Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/643

633 Vico. 633 been accompanied by a peculiar modification of their lan- guage. These are the most important of Vico's philosophical and philological axioms. The history of one of the great cycles of human affairs is thus traced by him. After the Delude the condition of mankind, with the exception of the people of Godj was that in which Homer describes the Cyclops of Sicily; their stature was gigantic, like that of the Patago- nians, they abused their bodily strength in governing tyran- nically their families and households, but had no laws or social union. They lived at first without religion, but the terrific display of divine power awakened in their minds the idea of a supernatural Being. This triumph of religion, over minds in which hitherto brutal passion had reigned, is the destruction of the giants by the thunder of Jupiter, almost every nation having its giants and its Jupiter. As men can conceive of the unknown, only by assimilating it to the known, when once the idea of a God was suggested to the mind, all natural phoenomena were explained by the presence and agency of the gods. This is the divine age, when the gods (of whom Varro reckoned thirty thousand among the Latins) lived upon the earth. As the deaf and dumb supply their want of speech by signs, so the rude men of this age, not having yet acquired an articulate language, helped themselves out by signs, which gave rise to hieroglyphics. - These have been falsely supposed to be a contrivance of the priests, to conceal their knowledge from the vulgar ; they were really the result of the imper- fection of speech. Language was poetical; for imagination was excited before reason was cultivated ; and musical ; for those who stammer assist themselves by singing. To the divine succeeded the heroic age ; as Polyphemus is the model of the men of the first, so is Achilles, fierce and passionate, but magnanimous and affectionate, of those of the second. The characteristic of the heroes is energy, exerted for the protection of the feeble and the overthrow of the oppressor. Such was preeminently Hercules, whom we find in so many countries, because their condition was similar ; many noble and royal races of Greece deduced themselves from himo The commencement of the communities of men was that those who suff^ered from the oppression of the fero-