Joseph Justus Scaliger

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Joseph Justus Scaliger

Joseph Justus Scaliger or Joseph Juste Scaliger (born August 5, 1540 in Agen , today Département Lot-et-Garonne ; †  January 21, 1609 in Leiden ) was the tenth child and the third son of Julius Caesar Scaliger and Andiette de Roques Lobejac . He is considered one of the greatest scholars of the second half of the 16th century .

youth

At the age of 12 Scaliger was sent together with two younger brothers to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux , which was under the direction of Jean Gélida (1493-1556) at the time. A plague epidemic forced them to return to Agen in 1555, where Joseph was his father's constant companion and secretary for the next few years. His main pastime in his later years was the writing of Latin verses, of which he dictated 80 to 100 lines, sometimes more, to his son every day. Joseph was also asked every day to write down a subject or a declamation in Latin, but on the other hand seems to have been left to his own devices in other respects. However, his father's company was worth more to him than any instruction. He learned from him not only to be a scholar, but more: a precise observer who does not lose touch with reality, who does not exhaust himself in correct grammar, but sets the foundations of science as his goal.

After the death of his father in 1558 he went to the University of Paris for four years , where he began to study the Greek language with Adrianus Turnebus , which he broke off after two months because he had come to the opinion that he was from could not benefit from the lectures of the greatest scholar in the field in his day - he went on to teach himself . He read Homer in 21 days, followed by a large part of the other Greek poets, speakers and historians. According to his progress, he put together a grammar himself . From Greek, at the suggestion of Guillaume Postel, he switched to Hebrew , then to Arabic : in both fields he gained remarkable knowledge, but without attaining the mastery he had in Latin and Greek. In 1562 Scaliger converted to Protestantism .

Chastaigner's companion

At that time, in the Greek language, Jean Dorat was considered to be of equal value as a scholar next to Turnebus. As a teacher he is said to have been more talented. Scaliger owes his point of reference for the next 30 years to him. In 1563 Dorat recommended him to travel with Louis de Chastaigner , the young lord of La Roche Pozay, from whom a close friendship developed that lasted until Louis' death in 1595. The travelers first went to Rome , where they met Muretus (Marc Antoine Muret), who was a friend of Julius Caesar Scaliger during his time in Bordeaux and Toulouse and had also visited him several times in Agen. Muretus soon recognized Scaliger's abilities and introduced him to important men of the time.

After Louis and Joseph had toured a large part of Italy, they went to England and Scotland , probably also visiting La Roche Pozay on the journey there, since Scaliger's foreword to his first book Conjectanea in Varronem was signed here in December 1564. Joseph got an unfavorable impression from the English, he did not understand their nature and felt treated inhospitable. He was disappointed in the small number of Greek manuscripts and people who seemed to him well educated. He came into close contact with Richard Thomson and other English personalities only years later.

After returning to France, he spent three years with the Chastaigner family in their castles in the Poitou . In 1570 he accepted the invitation of Jacques Cujas and went to Valence to study law with the eminent lawyer. He stayed for three years, during which he benefited not only from Cujas' lectures, but above all from his library, which extended over many rooms and comprised 500 manuscripts.

The horrors of Bartholomew's Night in 1572 - at that time he accompanied the Bishop of Valence on an embassy to Poland - led him, like many other Huguenots , to move to Geneva , where he was welcomed with open arms. He was appointed professor at the academy, gave lectures on the Organon of Aristotle and Ciceros De finibus , much to the satisfaction of his students, but less for himself: he hated lecturing as well as the intrusiveness of the fanatical preachers - he returned in 1574 France back, and settled with Chastaigner for the next 20 years.

The Lettres françaises inédites de Joseph Scaliger , edited by Philippe Tamizey de Larroque (Agen 1881), provide information about his life during these years . During the religious war he led an unsteady life in the Poitou and Limousin . Occasionally deployed as a guard, at least once in the field against the Catholic League , without access to libraries, often even separated from his own books, his life during this time seems to have been unsuitable for study. After all, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was free of financial worries.

