John Scaliger

“ Scaliger learned to appreciate Casaubon better, and called him ‘the most learned man in Europe,’ and owned that he was a better Greek scholar than himself.
Casaubon yearned to leave Geneva; his salary was miserable, the cost of living was high, he had little access to books, and his precious time was intruded upon by injudicious friends. He was French by descent, and always regarded himself as a Frenchman until he became a naturalised Englishman. ”

“ Scaliger was so completely deceived, that he afterwards cited these verses, as lines from the play of Harpace, by Q. Trabea, in the first edition of his Commentary on Varro’s Dialogues De Re Rustica, in order to illustrate some obscure expression of his author—“Quis enim,” says he, “tam aversus a Musis, tamque humanitatis expers, qui horum publicatione offendatur.” Muretus, not content with this malicious trick, afterwards sent him some other verses, to which he affixed the name of Attius, expressing, but more diffusely, the same idea. ”

“ On the death of his father in 1558 the younger Scaliger went to Paris to study Greek under Turnebus. Turnebus, though a learned man, was a tedious teacher: he advanced too slowly to suit the long and rapid strides in scholarship which his pupil was prepared to take. ”

“ SCALIGER, Julius Cæsar, was one of the ablest of those energetic but unsettled spirits, who during the fifteenth century were at once the effect and the cause of the revival of letters in Italy. The story of his life has been told in two different ways. By his own and his son's account, he was descended from the Scaligeri, the ancient princes of Verona, and was born in 1484, in the castle di Riva, on the banks of the lake di Garda. ”

“ Scaliger, in his next edition of Varro, published them, along with the former lines, as fragments from the Œnomaus, a tragedy by Attius, and a plagiarism from Trabea—observing, at the end of his note, “Fortasse de hoc nimis.” Muretus said nothing for two years; but, at the end of that period, he published a volume of his own Latin poems, and, along with them, under the title Afficta Trabeæ, both sets of verses which [pg 175] he had thus palmed on Scaliger for undoubted remnants of antiquity. ”

“ M. de Bourousse de Laffore’s Etude sur Jules César de Lescale (Agen, 1860) and M. Magen’s Documents sur Julius Caesar Scaliger et sa famille (Agen, 1873) add important details for the lives of both father and son. The lives by Charles Nisard—that of Julius in Les Gladiateurs de la républigue des lettres, and that of Joseph in Le Triumvirat littéraire au seiziéme siècle—are equally unworthy of their author and their subjects. Julius is simply held up to ridicule, while the life of Joseph is almost wholly based on the book of Scioppius and the Scaligerana. ”

“ This he printed in 1606 in his Thesaurus temporum, in which he collected, restored and arranged every chronological relic extant in Greek or Latin. When in 1590 Lipsius retired from Leiden, the university and its protectors, the states-general of Holland and the prince of Orange, resolved to obtain Scaliger as his successor. He declined their offer. He hated lecturing, and there were those among his friends who erroneously believed that with the success of Henry IV. learning would flourish, and Protestantism be no bar to advancement. ”

“ Scaliger, De Versibus Comicis. Taubman died the year after the appearance of this edition: Its fame, however, survived him, and not only retrieved his character, which had been somewhat sullied by the bad ink and dirty paper of the former edition, but completely eclipsed the classical reputation of Pareus. Envious of the renown of his rivals, that scholar obtained an opportunity of inspecting the MSS. which had been collated by Taubman and Gruterus. These he now compared more minutely than his predecessors had done, and published the fruits of his labour at Neustadt, in 1617. ”

“ XXIII (1935) , pp. 23-4, 102-5, and Ausonius, Opuscula, ed. Rudolphus Peiper, Leipzig, 1886, p. 428. The younger Scaliger strongly condemns this epigram on the same grounds: Joseph Scaliger, Ausoniarum lectionum libri ii, 2.20, Heidelberg, 1688, p. 204.
[14] 3.66
[15] Epig. libri tres, ad D. Mariam Neville, 2.211. Epigrammata, Amsterdam, 1647, p. 47. Translated by Thomas Harvey, John Owen's Latin Epigrams, London, 1677, p. 36: "Sith th' Harps discording Strings concording be, / Is't not a shame [Pg 35] for men to disagree?" ”

