Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan Historiography

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Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan Historiography Author(s): Melissa Calaresu Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 641-661Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653964Accessed: 18-11-2015 08:52 UTC

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Images of Ancient Rome in

Late Eighteenth-Century

Neapolitan Historiography

Melissa Calaresu

The case of the late Neapolitan enlightenment, the variety and sophistica- tion of which has been little recognized outside of Italian scholarship, illus- trates the significance of particular regional concerns and intellectual traditions in the development of enlightened movements in Europe.' This becomes ap- parent when examining how Neapolitans looked to their own past in relation to the unique set of political and social problems of the Kingdom of Naples. In this article I shall examine a number of historical writings published in the 1780s. This was a decade of intense intellectual activity which saw the publication of the defining works of the later Neapolitan enlightenment, such as Gaetano

Filangieri's Scienza della legislazione from 1780 and Francesco Mario Pagano's Saggipolitici between 1783 and 1785.2 It was also the decade in which Giuseppe Maria Galanti's Storia filosofica e politica delle nazioni antiche e modeme

Research for this article was in part funded by a grant from the British School at Rome. Thanks also to David Armitage, Anthony Pagden, Joan Pau Rubies, Hamish Scott, and the three anonymous readers for this journal for comments.

'There exists no monograph on the Neapolitan enlightenment in any language, but see Franco Venturi, Riformatori napoletani (Milan/Naples, 1962). For an account in English, see Venturi, "The Enlightenment in Southern Italy," in Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment, ed. S. Woolf and tr. S. Corsi (London, 1972), 198-225; Giuseppe Galasso, La filosofia in soccorso de' governi: la cultura napoletana del settecento (Naples, 1989); Storia di Napoli (10 vols.; Naples, 1971), VIII and IX; and D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason 1685-1789 (London, 1987).

2 On Filangieri and Pagano see the introductory essays in Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 603-59 and 785-833; Gaetano Filangieri e l'illuminismo europeo, ed. L. d'Alessandro (Naples, 1991) and on Pagano Pensiero politico, 28 (1995); also my doctoral dissertation, "Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Writings of Francesco Mario Pagano" (Cam- bridge University, 1994), which is currently being revised for publication, as Enlightenment and Revolution in Naples: From Vico to Pagano (forthcoming, Cambridge).

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Copyright 1997 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.



Melissa Calaresu

introduced in translation important texts of the British and French Enlighten- ments, and the journal Scelta miscellanea briefly became an important focal

point of collaboration and intellectual exchange for reform-minded intellectuals in Naples.3 The impetus which bound together these many projects of the 1780s was twofold: on one hand, the growing awareness of the particular problems of Neapolitan society and of the urgent need for reform, expressed through the language and concerns of the wider enlightened movement; and at the same time a revived sense of a distinct cultural and political identity. The writing of

history, even of the most remote age, did not escape these concerns. The cultural renewal of the 1780s brought new histories of the Kingdom,

and in these Rome played an essential role. As Naples's most powerful neigh- bor in ancient times, Rome defeated the Samnites, the tribe which had inhabited the Kingdom, and brought the region under Imperial control. From the Middle Ages the universal pretensions of the Roman papacy had continually threatened the temporal authority of Neapolitan rulers, and the symbol of these

pretensions had survived into the eighteenth century with the offering each

year of a feudal homage, the Chinea, to Rome. It was against this threat which Pietro Giannone's anti-clericalism in the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723) was directed.4 The symbol of Rome, ancient and modern, served as an effective foil for Neapolitan intellectuals who believed that the development of

good government in the Kingdom had been frustrated by the interference of outside powers.

This interference was perceived as having broken the natural bond between the rulers of Naples and their subjects. The Spanish viceroys already had an established and especially reviled place in this history of misgovernment in

Naples.s The arrival of Charles III in 1734 and the establishment of an autonomous monarchy in the Kingdom broke this history and brought a new opti- mism for the possibility of reform. As regalisti, the reformers of the end of the

3 On Galanti's Storiafilosofica e politica, a compendium of contemporary historical works which included essays from Hume's History of England, William Robertson's History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, and Voltaire's Le Siecle de Louis XIV, see M. L. Perna, "Giuseppe Maria Galanti editore," Miscellanea Walter Maturi, ed. G. Torcellan (Turin, 1966), 244-49, and Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 957-62. On the Scelta miscellanea (1783-84), see N. Cortese, Eruditi e giornali letterari nella Napoli del Settecento (Naples, 1921), 97-103.

4 See Giannone, Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (4 vols.; Naples, 1723), I, "Introduzione" [2-3]; Elvira Chiosi, "La tradizione giannoniana nella seconda meta del settecento," Pietro Giannone e il suo tempo, ed. R. Ajello (2 vols.; Naples, 1980), II, 763-823; and Chiosi, Lo spirito del secolo: Politica e religione a Napoli nell'eta dell'illuminismo (Naples, 1992), 143- 96.

5 The anti-Spanish tradition of Neapolitan historiography, stretching back to at least the seventeenth century, was most clearly formulated by Paolo Mattia Doria in his Relazione written in 1710 or 1711 under the Austrians and before the arrival of the Bourbons. See G. Galasso, introduction to Doria, Massime generali e particolari colle quali di tempi in tempo hanno gli spagnoli governato il Regno di Napoli, ed. V. Conti (Naples, 1973); and Anthony Pagden, "Fede Pubblica and fede Privata: Trust and Honour in Spanish Naples," Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, 1990), 65-89.

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Images of Ancient Rome

eighteenth century continued their efforts to strengthen the jurisdictional rights of the now autonomous Bourbon monarchy against both the Papacy and the feudal nobility within the Kingdom.6 Within these historiographical and political traditions Rome was clearly recognized as a recurring symbol of oppression and obstacle to Naples's sovereignty, and late eighteenth-century historians looked back to a period before the arrival of the ancient Romans to find a native tradition which could inform contemporary reform and upon which a cultural

identity could be constructed.

