sacred to profane history, from Moses to Homer, set his face stubbornly against the opposite transition from Homer to Moses, from profane history to sacred. CHAPTER XVII THE HISTORY OF ROME AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY Heroic society in the period of youthful vigour above described contains within itself, rigorously repressed, and in fact made into a support, the element of opposition; the slaves, clients or vassals, that is to say the plebs. But this element little by little succeeds in detaching itself from and opposing itself to the society, engaging it in a continual and undisguised conflict, so as by degrees to overthrow this old society and give life and form to a new society of which it is itself the material: a democratic society, the popular republic. Vico believes this process to be uniform in all peoples; but since references to histories other than that of Rome are either absent or very vague (he hardly mentions the origin of the Athenian democracy) the description of this process appears in the pages of the New Science as a fragment of Roman history, or as we should nowadays call it the social history of Rome. Vico's guesses about the population and primitive culture of Italy are of no great importance. The subject belongs rather to archaeology and ethnography than to history, and Vico did not make a special study of it. In the _De antiquissima sapientia Italorum_ he had provided the origins of Rome with a basis in an Italian civilisation of high antiquity, earlier than the Greek and derived from Egypt, which the Romans absorbed in a manner agreeing with their character; by rejecting, that is to say, its theoretical hypotheses while taking over their practical results, just as they adopted from the Etruscans their tragic religion and their art of tactics, and as they later adopted laws from Athens and Sparta. In this way their ignorance and savagery remained unchanged, and hence they spoke the language of philosophers without being philosophical. In his later writings Vico still for a time maintained the priority and independence of the earliest Italian civilisation as regards that of Greece, and considered Pythagoras less as the founder than as the student of Italian wisdom. Finally, however, he seems to have given up this view, just as he definitely abandoned that which explained the origins of Roman religion, language, customs and law by the imitation of foreign peoples and "frankly confessed that he had been in error here" owing to the example of Plato's _Cratylus._ What conditions brought about the rise of Rome Vico does not precisely say. He is certain that if Rome and the world did not begin together, at least the foundation of Rome was a new beginning. The point of departure which he assumes is the asylum of Romulus, consisting of the "families" of fathers who gave their hospitality to wanderers and made them into _famuli._ There was no Trojan colonisation; Vico