Vico’s Ring
259
proach and point of view represents merely a particular, and like-
ly relatively ancillary, aspect of Vico’s multifaceted program. It
mainly revolves around the nature of the “history” into which he
was inquiring. As a way of narrowing down the location of Vi-
co’s research in the “space” of approaches to history, just two
different approaches – out of not a few others – in the history of
Homeric reception will here be highlighted. On one side of the
interpretive space, both diachronically and hermeneutically, we
can look to the earliest Homeric reception in antiquity among
the Greek-speaking people that in essence took the
Iliad
and
Od-
yssey
to be factual, reliably detailed, unquestionable accounts of
the Trojan War and its aftermath
557
. This began to change, how-
ever in the late sixth and early fifth centuries (BC), the best wit-
nesses to that change being Herodotus and Thucydides. Both
engage critically with Homer’s historical accuracy (and finding
plenty of implausibilities, and replacing them at times with their
own implausible scenarios), but find themselves in a dilemma,
wanting to recognize Homer’s poetic imagination and prowess,
not necessarily positively, on the one hand, while not abandoning
their historical content and significance, in principle, on the other
hand
558
. At the opposite side of this space is the view that the
Homeric poems are strictly the product of the 8
th
century BC,
dealing with contemporary interests, but overlaid with a “patina”
of putatively archaic or “old-fashioned” touches
559
. Thus, the po-
ems are taken to portray an actual society existing at a particular
time (in rapid transition, by ancient standards), but any suppos-
edly older elements are literary devices to create an “epic dis-
tance” or “alienation effect”
560
.
Vico’s approach stands in contrast to both “schools of
thought”: he is interested in reconstructing, or at least bringing
to the surface, not actual events and actual participants, on the
one hand, but, on the other hand,
contra
a purely fictionalized
reading, the actually prevailing cultural characteristics of primi-
tive societies and peoples much earlier than the 8
th
century
561
, the