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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
In order to explain ancient myths rationally, Vico claims that one must affect to have no erudition whatever (in his words, “ridursi in uno stato di somma ignoranza di tutta l'umana e divina erudizione”), for myths are not fables but accounts of the beginnings of civil history as primitive minds, comparable to the minds of children, might have been expected to relate them. Later thinkers who dwelled on these “narrations” with their own civilized minds, failed to seek in them the very framework of the primitive and poetic world they described.
1 "It is equally beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of these first men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body."
2 "…Varro was able to enumerate a good forty Herculeses among the ancient na tions…" (761).
3 G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, New York, Penguin Books Ltd., 1974, p. 203.
4 Ibid., p. 207.
5 "Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of Falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth." (408).
6 (51, 331).
7 (374).
8 (504).
9 (198, 199).
10 (178).
11 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, New York, Penguin Books Ltd., 1955, Vol. II, pp. 104-105.
12 Ibid., pp. 108-109.
13 (544).
14 (1106).
15 (242).
16 Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, New York, Pocket Book Inc., 1977, p. 116.
17 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, New York, Bantam Books Inc., pp. 202-203.
18 (1108).
19 (261).
20 (132, 133).
21 (338).
22 "The giants, enchained under the mountains by the frightful religion of the thunderbolts, learned to check their bestial habit of wandering wild through the great forest of the earth." (504).
23 H. P. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, New York, Russell and Russell, 1970, p. 219.
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