Italian writers, from the Renaissance, had charted the early history of the various city-states, duchies, and kingdoms in the Italian peninsula relative to the rise and fall of ancient Rome. Despite the local patriotism which these histories expressed, Rome remained a powerful symbol and model of civiliza- tion, and it was from such a model that both politics and culture were discussed and compared in Europe. Consequently, interest in pre-Roman Italy most often related to the reconstruction of the origins and early history of Rome, and it was towards this which most antiquarians and historians worked in their at-

tempts to understand the causes for its rise.7 In any case antiquarian interest in

pre-Roman Europe had been for the most part restricted to the Etruscans and the Greeks, in part because of the scarcity of material remains of other pre- Roman tribes in the Italian peninsula. In the eighteenth century, however, a crucial shift in the perimeters of historical study of the ancient world took

place. While the rise and fall of Rome remained the center of political dis- course, there began a more systematic study of local Italic or pre-Roman tribes

beyond the restrictions of the Bible and Trojan origin myths which had con- strained earlier historians.

From the Renaissance the Etruscans dominated the historiography of the Italian peninsula before the expansion of the Roman Empire, reflecting their

centrality to the history of the early Roman monarchy and later of the Tuscan

city-states. Their position was strengthened in the eighteenth century with the

discovery and publication in the 1720s of Thomas Dempster's seventeenth-

century manuscript De Etruria regali.8 Interest in Etruscan culture, or "Etrusco-

6 On regalismo, see Chiosi's writings (n. 4 above) and her Andrea Serrao: Apologia e crisi del regalismo nel settecento napoletano (Naples, 1983). On the feudal debates, see P. Villani, "II dibattito sulla feudalita nel Regno di Napoli dal Genovesi al Canosa," Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, ed. E. Sestan (Naples, 1968), 253-331, and A. M. Rao, L' "Amaro della feudalita": La devoluzione di Arnone e la questione feudale alla fine del '700 (Naples, 1984).

7 While recognizing that the "discovery" of pre-Roman Italy encouraged new approaches to historical writing, Peter Bietenholz places this discovery only within its significance to the reconstruction of the origins of Rome, in Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Histori- cal Thought (Leiden, 1994), 280.

8 On the history of the manuscript written between 1616 and 1619 and its subsequent publication a century later, see Mauro Cristofani, "Sugli inizi dell' 'Etruscheria': La

pubblicazione del De Etruria regali di Thomas Dempster" Melanges de L'Ecole Franfaise de

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Melissa Calaresu

mania," continued throughout the century and produced several studies, such as Mario Guarnacci's Origini italiche, ossiano Memorie storico-estrusche sopra l'antichissimo Regno d'ltalia, which then became models for the systematic study of the peoples in areas outside of the boundaries of ancient Etruria.9

Compared to the long history of interest in the Etruscans, the study of other Italic tribes had been limited except in relation to the history of the conquests of Rome, until the eighteenth century.

Arnaldo Momigliano recognized that this new interest in pre-Roman societies, of which there was little or no literary evidence, corresponded to the

growing importance of material evidence in historical writing. More to the

point here, it also, he believed, marked the beginning of a revived sense of

regional identity in Italy.

Italian scholars were looking for a new focus for their patriotic feelings and cultural interests. Deeply rooted in their regional traditions and

suspicious of Rome for various reasons, they found what they wanted in the Etruscans, Pelasgians, and other pre-Roman tribes. Local patriotism was gratified by the high antiquity of pre-Roman civilizations.'0

The cultural renewal of the last decades of the eighteenth century and the anti-

Papal tradition in the Kingdom of Naples proved to be a receptive context in which to pursue an interest in its pre-Roman history.

There was, however, a clear paradox in this new interest in the Italic predecessors of the Neapolitans, for it was near Naples that the most significant archaeological Roman ruins of the century had been discovered." While Nea-

politans noted the attraction of the sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii for for-

eign visitors to the city who were making the Grand Tour, the excavations in fact had surprisingly little effect on intellectual life in the capital.'2 Thus, while

Rome: Antiquite, 90 (1978), 577-625; also Araldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 18-19.

9 Origini Italiche, ossiano Memorie storico-etrusche sopra l'antichissimo Regno d'ltalia e sopra i di lei prima abitatori nei secoli piu remoti (3 vols.; Lucca, 1767-72); a second revised edition was published in Rome between 1785-87; for further bibliography see Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," 28-30.

'0 Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," 19; also Frederick Mascioli, "Anti- Roman and Pro-Italic Sentiment in Italian Historiography," Romanic Review, 33 (1942), 366- 84, and [Antonio Casati], "Storia degli studii sulle origini italiche," Rivista Europea [Milan] (June 1846), 721-48.

" See Felix Fernandez Murga, Carlos III y el descubrimiento de Herculano, Pompeya y Estabia (Salamanca, 1989), and Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Exca- vation at Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae (Cambridge, 1995).

12 See my article, "The End of the Grand Tour and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: Neapolitan Critiques of French Travel Accounts (1750-1800)," Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, eds. J. Elsner and J. P. Rubies (forthcoming).

644




foreign visitors continued to flock to the Roman sites near Naples in order to understand better their common European past, Neapolitans began to look be-

yond Rome to what was perceived as their own particular native origins. In

Naples the pre-Roman tribe which generated the most interest among Neapoli- tan historians and reformers were the Samnites, the inhabitants of the ancient

region of Samnium.'3

The growing prominence of the Samnites in Neapolitan historiography appears in the writings of Giovanni Donato Rogadei, Giuseppe Maria Galanti, and Francescantonio Grimaldi, which were all published in the 1780s. Rogadei was writing a history of public law and recognized the importance of including the pre-Roman foundations of civil society in Naples; Galanti's opposition to the feudal system in the Kingdom inspired him to look back to the idyllic world of his ancient predecessors; and Grimaldi looked to the Samnites as a model for understanding the nature of feudal, or barbaric, government. All of these authors emphasized that they were not writing as antiquarians. The an- tipathy of enlightened writers in Naples to antiquarian scholarship, in particular that of Rome, was a result, as Raffaele Ajello has pointed out, of contemporary Neapolitans' awareness of the necessity of providing solutions to practical problems in Naples. The vain and useless erudition of antiquarian works often served as a useful foil to the perceived utility of their own writings.'4 These new civil histories, as we shall see, incorporated, as part of an ongoing dis- course, the political debates concerning the autonomy of the Bourbon monar-

chy in its jurisdictional struggles with Rome and with the feudal barons within the Kingdom.

In fact all three authors could be placed within the tradition of the ceto civile or ordine civile, an administrative and legal order which from the middle of the seventeenth century had fought to weaken the prerogatives of the nobil-

ity granted earlier by the Spanish viceroyalty.'5 It was this order, made up of intellectuals, administrators, and lawyers, that most welcomed the arrival of an autonomous monarchy in 1734 and, as regalisti, defended the interests of the crown against the Papacy and the nobility. And it was this tradition, in particu-

13 The ancient region of Samnium corresponds to the central part of southern Italy; see the map in E. T. Salmon, Samnium and the Samnites (Cambridge, 1967), 25.

14 Raffaele Ajello, "Ercolano tra antiquari e filosofi," Le antichita di Ercolano (Naples, 1988), 5; and see Hans Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syn- drome and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1990), 310-30.

15 On the ceto civile in the late seventeenth century, see S. Mastellone, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda meta del seicento (Messina/Florence, 1965), esp. ch. 1; on the role of the togati, see R. Ajello, "Potere ministeriale e societa al tempo di Giannone: II modello napoletano nella storia del pubblico funzionario," Pietro Giannone e il suo tempo, ed. R. Ajello, II, 451-511; and on these terms, see G. Ricuperati, "Una lettura di Vico, Giannone, e Genovesi nei decenni della crisi dell'antico regime a Napoli: L'esperienza intelletuale e storiografica di Francesco Antonio Grimaldi," Studi Filosofici (Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples), X-XI (1987-88), 206-7.

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Melissa Calaresu

lar the writings of Pietro Giannone and Paolo Mattia Doria, with which reformers at the end of the eighteenth century most easily identified and within which the three historians can be placed.16 These were then not simply histories, nor were the authors simply historians; for Rogadei, Galanti, and Grimaldi were all

responding to the cultural renewal of the late eighteenth century in Naples and concerned with the possibilities of reform within Neapolitan society.

The study of Italic society before the arrival of the Romans allowed the three historians to link with another intellectual tradition in relation to Rome. The influence of Giambattista Vico in late eighteenth-century Neapolitan writ-

ings is not as well documented as that of the anti-papal tradition of Giannone. As the preeminent history of the Kingdom, Giannone's work was clearly an

important model for later Neapolitan historians, particularly as his discussions of the influence of the Papacy were more directly relevant to contemporary political concerns. Nonetheless, although the influence of Vico's work, and in

particular his Scienza nuova of 1744,17 was less continuous in the eighteenth century, his characterization of ancient Roman society as essentially feudal and his questioning of the virtue of the ancient Romans were relevant to the history of Italic society.'8

In opposition to traditional interpretations Vico placed the origins of feudalism not with the arrival of the barbarians after the fall of the Roman empire but rather with Roman law itself.'9 This alternative understanding of the ori-

gins of feudalism was not lost on the works of the Neapolitan historians exam- ined here, for the feudal barbarism of Rome could more easily be contrasted with the relative liberties and rural tranquility of the Italic tribes. As Giuseppe Giarrizzo has pointed out the development of a contrasting Italic model from Vico's characterization of Roman society was due to the infuence of Antonio Genovesi, the foremost reformer of the 1750s in Naples, and this in relation to the interpretation of the history of feudalism in the Kingdom.20 This model of Italic society fits neatly, as we shall see, into the Neapolitan civil histories which were critical of Rome's influence, both ancient and modern.

The importance of Dell 'antico stato de'popoli dell'Italia Cistiberina che oraformano il regno di Napoli was to identify the Kingdom's Italic past as part of a broader civil history rather than simply as an antiquarian curiosity. The

16 See Chiosi's writings cited (nn. 4 and 6 above). 17 See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, eds. and trs. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch

(New York, 1988) (hereafter "SN," followed by the paragraph number). 18 Vico does this through an analysis of the similarity of the use and the meaning of the

Roman clientela and the barbarian feudum (SN, 1057). On the lack of virtue of the Romans, see SN, 68. This theme is discussed in J. Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico's New Science

(Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4, and is developed in relation to contemporary Neapolitan feudal debates in my forthcoming book (n. 2 above).

19 SN, 1085. 20 Giarrizzo, Vico, la politica e la storia (Naples, 1981), 198-205.

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author, Giovanni Donato Rogadei (1718-84), trained as a lawyer in Naples, began a history of public law in the Kingdom, from which an essay was published in Lucca in 1767 (the same year and place of publication as the first two volumes of Guamacci's work).21 It was not until 1780 that the first volume of his work was published by Giuseppe Maria Porcelli in Naples. The publisher believed that the volume could appear on its own and gave the work a new title, which emphasized the work as a study of the early peoples of the Kingdom.22 The other volumes were never published, and although it was not originally meant to be a single volume, the relative importance which was placed on the first of five epochs covered by Rogadei demonstrates the significance for the author of this early history as the foundation in the development of civil law in the Kingdom.

Rogadei provided descriptions of the many tribes which had inhabited the region, the Samnites as well as, for example, the Sabines, and the Campanians. He also included a more general description of the government of these tribes, using comparisons with barbaric tribes mentioned in the Scriptures, in Roman histories, in Guamacci's study of the Etruscans, and in other antiquarian works. His task was made difficult, as he recognized, because of the lack of monumenti.23 Rogadei, however, rejected the use of fables, myths, and popular traditions, the sources which Vico had used in his analysis of ancient societies in the Scienza nuova.24 He had read the writings of Vico, to whom he referred as "one of our illustrious citizens" and whose work had been neglected in the years since his death.25 Rogadei, however, distanced himself from Vico in his own adherence to the authority of the Scriptures, and included a long footnote criticizing Vico's "fantastic" reconstruction of the origins of civil society, when "the Pentateuch could have freed him from the boring enquiry of those origins."26 The lack of material sources and his rejection of Vico's methods therefore compelled Rogadei to depend on Roman histories "as the principal foundation of this first volume."27

21 Rogadei, Dell'antico stato de' popoli dell'Italia Cistiberina che oraformano il regno di Napoli (Naples, 1780). As a member of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rogadei had been sent to Malta in 1777 to establish a new legislative code and judicial system for the island from where he would return in 1780. See D. Vaccolini in Biografia degli italiani illustri nelle scienze, lettere ed arti del secolo XVIII, e de' contemporanei, ed. E. De Tipaldo (10 vols.; Venice, 1834-45), IV, 393-94.

22 Porcelli wrote a short preface to Rogadei's work, explaining the history of the manuscript and the subsequent publication. The complete work was to be entitled Diritto pubblico e politico del regno di Napoli; the change in title suggests that Porcelli must have believed that, with such an emphasis, the book would find an audience in Naples (Porcelli, "Al lettore," in Rogadei, Dell'antico stato, i).

23 Rogadei, Dell'antico stato, I. 24 See, for example, on the use of Greek myths as historical evidence, SN, 34. 25 Rogadei, Dell'antico stato, 59. 26 Ibid., 54-56. 27 Ibid., II.

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Melissa Calaresu

In his preface to Dell'antico stato Porcelli wrote that the work was important because it studied the formation of public law of the Kingdom "in relation-

ship to sovereignty, political economy, and the civil orders."28 It was then not

simply a political history but an attempt to study the development of the civil institutions and public law in the Kingdom. Echoing Pietro Giannone's preface to the Istoria civile, Rogadei himself emphasized that he did not wish simply to narrate political events.29 Instead his history "could serve as an escort and sure

guide to display, according to events, the government of Peoples in the most suitable and most convenient form" by examining "the varied nature and form of civil government and the consequences which are derived from various cir- cumstances."30

The utility of the work then lay, according to Rogadei, in its benefit to both

public and private good by outlining the beginnings of the moder Neapolitan state. For this reason he emphasized the continuity of the ties which had bound the peoples of the region to both the government of the ancient tribes and later to the monarchy, and he wrote:

For many epochs of secular history, various governments and, for some time, the most august of regular monarchies have all ruled on the basis of the sacred reciprocal bonds between our peoples and the civil powers.31

The purpose of his work, like that of Giannone's, was to understand better the civil foundations of the moder Kingdom. Despite the variety of the tribes which he described, Rogadei emphasized their common origins and the simi-

larity of their customs and government. As the title suggested, they formed a

political entity which corresponded to the limits of the modern Kingdom of Naples. Although the tribes had lived in separate and scattered settlements, only meeting for military councils, the author intended to present a cultural and

political unity within the tribes of the Kingdom which, he wrote, were "one nation although divided into many States."32

Rogadei commended the system of national councils in maintaining peace and unity within this nation.33 These councils met primarily for matters of war and disputes between the various tribes.34 Leaders were elected to represent the

28 Porcelli, "Al lettore," in Rogadei, Dell'antico stato, i. 29 Rogadei, ibid., I; and see Istoria civile, I, "Introduzione," 1 and 7-8. 0 Rogadei, Dell'antico stato, I.

3' Ibid. 32 Ibid., 396. 33 Ibid., 396-97. 34 Ibid., 397.

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tribes at the meeting of the council and were meant to act for the entire nation.35 These early leaders, Rogadei emphasized, although often named as kings, had to be considered as elected chief magistrates or commanders of the army. They were not completely independent, for "their power was very limited and they were subject to the People."36 According to Rogadei, the Neapolitan tribes had not yet achieved the perfection of a moder absolute monarchy, "in which all

majesty resides in the person of the Prince."37 The war councils, however, rep- resented a political unity among the tribes of the region as well as an effective forum to respond to local needs.

With the expansion of Rome and the establishment of Roman jurisdiction in the region, the reciprocal bonds between government and the people were broken.

It seems that these Councils of Nations were stopped at the time when the Peoples of Italy were subjugated by the Romans, and that when a

people entered under this yoke, it then lost this very ancient right.38

Rogadei had described the Samnites as having conquered the largest territory among the tribes in Italy and having been at one time a real threat to Roman dominance in southern Italy.39 The establishment of the Empire in Italy, however, brought "the division of Italy into seventeen Provinces," and "the memory of many ancient regions was extinguished."40 The regional autonomy of the

Neapolitan tribes was displaced and their culture was subsumed by the ambi- tions of Rome.

In Dell'antico stato Rogadei tried to show the cultural and political unity among the tribes which had inhabited the limits of the Kingdom of Naples, and after this followed the four volumes of his history of public law. The usefulness of his study of this epoch, which was "all but ignored," was, he claimed, "to

penetrate the true origin of change in civil government, which are the conse-

quences of their state and condition."41 In this way Rogadei showed a continu-

ity between the history of these early peoples with the later political and civil traditions of the Kingdom. Rogadei was not imagining any of the original laws or liberties of these early tribes, which, as we shall see, Giuseppe Maria Galanti described; but the importance of Del antico stato de 'popoli dell'Italia Cistiberina was the author's belief that the civil foundations of the Kingdom and their later

development lay in the pre-Roman history of the region.

35 Ibid., 396. 36 Ibid., 386. 37 Ibid., 394. 38 Ibid., 397. 39 Ibid., 200, and 225-26. 40 Ibid., 201. 41 Ibid., 74.

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The political implications in the writings of Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743- 1806) were much more explicit than in Rogadei's history. Galanti's use of the Roman conquerors as a metaphor had a more powerful political import than

simply as a foil to establish a native cultural and historical foundation for the

Kingdom of Naples. Galanti's involvement in the political and intellectual culture of the late eighteenth century was in fact much greater. The son of a provincial landowner, Galanti was educated in Naples, where he had been greatly influenced by Antonio Genovesi.42 He became a practicing lawyer in 1765 and his early forensic career was often concerned with the defense of communes and tenants against landowners in his own province. It was at this time that he first began to understand the effects of the feudal system.43 Galanti's activities as a writer and publisher are also important in understanding his role in the

political culture of the period. He set up a publishing house in Naples, which translated and published foreign works and his own works throughout the 1780s and 1790s.44 In the same period he collaborated with the government and, after 1791, worked with the minister of justice in the formulation of a program of

judicial reform for the provinces of the Kingdom.45 Galanti's activities demonstrate his active participation in the political and literary culture of Naples and

Europe and show his firm commitment to actual reform in the Kingdom. It is in these contexts that one must read Galanti's works.

In the introduction to the Saggio sopra l'antica storia de'primi abitatori dell'Italia, published in 1783, Galanti was careful to distinguish his work from

antiquarian studies, which he described as having "more erudition than logic, more trifles than genius."46 His objective was instead to write a philosophical history which attempted to provide "a complete description" of Samnite soci-

ety.47 Although antiquarian works had been useful for his study as for that of

Rogadei, he also had to rely on ancient Roman histories.48 These restrictions would not prevent Galanti from writing a detailed (and idealized) account of the indigenous peoples of the peninsula before the expansion of Rome.

42 See Galanti's Elogio storico del Signor Abate Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1772); also Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 941-83.

43 Ibid., 941-43, and Vaccolini, Biografia degli italiani illustri, I, 256. See, for example, an account of Galanti's defense of the commune of Santa Croce against the baron Tramontano, in Galanti, Memorie storiche del mio tempo, ed. D. Demarco (Naples, 1970), 36.

