The New Science of Giambattista Vico by New Science The

Author:New Science, The [1744] (Cornell, 2015)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

[Chapter II] The Families with Their Famuli, Which Preceded the Cities, and without Which the Cities Could Not Have Been Born

553 Among the impious giants who had continued the infamous promiscuity of things and of women [D2], the quarrels produced by use in common finally brought it about, at the end of a long period of time, that (to borrow the language of the jurists) Grotius’s simpletons and Pufendorf’s abandoned men had recourse to the altars of the strong to save themselves from Hobbes’s violent men [179, 338], even as beasts driven by intense cold will sometimes seek salvation in inhabited places. Thereupon the strong, with a fierceness born of their union in the society of families, slew the violent who had violated their lands, and took under their protection the miserable creatures who had fled from them. And above the heroism of nature which was theirs as having been born of Jove or engendered under his auspices, there now shone forth preeminently in them the heroism of virtue. In this heroism the Romans excelled all other peoples of the earth, practicing precisely these two aspects of it, sparing the submissive and vanquishing the proud: Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos [Vergil, A. 6.854].

554 And here it is worth reflecting how men in the feral state, fierce and untamed as they were, came to pass from their bestial liberty into human society. For in order that the first of them should reach that first kind of society which is matrimony, they had need of the sharp stimulus of bestial lust, and to keep them in it the stern restraints of frightful religions were necessary [505ff]. Thus marriage emerged as the first kind of friendship in the world; whence Homer, to indicate that Jove and Juno lay together, says with heroic gravity that “they celebrated their friendship” [I. 14.314]. The Greek word for friendship, philia, is from the same root as phileō, to love; and from it is derived the Latin filius, son. Philios in Ionic Greek means friend, and mutation to a letter of similar sound yielded the Greek phylē, tribe. We have already seen above that stemmata was the word for the genealogical threads called lineae by the jurisconsults [529]. From this nature of human institutions there remained the eternal property that the true natural friendship is matrimony, in which are realized the three final goods: the honorable, the useful, and the pleasant. Husband and wife by nature share the same lot in all the prosperities and adversities of life, just as by choice friends have all things in common (amicorum omnia sunt communia), and Modestinus therefore defines matrimony as a lifelong lot sharing (omnis vitae consortium) [110].

555 The second comers came into this second society (which had that name by a certain excellence [558]) only for the ultimate necessities of life. And here again is a matter worthy of reflection. For the first comers to human society were driven thereto by religion and by the natural instinct to propagate the human race

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