of virtue possible and necessary in primitive times, the virtue of strength, discipline, and a deep and uncompromising sense of religion. The misrepresentation of the primitive hero as a wise and virtuous member of a civilised society reaches its height, so far as political history is concerned, in the failure to understand the three chief words which sum up the constitution of the state: king, people and freedom. By a misunderstanding of the first, it is believed that the original form of the state was monarchy, the absolute monarchy which rests on the strength of the people and keeps in check the nobles: which is really a late development in history, if not the latest. Into this error had fallen Jean Bodin, whom Vico chose as the object of his polemic. But Bodin, more acute than other political writers, involved himself in a contradiction, because though he accepted the common error he nevertheless, observing the effects of an aristocratic republic in the supposed freedom of ancient Rome, propped up his system by distinguishing between state and government, and asserting that Rome in the earliest period was popular in state but aristocratically governed; and since this prop was too weak to bear the whole weight of the facts he at last confessed that this republic was aristocratic both in government and in state, thus contradicting the whole of his own doctrine as to the necessary succession of states. The truth is that the kings of these earliest periods were at Rome, as at Sparta and elsewhere, not monarchs at all. The fathers, patricians or heroes were monarchical kings only in the period of domestic monarchy, when each family lived separately; but they were kings of a special kind, subject to no one but God, armed with religions of terror and consecrated with the most cruel penalties. On emerging from this first state, when the fathers united into a patrician order, their king was simply one or more of themselves, the mere magistrate of the order. Hence Rome, after expelling the Tarquins by a purely aristocratic revolution, did not change her state at all. She preserved her kings in the shape of two consuls, "annual kings," two aristocratic kings who were "deprived of no single detail of the royal power." The two kings of Sparta had the same character; they were liable like the consuls to be held accountable for their actions and could be condemned to death by the ephors.