ABSTRACT
Finding unity in Vico’s own ideas is hardly less challenging a task than the one he set himself in organizing learning. Of the many rubrics by which one may seek to take hold of his efforts, however, none are more plain, more reliable, or more useful than the two that fairly dominate his published works: wisdom and eloquence. For Vico, as for the tradition he represents, knowledge alone is impotent in the face of ferocity; only eloquence has the power to make men quit their independent ways and submit to the forces of civilization. The De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda is the strangest of all his works, a true “anomaly” in the judgment of the nineteenth-century critic Carlo Cantoni, “which runs counter to the tendencies and principles of Vico’s entire scholarly life and to the method he would later employ almost instinctively in his historical inquiries”.