Nevertheless, he presents a new, revolutionary editing technique in his publications from this period. His editions of the Catalecta (1575) by Sextus Pompeius Festus (1575), the works of Catullus , Tibullus and Properz (1577) show the examination of the actual meaning and power of the respective author. He was the first to lay down and apply well-founded rules for criticism and emendation , and instead of a series of arbitrary assumptions, developed a real textual criticism in the form of a "rational approach based on fixed laws" ( Mark Pattison ).

Scaliger was one of the most important contemporary Latin scholars, and his edition of Marcus Manilius (1579) and his De emendatione temporum (1583) expanded the scope of historical science considerably: they showed that ancient history is not limited to Greeks and Romans, but also to the Persians include the Babylonians and Egyptians , who had previously been neglected as completely worthless, or the Israelites , who were previously misunderstood , and that their historical narratives, fragments and chronologies must be critically compared with one another in order to obtain correct and generally valid results. His Manilius commentary is a treatise on ancient astronomy and forms an introduction to De emendatione temporum , in which, in the light of modern and Copernican science, he saw the old system as the epoch, the calendar and the computing technology of time.

In the remaining 24 years of his life, he expanded and corrected the basis that he had laid out in the De emendatione . With unbelievable patience, sometimes with a cheerful audacity of guesswork that is almost ingenious itself, he succeeded in reconstructing the lost chronicle of Eusebius , one of the most valuable relics of antiquity and of the greatest value for the chronology of that time. He printed them in 1606 in his Thesaurus temporum , in which he collected, restored and arranged every relic serving chronology in Greek or Latin.

The chronologies, named after his father or simply after the current Julian calendar , go back to these works : those of the Julian period and that of the Julian date .

At the University of Leiden

Joseph Justus Scaliger
Mesolabe , 1594

When Justus Lipsius retired from his chair in 1590, the University of Leiden and its protectors, the Dutch General Council and the Prince of Orange , decided to appoint Scaliger as his successor - which he rejected, however, as he continued to oppose lectures and also - like some His friends too - firmly believed that after the success of Henry IV in France, research would flourish and Protestantism would no longer be an obstacle. A year later, the invitation was renewed in a most flattering way: Scaliger was not obliged to give lectures, the university only wanted his presence, he was in control of his time in every respect. Scaliger temporarily accepted this offer, and in mid-1593 he set off for the Netherlands, where he spent the remaining 13 years of his life, never to return to France. The reception in Leiden offered everything he could wish for: a handsome income, the greatest possible consideration and recognition as Prince of Verona , according to the origin that his father claimed for himself. In the middle between The Hague and Amsterdam , he was able to take advantage of the best society in both cities in addition to the learned circles in Leiden, especially since Scaliger was not a bookworm, but proud of his social contacts and a good narrator.

In the first seven years of his stay in Leiden, his reputation was at its peak. His literary leadership role was beyond question, from his Leiden throne he ruled the world of scholarship, a word out of his mouth could make or break careers, and he was surrounded by young men eager to hear and talk to him to benefit. He encouraged Hugo Grotius to publish Martianus Capella , although he was only 16 years old; he mourned the early death of the younger Dom like that of a beloved son; Daniel Heinsius , his preferred student, became his closest friend. However, Scaliger also had a number of enemies. He hated ignorance, even more half-knowledge, but most of all dishonesty in argumentation and quotes. Honest and honest himself through and through, he showed no tolerance for the insincere argument and misrepresentation of facts by those who wrote to support a theory or to defend an ill-founded cause. His sharp sarcasm was soon revealed to those he was referring to, and his pen was no gentler than his tongue. He reminds of his father and his arrogant manner towards those he disdained or hated - and he disdained and hated all who disagreed with him. He was aware of his power and was not careful or kind enough in his utterances. He trusted his memory too much, but it occasionally failed him. His corrections, often successful, were sometimes absurd. In establishing the foundations of ancient chronology, he relied several times on unfounded, sometimes even absurd hypotheses, often on an incomplete conclusion. Occasionally he misunderstood ancient astronomy, occasionally that of Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe . And he wasn't a mathematician.

