New Science (Penguin Classics) by Vico Giambattista

Author:Vico, Giambattista [Vico, Giambattista]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141907697
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1999-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

Extended Families of Family Servants as Essential to the Founding of Cities

[552] Both philologists and philosophers commonly supposed that families in what is called the state of nature included children only; but in fact they included the household servants or famuli, which is the principal reason why they were called families. On this flawed economics, they constructed a false politics, as my Science shows. By contrast, I address the topic of the family servants, famuli, which pertains to domestic economics, as an introduction to politics.*

[553] Eventually, the abominable sharing of property and women by the impious giants provoked continuous quarrels among them. As a result, Grotius’ simpletons and Pufendorf’s abandoned men took refuge from Hobbes’ violent men, to borrow the language of the jurists. So they fled to the altars of the strong, just as we see that wild beasts, when driven by intense cold, take refuge in populated areas. The strong men, who were already united in a family society, now fiercely slew the violent men who had violated their lands, and took under their protection the wretches who had fled from them. As men ‘born of Jupiter’, that is, conceived under his auspices, the strong possessed natural heroism, but now it was the heroism of virtue which they principally displayed. In this kind of virtue, the Romans later surpassed all other nations, practising the two aspects described by Virgil as ‘sparing the humble and conquering the proud’.

[554] Here is a matter worthy of reflection. What caused these fierce and untamed people, living in a brutish state, to advance from their bestial liberty to human society? When the first, pious giants entered the first stage of society, which is marriage, it was the keen stimulus of bestial lust that urged them, and the powerful restraint of fearful religions that kept them within its bounds. Such was the origin of marriage, which was the world’s first form of friendship. Thus, when Homer describes Jupiter and Juno engaging in intercourse, he says with heroic gravity that they ‘celebrated their friendship’. In Greek, the word for friendship, philía, has the same root as the verb phileo, to love, from which is also derived Latin filius, son. In Ionic Greek, philios means friend, and a slight change of vowel formed the noun phylē, tribe. (We have seen that genealogical strands, fili, were called stemmata in Greek, and lineae in Roman law.) The nature of this human institution determined this invariable property: that marriage is the true natural form of friendship, and that spouses naturally share all three kinds of ultimate good, the honourable, the useful, and the pleasant. Husband and wife by nature share the same lot in all of life’s prosperity and adversity. In precisely the way friends hold all things in common, the jurist Modestinus defines marriage as the lifelong sharing of one’s lot.

[555] Next, the second, impious giants, being driven by utmost necessity, joined the second stage of ‘society’, which was so called because they became ‘associates’. Here is another matter worthy of reflection.

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