“ Again, Scaliger, though he has no more right to arrogate Reason and Nature as on his side than the rest of his school, possesses, like all of the best of them, a certain sturdy prima facie common-sense. |His solid merits.| It is this which 79dictates his theory of dramatic verisimilitude; this which palliates some of his Homeric and other blasphemies. Though uncompromisingly moral, and by no means illogical (when you have once granted his bundle of postulates) , he is not in the least metaphysical. ”

“ His life was a series of literary quarrels; and in the whole annals of literary polemics, there are none with which, for acrimony, virulence, and ferocity of vituperation, these quarrels may not compete. And hence, although there is hardly a subject, literary, antiquarian, philological, or critical, on which he has not written, and (for his age) written well, there are few, nevertheless, who have exercised less influence upon contemporary opinion. Scaliger spoke thirteen languages, in the study of which Baillet [98] says he never used either a dictionary or a grammar. ”

“ We may venture indeed to suspect that Scaliger “had more wit than to be here.” One may frequently differ with him; but he seldom runs mad on mere theory. It is he, for instance, who, while, as we have seen, he lays down uncompromisingly that the material of poetry is verse, instances the Æthiopica as a perfect epic. Instead of confusing poetry and learning, as some have done, he holds the much more sensible position that learning is useful to a poet. He takes the hard-and-fast ethical view of the ends both of tragedy and of all poetry, and he believes firmly in the type. ”

“ A celebrity as a linguist equally distinguished, and even more unamiable, than Postel’s, is that of his countryman and contemporary, the younger of the two Scaligers.
Joseph Justus Scaliger was born at Agen in 1544, and made his school studies at Bordeaux, where he was only remarkable for his exceeding dulness, having spent three years in a fruitless, though painfully laborious, attempt to master the first rudiments of the Latin language. ”

“ Pattison the type of the real greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us, with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten; but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. ”

“ Joseph Scaliger embraced the Reformed religion in 1562, and in the following year became domestic tutor in a noble family named Roche-Pozay. In this connexion he was very fortunate: his patron was a generous and discerning man, by whose liberality he was enabled to visit the principal Universities of France and Germany. He studied theology at Geneva under Beza, and shortly after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572, was invited to accept the chair of philosophy in the University of that city: this he declined, but it appears that he did give lectures there in 1578. ”

“ The world has been for some time pretty well satisfied that these two illustrious scholars were mere impostors in the claim they made, that Joseph Scaliger's letter to Janus Dousa was a very impudent affair. ”

“ But that the reproach of over-much credulity may not lie upon Cardan alone, Scaliger, who lay at catch with him to take him tripping wherever he could, cavils not with any thing in the whole narration but the bigness of wings and the littleness of the body ”

“ Vieta, the first man of his time, who answered him, had such regard for his opponent as made him conceal Scaliger's name. Not that he is very respectful in his manner of proceeding: the following dry quiz on his opponent's logic must have been very cutting, being true. "In grammaticis, dare navibus Austros, et dare naves Austris, sunt æque significantia. Sed in Geometricis, aliud est adsumpsisse circulum BCD non esse majorem triginta sex segmentis BCDF, aliud circulo BCD non esse majora triginta sex segmenta BCDF. Illa adsumptiuncula vera est, hæc falsa." ”

“ They are employed upon grammatical and settled languages, whose construction contributes so much to perspicuity, that Homer has fewer passages unintelligible than Chaucer. The words have not only a known regimen, but invariable quantities, which direct and confine the choice. There are commonly more manuscripts than one; and they do not often conspire in the same mistakes. Yet Scaliger could confess to Salmasius how little satisfaction his emendations gave him: "Illudunt nobis conjecturæ nostræ, quarum nos pudet, posteaquam in meliores codices incidimus." ”

“ After completing his early education at Leiden, he entered the university of that city, and in 1608 took the degree of master of arts. By the advice of Scaliger he studied Oriental languages whilst taking his course of theology. He afterwards travelled in England, France, Italy and Germany, forming connexions with learned men, and availing himself of the information which they communicated. During his stay at Paris he contracted a friendship with Casaubon, which lasted during his life, and also took lessons in Arabic from an Egyptian, Joseph Barbatus, otherwise called Abu-dakni. ”

