It is however certainly not in the resolution, materially understood, of the individual Homer into a myth or poetic character that the importance of Vico's theory lies: and the same is perhaps the case with its truth. From the inconsistencies observed by him, and not always accurately observed (which are moreover unimportant, since the inaccuracies he notes might easily be balanced by the correct statements he omits), there was no strictly logical passage to the denial of the existence of an individual Homer, the principal author of one or both poems. These inconsistencies might serve to demonstrate that the poet or poets were working upon a rich fund of traditional material, of origin very various both as to time and place, and not regularly stratified according to origin, but having its strata confused and contorted. One or more poets, or even many poets and an able compiler of their lays, or a society of able compilers: these and similar hypotheses might equally well have been suggested, as happened later, and supported, as was later the case, by arguments neither more nor less cogent, because incapable of documentary proof. But underlying this resolution of Homer into a poetic character, as it underlay other resolutions made or attempted by Vico, lay the discovery of the long and laborious historical genesis through which the matter of these poems had passed, so that in this sense they might really be called a product of collaboration on the part of the whole Greek people. The substitution of a nation of Homers for a single Homer was only another case of mythology constructed according to the principles discovered by Vico himself: mythology which must be retranslated into scientific prose. In the same way Vico's analysis of the customs described in the Homeric poems may be, and is, not only here and there adulterated with a few inaccuracies, but is on the whole exaggerated and one-sided. Still, this analysis taken as a whole was a great advance and opened new paths to Homeric criticism. How could the stubborn illusion of the noble Homeric hero, a great lord and a good ruler, a shining example of all civil, military and domestic virtues, be dispelled except by setting against it the picture of a boorish Achilles, full of elemental passions, violent, stubborn, unreasoning, quick to a generous impulse but no less quick to outbursts of brutal wrath?