character; a type of the Greeks in so far as they narrated tales in ballad form. Thus facts which had only caused confusion and lacked plausibility in Homer as then understood became natural and necessary elements of the Homer now rediscovered. Above all, this latter Homer deserves the high praise of being the first of all historians of Greece known to us. In Homer we have a proof of the original identity of history and poetry, and a confirmation of Strabo's assertion that before Herodotus, before even Hecataeus of Miletus, the history of the Greek peoples was written by their poets. In two golden passages of the _Odyssey_ a man is praised for having told a story well and said to have "told it as a musician and a singer." Vico did not undertake a detailed investigation into the way in which the Homeric poems were elaborated. He seems however to incline towards two chief poet-authors, one, a native of the east of Greece, towards the north, for the _Iliad,_ the other for the _Odyssey,_ a native of the west towards the south: and by the title "Homer" he understands a composer and compiler of legends. But on the other hand, owing to the purely ideal meaning which this name has for him, we must not rule out the interpretation that the two Homers in their turn may be two streams of poetry and two groups of peoples or of popular singers. The historic figures whom Vico finds before him are the rhapsodes, men of the people who wandered independently about the fairs and festivals of the Greek cities reciting the songs of Homer. From the time of their primitive composition long ages elapsed before the Pisistratidae had them divided and arranged into two groups, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey,_ a fact which shows clearly that in their time only a confused mass of material was to be found, and decreed that they should henceforth be sung by the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea.