640 Vico. as the ultima Thule of the Grecian world. He therefore probably lived on the western side of Greece. The traces of refinement and luxury are chiefly found in the Odyssey. Even in the Iliad they are such as to be inconsistent with the supposition that the author lived near the time of the Trojan war, and when the warrior still retained so much ferocity as the heroes of the Iliad manifest. The inference is, that these poems have past through and been worked up by several hands^^ in several ages. As the means of dis- covering who the real Homer was, he observes, that the earliest history of all nations, of the Greeks and Romans no less than the barbarians, was consigned to verse, that Homer, as Josephus assures us, left no written work behind him, and never mentions alphabetical writing in his poems, that his verses were sung in detached portions by the payj/coSoi, to whose nameO/a>7j0O9 {6/ulov eipeiv) answers; and that the Pisistratidoe at Athens divided and arranged the Homeric poems, which shews that they had been previously a confused mass. Aristarchus corrected the text of Homer, yet there still remain varieties of dialect and speech which must have been the peculiarities of different nations of Greece, to say nothing of the licences of metre. The extreme disparity between the Iliad and Odyssey, Longinus endeavours to ex- plain by the supposition that the poet wrote one in his youth and the other in his old age, but this must be a gratuitous hypothesis in regard to an author, whose country and life are wholly unknown to us. Not absolutely denying therefore the real existence of Homer, Vico considers him '^ as an idea or an heroic character of the Greek nation, in as far as they related their history in poetry C meaning, we presume, that to one person, who really lived (he elsewhere says about the time of Numa), the whole conception of the heroic poets of Greece has been transferred. Thus all difficulties are cleared up; so many cities claimed him as their own, because in this sense each of them had a Homer ; the age in which he lived was variously assigned ; for in this sense Homer lived in the mouths and memories of the Greeks for 460 years, from the war of Troy to the time of Numa. He was said '3 "Sembrano tai poemi essere stati per piu eta e da piu mani lavorati e condotti." Sc. N.iii. 13.
