Horst Steinke, Vico’s Ring. Notes on the“Scienza nuova”, its Structure, and the Hermeneutics of Homer’s Works

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ond half of the 2nd millennium BC, to the extent of what is known about it,
are J. Katz, The Indo-European Context, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. by J.
M. Foley, Malden, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 20-30; and E. D. T. Vermeule, “Priam’s
Castle Blazing”: A Thousand Years of Trojan Memories, in Troy and the Trojan War:
A Symposium held at Bryn Mawr College October 1984, ed. by M. J. Mellink, Bryn
Mawr, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, 1986, pp. 77-92.
More recently, E. H. Cline, while focusing on the “traditional” dating and
events associated with Troy, has raised the hypothetical possibility of refer-
ence to the 15th century BC: «[…] if one were to search for a historical event
with which to link pre-Homeric traditions of Achaean warriors fighting on the
Anatolian mainland, the Assuwa Rebellion, ca. 1430 BC, would stand out as
one of the largest military events within northwestern Anatolia prior to the
Trojan War, and as one of the few events to which the Mycenaeans (Ahhiya-
wans) might tentatively be linked via textual evidence […]» (Id., 1177 B.C.: The
Year Civilization Collapsed, Princeton-Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2014,
p. 41; see also Id., Achilles in Anatolia: Myth, History, and the Aššuwa Rebellion , in
Crossing Boundaries and Linking Horizons: Studies in Honor of Michael C. Astour on
His 80th Birthday, ed. by G. D. Young, M. W. Chavalas, R. E. Averbeck, Be-
thesda, Maryland, CDL Press, 1997, pp. 189-210).
564 As Haddock comments, attributing the ancient mores to inventions of
intellectuals was considered anachronistic by Vico (Id., Vico’s “Discovery of the
True Homer”, cit., p. 590). To some extent, the issue at hand may be illustrated
(with requisite caution and caveats, to be sure) by the difference between two
modern literary works, the musical West Side Story, on the one hand, and Um-
berto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose ( Il nome della rosa), on the other hand.
West Side Story, about individuals caught up in rival gang feuds in New York’s
Harlem, is a modern version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which in turn
has antecedents in Italian Renaissance plays, and even in antiquity; in spite of
the immense literary and situational transformation(s) of the story, the under-
lying historical background of a particular form of social pathology has been
preserved over great arcs of time. On the other hand, The Name of the Rose is a
work about, among other things, modern semiotics and literary theory, but
given the “patina” of the late Middle Ages. But, as The Name of the Rose
demonstrates, even historicizing “patina” presupposes historical knowledge
(which in Eco’s case is considerable), and thus could be “mined” for actual
historical insights, however refracted and fractured, thus leaving open the
possibility of a certain convergence of these two seemingly incompatible par-
adigms. Be this as it may, it has been correctly observed that «Vico […] sug-
gested that [language is] the most serious witness of […] ancient customs and
ways of living followed by peoples in which the same language originated» (E.