263 / 298
Vico’s Ring
263
through time, of the material at all levels, Vico remains con-
vinced of the authenticity of many of its archaic features: «The
ineptitudes and indecencies are effects of the awkwardness with
which the Greek peoples had labored to express themselves in
the extreme proverty of their language in its formative period» (§
830). The material – or, rather, the parts of the material that Vico
designates as such - had to be originally created in the ancient
culture(s), by gifted - but forever remaining anonymous – “po-
ets”: «we must suppose that the two poems were composed […]
by various hands through successive ages [the time frames of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
]» (§ 804)
574
. These first poets gave expression to
their culture(s), and also, vice versa, these cultures gave rise to
these poets and poetic works, so that Vico could give credit for
the poems to the communities as a whole: «These two characters
[Achilles and Ulysses], since they had been created by an entire
nation, could only be conceived as naturally uniform ([…] agree-
able to the common sense of an entire nation […])» (§ 809). The
other side of the coin (of genuine authorship of the poems), or
corollary, is Vico’s rejection of the notion that the poems were
the brainchild of a single literary giant of an intellectually highly
advanced age
575
, calling such attribution «the Homer as he has
hitherto been held to be/believed in»
576
(§§ 805, 873, 874, 901).
In support of his thesis, Vico cites the conflicting stories and
claims about the person supposed to be that author, in terms of
his fatherland, and time in which he lived; the fact that he reiter-
ates these incongruities three times indicates the weight they are
meant to carry in his argumentation (§§ 788-804, 861-872, 875-
879).
Therefore, when Vico says that «Homer was an idea or a he-
roic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories
in song» (§ 873), he is giving full credit to the long line of folk
poets and their epigones
577
for the epic poems that later came to
be attributed to someone in the 8
th
century named Homer; these
folk poets were «the true Homer» (§ 787), where “Homer” is