44 See Perna, "Giuseppe Maria Galanti editore," Miscellanea Walter Maturi, ed. Torcellan, 221-58, and Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 957-62. See also Lorenzo Giustiniani, Saggio storico-critico sulla tipografia del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1793), 187-223.

45 See A. M. Rao, "Galanti, Simonetti e la riforma della giustizia nel Regno di Napoli (1795);' Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 102 (1984), 281-341.

46 Galanti, Saggio sopra l'antica storia de'primi abitatori dell'Italia (Naples, 1783), 4. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 10. The Roman historians were, however, not entirely trustworthy (ibid., 20);

Galanti also mentions Rogadei's reliance on Roman histories (ibid., 9).

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Although recognizing the civil and cultural achievements of Rome, the

Saggio was written to reveal the glory and simplicity of Italic societies which had preceded the arrival of the Romans. The reason that Galanti focused mainly on the Samnites was in part, he admitted, for patriotic reasons, but also because of the absence of an accurate history of a people which had required twenty- four triumphs before their defeat by the Romans.49 In 1780, he had in fact

published an essay, specifically on the Samnites, which was included in his sixteen-volume compendium of ancient and moder history.50 In the introduction which preceded this earlier essay he emphasized the utility of the study of

pre-Roman history for a Kingdom which had gone through so many political "revolutions."51 Like Rogadei, Galanti believed that the history of these early peoples was relevant to the present state of the Kingdom.

For Galanti the Samnites were the most powerful people before the emer-

gence of the Romans and held the greatest territory of any other people in Italy.52 The pre-Roman tribes of Italy had been divided into separate independent republics which were governed by their own laws and magistrates. Repub- lics with a common origin and mutual interests formed a single nation, united

by councils. The Samnites, according to Galanti, formed such a nation.53 Like

Rogadei, he depicts the Samnite tribe as a cultural and political unity, compar- ing their hard-working and sober life to the excess and extravagance of other Italic nations and the Greek colonies.5 In fact Galanti was careful throughout the Saggio not to attribute the achievements of the region's ancient inhabitants to the decadent influence of Greek culture, and he rejected the Greek colonies as any kind of native political model.55 He describes instead a civil society the character and development of which was determined, above all, by agricultural activity: "their fields were cultivated like gardens, they had populous cities and brave, courageous, and strong citizens who valued agriculture and honoured their patria."56

The cultivation of land by the Samnites was in fact, for Galanti, an important indication that their society had passed from a barbarous to a civil stage.57 "There is no agriculture," he writes (echoing Locke), "without the ownership

49 Ibid., 3. See also ibid., 79. 50 Saggio della storia degli antichi popoli d'Italia, in Storia filosofica e politica delle

Nazioni antiche e modeme (16 vols.; Naples, 1780), V, 179-264; and n. 3 above. 51 Citing Denina's work, cited (n. 21 above), in ibid., 259. 52 Ibid., 57 and 62. 53 Ibid., 30 and 206; also ibid., 162. 54 Ibid., 83. 55 Ibid., 166-68. 56 Ibid., 225. 57 Ibid., 226-27; here he includes a footnote on Vico's theory of the "course of nations"

(ibid., 227, fn. 1).

651



of land, and there is no ownership of land without civil life."58 A strong agricultural economy had encouraged the growth of the Samnite population (Galanti estimated that it had been four times that of the modem Kingdom).59 And with a flourishing population came the development of civil institutions and the cultivation of arts and sciences.60 The character of the laws of the Italic republics, according to Galanti, was inextricably linked to this agricultural foundation.

These types of government which were divided into small domains did not have to put up with great proprietors of lands because the ancient

republics were founded on agrarian laws. The territory was distributed

proportionally between the citizens who formed the state, and the political laws were directed to impede the growth of inequality. This equal- ity must have necessarily formed laudable customs and better citizens.61

Here Galanti is making a clear distinction between the primacy of agricultural activity (and its positive political consequences) in Samnite society and the obstacles to agricultural prosperity (and the corresponding political problems) under the "great proprietors" in his own times. Above all it was the way in which land was distributed which marked the difference between Samnite and later feudal governments. This comparison also extended to the depiction of a

flourishing economy in Samnium in which, in contrast to the present King- dom, "there were no privileges, taxes, feudal rights, nor many other terms which could fill a dictionary."62 The Samnites, Galanti concludes, had been fortunate not to have known feudal law, canon law (regarding civil affairs, he noted cau-

tiously in the footnote), nor any of the taxes or dues which he felt had limited economic prosperity and created inequalities of wealth in his own time under feudalism.63 While the allusions to contemporary criticism of the feudal system are clear, Samnium was somewhat less amenable as a workable political model for contemporary Naples.

Although the Samnites left no constitution, Galanti thought that they had

governed themselves by democratic principles.64 As the quotation above sug-

58 Ibid., 227. Grimaldi also makes this connection but denies that the kind of agriculture practiced by the Samnites encouraged the conception of property in his Annali del Regno di Napoli (10 vols.; Naples, 1780), "Epoca I" I, 168-74.

59 Galanti, Saggio sopra l'antica storia, 81. 60 Ibid., 229. 61 Ibid., 219-20. 62 Ibid., 225. 63 Ibid., 228-29, echoing Genovesi's depiction of Italic society in Lezioni di Commercio

(1765), cited in Giarrizzo, Vico, la politica e la storia, 198-99. 64 Ibid., 85. He also compares the inequalities of the Greek republics in southern Italy and

the "democratic" government of the Samnites and other Italic tribes, although he admits that there must have existed some distinctions (ibid., 222). Samnite government is later described

652 Melissa Calaresu




gests, Galanti believed that the nature of Samnite government stemmed from the way in which property was distributed. As a result all individuals were citizens who were equally protected by the laws and equally arbiters of their civil rights and their property.65 Yet Galanti recognized an inherent weakness in their political system: "The spirit of independence and liberty of many republics created inevitable factions among the leaders and the operations of government were slow."66 The system of councils which made up each Italic nation was the key to their defeat by the Romans.67 While the object of Roman government had not been the happiness of its citizens, Galanti states, it had created a far stronger and more powerful political unit.6 In comparison, the separate republics, each with their own laws, of the more virtuous Samnite nation, were united solely by the war council which Rogadei had described.69

Although Galanti believed that the kind of government of each separate republic must be hailed as "the greatest work of civil knowledge," he recognized that the independence of each republic had brought weakness to the national confederation of the Samnites,70 which led to their defeat by the Ro- mans.71 These divisions within the Samnite nation most obviously echoed the

political weakness, created by jurisdictional privileges of the barons and by the

impotence of royal authority, which existed within the modern Kingdom. While

confirming that for the Italic peoples in general "nothing was then more mon- strous than government by one man," Galanti argued that it was the lack of an authoritative center which had determined their defeat by the Romans.72 It was the lack of a similar authority which was preventing the Bourbon monarchy from overriding the jurisdictional privileges of the feudal barons.

