Scalĭger
The Latinized form of a family name originally Italian (della Scala) and afterwards French
(de l'Escale), made famous as that of two great classical scholars.
1.
Iulius Caesar Scalĭger, born in 1484 and claiming
descent from an illustrious family of Verona, but by his enemies said to be the son of a
sign-painter. After serving in the army under the emperor Maximilian, he
entered the University of Bologna, where he remained a short time, and then took service in
the French armies in Italy, winning the approval of King Francis for gallantry and remarkable
feats of strength. He became naturalized as a French subject in 1528, when he settled at Agen
and began practice as a physician. He had learned some Greek and prided himself on his Latin
style, so that he felt called upon to attack Erasmus with bitter invectives for his satire on
the stylists of Italy entitled
Ciceronianus, a satire which Scaliger
interpreted as an attack on Cicero himself. Scaliger died in 1558. His chief works were a
grammar,
De Causis Linguae Latinae, in thirteen books and of much value; a
commentary on Theophrastus; an edition of Aristotle,
De Animalibus, with
notes; commentaries on Hippocrates,
De Insomniis; and some Latin poems of
considerable merit. Scaliger was a man of fine natural gifts but of a coarse and jealous
nature, and with an education too unsystematic to enable his powers to appear in their true
greatness. See Nisard,
Les Gladiateurs de la République des
Lettres (Paris, 1860); Bourousse de Laffore,
Jules
César de l'Escale (Agen, 1860); Magen,
Documents sur
Julius Caesar Scaliger et sa Famille (Agen, 1873).
2.
Joseph Justus Scalĭger. The tenth child of Julius
Caesar Scaliger, born at Agen in 1540. He studied as a boy at the Collège de
Guyenne in Bordeaux, and was also trained by his father, who made him copy from eighty to two
hundred lines of Latin verse every day, besides writing an original Latin theme. After his
father's death, the young man went to Paris, where he studied at the University under Adrian
Turnebus, from whom he learned Greek, reading all Homer in twenty-one days and the whole body
of Greek poetry in four months. His linguistic studies advanced, until at last he boasted of
being able to speak thirteen languages, ancient and modern. After travelling in Italy,
England, and even Scotland, he settled at Valence in France
(1570), and pursued
a course of study under the jurist Cujacius; and from 1572 to 1574 was professor in the
academy at Geneva founded by Calvin. About this time he began producing the great works that
secured him the primacy among the classical scholars of Europe. Among these productions are
to be mentioned his
Coniectanea to
Varro's Lingua Latina
(1565); his
Catalecta Vergilii, etc.
(1572); his editions
of Festus
(1575), Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius
(1577);
Manilius
(1579); and especially a remarkable treatise on the Eusebian
chronology,
De Emendatione Temporum (1583); a
Thesaurus Temporum (1606); twenty-four indices to
Gruter's Thesaurus Inscriptionum Latinarum (1601); a
numismatical treatise,
De Re Nummaria (1616); besides
Opuscula (1610), and
De Arte Critica
(1619).
In 1583 Scaliger was called to Leyden to succeed Justus
Lipsius (q.v.), and at this university he spent the rest of his life. To his
influence and example Holland owes the long line of illustrious scholars that follow one
another so closely in the seventeenth century and whose memory is still cherished. His later
years were made unhappy by the numerous controversies in which he became engaged, and whose
motives sprang largely from the
odium theologicum. An outrageous but
immensely able attack made upon him by the Jesuit scholar Gaspar Scioppius is believed to
have actually hastened Scaliger's death. This attack was contained in a treatise styled
Scaliger Hypobolimaeus, and ridiculed Scaliger's pretensions to aristocratic
descent, holding him up to the scorn of all Europe as a base-born impostor and an atheist.
Scaliger died in 1609. His great learning, keen critical faculty, and rare achievements have
led men to regard him as, on the whole, the first scholar of all time. Niebuhr spoke of him
as standing “on the summit of real and universal knowledge, as no one after him has
done.” Pattison calls his “the most richly stored intellect that ever
spent itself in acquiring knowledge.”
See Bernays,
Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin, 1855); Nisard,
Les Gladiateurs de la République des Lettres (Paris,
1860); id.
Juste Lipse, Joseph Scaliger, et Isaac Casaubon
(Paris, 1852); and Pattison,
Essays, vol. i.
(Oxford,
1889). A bibliography of the writings of Scaliger in their different editions is given
by Bernays.
