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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

.