 In addition to his account of the origins and history of civil society developed in The New Science, Vico also advances a highly original thesis about the origin and character of Homeric poetry, which he refers to as “The Discovery of the New Homer.” Vico observes that the “vulgar feelings and vulgar customs provide the poets with their proper materials” (“Discovery of the True Homer,” §781, p.301), and, given that in the age of heroes these customs constituted a “savage” and “unreasonable” state of human nature, the poetry of Homer cannot be the esoteric wisdom or creative act of a single individual, as scholars have assumed, but represents the imaginative universals of the Greek people themselves. Homeric poetry thus contains the “models or ideal portraits” which form the mental dictionary of the Ancients, and explains the place Vico assigns to Homer in the frontispiece where his statue represents the origins of human society in poetic wisdom. Vico thus applies his doctrine of the imaginative universal to the case of Homer and concludes that though it “marks a famous epoch in history it never in the world took place.” The historical Homer was “quite simply a man of the people” (“Discovery of the True Homer, §806, p.308) and quite distinct from the ostensible author of the Odyssey and Iliad who was actually a ”purely ideal poet who never existed in the world of nature...but was an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song“ (”Discovery of the True Homer, §873, p.323).