Horst Steinke
266
es of, or (anaphoric) references to, “Homer” in this statement. In
our reading, this section (re)-introduces all three “Homers” that
appeared, and re-appeared, previously in the Book: (1) the
“Homer” of which «vestiges in the form of his poems» remain,
denotes Homer, the individual of the 8
th
century; on the other
hand, (2) the «purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular
man» means the presumed literary genius, the “philosopher”, the
«rare and consummate poet», who supposedly single-handedly
created the poems out of his boundless imagination, in other
words, being «the Homer believed in up to now». And, finally,
the paragraph confronts the reader with (3) «the true Homer»,
the Grecian people(s) and culture(s) that gave expression to and
preserved their history/ies in their songs and poems, to be rec-
orded for posterity in due course more permanently, if in «cor-
rupted» form.
Vico’s baroque beginning contrafactual conditional –
if there
did not remain
…,
the difficulties would lead us…
– can be converted
into its equivalent, the factual logical conclusion that, first of all,
“Homer” «existed as a particular man in the world of nature», the
opposite of «a purely ideal poet». Vico then – relating them chi-
astically to the order in which they appear in the preceding sen-
tence
588
– reiterates «the many […] difficulties» as well as «the
surviving poems», before affirming that «the true Homer» was
the entire Greek civilization(s). The «many and great difficulties»
refer, of course, both to the contradictory and inconsistent
claims regarding Homer’s homeland and age, and other, more
substantive, incongruities that Vico rehearses in a
staccato
series
of twenty-four points (§§ 874-901) immediately following § 873.
This is the third time he does so, serving to emphasize his po-
lemical target that runs like an unbroken thread runs through
Book III, namely, the notion of the singular literary creator of
the poems.
As has been noted, Vico does not engage appreciably with the
received Homeric texts as literature since his primary, if not ex-