This chapter is the first of a series; I’ve been working on this piece since before I joined this site, but I feel as if this is the right place to put it.
“ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα,”12 are the first four words of Homer’s Odyssey in Ancient Greek. These four words form an imperative, namely, to “Tell me of a man, O Muse.” Each word here is somewhat unremarkable, partly because it has been taken out of context from the rest of the poem. “ἄνδρα” is the singular form of “man;” it is related to the English root for “androgynous” and “androgen,” among others. “Mοι” is the object form of “I,” or “me.” “ἔννεπε” is the imperative of the verb “to tell” or “to recount,” εἰπεῖν.
The word most peculiar in this phrase, at least to me, is “μοῦσα.” Of course, it means “Muse.” Since you’re addressing the Muse, you—or in this case Odysseus’ swineherd recounting his epic tale—refer to her in the vocative case; literally, the “calling case,” from the Latin verb vocare, to “call” or “summon.” Since many modern languages have lost their case system, they have accordingly lost the vocative case. Romance languages, languages descended from Latin, now do not have a case system where word endings change the meaning of that word within a sentence. However, we still retain it in some way through context, even in non-Romance languages; I might address my friend in English, a Germanic language,3 by saying “Hey, you!” or “Come here, you!” Archaic forms of English use “O” to denote a kind of calling or summoning, equivalent to “ὦ” in Ancient Greek (hence its use in the former translations). These phrases serve the same purpose, even if they are not inflected.
Here, I’m not interested necessarily in the grammatical or linguistic particularities of the Odyssey, although that is an extremely interesting topic in and of itself. Instead, I’m interested in what this address implies. Of course, the phrase itself is still unremarkable. But, since I enjoy delving into possibly useless metaphysical speculation, I had the urge to ask myself why the Muse is being called upon by the swineherd. Why does the Odyssey begin this way? Why isn’t she being asked to come here to some specific location? Why is she even being addressed at all? Do we need her, a Muse, to start this story?
Of course, it can be argued in a somewhat clinical fashion that she serves a narrative purpose in the story of the Odyssey. The Muse, as a member of the Ancient Greek pantheon of deities, would canonically have the power to recount and sing about such tales and exploits by our favorite cunning Odysseus; but the strange thing is that the Muses—and even other goddesses in Ancient Greek literature—are called upon even in other mythological retellings, as well as non-fiction works. Homer’s Iliad also starts with a similar summon: “Mῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος,”4 where “θεὰ,” or “goddess,” is again addressed in the vocative case, this time to tell us about our beloved Achilles (Ἀχιλῆος). Hesiod’s Works and Days also starts similarly: “Mοῦσαι Πιερίηθεν ἀοιδῇσιν κλείουσαι δεῦτε, Δί᾽ ἐννέπετε, σφέτερον πατέρ᾽ ὑμνείουσαι:” or “Muses, who from Pieria give glory through singing, come to me, tell of Zeus, your own father […]”5
Apart from Homer and Hesiod, a particularly interesting example is one in Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates calls upon the Muses to help him deliver a speech against the primacy of the lover: “ἄγετε δή, ὦ Μοῦσαι,” “Come then, O Muses.” Socrates later remarks on the state of frenzy he found himself in while giving this speech: “Well, my dear Phaedrus, does it seem to you, as it does to me, that I am inspired?”6 Clearly the Muses have an important role in Ancient Greek works, not just as mythological deities, but seemingly as something else that extends outside of the subject matter of all of these works. What could this be?
Two millennia after the time of Socrates, a philosopher, whose name or work most do not know of, walked the streets of 18th Century Naples. During this period, Naples was under control of the Spanish Empire in the form of a viceroyalty (virreinato); its universities were enriched by the Habsburgs and Bourbons. Because of these peculiar conditions, the Kingdom of Naples, in addition to the rest of the Italian peninsula, was undergoing its own sort of intellectual Enlightenment similar to but geographically separate from other polities on the Continent and the British Isles at the time. This philosopher’s name was Giambattista Vico; had we all known his name, the world would have been much different.
He would give eight inaugural orations at the University of Naples (the modern-day University of Naples Frederico II)—the first in 1699 and the last in 1732. The first six were given each year from 1699 to 1707 (with the exception of a gap between the third and the fourth), and the seventh on 1708. He published the eighth on 1732 under a specific title, On the Heroic Mind. During this period, Vico was Professor of Rhetoric at the university, and was tasked with introducing new students to the world of study in which they were about to enter. While all of these orations are interesting and thought-provoking in their own right, one in particular served as the first exposition of Vico’s later philosophical work, and will serve as a starting point of our discussion: the seventh oration, or De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time).7
This work was intended as an extension of his previous oration, his sixth inaugural address given in 1707 entitled On the Proper Order of Studies.8 In it, Vico proposes a study method that takes into account the changes that the student undergoes over the course of their life, as we will see later. De nostri may be viewed as a theoretical predicate of the practices endorsed in the sixth oration—albeit in a more lengthy and thought-out manner. This was because Vico had revised and lengthened the oration after he delivered it in 1708, as he deemed it worthy of publication as a separate volume. After this period of revision and lengthening, he had it published in 1709.
