knows Bochart's treatise (1663) criticising the legend of Aeneas's arrival in Italy and accepts its conclusions, which only confirm the doubts already entertained by certain ancient historians. For Vico, the Trojan origin of Rome is a legend sprung from the union of two different examples of national arrogance: that of the Greeks, who made such a noise about the Trojan war and forced their Aeneas into the history of Rome, and that of the Romans, who accepted him in order to boast of a distinguished foreign origin. The legend moreover could not have arisen much before the time of the war with Pyrrhus, when Rome began to acquire a taste for things Greek. In order to explain the infusion of Greek names and myths into the story of primitive Rome and the similarity of the Roman alphabet to the ancient Greek, Vico would incline rather to the hypothesis that early in their history the Romans conquered and destroyed some Greek colony on the Latin coast, of which all trace has since been lost in the mists of antiquity; and that through receiving its inhabitants in Rome as refugees and allies, they came under the influence of several Hellenic traditions and customs. Vico does not spend much time over the historical events of the royal period. Here in fact lay one of the chief differences between his criticism and that which had already been originated and was continued after his time dealing with the first centuries of Roman history. Vico aims not at substituting historical for legendary anecdotes but at understanding the essence of institutions and the ways in which they change. He uses two guiding principles, as we have seen in considering the royal period: first, that it was a period not of monarchy but of aristocracy and that therefore the type of heroic society or the patriarchal republic is applicable to it: secondly, that the names of the kings are symbols or "poetic characters" for the institutions of this society. In Vico's judgment, as we have had occasion to observe, the constitution of Servius Tullius should not be considered the basis of popular liberty, as the later Romans considered it; it was really the basis of the liberty of the feudal lords, since by it the patricians granted to the plebeians the bonitary tenure of their land together with the duty of paying rent to and serving at their own expense in war themselves, the patricians. And Junius Brutus, in driving out the Tarquins and replacing them by two consuls or annual aristocratic kings, restored to the Roman republic its primitive form; that is to say, he delivered the lords from the domination of their tyrants but left the people under the domination of their lords.