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634 634 Vico. cious fled to the asylum which the heroes offered them ^. They did not however thus obtain equality of rights; they purchased protection by becoming slaves. Thus society began in a rigid aristocracy. The early ages of Rome answer to the heroic age of Greece, and are characterized, by aristocratic ascendancy. There must have existed on the banks of the Tiber a Greek colony of which history has not preserved the name or memory, which the Romans destroyed, receiving the vanquished into the city, where they formed the plebs. As the aristocracy would not yield to one another, they con- stituted themselves into a senate, in which all were equal; they possessed exclusively the sacerdotal and military power ; they were the only Qtiirites or citizens, of them the comitia curiata were composed. But as they would have been left without subjects to command, if they had not relaxed some- thing of their rigour, they were compelled to concede to the revolted plebeians at first only the honitary dominion of their lands, i. e. the power of using them liable to perpetual revo- cation. The royal dominion was at first very feeble ; Tacitus says, " Urbem Romani a principio reges lidbuere^'' using the least expressive of the three words by which the jurists denote possession, habere^ tenere^ possidere^. The characters of the heroic age are not real personages, but representatives of general ideas, one name having drawn to itself the attributes of a multitude of the same class. A child sees an object and gives it a name ; when he sees another of the same kind he bestows the same name upon it ; men in early ages did the same, and we must consider a single name as representing many individuals^ and even several generations. The Egyptians, says Jamblichus, attri- buted everything to Hermes Trismegistus ; so did the Greeks to Orpheus, the Persians to Zoroaster. Romulus and The- seus are types of heroic sovereigns and legislators; Homer himself is not a single poet, but the representative of the poets of the heroic times. Law in the divine age had been theocratic, every thing being supposed to depend on the will of the Gods, who con- 8 " Vetus urbes condentium consilium," says Livy, i. 8. of the asylum opened by Romulus. This is one of Vico's luoghi rf' oro^ and the foundation of his system. 9 Sc. N. Vol. III. p. 100.