The fictive persons of a serious poem: on Vico’s anthropology on “literature”

The present essay will explore legal areas of Giambattista Vico’s thought from a rhetorical and literary perspective. In particular, the essay will focus on the idea of «person» as it is investigated in De uno and New Science. The euristic quality of the notion of fictio iuris will be identified as generative core of the imaginative universal theory. The notion of legal person, made to stand for a whole collectivity, is a case in point. It will also be stressed the crucial role Vico awards to fictio iuris in the process that allowed ancient Roman law to tame violence while at the same time complying with the sacredness of its form. Vico’s conclusions are supported by modern juridical scholarship, which collocates the birth of fictio as part of the development of sacrificial practice in symbolic direction. The tie linking fictio to civics is thus configured as poietic field open to verisimilitude, an horizon of possibilities that can be narrated and that humans will adopt in their infancy and employ through the long course of centuries.