Julius Caesar Scaliger
Julius Caesar Scaliger (Italian Giulio Cesare Scaligero ; born April 23, 1484 in Riva del Garda , † October 21, 1558 in Agen , today the Lot-et-Garonne department ) was an Italian humanist , poet and naturalist.
Live and act
According to his own account, he was a member of the Scaliger family (della Scala), who were the lords of Verona for about 150 years . When he was 12 years old, Maximilian I made him one of his pages, spent 17 years in the emperor's service and distinguished himself as a soldier and captain. During this time he said he corresponded with the most important scholars and artists of the time and studied with Albrecht Dürer . After the Battle of Ravenna in 1512 , in which he lost his father and brother, he received the highest honors of chivalry from his imperial relative, which, however, remained purely symbolic and did not contribute to his prosperity.
He left the imperial service, and after a brief employment with another relative, Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara , he decided to leave the military. In 1514 he enrolled as a student at the University of Bologna , where he embarked on the spiritual path, expecting to become cardinal and eventually pope, when he would wrest the principality of Verona from the Venetians , from which the republic had driven his ancestors. He soon abandoned this plan but stayed at the university until 1519.
According to his own statements, he spent the next six years at Vico Nuovo Castle in Piedmont as a guest of the della Rovere family , spending his time on military expeditions in summer and studies in medicine and natural history in winter , until gout forced him to do his abandon military career and devote himself fully to his studies. In 1525 he accompanied MA della Rovere, the bishop of Agen, as a doctor in his diocese . So much for his own account of the first 40 years of his life. Some time after his death, opponents of his son Joseph Justus Scaliger claimed that he did not come from the della Scala family, but was the son of Benedetto Bordone , a lighting technician or teacher from Verona, that he was brought up in Padua , where he received the degree of an MD and that the story of his life was a fiction. His biography up to this point is only supported by his own statements, some of which actually cannot be reconciled with facts known from other sources.
He spent the remaining 32 years of his life almost exclusively in Agen. They were without adventure, almost uneventful, but during this time he earned such great merit that, on his death in 1558, he enjoyed the highest literary and scientific reputation in Europe. A few days after arriving in Agen, he fell in love with a 13-year-old orphan , Andiette de Roques Lobejac, but the marriage was prevented by her relatives who pretended she was already married to an unknown adventurer; three years later, in 1528, he had already gained so much reputation as a doctor that the family's objections were invalid and he was able to marry Andiette at the age of 45, who was 16 at the time. The marriage lasted, Andiette gave birth to 15 children, of whom the tenth (third son) was Joseph Justus Scaliger .
The acquaintance with the plague doctor Nostradamus , who stayed in Agen from 1533–1535, and from whom he separated in a dispute, and an indictment of heresy in 1538, from which he was acquitted by friendly judges, including his friend Arnoul Le Ferron , are the only interesting events of these years, besides the publication of his books and the disputes they gave rise to. In 1531 he printed his first speech against Erasmus of Rotterdam , a defense of Cicero and the Cicerones, a passionate diatribe which, like all his subsequent works, shows an astonishing knowledge of Latin, demonstrates brilliant rhetoric , but is full of vulgar verbal incursions, and of Erasmus' arguments completely passes.
His outrage at seeing his speech treated with slight contempt by the great scholar who assumed it was the work of a personal enemy ( Meander ) led him to write a second speech, more brutal than the first, more insulting, with more self-adulation, but less actual content. He led similar feuds on scientific questions with François Rabelais and Gerolamo Cardano .
The speeches were followed by a huge number of Latin verses which he published in 1533, 1534, 1539, 1546 and 1547, and on which a kind critic, Mark Pattison , felt compelled to refer to the judgment of Pierre Daniel Huet , who said: “par ses poésies brutes et informes Scaliger a deshonoré le Parnasse "(" Scaliger dishonored Parnasse with his crude and clumsy poems "); However, their numerous editions show that they not only appealed to his contemporaries, but also to later scholars. A short treatise on comic metrics ( De comicis dimensionibus ) and a work De causis linguae latinae (1540) - the earliest Latin grammar based on a scientific method - were his only other purely literary works published during his lifetime.
His most important work, the Poetices libri septem , appeared in 1561, after his death. With many contradictions, with many scornful criticisms, and with much evidence of personal animosity - particularly with regard to Étienne Dolet , whose death he was delighted to see with brutal malice - it nevertheless shows for the first time what such a treatise should be and how it should be written .
However, Scaliger should be seen as a philosopher and scientist. He viewed classical studies as pleasant relaxation from more serious subjects. Whatever his first 40 years, he was certainly a precise observer, and familiarized himself with many strange and little-known phenomena that he stored in his brilliant memory.
Throughout his scholarly works he took the form of a commentary, and it was not until he was 70 (with the exception of a brief treatise on De somniis by Hippocrates , 1539) that he considered any of them sufficiently complete for it to appear . In 1556 he printed his Dialogue on Plants ( De plantis ), which he dedicated to Aristotle , and in 1557 his Exercitationes zu De subtilitate von Cardano. His other works, a commentary on Theophrast's De causis plantarum and a translation of Aristotle's zoology , he left more or less unfinished; they were only printed after his death, in 1566 and 1619 respectively. All of these writings exude an arrogant dogmatism and vehemence of language, a constant tendency to glorify the author, strangely combined with extensive actual knowledge and sharp reasoning, as well as an unprecedented attention to facts and details.
