New ScienceBy: Giambattista Vico Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668 1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and