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Vico’s Ring
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with having refuted him completely in the natural succession of
political forms […]. But it pleases us to add […] a refutation
based on the impossibilities and absurdities of his own posi-
tion»
52
. Vico’s placement of this topic in the center of the materi-
al serves to draw attention to it.
The third section switches back to the topic of Roman juris-
prudence, but in unexpected ways. Rather than elaborating fur-
ther on the achievements of Roman legal thinking and practice,
and its associated forms of state that he discussed in the first sec-
tion, Vico reverses course and returns (once more) to the very
beginnings, described in the subheading: “[
T
]
he Ancient Roman
Law Was a Serious Poem, and the Ancient Jurisprudence a Severe Kind of
Poetry, within Which Are Found the First Outlines of Legal Metaphysics
in the Rough, and How, among the Greeks, Philosophy Was Born of the
Laws”.
The “chapter” begins and ends on the same note: § 1027
recalls the “axiom” that «as men are naturally drawn to the pur-
suit of the
true
, […] when they cannot attain it, causes them to
cling to the
certain»
(italics added), and § 1045 brings closure:
«Hence, with regard to what is just, the
certain
began in mute
times with the body. […] And finally, when our human reason
was fully developed, it reached its end in the
true
in the ideas
themselves with regard to what is just» (italics added). The mate-
rial enclosed by these bracketing statements makes it clear that
the topic is not the distinction of
true
and
certain
as philosophical
concepts in isolation but the nature of law in its two aspects, alt-
hough they are intimately related, «the true [being] the universal
idea, the perfect form of equity and justice», and «the certain
embrac[ing] the set of heterogeneous, empirical facts»
53
. Vico
brings to bear on this distinction the historical reality of the early
days of the Greek and Roman peoples: «Because they did not
understand abstract forms, they imagined corporeal forms. […]
If they did not understand, they at least sensed in a rough way
that rights were indivisible» (§ 1035). However, in a reversal of
the traditional elevation of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, he por-