That he anticipated inductive philosophy in every way cannot be argued; However, his botanical studies did not, like his contemporary Conrad Gessner , lead him to the idea of a natural classification, and he also rejected the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus with the utmost arrogance and sharpest words . In metaphysics and natural history , Aristotle was law for him, in medicine Galen , but at the same time he remained neither a slave to the text nor to the details. He has thoroughly absorbed their principles and was also able to see where his masters were being unfaithful to themselves: he corrected Aristotle where he could.
At this stage he tries to reconcile the written word with the actual situation, with the result that his results have no real scientific value. Your interest is purely historical. His Exercitationes on De subtilitate by Gerolamo Cardano (1551) made him best known as a philosopher. Its numerous editions testify to its popularity, and it remained popular reading until the Aristotelian worldview fell. His encyclopedic knowledge is astonishing, as the Exercitationes show. About the power in the style of the author, about the accuracy of his observations, but one has to agree with Gabriel Naudé that he made more mistakes than he himself discovered with Cardano, and with Charles Nisard that his statements seem to refute everything that Cardano confirms , and affirms everything Cardano rejects. On the other hand, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and William Hamilton recognize him as the best representative of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. Martin Opitz (1597–1639) translated his “Book of German Poetry” in a completely authentic way based on Julius Caesar Scaliger's works and related it to the German language. In this way, Scaliger contributed indirectly to the fact that the learned German poetry found its way from Latin to a regulated German.
Honors
According to Julius Caesar Scaliger, the plant genera are Scaligera Adans. from the legume family (Fabaceae) and Scaligeria DC. named from the umbelliferae family (Apiaceae).
Works
- Iulii Bordoni Patauini liberalium disciplinarum cultoris ad lectorem Epigrammata . In: Antonius de Fanti: Tabula generalis ac mare magnum Scoticae subtilitatis (...). Venice 1516.
- Italian partial translation by Plutarch: La seconda et ultima parte delle vite (…). Venice 1525.
- Oratio per Marco Tullio Cicerone contra Desiderium Erasmum . Paris 1531. ( online )
- Nova epigrammata, liber unicus. Hymn duo. Diva Ludovica Sabaudia . 1533.
- Lacrymae . 1534.
- Nemesis, una cum duobus hymnis . 1535.
- Adversus Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami dialogum Ciceronianum oratio secunda . 1537.
- In luctu filii oratio . Lyon 1538. ( online )
- Aristotelis liber, qui decimus historiarum inscribitur . Ms. 1538. Lyon 1584. Toulouse 1619. ( online )
- Liber de comicis dimensionibus . Lyon 1539. ( online )
- Heroes . 1539. ( online )
- Hippocrates: Liber de somniis, cum Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri commentariis . 1539. ( online ) Expanded Geneva 1561.
- De causis linguae Latinae libri XIII . Lyon 1540. ( online ) Geneva 1580. ( online ) Heidelberg 1597. 1609. 1623.
- Poematia, ad illustrissimam Constantiam Rangoniam . 1546. ( online ) Lyon 1566. Marburg 1598.
- In duos Aristotelis libros de plantis libri duo . Paris 1556. ( online ) Marburg 1598.
- Exotericarum exercitationum liber XV, De subtilitate, ad Hieronymum Cardanum . Paris 1557. ( online )
- Poetices libri VII. Lyon, Genève 1561. ( online ) (published posthumously, reprint 1581, 1586, 1594, 1607, 1617)
- Commentarii et animadversiones in VI libros de causis plantarum Theophrasti (…) . Lyon 1566. ( online )
- De sapientia et beatitudine libri VIII, quos Epidorpides inscripsit . Geneva 1573. ( online )
- Poemata, in duas partes divisa . 1574. ( online )
- Poemata sacra . Cologne 1600. ( online )
- Epistolae et orationes . 1600. ( online )
Modern editions and translations
- Luc Deitz , Gregor Vogt-Spira (eds.): Iulius Caesar Scaliger: Poetices libri septem. Seven books on poetry. 6 volumes. Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart 1994–2011
- Ilse Reineke (Ed.): Julius Caesar Scaliger's Critique of the Neo-Latin Poets. Text, translation and commentary of Chapter 4 of Book VI of his Poetics. Fink, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-7705-2449-7
literature
- Kristian Jensen: Rhetorical Philosophy and Philosophical Grammar. Julius Caesar Scaliger's Theory of Language. Fink, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-7705-2633-3
- Kuni Sakamoto: Julius Caesar Scaliger, Renaissance Reformer of Aristotelianism: A Study of His Exotericae Exercitationes , Brill 2016
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
Web links
- Culturegraph information on Julius Caesar Scaliger
- Literature by and about Julius Caesar Scaliger in the catalog of the German National Library
- Publications by and about Julius Caesar Scaliger in VD 17 .
- Short biography
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Scaliger, Julius Caesar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Scaligero, Giulio Cesare |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | humanistic scholar |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 23, 1484 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Riva del Garda |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 21, 1558 |
| Place of death | Agen , France |