Galanti ended his history with two passages on contemporary Italy. The first described a village community through which he had recently passed whose inhabitants worked the land and lived in peaceful accord and where there was neither the vices nor the poverty of the modern city.73 This rustic scene proved to him that the spirit of their ancient predecessors had not been completely

as democratic in the first volume of the acts of the newly established royal academy in Naples in which a new history of the Kingdom, which was to include "the most remote period" of its

history, was proposed, in Atti della Reale Accademia delle scienze e belle lettere di Napoli dalla fondazione sino all'anno MDCCLXXXVII (Naples, 1788), XXXIV-XXXV.

65 Saggio sopra l'antica storia, 220. 66 Ibid., 224. 67 Ibid., 31. 68 Ibid., 223. 69 Ibid., 86. 70 Ibid., 224. 71 Ibid., 86. 72 Ibid., 29. 73 For a comparison of life in a modem city and the salutary life of the Italic tribes, see

ibid., 247.

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lost.74 The continuities of ancient traditions and customs which Galanti had observed between the village people and their Italic ancestors compelled him once again to distinguish his work from the works of antiquarians, writing "This fact is worth more than all the discoveries of a scholar on the etymolo- gies of words."75 In fact Galanti repeated his hopes that his history would have some utility for his own times rather than merely contributing to scholarly literature on pre-Roman antiquity.76 In the second passage he envisaged a strong monarch who would overcome the division of the Kingdom in separate baronial jurisdictions which he compared to the division of the Samnite nation into

independent republics. The encouragement of agriculture, which had been the foundation of the Samnites' strength, would also bring new prosperity to the

Kingdom.77 Galanti similarly projected his own aspirations for modern Neapolitan so-

ciety in a later account of the indigenous peoples of the Kingdom, although in this case Rome plays a more active and malevolent role. The Della descrizione politica e geografica delle due Sicilie, first published in Naples in four volumes between 1786 and 1790, was intended as a study of the natural and demo-

graphic features and of the peoples and governments of the many regions of the

Kingdom.78 However, within the narrative of Galanti's Nuova descrizione, which was funded by the Bourbon government, there was a clear political program.79 Although he recognized that the government had made some effort to resolve the jurisdictional friction between the baronial landowners and the king, Galanti believed that the effective rule of the monarch could only be guaranteed with the weakening of the feudal rights of the barons.

When not describing the effect of the feudal system on contemporary Nea-

politan society, Galanti turned in the historical passages to an age when the

people of the Kingdom had not yet become the victims of the feudal system.80

Since the constitution of the ancient republics, which tied all citizens and united them with an active sentiment of love of liberty and of

patria, was succeeded by feudal government, in which they were re-

74 Ibid., 247-48. 75 Ibid., 248-49. 76 Ibid., 254. 77 Ibid. 78 Della descrizione geografica e politica delle Sicilie, eds. F. Assante and D. Demarco (2

vols.; Naples, 1969), a critical edition which follows mainly the second edition of 1793-94 (see ibid., I, LXXX-LXXXVI).

79 Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 972. See also G. M. Monti, "La feudalita napoletana alla fine del settecento e le 'Relazioni al re' di G. M. Galanti," Studi di storia napoletana in onore di M. Schipa, ed. N. Cortese (Naples, 1926), 531-37.

80 On the consequences of feudal ownership in Campania, see Galanti, Nuova descrizione, II, 243.

654 Melissa Calaresu




garded as beasts of an estate and were governed only for profit by a

particular landowner.81

His use of an idealized historical past highlighted the destruction and corrup- tion which the Romans had brought to the region. For Galanti as for Vico, the seeds of feudalism lay with Rome. When the Romans arrived, Galanti writes, the Samnites "had been the first to prefer destruction to servitude."82 However, despite their long struggle of resistance, the Samnites were eventually put under the "yoke" of the Romans, under a political system in which civic virtue

played no role. What follows in the Descrizione is a long passage on the complexity of

moder society and on the role of luxury in the decline of civic virtue, particularly in the Kingdom of Naples. A political system must be founded on good moral customs and, in his own time, Galanti lamented, government could not succeed as "all of the thoughts of our politicians are turned to wealth and to commerce."83 What had then replaced this good moral foundation was the pur- suit of luxuries in modern times which had "stripped away and abolished every idea of the ancient customs."84 Galanti's critique of moder society and of a feudal system in which the barons exploited their tenants and then spent their

money not on agricultural improvement but on the excesses of the city, led to an idealization of the "ancient customs" of the early inhabitants of the King- dom. In the history of the Kingdom Galanti perceived the Romans as having brought a similar depravity of customs as those found in moder society and the consequent end to these native ancient virtues.85

Galanti described the fate of other regional tribes under the rule of the Romans. "Roman history," he writes, "is nothing but a story of the destruction of nations."86 He described, for example, the fate of the Lucani, who had inhabited the present-day province of Basilicata and who had been allies of the Ro- mans but were then subjugated by them. He emphasized the effect of the Ro- mans' arrival in the loss of the tribe's autonomy in a once prosperous region:

The Romans after having been allies and then enemies of the Lucani finished by being their padroni, as had happened to all the peoples of

Italy. Their history is more or less the same: they governed themselves in confederated Republics, and their cities were large and happy until

81 Ibid., I, 4. 82 Ibid., II, 417. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., II, 418. 85 Ibid., II, 236-37. 86 Ibid., II, 420.

