.There was no Trojan colonisation; Vico knows Bochart's treatise (1663) criticising the legend of Aeneas's arrival in Italy and accepts its conclusions, which only confirm the doubts already entertained by certain ancient historians. For Vico, the Trojan origin of Rome is a legend sprung from the union of two different examples of national arrogance: that of the Greeks, who made such a noise about the Trojan war and forced their Aeneas into the history of Rome, and that of the Romans, who accepted him in order to boast of a distinguished foreign origin. The legend moreover could not have arisenmuch before the time of the war with Pyrrhus, when Rome began to acquire a taste for things Greek. In order to explain the infusion of Greek names and myths into the story of primitive Rome and the similarity of the Roman alphabet to the ancient Greek, Vico would incline rather to the hypothesis that early in their history the Romans conquered and destroyed some Greek colony on the Latin coast, of which all trace has since been lost in the mists of antiquity; and that through receiving its inhabitants in Rome as refugees and allies, they came under the influence of several Hellenic traditions and customs.
Vico does not spend much time over the historical events of the royal period. Here in fact lay one of the chief differences between his criticism and that which had already been originated and was continued after his time dealing with the first centuries of Roman history. Vico aims not at substituting historical for legendary anecdotes but at understanding the essence of institutions and the ways in which they change. He uses two guiding principles, as we have seen in considering the royal period: first, that it was a period not of monarchy but of aristocracy and that therefore the type of heroic society or the patriarchal republic is applicable to it: secondly, that the names of the kings are symbols or "poetic characters" for the institutions of this society. In Vico's judgment, as we have had occasion to observe, the constitution of Servius Tullius should not be considered the basis of popular liberty, as the later Romans considered it; it was really the basis of the liberty of the feudal lords, since by it the patricians granted to the plebeians the bonitary tenure of their land together with the duty of paying rent to and serving at their own expense in war themselves, the patricians. And Junius Brutus, in driving out the Tarquins and replacing them by two consuls or annual aristocratic kings, restored tothe Roman republic its primitive form; that is to say, he delivered the lords from the domination of their tyrants but left the people under the domination of their lords.
The patricians' oppression of the plebeians after the restoration of Junius Brutus and the struggles and resistance caused by it constitute the soul of the new development and contain the secret of the greatness of Rome, the "key to universal Roman history,"clavis historiae Romanae universae.Polybius's explanation of this greatness is too vague. He describes it as due to the virtue or the religion of the patricians and relates the facts of this virtue rather than their cause. Vico also criticises Machiavelli, at one time because he adduces certain civil and military institutions as the cause of Rome's greatness without investigating the cause of those institutions, that is to say the character of Roman society: at another time for adducing what was only a partial cause, the high spirit of the plebeians. He thinks Plutarch worst of all, since envy of the virtue and wisdom of Rome leads him to ascribe her greatness to fortune. The fact was that Rome subjugated the other cities of Latium and then Italy and the world because her heroism was still young, while among the other Latin peoples it had begun to decay. Thanks to this youthful vigour the patricians were strong enough to preserve their order and the religion which formed its foundation and safeguard (the nobles, Vico observes at this point, were always and everywhere religious, so that the first sign of contempt for religion among them is a symptom of national decadence); the plebeians were spirited enough to demand a share in religion, auspices and all civil rights; the lawyers, lastly, were wise enough to interpret the old laws and apply them to any new case that might arise, and strove with all their might to alter the text of these laws as little and as slowly as possible. These were the chief causesof the growth and permanence of the Roman empire; for in all its political changes it contrived to remain faithful to its principles. Prowess in war was another result of the rivalry of the orders; since the nobles were naturally consecrated to the safety of their country, as the only means of preserving the civil privileges of their order, and the plebeians accomplished brilliant deeds in order to prove themselves worthy of patrician honours. And when the Romans extended their conquests and their victories over the whole world, they made use of four rules which they had already applied to the plebeians within Rome itself. They reduced barbarian provinces to the position of clients by planting colonies in them: they granted civilised provinces bonitary tenure of their land: to Italy they gave the quiritary tenure: and to the municipia, the towns which had earned better treatment, they accorded the same equality with themselves which the plebs had finally won.