“ That Scaliger was profoundly learned and of immense acquirement, will not be denied; that it is impossible to push things farther than he has, will not now be asserted, “because,” says Niceron, “it has been done by many.” Unfortunately, this extravagant admiration contributed, no doubt, by feeding his vanity, to exacerbate that intolerably scurrilous and malignant humour, the worst part of his character, which he inherited, with his great talents, from his remarkable father. ”

“ Scaliger called him “a poverty-stricken talent, slow in operation; his work is very commonplace; he aped his father.” What is true in this remark lies partly in the fact that scholarship in Aldo’s days had flown beyond 626 the Alps, where a new growth of erudition, on a basis different from that of the Italian Renaissance, had begun.
See Renouard’s Annales de l’imprimerie des Aldes (Paris, 1834) ; Didot’s Alde Manuce (Paris, 1873) ; Omont’s Catalogue of Aldine publications (Paris, 1892) .
(J. A. S.)
MANWARING, ROBERT, English 18th-century furniture designer and cabinet maker. ”

“ Besides the direct influence of the Italian critics, another influence contributed its share to the sum of critical ideas which French classicism owes to the Italian Renaissance. This was the tradition of Scaliger, carried on by the Dutch scholars Heinsius and Vossius. Daniel Heinsius was the pupil of Joseph Scaliger, the illustrious son of the author of the Poetics; and through Heinsius the dramatic theories of the elder Scaliger influenced classical tragedy in France. ”

“ Such, too, was the Christian Anacreon of Patrignanus, another Jesuit, who preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that the Graecian poet had dedicated to festivity and love.
His metre has frequently been adopted by the modern Latin poets; and Scaliger, Taubman, Barthius, and others, have shown that it is by no means uncongenial with that language. The Anacreontics of Scaliger, however, scarcely deserve the name; as they glitter all over with conceits, and, though often elegant, are always labored. ”

“ Scaliger’s most important and most original work is that ‘De Emendatione Temporum, 1583,’ which merits especial praise, as being the first attempt to produce a system of chronology. It contains a vast quantity of learning, in the collection of which the author was greatly assisted by his knowledge of the Oriental languages, as well as of Greek and Latin. That he is often in error is, in this instance, hardly a blemish upon his merited fame: in so vast 37an untrodden field it was impossible to avoid mistakes. ”

“ But despite his subservience to Scaliger, he is not afraid to express his independence of the ancients. We are not, he says, entirely bound to their laws, especially in the number -206-of actors on the stage, which according to classic usage never exceeded three; for nowadays, notwithstanding the counsels of Aristotle and Horace, an audience has not the patience to be satisfied with only two or three persons at one time. ”

“ This is that epoch, called that of Maharat, or Mercy, which Scaliger and Ludolf have called the æra of grace. Scaliger says, he has toiled much before he found out what it was; and I doubt his toil has not been blessed with all the success we could wish. That it is not the æra of redemption, is plain upon a hundred trials, nor of the conversion, nor of Dioclesian. What it alludes to we know not, but it is first quoted in the Abyssinian history in this reign, and answers to the year 1348 of Christ ”

“ He died at Sorb on the 10th of September 1639. Meursius was the author of classical editions and treatises, many of which are printed in J. F. Gronovius’s Thesaurus antiquitatum graecarum. Their lack of arrangement detracts from their value, but they are a storehouse of information, and Meursius does not deserve the epithets of “pedant” and “ignoramus” which Scaliger applied to him. Meursius also wrote on the troubles in the Netherlands and the history of Denmark. ”

“ Thus may Aristotle be made out, when he affirmeth the right claw of Crabs and Lobsters is biggest, if we take the right for the most vigorous side, and not regard the relative situation: for the one is generally bigger then the other, yet not alwayes upon the same side. So may it be verified what is delivered by Scaliger in his Comment, that Palsies do oftnest happen upon the left side, if understood in this sense; the most vigorous part protecting it self, and protruding the matter upon the weaker and less resistive side. ”