Nikolaes Heinsius the Elder

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolaes Heinsius the Elder
Title page of the first edition of Heinsius' Latin poems (1653)

Nikolaes Heinsius the Elder (born July 20, 1620 in Leiden , † October 7, 1681 in The Hague ), son of Daniel Heinsius , was a Dutch classical philologist and neo-Latin poet .

Life

His Latin poem Breda expugnata was printed in 1637 and received a lot of attention. In 1642 he began his travels in search of ancient manuscripts with a stay in England , where he met with little interest from scholars.

In 1644 he went to Spa for health reasons , from there to look again for codes : Leuven , Brussels , Mechelen , Antwerp . Almost immediately after his return to Leiden, he left for Paris , where he was received with open arms by the scholars. After studying all the ancient texts he could get his hands on, he continued his journey south: Lyon , Marseille , Pisa , Florence (where he paused to edit Ovid ) and Rome . The following year, 1647, he was in Naples , which he fled during Masaniello's reign to continue his work in Livorno , Bologna , Venice and Padua . At his last residence in 1648 he published a volume of original Latin verses under the title Italica .

He went to Milan , where he worked for a considerable time in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana . He was unable to go on a planned trip to Switzerland because the news of his father's illness called him back to Leiden. Soon after, he was from the Swedish Queen Christina of Stockholm called, where he was in a dispute with Claudius Salmasius crashed, the accused, John Milton to have supplied information about his (Salmasius') life. In 1650 Heinsius returned shortly to Leiden, but was back in Stockholm a little later. In 1651 he made a second trip to Italy, spending the rest of his life alternately in Uppsala and the Netherlands.

In 1653 he published his collection of Latin poems. His last work was an edition of the works of Velleius Paterculus 1678 and Gaius Valerius Flaccus 1680.

Nikolaes Heinsius was one of the purest and most elegant Latinists, and if his erudition was not as perfect as that of his father, he showed higher qualities as a writer.

The writer Nikolaes Heinsius the Younger (1656-1718) was an illegitimate son of Nikolaes Heinsius the Elder.

literature

Web links