Vico said history doesn't march forward — it loops through the same three ages

In The New Science (1725), Giambattista Vico argued every civilization cycles through an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men, before collapsing back into a new age of gods — a pattern he called corsi e ricorsi. He also claimed we can only truly know what we ourselves have made, so history and mathematics are more knowable to us than nature, which only God made. It's one of the first attempts at building history into its own rigorous science.

— Giambattista Vico, The New Science — 1725 (Scienza Nuova)
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