Joseph Justus Scaliger

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The proudest nation on earth might be more proud of a seat of learning, founded thus amidst carnage and tears, whence so much of profound learning and brilliant literature had already been diffused. The classical labours of Joseph Scaliger, Heinsius father and son the elder Dousa, almost as famous with his pen in Latin poetry as his sword had made him in the vernacular chronicle ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is wronged by being coupled with Joseph Scaliger, as the two great instances of men of letters who have come into geometry to help the mathematicians out of their difficulty. I have never seen Scaliger's quadrature, [201] except in the answers of Adrianus Romanus, [202] Vieta and Clavius, and in the extracts of Kastner. [203] Scaliger had no right to such strong opponents: Erasmus or Bentley might just as well have tried the problem, and either would have done much better in any twenty minutes of his life. ”

“ Casaubon was the last of the great scholars of the sixteenth century. Joseph Scaliger, who, especially in his recorded conversation, was very sparing of praise, says expressly, “Casaubon is the most learned man now living.” It is not impossible that he meant to except himself; which would by no means be unjust, if we take in the whole range of erudition; but in the exactly critical knowledge of the Greek language, Casaubon had not even a rival in Scaliger. ”

“ A determined attempt must be made, if not to answer his criticisms, or to disprove his statements, yet to attack him as a man, and to destroy his reputation. This was no easy task, for his moral character was absolutely spotless.
After several scurrilous attacks by the Jesuit party, in which coarseness and violence were more conspicuous than ability, in 1607 a new and more successful attempt was made. Scaliger’s weak point was his pride. In 1594, in an evil hour for his happiness and his reputation, he published his Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae et J. C. Scaligeri vita. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ Whatever the case as to Julius, Joseph had undoubtedly believed himself a prince of Verona, and in his Epistola had put forth with the most perfect good faith, and without inquiry, all that he had heard from his father. He immediately wrote a reply to Scioppius, entitled Confutatio fabulae Burdonum. It is written, for Scaliger, with unusual moderation and good taste, but perhaps for that very reason had not the success which its author wished and even expected. In the opinion of the highest authority, Mark Pattison, “as a refutation of Scioppius it is most complete” ”

“ Every piece of scandal which could be raked together respecting Scaliger or his family is to be found there. The author professes to point out five hundred lies in the Epistola de vetustate of Scaliger, but the main argument of the book is to show the falsity of his pretensions to be of the family of La Scala, and of the narrative of his father’s early life. ”

“ Joseph Scaliger, who assisted the lord of Candale, bishop of Aire, to translate the Hermes, or Mercury Trismegistus, doubts not that the original was Egyptian. Add to these reasons that it is not very probable that a Greek would have addressed himself so often to Thaut. It is not natural for us to address ourselves to strangers with so much warm-heartedness; at least, we see no example of it in antiquity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Scaligers are well known, not only as having held the lordship of Verona for some generations, but also as having been among the friends of Dante in his exile, no mean reputation in itself; and, at a later period, as taking very high rank among the first scholars of their day. To which of them the passage above properly belongs—whether to Can Grande, or his brother Bartolommeo, or even his father Alberto, commentators are by no means agreed. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Susanna endured a severe fight, more severe than that of Joseph. He, a man, contended with one woman; but Susanna, a weak woman, had to contend with two men, and was a spectacle to men and to angels. The slander against her fidelity to her marriage-vow, the fear of death, her condemnation by all the people, the abhorrence of her husband and relations, the tears of her servants, the grief of all her household, she foresaw all this, and yet nothing could shake her fortitude.”
The way to preserve chastity. Susanna’s example shows us how we ought to act when tempted to sin against holy purity. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I choose, then, to take the course that accords with the language of the Constitution and with our interpretation of it through the first half of this century. I reject the principle, aptly described and faithfully followed in Justice O'CONNOR's dissent, that a traditional procedure of our society becomes unconstitutional whenever the Members of this Court "lose . . . confidence" in it, post, at 63. And like Justice Cardozo in Snyder, I affirm that no procedure firmly rooted in the practices of our people can be so "fundamentally unfair" as to deny due process of law. ”