How the world emerged from the second barbarismi and the feudal constitution, Vico does not say. He does not seem to have fixed his attention upon the communal movement which presents so many analogies with the struggles of the Roman plebs and the formation of ancient democracy. He makes game, here again, of those who traced the genesis of modern monarchies such as the French to a simple law like that of Tribonian by which, he explains ironically, the paladins of France deprived themselves of their power and conferred it upon the kings of the Capetian dynasty. He also observes that the baronial power, being dispersed and dissipated by reason of civil wars in which they were obliged to depend upon the people, was the more easily gathered up by sovereign monarchs; and that thus the "_obsequium_" of vassals to their baron passed into the "_obsequium principis._" But he gives quite a special importance to the rediscovery of Roman law (that "natural law of the European nations" as Grotius had called it) by the studies undertaken in the Italian universities. Men thus learnt anew the principles of natural equity; the nobles and plebeians became equal in the eyes of civil law as they are already in human nature, the secrets of the laws passed out of the hands of the feudatories, whose power consequently diminished by degrees, and the humane government of free republics and perfect monarchies came into being. The reflux of heroic society had now undergone a contrary reflux; it was no longer possible, under the conditions of modern civilisation, to recall it to life, just as it was impossible for the attempts of the Pythagoreans and Dion of Syracuse to restore the ancient aristocracies. The plebeians, once recognised as naturally equals of the nobles, no longer submitted to remaining inferior to them in civil life. And the few aristocratic republics which here and there survived in Europe were compelled to take infinite pains and all manner of wise measures in order to keep quiet and contented the multitudes whom they governed. [Footnote 1: See my preface to Sorel's _Reflections on Violence_ (Italian tr., Bari, 1909). pp. xxii-xxvii.] CHAPTER XIX VICO AND THE TENDENCIES OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE