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Rh showed him the untruth of the traditions of the Twelve Tables, and starting from this point, he anticipated almost everything subsequently brought forward by Niebuhr, although from his deficiency in exact philological knowledge his arguments were less conclusive. His scepticism respecting Homer was also the result of speculation; before the ballads of the mediæval period had been compared with the Homeric poems, he pronounced on the internal evidence of the latter, that they must be the work, not of a man, but of a nation. In both departments he may have gone too far, but his views are the divinations of an extraordinary genius. They are intimately connected with his speculations on history which anticipate the general drift of modern thought by tending to put nations into the place of individuals and to represent history as the product of an inevitable sequence of development. These views greatly influenced Herder and Turgot, and, through them, Europe Vico's doctrine of the three stages through which human society passes was used, if it was not plagiarised, by Comte and Schelling.

Another great Neapolitan writer of the age, though working on a much smaller scale than Vico, attracted more notice from contemporaries, inasmuch as Vico seemed to deal merely with abstract things, while came into rough contact with vested interests. Giannone, born at Ischitella, in Apulia, May 1676, went to the Neapolitan bar, and made the legal and ecclesiastical history of the kingdom his especial study. In his Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), the work of twenty years, he demonstrated the illegitimacy of the Papal claims to jurisdiction over Naples, with a learning and research which, now that