It would be useless to look in earlier or contemporary philology for clear general precedents for these principles, negative and positive, established by Vico for the history of obscure and legendary periods. They are too closely bound up with and essential to his whole philosophical thought ever to have originated apart from this thought itself. The rude fragments of ancient Roman laws, customs and formulae, the Homeric poems, the words of the Latin language, when examined with unprejudiced eyes--the power which enables a man of genius to see things without distortion--and worked over by a mind ready to accept them in their true nature, were bound to excite in Vico, compared with the learned but colourless or falsely-coloured historical research of his day, a rebellion and upheaval like that which took place a century later in the mind of Augustin Thierry when he saw, depicted in the pages of Chateaubriand's poetical prose, Pharamond and his Franks, with their unrestrained movements, their rude and savage arms, their terrible war-cries and their barbaric songs. CHAPTER XV HEROIC SOCIETY As the Franks, in the compilations of national history made by the Jesuit colleges and other French schools, appear stripped of all their characteristic features and reduced to wise monarchs, pious queens and devoted warriors of the Church, so ancient and primitive history, thanks to the rhetoric and the naïve ideas of scholars, has been painted in brilliant and untrue colours of the same kind as those with which Lebrun or Luca Giordano painted their pompous and theatrical pictures. Kings who devoted themselves to sage counsel in order to aid their subjects while at the same time not diminishing the splendour of their courts and the brilliancy of their happy nobles, philosopher kings such as made Plato sigh for the day when philosophers should rule or kings philosophise; loyal and valiant knights, eager to sacrifice themselves for the common welfare; statesmen who used to accomplish pilgrimages at speed in order to bring back from afar to their waiting citizens laws more wise than their own; good fathers of families, admirable mothers, brave and obedient young men, loving and modest maidens, every one a personification of some virtue or even of all virtues at once, models of human perfection: such are the figures which sanctified by their venerable antiquity fill alike volumes and imaginations. These are the heroes of Greek and Roman history: and all this splendid cloth-of-gold decoration must be torn off and cleared away if we would attempt to discover in the deepest recesses of the memory of mankind the true heroes, the heroes of reality, not of literature, of life, not of the stage: ignorant, superstitious, fierce, selfish, harsh to their families, cruel to their inferiors, avaricious, grasping, and yet, in spite of or even because of these same characteristics of barbarism, heroes: virtuous with the one kind