The result of the first struggles, in which the point at issue was according to Vico the bonitary possession of land (a right already recognised in the constitution of Servius, but cancelled by the nobles in return for arrears of rent), is seen in the tribunate, and later, when the plebeians claimed the right of quiritary tenure, in the laws of the Twelve Tables, ratifying this plebeian victory. But the law of the Twelve Tables represented at the same time the victory of written law, the end of the secrecy with which the laws had been fenced round by the patricians, who alone knew, understood, interpreted and therefore applied them as they thought fit. This publication and codification of a written law cannot have been benevolently granted by the patricians out of that anxiety "not to despise the wishes of the plebs" of which Livy speaks; rather they must have resisted it with all the stubbornness which Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes and expresses in the phrase "mores patrios servandos,leges ferri non oportere" (our fathers' customs must be preserved, and laws must not be passed).
Later historians decorated the origin of the Twelve Tables with various legends. They told, among other things, of the mission sent by the decemvirs to Athens to bring back new laws: a tale given by Livy and Dionysius, but unknown to Polybius and discredited by Cicero. How, in the savage aloofness of primitive nations, between whom oral communication could only have been instituted by the necessities of warfare, alliances and commerce, could the fame of Solon's wisdom have crossed the seas from distant Attica to Rome? How could the Romans of that time have possessed such accurate knowledge of the quality of Athenian law as to believe it capable of setting at rest the strife between their plebeians and their nobles? How could ambassadors have travelled between Greece and those Romans whom seventy-two years later the Greeks of Tarentum could still maltreat as strangers? And what shall we say of ambassadors who returned carrying with them the Greek laws from Athens but without knowing what they meant; so that but for the coincidence by which Hermodorus the pupil of Heraclitus, an exile from his country, happened to be in Rome, the Romans would have been unable to make any use of this unintelligible and inaccessible treasure? Again, how could Hermodorus have translated the laws into Latin of such purity that Diodorus Siculus pronounced it devoid of the slightest taint of Hellenism, and with a perfection unattained by any subsequent writer of any period in a translation from the Greek? How did he contrive to clothe Greek ideas in Latin words so appropriate (for instance,auctoritas) that Greeks, Dio Cassius among them, declare that their own language has no corresponding words by which to explain them? Heraclitus's letter to Hermodorus must have been conveyed by the same mail that served Pythagoras in his distantvoyages up and down the world: it is, in fact, an imposture of the first quality, and the whole story of the Athenian origin of these laws is due to the arrogance of scholars, who derived them first from the other Latin peoples (such as the Aequi), then from the Greek cities of Italy, then from Sparta and finally from Athens, with whose name, thanks to the renown of the Athenian philosophers, they were at last satisfied. No doubt, the laws of the Twelve Tables present resemblances not only to Athenian or Spartan laws but to those of various nations, the Mosaic code among others; but this is due to the uniformity of national history. No doubt, the decemvirs were in antiquity supposed to have originated laws bearing clear traces of Greek influence, such as that prohibiting the Greek style of mourning at funerals: but this is because as we have seen the decemviral legislation, like the names of the various kings, became a "poetic character," and to it were referred all laws later recorded in the public archives which tended to the equalisation of liberty. But the original law of the Twelve Tables, with its primitive rudeness, inhumanity, cruelty and ferocity, which agrees so ill with the period of highly-developed civilisation at Athens, is a document of the greatest value for the ancient natural law of the Latin peoples, and the customs which had existed among them from the age of Saturn.
Quiritary tenure of land and a written code of law once gained, the struggle recommenced over the question of the right of marriage. The true meaning of this contest has been lost among the absurdities written on the subject by the ancient historians themselves, in the belief that its basis was the desire on the part of the plebeians (who were little more than wretched and common slaves) to be allowed to form connexions with the nobles. This error has made Roman history even less credible than the legendary history of Greece; for if we do not know themeaning of the latter, the former is in opposition to the true order of human desires. It shows us a plebs aspiring first to nobility, secondly to offices and magistracies, and finally to wealth: whereas men desire first of all wealth, then offices in the state, and lastly nobility. What the Roman plebs really claimed was not"connubio, cum patribus"but"connubio, patrum": not the right of connexion by marriage with the nobles—a claim which they would not have wished to make, and was at bottom unimportant—but the right of contracting solemn marriages as the nobles did. For without such solemn marriages, without privilege of the auspices, the plebeians were in fact unable to enjoy the quiritary tenure of land and to transmit it to their families, deprived as they were of descent, kindred and relatives. The demand forconnubiowas, in a word, simply equivalent to a demand for the rights of citizens, and it was satisfied by the Canuleian law.