The fall

But his opponents were not just those whose errors he had exposed and whose enmity he had aroused by the violence of his utterances. The results of its system of historical criticism ran counter to Catholicism and the credibility of many of the documents on which it had become accustomed to rely. The Jesuits , aspiring to be the source of all scholarship, noticed that the scriptures and the authority of Scaliger were the greatest obstacles in their endeavors. Muretus declared the strictest orthodoxy in the later part of his life , Lipsius had reconciled himself with the Roman Church, Isaac Casaubon was viewed as wavering, only Scaliger was viewed as a hopeless case, and as long as his sovereignty was out of question, the Protestants carried the victory in research and Teaching of it. A determined effort had to be made, if not at answering his criticism or refuting his testimony, then at destroying his reputation - no easy task, especially since his morale and character were absolutely spotless.

After a few bizarre attacks by the Jesuit party, a new and successful attack was launched in 1607. Scaliger's weak point was his pride. In 1594 he published his Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae et JC Scaligeri vita . In 1601 Gaspar Scioppius , at the time in the service of the Jesuits, published his Scaliger hypobolimaeus ( The Scaliger , which was placed under it ), a perfectly written quarto of more than a hundred pages. In a sarcastic style, Scioppius presented all discoverable offenses about Scaliger and his family. The author claims to point 500 lies in Scaliger's Epistola de vetustate , but then essentially states that, contrary to his presumptuousness and contrary to his father's early reports, Scaliger does not belong to the della Scala family . “There can be no stronger evidence,” says Mark Pattison, “of the impression produced by this powerful philippika devoted to defamation of an individual than that she was the source from which the biography of Scaliger, like her, was is in our biographical collections today, is mainly curdled. "

For Scaliger the shock was devastating. In his Epistole, in good faith and without questioning, he reproduced everything that he had heard from his father. He immediately wrote an answer to Scioppius, called Confutatio fabulae Burdonum , in an unusually moderate tone for Scaliger's standards , but it did not produce the desired success.

In his answer, Scaliger undoubtedly states that Scioppius is botching more than he is correcting, that his book is bursting with lies and slander. However, he cannot produce any proof of his father's ancestry or any event that occurred in his family prior to his arrival in Agen. Nor does he even attempt to refute the crucial point that Scioppius had established, namely that Guglielmo, the last Prince of Verona had no son Niccolò (or any other son) who could have been Julius' alleged grandfather.

Complete or not, the Confutatio was unsuccessful, and the Jesuit attack was victorious beyond all expectation. Scioppius boasted that his book had killed Scaliger.

The Confutatio was Scaliger's last work. Five months after its publication, on January 21, 1609, at 4 a.m., he died in Heinsius' arms.

An institute of the Leiden University Library has been named after him (Scaliger Institute) since 2000 .

Sources

The main sources on Julius Scaliger's life are the letters his son edited and published in 1620 by Philippe Jacques de Maussac (1590–1650) under the title Scaligerana , as well as his own writings full of autobiographical material.

Jules de Bourousse de Laffores Etude sur Jules César de Lescale (Agen 1860) and Adolphe Magens Documents sur Julius Caesar Scaliger et sa famille (Agen 1873) add important details about the life of father and son. Charles Nisard's biographies ( Julius et Les Gladiateurs de la république des lettres and Le Triumvirat littéraire au seizième siècle ) do not do justice to their subject and object: Julius is simply ridiculed, Joseph's life is described using Scioppius' book and the Scaligerana . Jacob Bernays (1855) wrote a basic biography with a critically compiled list of publications .

Fonts

  • The Correspondance of Joseph Justus Scaliger (= Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 507). 8 volumes, ed. by Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert. Supervisory editors Anthony Grafton , Henk Jan De Jonge and Jill Kraye. Droz, Geneva 2012, ISBN 978-2600-01638-4 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Joseph Justus Scaliger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. 2014 Gélida, Jehan. Patrimoine Aquitaine de l'Education. 2014, online