In De nostri, he compares the study methods (studiorum ratione) of the Ancients (Greeks and Romans) with his own day’s methods. This style of discourse in European literature was actually somewhat ubiquitous; comparing Ancient methods of learning with modern ones was spurred by an interest in Classical Antiquity during the 17th and 18th Centuries, and had its origins in the Renaissance. The Renaissance marked the period in Europe in which the last Ancient texts that could be reclaimed were reclaimed, leading to novel discussion and debate.9 However, Vico contributed to this literary style in a particularly unorthodox way. In his period, at least within the setting of 18th Century Naples, most scholars working at the time were decidedly Cartesian, as is evidenced by testimony from Vico himself in his autobiography:
With this learning and erudition [from his experience in composing Italian canzoni] Vico10 returned to Naples a stranger in his own land, and found the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters. That of Aristotle, on its own account but much more because of the excessive alterations made in it by the schoolmen, had become a laughingstock.11
However, Vico’s thought after 1710, when he published his De antiquissima sapientia Italorum (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians),12 was explicitly anti-Cartesian and it would remain so until his death in 1744, although not before being a Cartesian for most of his life before 1708! As Fisch and Bergin write in the introduction to Vico’s autobiography:
Actually, moreover, Vico became a Cartesian and remained so until his own original doctrine began to emerge; that is, until about the age of forty. Indeed, the greatest critic of Descartes was himself the greatest Cartesian of Italy. […] The teaching of Vico’s first six inaugural orations (1699-1707) is largely Cartesian.13
However, the idea that all six of these orations had a Cartesian character is disputed by Donald Phillip Verene, who argues that simply because Vico did not necessarily argue against Descartes in his orations does not mean they were explicitly Cartesian; although they did contain many similar themes. In his introduction to Vico’s six inaugural orations, Verene writes:
But fundamentally what Vico is advocating as a model of education in these orations is not Cartesian. He is not aggressively attacking Descartes as having the precisely wrong conception of knowledge, as he does from at least 1710 on [the publication year of De antiquissima], and, in the Study Methods, even a bit earlier [1708-1709]. But the view that he was simply a Cartesian must, I think, be modified.14
Disputes about Vico’s conversion to anti-Cartesianism aside, all of this background is to say that he was a highly original and unorthodox thinker whose ideas bring to light more than they appear to. His magnum opus, La Scienza Nuova (The New Science) further amplified these ideas and applied them to historical, poetic, jurisprudential, and epistemological ideas, among many others.15 We will return to this work very soon in later chapters.
Back to De nostri. Here Vico lays the groundwork for his later thinking by providing a pedagogical framework not based primarily on the acquisition of abstract and esoteric concepts, as was prescribed by Descartes’ geometric method, but rather on memory, imagination, and the acquisition of language(s). He argued that, despite recent advancements in all sorts of scientific endeavors, the individual desiring to learn about them and work with them will never be able to do so if they are deficient in the study of rhetoric and languages.
Surely there is reason to think that becoming more articulate and knowing the origins of words is a good thing and makes you better at whatever you do; of course, this can’t hurt. But there is also quite good reason to believe, even as made explicit by Vico himself, that he meant something more than just knowing about languages, becoming more articulate, and employing etymologies; in fact, such a thesis runs contrary to his entire philosophy! One could say that his prescription for the student was not just to engage in the former activities, but primarily and most fundamentally to invoke the Muses.
In this work I want to develop a theory of language; namely, a theory that posits language as a bodily, striving, and fundamentally human thing. Accordingly, like Vico, I aim to establish a pedagogical imperative based fundamentally on one’s ability to live through and engage with communicative practices using Vico’s framework as well as other philosophical understandings of how we use language; drawing in large part, as did Vico himself, on Ancient thought. My starting point for this inquiry rests on the idea that language is fundamentally a part of us that strives for something that it itself does not have; a fact that I believe Vico, and perhaps Plato, recognized like no other.16
P.S. Hopefully the Greek text is rendered correctly. Sometimes the diacritics are hard to get right!
Homer. 1919. Odyssey, Volume I: Books 1-12. Translated by A. T. Murray. Revised by George E. Dimock. Loeb Classical Library 104. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 12.
For a good online resource to view the original Ancient Greek text, check this out. Physical editions that include the original text are available in the form of the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press.
Old English or Anglo-Saxon, like Latin and Ancient Greek, also had a case system that has since been lost to time. For more information on this, see Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. 2012. A Guide to Old English. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, Ma: Wiley-Blackwell. The original system of case inflections exhibited by Old English, Ancient Greek, and Latin was inherited from much earlier origins, namely Proto-Indo-European (PIE), from which all languages in the Indo-European language family derive. Some Indo-European languages, such as Russian or German, still retain these cases (through Proto-Slavic and Proto-Germanic respectively). Plenty of great explanations on Indo-European case systems are available on Substack!
Homer. 1924. Iliad, Volume I: Books 1-12. Translated by A. T. Murray. Revised by William F. Wyatt. Loeb Classical Library 170. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 12.
Hesiod. 1970. The Works and Days; Theogony; the Shield of Herakles. Translated by Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, p. 19.
The Greek is as such: “Ἀτάρ, ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, δοκῶ τι σοί, ὥσπερ ἐμαυτῷ, θεῖον πάθος πεπονθέναι;” Plato. 1914. Plato, with an English Translation: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 447.
Vico, Giambattista. 1990. On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated by Elio Gianturco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vico, Giambattista. 1993. On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699-1707). Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 123.
Monfasani, John. 2016. Renaissance Humanism, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Routledge.
In his autobiography, Vico refers to himself from a third-person perspective.
Vico, Giambattista. 1975. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 132.
Vico, Giambattista. 1996. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language; Including the Disputation with the “Giornale De’ Letterati D’Italia.” Translated by Lucia M Palmer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vico, Giambattista. 1975. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 36-37.
Vico, Giambattista. 1993. On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699-1707). Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 25.
Vico, Giambattista. 2020. The New Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
I am indebted to one of my dear professors, Dr. Morrisey, who during my undergraduate degree for facilitated a study abroad to Greece that I will never forget, helped me in my early research on Vico, and exposed me to many of the ideas that I’ve synthesized here. Thank you.