The next demand of the plebeians was for privileges depending on public rights. Of these they gained first theimperiumtogether with the consulship, and lastly the offices of priest and pontifex, which carried with them knowledge of the law. In this way the system of seigneurial liberty planned by Servius Tullius grew into a system of popular liberty, and the census, which was originally paid to the patricians, was paid hereafter into the public treasury, out of which the expenses of the plebeians in war were paid. The tribunes now proceeded to demand the power of legislation; for the previous laws, the Horatian and Hortensian, had not made plebiscites binding on the whole people, except upon the two special occasions which led to the secession of the plebs to the Aventine and Janiculum respectively. This new victory, which established the superiority of the plebs and transformed the aristocratic into a popular republic, was the Publilian law due to the Dictator Publilius Philo anddecreeing that plebiscites should "be binding on all the Quirites" (omnes quirites tenerent). The authority of the senate came out of the struggle somewhat impaired, for while formerly the fathers had acted as "auctores" for the deliberations of the people, they were now the proposers of law to the people, which the latter then approved according to the formula submitted to them by the senate, or else "antiquated" the proposal (antiquo,to vote against a measure) and decided to make no innovation. Besides this, the plebs won the last office to be conceded to them, that of censor. The Petelian law, a few years later, abolished the last remnant of feudalism, the bond (nexus) which made the plebeians the bondmen of the nobles for debt and often compelled them to spend their lives working in their private prisons.
Some time later, when the division between patriciate and plebs with the correspondingcomitia curiataandtributawas replaced by Fabius Maximus's division according to the property of citizens, who were now grouped into three classes of senators, knights and plebeians, the order of the nobles disappeared entirely: "senator" and "knight" were no longer synonymous with "patrician," nor "plebeian" with "base-born." The Senate however preserved sovereign dominion over the finances of the Roman Empire, though the Empire itself had passed to the plebeians; and thanks to the so-called "senatusconsultum ultimum" it maintained this dominion by force of arms as long as Rome remained a popular republic. Whenever the people attempted to take it into their own hands, the Senate armed the Consuls, who forthwith declared traitors and put to death plebeian tribunes who had originated these attempts. This may be explained as a right of feudal sovereignty subject to a higher sovereign, a view confirmed by the language of Scipio Nasica when he armed the people against Tiberius Gracchus: "whoever wishesfor the safety of the republic, let him follow the consul" (qui rempublicam salvam velit, consulem sequatur). And indeed, once the road to office was opened by law to the multitude which rules in a popular republic, there was nothing left in time of peace but to contest its rule not by laws but by force of arms, and for those in power to pass laws for self-enrichment like the Gracchan agrarian measures, resulting at once in civil wars at home and unjust wars abroad.
With the triumph of the plebs and the change of constitution from aristocratic to popular, the whole face of society changed. In the first place, the aspect of the family changed. Here, during the rule of the patriciate, testamentary succession was admitted only at a late date and was easily cancelled, in order to keep wealth in patrician hands: kindred even in the seventh degree excluded the emancipated son from the paternal heritage: emancipation had the effect of a penalty: legitimising was not allowed: and it is doubtful whether a woman could inherit. But in the democratic society, since for the plebs wealth, strength and power all depended on the number of their children, family feeling began to grow up, and the praetors began to consider its claims and to satisfy them by means of the"honorum possessiones,"thus remedying the faults or shortcomings of wills and facilitating the diffusion of wealth, the only thing desired by the common people.
A change took place, again, in the meaning of the institutions of property. The civil tenure was no longer a matter of public right, but was dispersed among the various private tenures of the citizens now forming the body of the popular state. "Eminent" tenure no longer signifies the strongest kind of tenure, unencumbered by any actual charge, even a public charge, but applies simply to an estate free from any private charge. Quiritary tenure is no longer that of which the noblewas feudal lord and under the obligation to aid his client, the plebeian, if ousted from it: it has become a private civil tenure, capable of being defended by a civil suit as opposed to the bonitary which could be maintained by possession only.
The forms of legal process were pruned of the luxurious growth of fictions, solemn formulae and symbolic acts, simplified and rationalised: the intellect, the thought of the legislator was brought into play and the citizens conformed to an idea of a common rational utility, understood as spiritual in value. Causes, which were originally formulae safeguarded by accurate and precise language, became affairs or negotiations solemnised by agreement and, in the case of transference of tenure, by natural tradition; and it was only in contracts said to be completed by word of mouth, that is to say in stipulations, that the safeguards remained "causes" in the strict ancient meaning of the word. Thus the certitude of the law, when the human reason was fully developed, passed into the truth of ideas determined by the circumstances of fact, a "formula devoid of any particular form" (formula naturae,as Varro calls it) which, like a light, informs in all the minutest details of their surface the details of fact over which it extends. In popular republics the ruling principle is theaequum bonum,natural equity.
The harsh punishments of the periods of domestic monarchy and heroic society (the laws of the Twelve Tables condemned those who set fire to another's crops to be burnt alive, perjurers to be thrown from the Tarpeian rock, and insolvent debtors to be cut in pieces while living) were replaced by milder penalties, since the multitude, whose members are weak, is naturally disposed to clemency.
Laws, which under the aristocracy were few, inflexible and religiously observed, multiplied under the democracy and became liable to change and modification. TheSpartans, who preserved their aristocracy, said that at Athens they had many laws and wrote them; at Sparta few, but they obeyed them. The Roman plebs, like the Athenian, passed new laws every day, and the attempt by Sulla, the leader of the noble party, to reduce them by the institution of "quaestiones perpetuae" or permanent courts was in vain, for after his time laws were again multiplied.
War itself, which was under the aristocratic republics very cruel and resulted in the destruction of conquered towns and the reduction of the vanquished to the condition of labourers scattered over the country-side and cultivating it on behalf of the victors, was mitigated by the popular republics, which while they deprived the conquered of the rights of heroic society left them in possession of the natural rights of the human race. Empires grew, since a popular republic is much more adapted to conquest than an aristocratic, and a monarchy most of all.
But with all this humanisation of customs, the power of wise rule, political virtue, diminished. The ancient patricians enforced a rigid respect for law; and each, possessing a large share of the public utility, set his own minor personal interests below this greater particular interest, guaranteed as it was by the state. Hence all courageously defended and wisely consulted for the good of the state. In a popular state on the other hand since the citizens controlled the state property by dividing it among themselves into as many small portions as there were citizens in the body of the people, and through the causes which produced that form of state, ease, paternal affection, conjugal love and desire of life, men were led to consider the smallest details favourable to their own private interest; that is to regard nothing but theaequum bonum,the only interest of which a multitude is capable.
At this point arises spontaneously a new form of government, which has long been preparing and has nowbecome inevitable, namely monarchy. The ordinary political writers make monarchy originate, without any of the numerous and complex causes which are necessary to produce it, at the very outset of human history, "as a frog," says Vico, "is born of a summer shower." Still less did it originate artificially by the royal law which Tribonian believes to have deprived the Roman people of its free and sovereign power and conferred it upon Octavius Augustus. The law which brought monarchy into being was a natural law whose formula of eternal validity is as follows: when in a popular republic every one seeks his private interest only and presses the public forces into its service at risk of destruction to the state, to preserve the latter from ruin a man must arise, as Augustus did at Rome (who as Tacitus says "received under his sovereign power the whole state, worn out with civil wars, taking the title of Princeps":qui cuncta bellis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit):a single man, who by force of arms takes in hand all the affairs of the state and leaves his subjects to look after their own affairs or after any public business he may entrust to them; surrounding himself with a small number of statesmen as a cabinet to discuss public questions or principles of civil equity. Such a monarch is welcomed by nobles and plebeians alike: by the nobles, who after having been already humiliated by their subjection to plebeian rule abandon their ancient aristocratic claim to sovereignty and think only of securing a comfortable life; and by the plebeians, who after an experiment in anarchy or unbridled demagogy (than which no tyranny is worse, since it produces as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute men in the state) are led by their own misfortunes to welcome peace and protection.