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Melissa Calaresu

they resisted the Romans; but the superior fate of the Romans over- came them and made the regions they inhabited deserted.87

No longer under the rule of their native leaders, the Lucani lost their political autonomy, and this also signaled the end of the liberty and prosperity of the tribes of Italy. And, after the division of Italy by Rome into several administrative regions, Galanti writes,

This new situation brought with it a new government which deprived the cities of the prerogatives which they once enjoyed.... In this way that love ofpatria, that enthusiasm for liberty, and those virtues which had reigned in the preceding centuries and which had encouraged so

many glorious acts were entirely forgotten and extinguished in our

provinces.88

This new political arrangement brought a new system of obligation in which the once autonomous tribes were now subject to foreign and arbitrary rule. It was easy to make the comparison between a similar system based on feudal dues enforced by the invading barbarians after the fall of the Empire.89 The

competing images of the ancient virtue of the Samnites and of the destructive and depraved nature of the Romans served, according to Franco Venturi, as two

opposing markers in the political vision of Galanti.90 They were images through which Galanti expressed his opposition to feudalism.

An alternative and important image of Rome and an analysis of the Samnites are found in the Annali del Regno di Napoli by Francescantonio Grimaldi (1741- 84). Grimaldi, who of the three historians was most influenced by the writings of Vico, expressed a similar sense of continuity between ancient times and the

present state of the Kingdom. This continuity, however, was meant not to ex- tract an exemplary political and cultural model from Samnite society as Galanti had done, but rather to highlight the nature of government in a barbaric society and its relevance to the contemporary jurisdictional problems in the Kingdom of Naples.

87 Ibid., II, 337. 88 Ibid., I, 37. 89 For a detailed semantic analysis of Galanti's association of the Romans with the later

barbarian invaders and the origins of feudalism in the Kingdom, see A. Benevelli Bristow, "The Language of Politics: A Study of Reforms and 'Revolutions' in the Kingdom of Naples in the Late Eighteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., Council for National Academic Awards, Anglia College of Higher Education, 1989), 111-12.

90 Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 962.

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Grimaldi began the Annali in the last years of his life and published the first twelve volumes between 1781 and 1783.91 The list of subscribers to this

work, as Venturi has pointed out, reads "as a true guide to the world of politics and of Neapolitan culture around 1782" and demonstrates the diffusion and

importance of Grimaldi's history.92 Like other reformers, Grimaldi was from a

provincial land-owning family and was educated as a lawyer in the capital. His

principal intellectual concerns were philosophical, and he is frequently contrasted with his older, more practical-minded brother, Domenico, who had written

extensively on agricultural improvement.93 The younger Grimaldi, neverthe-

less, was appointed to an office in the Bourbon government, giving him the

opportunity to take part in actual reform.94 Before the publication of the Annali, Grimaldi was best known for his three-volume, Sopra l'ineguaglianza tra gli uomini, a critique of Rousseau's conception of the natural state, which was influential in political writings in the 1780s.95 Grimaldi's involvement in the intellectual and political culture of the 1780s makes an analysis of the first

chapters of the Annali, on the early peoples of the Kingdom before the foundation of Rome, indispensable to an alternative understanding of the image of Rome in late eighteenth-century Neapolitan historiography.

Grimaldi writes that the object of the Annali del Regno di Napoli is "to

present to the Reader the beginnings and progress of this Nation, with an unin-

terrupted order of facts."9 Like Vico, Grimaldi saw history clearly as a series of connected continuities and divided the history of the Kingdom into three epochs so as to compare one corso with another.97 He begins with "those most ancient and remote times in order to see the origin and state of those people" who had inhabited the region and to understand "the causes, by which they were later reunited in a system, and governed by one leader, which formed the

9' Francescantonio Grimaldi, Annali del Regno di Napoli (16 vols.; Naples, 1781-86). The Annali are divided into six volumes, numbered one to six, of "Epoca I" and ten volumes, numbered one to ten, of "Epoca II." After Grimaldi's death, the last four volumes of "Epoca II" were completed by Giuseppe Cestari and published in Naples between 1783-86. The tone of the Annali changed considerably under Cestari, reflecting more obviously the anti-feudal and anti-clerical debates of the period. On Cestari, see Chiosi, "La tradizione giannoniana," Pietro Giannone e il suo tempo, II, 798-806.

92 Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 587-88. 93 See ibid., 509-25, and ibid., 411-30, respectively. On the two brothers representing,

what Venturi considers, the two sides of the late Neapolitan enlightenment, see Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment, 213; see also Melchiore Delfico, Elogio del Marchese d. Francescantonio Grimaldi (Naples, 1784).

94 Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, 521-22. 95 Francescantonio Grimaldi, Sopra l'ineguaglianza tra gli uomini (3 vols.; Naples, 1779-

80). In the preface of volume VII of the Annali, Cestari writes that with this work Grimaldi showed himself to be "un altro Giambattista Vico," in Annali del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1783), "Epoca II;' VII, iii.

96 Grimaldi, Annali del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1781), "Epoca I," I, 1. 97 Ibid., 4-5.

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Melissa Calaresu

present Kingdom of Naples."98 The early peoples of the Kingdom were at the

beginning of this historical process:

These brutes with human features are linked to the political and moral chain of one of the cultivated and civil nations of Europe: we will see the corsi of its development in history.99

The subtitle of the first volume of the Annali states that it begins with the foundation of Rome; but as Grimaldi explains, the first volume, as an introduction to the other volumes, examines the state of these first peoples who had lived in the Kingdom before Rome's foundation.100 Not only does he, like Vico, use fables as historical sources but, in response to the growing interest in the

history of the earth in this period, he complements them with geological evidence in his reconstruction of the first age of man in the region.'0'

Grimaldi had no illusions about the tribes which lived in the Kingdom immediately before the arrival of the Romans. The Samnites and the other Italic tribes were clearly barbaric, and Grimaldi chided antiquarians looking for the illustrious origins of regional tribes and wrote:

The antiquarians who force themselves to find, in the obscure traditions of the Etruscan science, the light of sound and useful sciences, demonstrate more their zeal for the nation than a commitment to re-

vealing the truth.'02

There was, Grimaldi recognized, very little upon which to base the conjectures of historians of these ancient peoples. It was not simply that there were no memorials but, more importantly, that there was a "lack of those facts worthy to be handed down to posterity, not even under the shadow of fables."'03 Yet this did not prevent Grimaldi from making his own conjectures about "our first barbarians."'04

The barbarism of the Samnites can be identified above all by the nature of their government, which was made evidently clear in the Roman accounts.'05

98 Ibid., 1. 9 Ibid., 21. '00 Ibid., 5-6. 101 Ibid., 14 and 17. Grimaldi was also the author of Descrizione de' tremuoti accaduti

nelle Calabrie nel MDCCLXXXIII, published posthumously in Naples in 1784. The earth- quake in Calabria in 1783 had a significant effect on political writings in Naples. See Augusto Placanica, Illfilosofo e la catastrofe: Un terremoto del Settecento (Turin, 1985).

