Vico's progress in artistic appreciation of the Homeric poetry was no less marked. The recognition that a sound and rational philosophy was not to be found in the poet Homer would, in the mouth of any other critic of the time, have amounted to a slur on the poet: as expressed by Vico and as the consequence of his new aesthetic ideas it was a compliment. The errors which intellectualism and neo-classical criticism discovered in Homer led the critics to repeat freely the saying of Horace that "good Homer nods at times": whereas Vico on the contrary exclaims "if he had not nodded so often he would never have been good!" (_nisi ita saepe dormitasset, nunquam bonus fuisset Homerus_). Homer was a great poet precisely because he was not a philosopher. He had a retentive memory, a strong imagination and a sublime mind; and neither the philosophies nor the arts of poetry and criticism which came after him could ever produce a poet at all like him. He was the only poet who could conceive heroic characters: his comparisons are incomparable, his speeches sublime, expressive of the individuality of the speaker, and created by the power of a vivid imagination: his diction is clear and splendid, his language composed entirely of similes, images and comparisons, and has none of those ideas of genus and species by which things are intellectually defined. He is not delicate but grand, for delicacy is a small virtue and grandeur naturally despises small things: or even, just as a great and rushing torrent cannot help the turbidness of its water, and must perforce sweep rocks and trees with it in the violence of its course, so too in Homer we may find things of no value. But the torrent with all its impurities sweeps on its way superb and impetuous; and Homer in spite of and partly because of his ruggedness is for ever the father and prince of all sublime poets.