Monarchy is then a new form of popular government. In order that a powerful man may become sovereign, it is necessary that the people shall take his side, and thathe should rule in a popular manner; making all his subjects equal, humiliating the great to protect the multitude against their oppression, keeping the people satisfied and content as regards the necessaries of life and the enjoyment of natural liberty, and employing a well-balanced system of concessions and privileges granted sometimes to whole classes (in which case they are called "privileges of liberty") sometimes to particular persons, by promoting into a higher class men of unusual merit and exceptional virtues.
In monarchy, a "humane" government no less than democracy, the process of humanisation or softening of customs and laws, already begun under popular republics, still continues. The rigid bonds of the patriarchal family and kinship relax further. The Emperors, who tended to be overshadowed by the splendours of the nobility, made efforts to promote the rights of human nature common to nobles and plebeians. Augustus strove to safeguard the trusteeships by which formerly property had passed to persons incapable of inheritance thanks only to the conscientiousness of the injured heir; he transformed such understandings from a right into a necessity, by obliging heirs to execute them. A number of senatusconsulta followed which placedcognati(relations generally) on a level withagnati(relations through the father). Finally, Justinian abolished the difference between property inherited and property in the hands of trustees, confused the Falcidian quarter with the Trebellian and putcognatiandagnation precisely the same footing as regards inheritance"ab intestato."The latest Roman law was so entirely on the side of testaments that, while originally these could be broken for the slightest cause, they now had to be interpreted in the way most adapted to secure their validity. Once the "cyclopean" right of the father over the persons of his children had disappeared, his economic right over property acquired by themdisappeared also; and hence the emperors first introduced thepeculium castrense(property obtained during military service) to attract young men to war, then thepeculium quasicastrense,to attract them into the praetorian guard, and finally to satisfy those who were neither soldiers nor scholars thepeculium adventitium.They deprived thepatria potestasof its influence over adoptions, now no longer restricted to the small circle of relations; they uniformly countenanced formal adoption (arrogatio) which was somewhat difficult owing to the difficulty of a father's becoming a subordinate member of another family; they considered emancipation as a benefit and gave to legitimization "by a subsequent marriage" all the efficacy of solemn wedlock. Theimperium paternum,as an arrogant title seeming to detract from the imperial majesty, was altered intopatria potestas.The humane tendencies of the monarchs extended moreover to that part of the ancient "family" which consisted of slaves: for the emperors restrained the cruelty of masters towards these, and benefited them by increasing the force and decreasing the solemnity of manumission; and citizen rights, which were given originally only to distinguished foreigners who had deserved well of the Roman people, were granted to every one born in Rome, even of a slave father provided his mother were free or enfranchised. Punishments were also made milder, and the monarchs distinguished themselves by the gracious title of "clement." The letter of the law always tended to be more freely interpreted in the light of natural equity, and it may be said that Constantine absolutely cancelled the letter when he laid down the principle that any particular motive of equity should override the law. Thus was attained the precise opposite of the"privilegia ne irroganto"of the Twelve Tables ("that no exceptions be made"): all privileges were exceptions to the law dictated by some particular merit in the facts whichlifted them out of the sphere of legal generalisations. The restriction of rights to particular peoples was by degrees abolished: under Caracalla the whole Roman world was converted into a single Rome, since great monarchs desire the whole world to become one city, according to the thought of Alexander the Great, when he said that for him all the world was a single city of which his phalanx was the citadel. The praetor's edict gives place, under Hadrian, to the "perpetual edict" of Salvius Julianus, almost exclusively composed of provincial edicts.
With monarchy, the natural law of races gives place to the natural law of nations; and hence this political, social and juridical form is the most suitable to human nature at its fullest rational development. Here too, as we have already had occasion to remark, we reach again after a long process the unity which existed in the person of the primitive father under domestic monarchy; and the course of national history must be considered as absolutely complete. To go further is impossible: the only possibility, at this stage of the highest human civilisation and refinement, is corruption, the return of barbarism as a "barbarism of reflection" and a relapse into a kind of new state of nature, to return once more into a new and heroic barbarism.
Of this kind of "reflux" Vico mentions and examines only one instance: the period of European history which had in his own days for the first time been marked out definitely by historians and given the name (though Vico does not use it) of the "Middle Ages."
That this was a period of decadence and barbarism was certainly not a new thought for consciousness: for, especially in the humanistic period, a general feeling of estrangement and repulsion had been felt towards these centuries of "middle and low Latinity" in which the treasures of the classical literatures were neglected and scattered, and humane studies either lost their vigour or disappeared completely. This consciousness, general on the part of cultivated Europe, was especially full and vivid in Italy; for that country could never forget that though for other peoples the Middle Ages had seen the rise of their fortunes, power and civilisation, for her they had meant the end of Rome's greatness, the humiliation of her name before the arrogant Vandal, Visigoth and Lombard, the devastation of rich cities, and the destruction of majestic monuments whose miserable wreckage could be seen on every hand. Machiavelli had opened hisHistorieswith a famous and striking picture of the general change which followed the fall of the Western Empire. But to pass in review the ruins or to collectthe antiquities of the Middle Ages was not the way to penetrate into the spirit of the period, any more than to note a man's faults and the marks which distinguish him from another is the same thing as understanding the soul of either. Vico was the first to understand the soul of the Middle Ages, that is to say, the mental, social and cultural constitution of the period.
Though living in a part of Italy rich not only in documents but in survivals of the Middle Age, Vico confesses that this second period of barbarism is much more obscure to him than the first, and that it is only the first that has enabled him to throw light upon the second. This he expressed by the mere fact that he named the period "the second barbarism," or the "return" or "reflux" of barbarism, and thus considered it as an instance of his ideal law of reflux. The Middle Ages seemed to him both a representation of the primitive conditions of life, and in consequence a reproduction of the social process developing out of them. It was a view as original as it was rich in truth: and it is no objection to it to say that Vico reveals the generic characters rather than the particular traits of the Middle Ages, because we know that the problem he set before himself was precisely the investigation of generic characters or uniformities, and that he avoided history properly so called in order to escape a dilemma between science and faith, between the purely immanental conception of history, excluding revelation and miracle, and the purely transcendent conception, miraculous and therefore difficult to treat in a scientific manner. Even in our own times, it is a fact worth noticing that we have seen a recrudescence of this attempt to harmonise religion and history by abstracting from the individual aspect of events and reducing history to a history of institutions and uniformities.[1]In this positionassumed by the problem in Vico's mind we may see the reason for the fact, which some have thought very strange in a Catholic, that he lays no stress on Christianity, and when he encounters it at the outset of the Middle Ages dismisses it in a few words; saying that God, having by superhuman ways shown clearly the truth of the Christian religion, when he opposed the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome, and the doctrine of the Fathers, together with the miracles, to the empty wisdom of Greece, and knowing that armed nations must arise on every hand ready to fight for the divinity of that religion's author, permitted the birth of a new order of civilisation among the nations, in order that the true religion might be established according to the natural course of human affairs.
We must be content then with the resemblances observed by Vico between mediaeval society and that of the early centuries of Greece and Rome, and not take offence if his exemplifications and proofs very often seem fallacious and fanciful. His main historical thought as we know already is robust enough to pass over the errors or to live in the midst of them unimpaired.
We see (to reconstruct his story or picture, with some rearrangement) in the Middle Ages groups of dwellings everywhere springing up on the mountains, each dominated by its fortress as in the divine age of the "Cyclopes"; for the unhappy people, ground down by the violence of barbarian invasions and intestine strife, had no other means of defence. The most ancient cities built in the Middle Ages and almost all capitals of states are as a matter of fact placed upon heights; all new seigneuries formed at the time were called "castella" by the Italians; and this perhaps is also the reason why nobles were called men "born in a high or conspicuous position" (summo, illustri loco nati) while the plebeians living in the plains below were "born in a low or obscure place" (imo, obscuroloco nati). We find asyla or sanctuaries again open especially with the ecclesiastical lords, who were in humanity in advance of their savage times; here took refuge the oppressed and the terrified, to seek protection for person or property. Hence in Germany, a country which must have been wilder than the other parts of Europe, there remained almost more ecclesiastical than secular lords. A famous example of these political formations was the Abbey of St. Laurence at Aversa in the kingdom of Naples, with which was incorporated that of St. Laurence at Capua. This monastery governed either directly or by abbots or monks dependent upon it no less than a hundred and ten churches in Campania, Samnium, Apulia and the ancient Calabria, from the river Volturnus to the gulf of Tarentum; the abbots of St. Laurence were lords or barons of almost the whole of this country. The small chapels which they built in mountainous and remote places for the celebration of the mass and other religious offices became natural sanctuaries for the population, and they built their houses round them: and this is the reason why in Europe so many cities, lands and castles bear the names of saints, and why the churches are the most ancient monuments of this period. Consequently we also find feudalism, not establishing itself in Europe for the first time, but appearing once more. It has been mistakenly believed to be a relic of Roman law after its destruction by the barbarians (such is the theory of Oldenorp and all other jurists) whereas really Roman law itself arose out of the ruins of the feudalism of early Latin barbarism, and mediaeval feudalism was not a new law of the European nations, but a very ancient law renewed by the last barbarism. This feudalism is far from being the "vile matter" which Cujas calls it: it is a heroic matter, one worthy to be celebrated by the most erudite and profound learning of Greece and Rome. And to what is it due, if not to this essential unity of nature, that the choicest expressions ofRoman law, which Cujas himself allows to mitigate the barbarism of feudalistic learning, are so precisely adequate to express the properties and attributes of the system that no better terminology could be desired?
With the Middle Ages, then, we return to the fundamental division between heroes and slaves, between"viri"or "barons" ("varones" is the word still used for men,"viri"in Spanish) and mere "homines" as the vassals were called: between"patres"or "patrons" and serfs. The learned students of feudalism who translate"feudum"by"clientela"are really giving something, much more than a good linguistical equivalent; they are unawares giving a historical definition of the feoff. The first feoffs of the Middle Ages were necessarily personal, like the firstclientelaeof Romulus: a form of vassalage still extant in Vico's time in the north, especially in Poland, where the"kmet"were a kind of slaves who were often used as stakes in their lord's games, and passed with their families into the hands of the winner. Then came rustic feoffs, real in character and consisting in uncultivated land assigned by the victors to the conquered for their sustenance, while they themselves kept the cultivated land: these feoffs were called by the feudalists, with a new elegance of Latinity and an equally sound historical truth,"beneficia."The ancient "next" were the new "liege" or bound men, who were compelled to join in all the friendships and quarrels of their lord, and supplied what in Rome was called"opera militaris,"and in the Middle Ages"militare servitium."The feudal bond extended itself to larger political relations, and just as conquered kings became allies orsociiof Rome and "upheld the majesty of the Roman people," so there were sovereign feoffs subordinated to higher sovereignties whose representatives, the great kings and lords of large kingdoms and numerous provinces, took the title of "majesty."
Republics became aristocratic once more in government if not in constitution: this is admitted by political writers, among others by Bodin, who even says that his own kingdom of France was purely aristocratic in constitution under the Merovingian and Capetian dynasties. Till the end of the sixteenth century living witnesses to the past remained in the aristocratic kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark; and Poland, mentioned above, preserved the same constitution down to Vico's own time. The first state parliaments of Europe must have consisted like Romulus's senate of the elders of the nobility (seniores,henceseigneurs); and were armed courts of barons or peers like thecomitia curiataof old. In these parliaments were decided feudal causes concerning rights or successions or the devolution of feoffs through felony or default of heirs: which causes, confirmed many times by these judgments, formed the customs of feudalism. Vico saw a relic of these parliaments in the Sacred Royal Council at Naples, the president of which assumed the title of "Sacred Royal Majesty," as the councillors did the title of"milites,"and whose sentences admitted of no appeal to any other tribunal, but only a request for revision by the Council itself.