102 Grimaldi, Annali, "Epoca I," I, 248. 103 Ibid., "Epoca I," II, 7. 104 Ibid., "Epoca I," I, 165. 105 Ibid., 167-68.

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Images ofAncient Rome

Like all governments in barbarous societies, that of the Samnites was defined as a military oligarchy.'0 Grimaldi describes the first leader of the Samnites as a military commander who, having distributed territories among his compan- ions, formed a council from this military order.'07 In time the council became a kind of senate composed of the richest land-owners who were themselves leaders of independent repubblichette.'08 Grimaldi, however, could not disguise the

essentially barbaric character of these councils.

A troop of barbaric, ferocious, violent, and irrational men, guided only by their physical strength, were those who decided the fate of the nation. The most coarse superstition and strength were the foundations of their deliberations.'09

Grimaldi did not doubt that the Samnite peoples formed a nation by their common origins and customs."10 These "natural" bonds were not enough, however, in preventing the inherent weakness of the national council, which was created

by the continuing independence of the small republics within the confederation."' For Grimaldi this kind of government was the definitive characteristic of barbaric societies in history and in the Annali."2

Thus Grimaldi, rather than adopting the Italic model formulated by Genovesi and developed by Galanti, depicts Samnite society as essentially a feudal clientalist society."3 The inherent weakness of barbaric government as described by Grimaldi echoed the problem of overlapping jurisdictional divisions within the modern Neapolitan state. The division of the Samnite nation into separate and competing jurisdictions was the key to their defeat by the Romans. Grimaldi describes the Samnites as:

divided into small contadi, each making itself a centre on its own, the body of the nation was aggrandized with conquests but without in-

creasing its national strength, which being divided, remained always weak.''4

106 Ibid., "Epoca I," II, 10. 107 Ibid., "Epoca I"' I, 179-80. '08 Ibid., 181. '09 Ibid., 185. 10 Ibid., 183-84.

"' Ibid., 185. 112 Ibid., 185-86. 13 Ibid., 179-80. The martial spirit of Samnite society was in part tempered by agricul-

ture, a certain sign of civil life, but even this was also described as essentially a feudal arrangement (ibid., 168-73).

1'4 Ibid., "Epoca I," II, 9.

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Melissa Calaresu

The Romans, on the other hand, possessed a single center upon which all

parts of the nation were dependent, and according to Grimaldi, this was the key to their success as a nation and their progress as a society. 15 The Romans were

unique because "a city constituted the entire nation":

the interests of the peoples of the nation were not divided, the resolu- tions were easier to take and execute, and the government was able to

perfect itself with greater ease.116

In Grimaldi's account Rome does not play the role of the imperialist ogre which had deprived the freedom-loving Samnites of their ancient liberties; in fact it is

given a unique role by having brought the Samnites out of their barbarism with the conquest and their subjugation.17 Grimaldi did not, as Galanti had done, idealize a particular indigenous past from which could be created an alternative model for contemporary Neapolitan government. His account was instead an

attempt to understand the nature and institutions of barbaric, and therefore nec-

essarily feudal, societies. In Grimaldi's account the weakness which the jurisdictional divisions inherent in Samnite government had created reflected con-

temporary concerns for the political consequences of the competing jurisdictional claims of the barons within the moder Kingdom.

At the heart of the reform movement of the 1780s there was the need to

distinguish Neapolitan culture and traditions from the influence of the foreign powers which had governed the Kingdom through history.'18 This led to enqui- ries into the early history of the region before the arrival of the Romans at a

period which was perceived as being the beginning of the destruction of a native culture. The works of Rogadei and Galanti specifically included the pre- Roman history of the Kingdom, and Galanti in particular, used the image of

imperial Rome to contrast the ancient virtue and freedom of the Samnites. Similar interpretations of the Samnites appear in early nineteenth-century works, such as Vincenzo Cuoco's novel of Plato's travels in Italy, Platone in Italia, and Giuseppe Micali's study of Italy before the rise of the Romans.'9 The more directly Vichian interpretation in Grimaldi's history, which avoids the

temptation to idealize the indigenous peoples of the Kingdom, is later echoed

15s Ibid. 116 Ibid., "Epoca I," I, 188. 17 Ibid., 191. See Giarrizzo, Vico, la politica e la storia, 211-13. 18 On the importance of a "natural" or native sovereign for the Kingdom after centuries

of foreign rule, see Galanti, Della descrizione, I, 5. "9 See, for example, Plato's description of the Samnites, in Cuoco, Platone in Italia

[1804], ed. E Nicolini (Bari, 1924), II, 73-81; and Giuseppe Micali, L'ltalia avanti il dominio dei Romani [1811] (Florence, 1826), I, 187-98.

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in the writings of Francesco Mario Pagano on the nature of feudalism.'20 De-

spite Grimaldi's interpretation, the image of a despotic and corrupt Rome re-

sponsible for the subjugation of the virtuous and free peoples of Italy, most

clearly present in the writings of Galanti, remained the dominant model in Italian historiography into the nineteenth century.

Establishing a distinct cultural identity, however, was not the only inspira- tion for the historians of the 1780s. The defining political texts of the late

Neapolitan enlightenment, such as Pagano's Saggi politici and Filangieri's Scienza della legislazione, identified the feudal system as the primary obstacle to reform and to the development of modem civil society in the Kingdom. The

centrality of the feudal problem in political debates was echoed in the historical

writings of the same period. Intellectual traditions critical of Rome, both ancient and modem, and a political tradition in which government was weakened

by feudal divisions made it clear that history and politics were inextricably linked. Neapolitan historians, looking back to the Samnites before the arrival of Rome, could discover few remnants of inscriptions or shards of pottery; but like Galanti they found instead hope for the possibility of a flourishing and autonomous Naples or, like Grimaldi, a greater understanding of the problems which had determined its history and development.

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

'20 For a discussion of Pagano's analysis in relation to barbaric society in the Saggi politici (2 vols., Naples, 1783-85), see my dissertation (cited n. 2 above), ch. 5.

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Documents

Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan Historiography