Vico’s Ring
269
Instead of parallels, several incongruities spring to mind, at
various levels of analysis. At the most elementary level, Spinoza
places Moses as an individual early in the history of the He-
brews
599
whereas Vico places Homer, the compiler/redactor of
the poems at the (preliminary) end of their historic transmission.
In that respect, it might be more justified to compare the 8
th
cen-
tury Homer with (Spinoza’s) Ezra rather than Moses, but this
possibility is neither advanced by Vico, or in any Vico recep-
tion
600
. In a partial, limited agreement with Spinoza, Vico, actual-
ly, places Moses, and the Pentateuch, at a very early time, such as
in his argument about the antiquity of certain historical infor-
mation, or silence thereof, in the
Iliad
: «Painting had not yet been
invented.[…] Hence neither Homer nor Moses ever mention an-
ything painted, and this is an argument of their antiquity» (§
794)
601
. Vico never suggests that this ancient material was com-
piled/redacted only centuries, if not a millennium, later, by a
Hebrew “Homer”
602
. But perhaps the more fundamental ques-
tion, or objection, to be raised concerns the theoretical, and
philosophical, presuppositions with which Spinoza, on the one
hand, and Vico, on the other hand, read the ancient texts. Spino-
za, as noted, guided by the metaphysical imperative of «common
notions», is invested in seeing reflected in them a univocal
theme; none of this single-minded/valued focus is present in Vi-
co, to the contrary, in the words of Mazzotta:
Like the disjointed, contradictory, episodic structure of the Homeric
poems, history is made up of loosely arranged parts, anonymous and
discordant voices, and heterogeneous happenings that, in their sponta-
neous blind occurrences, resist a harmonious unified totalization if not
imposed by the political will of a tyrant
603
.