Vico, Genealogist of Modernity by Miner Robert C.;

Author:Miner, Robert C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

From Achilles to Socrates

Vico does not conceive the distinction between “age of gods” and “age of heroes” as a rigid dichotomy. Within the first republics, “the age of gods coursed on, for there still must have endured that religious way of thinking according to which it was the gods who did whatever men themselves were doing.”1 “Heroic nature” continues to be theocentric, defining those without the auspices as subhuman. Heroic ius is still based on strength; it is the ius of Achilles, “who referred every right to the tip of his spear.”2 Governments in the heroic ages are theocratic senates that strive to maintain a firm distinction between patricians of divine ancestry and plebeians of bestial origin. (The division is already embodied in the structure of the families, which Vico calls “monastic republics.”)3 Justice is a matter of civil as opposed to natural equity. Strict adherence to legal formulae, held sacred and cloaked in secrecy, prevails at the expense of the plebs. Qui cadit virgula, caussa cadit: the laws cannot be observed too scrupulously in the “punctilious” time of the heroes.4 In the interest of conserving their own power, the patricians withhold knowledge of the sacred laws from the plebs. Vico infers that “sacred” and “secret” originally meant the same thing.5

The first republics are established when the fathers unite to protect their own interests against the famuli, who grow increasingly discontent as the fathers begin “to abuse the laws of protection and to govern the clients harshly,” thereby departing “from the natural order, which is that of justice.”6 Having grown “weary of being always obliged to serve their lords,” the mutinous famuli unite to form “the first plebs of the heroic cities.”7 The coalition of individuals into classes that transcend family boundaries lays the foundation of the republic. Against Bodin and others, Vico emphasizes that these republics were not monarchic but aristocratic in form, because they were ruled by the union of noble families. The “kings” of the first republics are simply men chosen by the nobles, men “fiercer than the rest and with greater presence of spirit.”8 As Vico imagines it, the republic is the natural and necessary outcome of struggles in the family state. “Without human discernment or counsel,” the nobles discover that “they had united their private interest in a common interest called patria, which, the word res being understood, means ‘the interest of the fathers.’ The nobles were accordingly called ‘patricians,’ and the nobles must have been the only citizens of the first patriae or fatherlands.”9 Vico emphasizes the spontaneous rise of the republic, quoting Pomponius’s axiom that rebus ipsis dictantibus, regna condita.10 Against Hobbesian accounts, Vico denies that the republic is, or could be, “born from the force or from the fraud of a single man.”11 Precisely because it emerges without conscious calculation, Vico locates its cause in providence and claims that “beyond any design of [the fathers], they came together in a universal civil good, which we call ‘republic.’”12

The gathering of the family fathers

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