The governments, beside being aristocratic, were enveloped in an atmosphere of religion to such an extent that not only were bishops and abbots very often, as we saw, feudatories, but feudatories and sovereigns adorned themselves freely with religious insignia; Catholic kings everywhere, in order to defend the Christian religion whose protectors they were, wore the dalmatic of the diaconate, consecrated their persons (whence the title "Sacred Royal Majesty"), and took rank in the church, as Hugh Capet took the title of Count and Abbot of Paris; thus as we see from the earliest documents the French lords called themselves dukes and abbots or counts and abbots simultaneously. These early Christian kingswere the first to institute armed religious orders, by the help of which they defended Catholicism against Arians, Saracens and other infidels."Pura et pin bella"returned once more as in the heroic period; the globe surmounted by the cross worn by the Christian potentates on their crowns recalls the cross upon the standards in the holy wars or crusades. Heroic slavery returns, and lasts a long time among Christian nations because, considering war as the judgment of God, the victors believed the vanquished to be abandoned by God and held them no better than beasts (thus the Christians called the Turks "dogs" and were in turn called "pigs" by them). The ancients deprived the conquered of all things human and divine. The new barbarians on occupying a city endeavoured above everything to search out and carry off the tombs or relics of saints, which the peoples of that time buried and concealed with all possible care; and thus almost all translations of relics took place at this time. A trace of this custom survives in the rule by which a conquered nation must buy back from the victorious generals all the bells in the cities they have taken.
Analogous resemblances may be found in the juridical regulation of property. The primary division of property in feudal law is that into feudal goods and allodial goods. Allodial tenure was in origin a highly secure right, unencumbered by any external charge, even a public one; and applied to property directly acquired or conquered by the patricians or barons. Feudal tenure required the approval of the lord by whom it had been granted. Allodial tenure thus corresponded to quiritaryex optimo iure,and feudal to bonitary; and it was only when later in modern Europe as previously in ancient Rome a new census and treasury were formed, and when allodial property was made subject to public charges, that it could be contemptuously described as "goods of the spindle" as opposed to feudal, "goods of the lance." Thus, totake an example, the provinces which were later incorporated into the French kingdom had formerly been sovereign principalities feudally dependent upon the ruler of the said kingdom; their sovereign princes being free from all public charge in the tenure of their (allodial) possessions. Later, when through succession, rebellion or failure of heirs these provinces became part of the kingdom, the property was made liable to taxation and tribute; the tenureex optimo iurewas confused with private non-feudal tenure subject to these charges, and allodials in the noble sense of the word were identified with allodials in the common sense. The later students of feudalism missed the point of the primitive distinction just as the late Roman jurists forgot the meaning of tenureex optimo iure.To the feudal tenure belonged emphyteosis (so that the allodial right ultimately signified both what the vassal paid to the sovereign and the planter to his immediate lord): "commendations," identical with the ancientclientela: the "census" by which the vassals were bound to serve their lords in war (the tributaries,angariiorperangarii,being equivalent to the Romanassidui): the"precaria,"which must originally have been land granted by lords in response to the prayers of the poor: and "libelli" or transferences of non-movable property which in this agricultural economy took the place of commerce. The exclusion of women from inheritance, which went back to the beginnings of Roman law, was renewed in the form of the "salic law" in Germany and among all the early barbarian nations of Europe, though it preserved its force only in France and Savoy.
Punishments were cruel; death was called the "ordinary penalty." But there was in the Middle Ages no real penal law and procedure dealing with private offences. The murder of a plebeian was committed either by his own lord, whom nobody could accuse, or by another lord, who could indemnify the man's own lord for his lossas if he had been a slave. This custom was still in force in Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Under the name of "canonical purgations" (though unrecognised by canon law) certain kinds of divine judgments or duels were practised throughout Europe; and private vengeance flourished down to the time of Bartolo. In judgments concerned with allodial rights, the lords met in arms; and in the kingdom of Naples even in Vico's own days barons avenged intrusions upon their own feoffs on the part of other barons not by civil suits but by duels. In a society ruled by force, what wonder that the robbers of the heroic age returned, and that "pirate" became a title of nobility? Never has the fortune of kingdoms been so various or so inconstant.