The Problem of Oral Tradition in Vico's Historical Scholarship

Abstract

Rhetoric, an ancient discipline shunted to the margins of learning two centuries ago, flourishes once more in our times. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric has inspired a revival of interest in the work of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.I In his day he was admired as a teacher of rhetoric; but today he is remembered primarily for his new science of history, devised late in life through his search for the deep sources of the discipline that he had practiced. Rhetoric was the mainstay of a manuscript culture dating from antiquity, preserving and adapting techniques of oral tradition to serve its needs. For more than a millennium rhetoricians had founded their reputation on their verbal skill in expounding upon written texts for an audience still heavily dependent upon oral communication. As a late exemplar of this rhetorical radition of teaching, Vico, too, was engaged in such exegesis. But as a scholar aware that interest in his field of study was flagging, he inquired into the nature of the mindset from which it was derived. Vico's originality lies in his analysis of ancient texts for what they reveal about a still earlier, preliterate culture. It is the nature and significance of these investigations that I propose to consider in this essay. If Vico was a teacher of rhetoric of modest reputation in his own day, he should be honored by ours as a pioneering historian of oral tradition. Some sense of Vico's crossing from rhetoric into history and back again may be immediately surmised from the diagrams that embellish his preface to the third edition of the New Science (1744), the masterpiece in which his studies culminated.2 He begins with a frontispiece, presenting in pictorial design a mnemonic scheme of the argument he propounds