Those Limbs We Admire
Anthony Grafton
- BuyA Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ ‘Germania’ from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher Krebs
Norton, 303 pp, £18.99, June 2011, ISBN 978 0 393 06265 6
Giambattista Vico knew that history began with the giants: the primitive men and women who lived after the universal Flood, and invented myth and poetry. More important, he knew why they had become so immense. The Jews, God’s holy people, had kept themselves cleanly, in accordance with divine commands, and had achieved only ordinary stature. But non-Jewish babies had played with their own urine and faeces. And these had a great fertilising power, as anyone could see by planting crops where an army had made camp. No wonder, then, that giants had stalked the drying earth after the Flood, amid the terrifying cracks of thunder and bolts of lightning that inspired them to imagine the pagan gods.
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Vol. 33 No. 14 · 14 July 2011 » Anthony Grafton » Those Limbs We Admire
pages 15-16 | 3679 words