Joseph Justus Scaliger

Joseph Justus Scaliger (August 5, 1540–January 21, 1609) was a French religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and Ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Ancient Egyptian history.

He was born at Agen. When he was twelve years old, he was sent to the College of Guienne in Bordeaux. An outbreak of the plague in 1555 caused the boy to return home, and for the next few years Joseph was his father's constant companion and amanuensis. The composition of Latin verse was the chief amusement of his father Julius, and he would daily dictate to his son between eighty and a hundred lines, and sometimes even more. Joseph was also required each day to write a Latin theme or declamation. He learned from his father to be not only a scholar, but also an acute observer, aiming not so much at correcting texts as at historical criticism.

He spent four years at the University of Paris, where he began the study of Greek. He read Homer in twenty-one days, and then went through all the other Greek poets, orators and historians. From Greek, he proceeded to attack Hebrew, and then Arabic; of both he acquired a respectable knowledge. Then Scaliger went to Rome. After visiting a large part of Italy, he moved on to England and Scotland. He was disappointed in finding only few Greek manuscripts and few learned men there. In the course of his travels he had become a Protestant. In 1570 he proceeded to Valence to study jurisprudence. Here he remained three years, profiting not only by the lectures but even more by the library, which filled no fewer than seven or eight rooms and included five hundred manuscripts. The massacre of St Bartholomew made Scaliger flee, together with other Huguenots, for Geneva, where he was appointed a professor in the academy. He lectured on Aristotle and Cicero to much satisfaction for the students, but not appreciating it himself. He hated lecturing; and in 1574 he returned to France. It was during this period of his life (1575-1577) that he composed and published his books of historical criticism. His editions of the Catalecta, of Festus, of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius, are the work of a man determined to discover the real meaning and force of his author. He was the first to lay down and apply sound rules of criticism and emendation, and to change textual criticism from a series of haphazard guesses into a "rational procedure subject to fixed laws".

But these works, while proving Scaliger's right to the foremost place among his contemporaries as Latin scholar and critic, did not go beyond mere scholarship. It was reserved for his edition of Manilius (1579), and his De emendatione temporum (1583), to revolutionize received ideas of ancient chronology—to show that ancient history is not confined to that of the Greeks and Romans, but also comprises that of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, neglected, and that of the Jews, treated as a thing apart; and that the historical narratives and fragments of each of these, and their several systems of chronology, must be critically compared. It was this innovation that distinguished Scalinger from contemporary scholars. In Manilius Scaliger investigates ancient systems of determining epochs, calendars and computations of time. Applying the work of modern scientists, he reveals the principles behind these systems. In the remaining twenty-four years of his life he expanded on his work in the De emendatione. He succeeded in reconstructing the lost Chronicle of Eusebius—one of the most valuable ancient documents for ancient chronology. This he printed in 1606 in his Thesaurus temporum, in which he collected, restored, and arranged every chronological relic extant in Greek or Latin.

Midway through 1593 he set out for the Netherlands, where he would pass the remaining thirteen years of his life, never returning to France. During the first seven years of his residence at Leiden his reputation was at its highest point. His literary judgement was unquestioned. From his throne he ruled the learned world. At the same time, Scaliger had made numerous enemies. He hated ignorance, but he hated still more half-learning, and most of all dishonesty in argument or in quotation. His pungent sarcasm soon reached the ears of the persons who were its object, and his pen was not less bitter than his tongue. He was conscious of his power, and not always sufficiently cautious or sufficiently gentle in its exercise. Nor was he always right. Sometimes he misunderstood the astronomical science of the ancients. And he was no mathematician.

But his enemies were not merely those whose hostility he had excited by the violence of his language. The results of his method of historical criticism threatened the Catholic controversialists and the authenticity of many of the documents on which they relied. The Jesuits, who aspired to be the source of all scholarship and criticism, saw the authority of Scaliger as a formidable barrier to their claims. Scaliger was known to be an irreconcilable Protestant. As long as his intellectual supremacy was unquestioned, the Protestants had the advantage in learning and scholarship. His enemies therefore aimed, 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 strong.

In 1594 Scaliger had published his Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae et JC Scaligeri vita. In 1601 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits published his Scaliger hypototimaeus ("The Supposititious Scaliger"), with all the power of his accomplished sarcasm. Every piece of scandal which could be raked together concerning 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. To Scaliger the blow was crushing. He immediately wrote a reply to Scioppius, entitled Confutatio fabulae Burdonum. Scaliger undoubtedly shows that Scioppius committed more blunders than he corrected, that his book literally bristles with pure lies and baseless calumnies; but he does not succeed in adducing a single proof either of his father's descent from the La Scala family. But whether complete or not, the Confutatio had no success; the attack of the Jesuits was successful, far more so than they could possibly have hoped. Scioppius was wont to boast that his book had killed Scaliger. It certainly embittered the few remaining months of his life, and the mortification which he suffered may have shortened his days. The Confutatio was his last work. Five months after it appeared, in 1609, he died. In his will Scaliger bequeathed his renowned collection of manuscripts and books to Leiden University Library.