Horst Steinke
280
Riverso,
Vico and Wittgenstein
, cit., p. 272). Stripped to its core, Vico’s herme-
neutics has been characterized as: «En la palabra encarna la historia, y en la
historia encarna la palabra […] (In language, history is embodied, and in histo-
ry, language becomes flesh and blood)» (A. Gutiérrez, “
Verum et factum cum
verbo convertuntur”: La historicidad como discurso en Giambattista Vico
, in «CsV», 17-
18, 2004-2005, pp. 99-104, p. 101).
565
In his autobiography, Vico proudly underlines his achievement: «Vico
[…] read both the poems of Homer in the light of his principles of philology;
and by certain canons of mythology which he had conceived, […] shows how
[…] the poet weaves into the treatment of his two subjects two groups of
Greek stories, the one belonging to the obscure period [the
Iliad
] and the oth-
er to the heroic [the
Odyssey
] […]» (G. Vico,
Autobiography
, cit., pp. 159, 160).
566
In the preceding § 808, Vico had given a somewhat expanded outline
of the process of “corruption” of certain parts or aspects of the narrative:
«Hence he [Homer] must be assigned to the third age of the heroic poets. The
first age invented the fables to serve as true narratives, […]. The second al-
tered and corrupted them. The third and last, that of Homer, received them
thus corrupted». On the dynamics of this process over time, see Caponigri,
Time and Idea
, cit., pp. 195-197. It is the understanding of this dynamic that
Vico appropriates for penetrating through the layers of distortion, to the orig-
inal grounds of the legends, fables, and myths.
While Vico is primarily concerned with material changes to the stories, he
also recognizes editorial and text-critical alterations, such as those made under
the Pisitratids, Athenian tyrants (6
th
century BC), and by Aristarchus of Samo-
thrace (2
nd
century BC), at the library of Alexandria (§§ 853-855, 860). On Vi-
co’s reference to the Pisitratids, see further L. Ferreri,
La questione omerica dal
Cinquecento al Settecento
, Rome, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2007, pp. 189-
191; G. Mazzotta,
The New Map of the World
, cit., pp. 149, 150.
These editorial/redactional interventions, at the same time, are (indirect)
evidence for Vico of the original archaic nature of the poems, which he calls
«a confused mass of material they must have been before, when the difference
we can observe between the styles of the two poems is infinite» (§ 863), and
despite Aristarchus’ editing, the poems «still retain a great variety of dialects
and many improprieties of speech, which must have been idiomatic expres-
sions of various peoples of Greece […]» (§ 860). This raises the question of
Vico’s view of, and approach to, text-criticism as such which will not be ad-
dressed here, however; it is not without its own tensions if, on the one hand,
one can speak of «il disinteresse vichiano per la critica testuale e per la ricerca
delle fonti (Vico’s lack of interest in textual criticism and source criticism)»,
and, on the other hand, of Vico’s own practice of meticulously editing and re-