288 / 298
Horst Steinke
288
ended up denying «half» of Homer, namely, acknowledging him as «a heroic
character»[…])» (Id.,
La mancata edizione veneziana della Scienza nuova
, in
Vico e
Venezia
, cit., pp. 143-182, p. 171, 172); F. Valagussa: «Omero non è un aedo
realmente esistito […]; Vico intende considerare Omero come universale fan-
tastico […] (Homer is not an actually existing poet […]; Vico intends to con-
sider Homer as an imaginative universal […])» (Id.,
Vico. Gesto e poesia
, cit., p.
108); S. Mazzarino: «[…] ma già per Omero la precisazione vichiana ch’egli
fosse “carattere eroico” non consente di affermare senz’altro ch’egli “non fu
particolar uomo in natura” […] ([…] but already in the case of Homer, Vico’s
designation of him as “a heroic character” does not mean anything but that he
“never existed as a particular man in the world of nature” […])» (Id.,
Vico,
l’annalistica e il diritto,
Naples, Alfredo Guida, 1971, p. 42).
594
As in V. Hösle: «Und zweitens
kann
jenes Zur-Hälfte-Behaupten dur-
chaus auch dahingehend verstanden werden, Homer sei nichts als ein poeti-
scher Charakter: Denn auch in diesem Fall wäre er keine bloße Fiktion, son-
dern es läge ihm etwas Reales zugrunde – nämlich die Volksdichtung der
Griechen (And secondly, the half-affirmation
can
be understand arguably in
the sense that Homer was nothing but a poetic character: since in this case
also, he would not be merely fictional, but rather based on something real –
namely the folk poetry of the Greeks)» (Id.,
Einleitung
, cit., p. CCXXXVI; ita-
lics original; see also Amerio’s similar argument,
contra
Croce, in Id.,
Introduzio-
ne allo studio di G. B. Vico
, cit., p. 495, footnote 1, with reference to B. Croce
,
Saggio sullo Hegel,
cit., p. 280, who allowed for the existence of Homer as an
individual).
595
E. Kleinert,
Studien zur Mathematik und Philosophie
, cit., pp. 19-21.
596
TTP
, Chapter 8, pp. 105-115.
597
S. Nadler,
A Book Forged in Hell
, cit., p. 112.
598
TTP
, pp. 112, 113.
599
Vico also places Moses at the (relative) beginning of the history of the
Hebrews; this leads to a further problem with respect to Spinozan influence
on Vico’s reconstruction of early civilization, identified by L. Amoroso: «Così,
se per Vico Mosè fu poeta e fu teologo, lo deve essere stato però in un modo
abissalmente diverso da quello dei “poeti teologi” delle nazioni gentili (Thus,
if according to Vico, Moses was a poet and a theologian, he must have been
such in a profoundly different way from the “theological poets” of the gentile
nations)» (Id.,
Mosè fu un poeta teologo?,
in
Il sapere poetico e gli universali fantastici
,
cit., pp. 211-225, p. 220).
600
Bringing Ezra as writer of the Pentateuch into the picture and argu-
ment would have made the parallel(s) between Moses and Homer even more
problematic. Only by glossing over (Spinoza’s) Ezra, Mali, for example, could