The second source revealed by Vico is the interpretation of myths or fables, which agreeably to his doctrine were not allegories, fictions or impostures, but the science of primitive man. In the _Diritto universale_ Vico distinguished four different and successive characters of the gods. At first they represented natural facts, Jupiter the sky, Diana the flowing water, Dis or Pluto the lower earth, Neptune the sea, and so on; secondly, natural human affairs, for instance, Vulcan fire, Ceres corn, Saturn the seed; thirdly, social facts; and finally they rose to heaven and were translated to the stars, and terrestrial and human things were distinguished from divine. But in the two _Scienze Nuove_ he emphasised almost exclusively the third or social meaning, which became in his eyes the original; since, he appears to have thought, the earliest nations were too much intent upon themselves, too much immersed in their hard and difficult life, to speculate in abstraction from social matters. Hence he found reflected in mythology the institutions, inventions, social cleavages, class-struggles, travels and warfare of primitive nations. Even in considerably advanced periods Vico was hostile to naturalistic or philosophical explanations. The saying "know thyself" attributed to the ancient sage seemed to him merely a piece of advice to the Athenian democracy, to know its own strength, later transferred to a metaphysical and moral sense. Beside this principle of social interpretation he established another of great importance: namely, that indecent meanings were inserted in myths at a late and corrupt period when men interpreted early customs in the light of their own, or tried to justify their own lusts by fancying that the gods had set them the example. Hence arose the adulterous Jupiter, Juno as the implacable enemy of Hercules' virtue, the chaste Diana soliciting the embraces of the sleeping Endymion, Apollo persecuting modest maidens even to their death, Mars, not content with committing adultery with Venus by land, but pursuing her even into the sea, and, worst of all, the love of Jupiter for Ganymede and of Jupiter again, transformed into a swan, for Leda. Such representations can only result in unrestrained vice, as happened in the case of the young Chaereas in Terence's comedy. But in their original shape and meaning all myths were serious and austere, worthy of the founders of nations. The pursuit of Daphne by Apollo for instance referred to the magicians or diviners who arranged weddings and followed women through the woods where they were still liable to promiscuous ravishing; Venus, covering her nakedness with the cestus, was a modest symbol of solemn matrimony; the heroes, sons of Jupiter, were not the offspring of adultery, but born of permanent and solemn marriages celebrated according to the will of Jupiter as revealed by the diviners. To the pure all things are pure, and impure to the impure: the forests and mountain-tops could