Passing from the poems to the traditions of their author, the lives of Homer by Herodotus (if Herodotus really wrote it) and Plutarch are valueless. The most elementary facts about Homer are unknown: it is precisely concerning the man whom they considered the greatest luminary of Greece that the ancients leave us most completely in the dark. We know neither Homer's date nor his birthplace: each one of the Greek peoples claimed him as their citizen. It is said indeed that he was poor and blind, but it is just these details which excite our suspicion, as our laughter is aroused by the argument of Longinus which makes the _Iliad_ the work of his youth and the _Odyssey_ that of his old age. It would be indeed remarkable if such knowledge were current concerning a man in whose case the two trifling details of time and place were unknown! Above all, criticism must ask how a single man could ever have composed two poems of such a length at a time when writing was not in existence: since the three inscriptions of heroic age, one of Amphitryon, another of Hippocoön and a third of Laomedon mentioned with an excess of good faith by Vossius are mere forgeries like those made by the strikers of false coins. All these considerations led Vico to suspect that Homer himself was not a real person but one of those poetic characters to whom the ancient world ascribed long series of actions, works and events. If we try to conceive the Homeric poems not as the work of an individual but as two great storehouses of the manners and customs of earliest Greece, containing the history of its natural law and heroic period; if instead of a single poet we imagine a whole nation of poets, and instead of a single act of creation, a national poetry developing in the course of centuries, everything falls into its place and finds an explanation. The extravagance of the legends is explained by the fact that the composition of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ falls in the third period of their existence. In the hands of the theological poets they were true and severe, by the heroic poets they were altered and corrupted, and in this corrupt state they were incorporated in the two poems. The variety of customs is explained if we consider the various periods of composition, and so also the "young Homer" and "old Homer," which are symbolic of the earlier and later periods of primitive Greece. The diversity of sites assigned to his birth and death and the variety of his dialects are accounted for by the fact that different peoples produced the lays. Finally, it is explained why every Greek people claimed him as a citizen, just because these peoples were themselves Homer; and why he was called blind and a beggar, because such were as a rule the singers who went about from fair to fair reciting their tales. Thus in order to be rightly understood Homer must lose himself in the crowd of Greek peoples and be considered an idea or heroic