Joseph Justus Scaliger

Scholar, born in Agen, SW France, the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger. He studied in Paris, became a Protestant, and travelled widely in Europe, becoming professor at Leyden in 1593. One of the most erudite scholars of his day, a classical linguist and historian, he is best known for his Opus de emendatione temporum (1583), a study of earlier methods of calculating time.

Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) was a French religious leader and scholar.

He was born at Agen, the tenth child and third son of Julius Caesar Scaliger and Andiette de Roques Lobejac. At twelve years of age, he was sent with two younger brothers, to the College of Guienne at Bordeaux, then under the direction of Jean Gelida. An outbreak of the plague in 1555 caused the boys 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 Julius in his later years, and he daily dictated to his son from eighty to a hundred lines, and sometimes more. Joseph was also required each day to write a Latin theme or declamation, though in other respects he seems to have been left to his own devices. He learned from his father to be not a mere scholar, but something more—an acute observer, and aiming not so much at correcting texts as historical criticism.

After his father's death, he spent four years at the University of Paris, where he began the study of Greek under Adrianus Turnebus. But after two months he found he was not in a position to profit by the lectures of the greatest Greek scholar of the time.

Jean Dorat as a teacher was able not only to impart knowledge, but to kindle enthusiasm. It was to Dorat that Scaliger owed his home for the next thirty years of his life. Muretus soon recognized Scaliger's merits, and introduced him to all the men that were worth knowing.

After visiting a large part of Italy, the travellers passed to England and Scotland, taking as it would seem La Roche Pozay on their way, for Scaliger's preface to his first book, the Conjectanea in Varronem, is dated there in December 1564. Scaliger formed an unfavourable opinion of the English.

On his return to France he spent three years with the Chastaigners, accompanying them to their different châteaux in Poitou, as the calls of the civil war required. Here he remained three years, profiting not only by the lectures but even more by the library of Cujas, which filled no fewer than seven or eight rooms and included five hundred manuscripts.

The massacre of St Bartholomew—occurring as he was about to accompany the bishop of Valence on an embassy to Poland—induced him with other Huguenots to retire to Geneva, where he was appointed a professor in the academy. and in 1574 he returned to France, and made his home for the next twenty years with Chastaigner.

Of his life during this period we have interesting details and notices in the Lettres françaises inédites de Joseph Scaliger, edited by Tamizey de Larroque (Agen, 1881). Constantly moving through Poitou and the Limousin, as the exigencies of the civil war required, occasionally taking his turn as a guard, at least on one occasion trailing a pike on an expedition against the Leaguers, with no access to libraries, and frequently separated even from his own books, his life during this period seems most unsuited to study.

It was during this period of his life that he composed and published his books of historical criticism.

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, hitherto neglected, and that of the Jews, hitherto 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. His commentary on Manilius is really a treatise on ancient astronomy, and it forms an introduction to De emendatione temporum, In this work, Scaliger investigates ancient systems of determining epochs, calendars and computations of time.

In the remaining twenty-four years of his life he exapnded on his work in the De emendatione. He succeeded in reconstructing the lost Chronicle of Eusebius—one of the most valuable ancient documents, especially valuable for ancient chronology.

When in 1590 Justus Lipsius retired from the University of Leiden, the university and its protectors, the States-General of the Netherlands and the prince of Orange, resolved to obtain Scaliger as his successor. The invitation was renewed in the most flattering manner a year later. Scaliger would not be required to lecture. This offer Scaliger provisionally accepted. About the middle of 1593 he started for the Netherlands, where he passed the remaining thirteen years of his life, never returning to France. For Scaliger was no hermit buried among his books;

For the first seven years of his residence at Leiden his reputation was at its highest point. But Scaliger had made numerous enemies.

But his enemies were not merely those whose errors he had exposed and whose hostility he had excited by the violence of his language. The Jesuits, who aspired to be the source of all scholarship and criticism, saw the writings and authority of Scaliger as a formidable barrier to their claims. Muretus in the latter part of his life professed the strictest orthodoxy, Lipsius had been reconciled to the Church of Rome, Isaac Casaubon was supposed to he wavering, but Scaliger was known to be an irreconcilable Protestant.

After several scurrilous but ineffectual attacks by the Jesuit party, in 1607 a new and more successful attempt was made. Scaliger's weak point was his pride. In 1601 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits, whom he afterwards so bitterly libelled, published his Scaliger hypototimaeus ("The Supposititious Scaliger"), a quarto volume of more than four hundred pages, written with consummate ability in an admirable and incisive style, with the entire disregard for truth which Scioppius always displayed, and with all the power of his accomplished sarcasm. Every piece of scandal which could be raked together respecting 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. "No stronger proof," says Pattison, "can be given of the impressions produced by this powerful philippic, dedicated to the defamation of an individual, than that it had been the source from which the biography of Scaliger, as it now stands in our biographical collections, has mainly flowed."

To Scaliger the blow was crushing. Whatever the case as to Julius, Joseph had undoubtedly believed himself a prince of Verona, and in his Epistola had put forth with the most perfect good faith, and without inquiry, all that he had heard from his father. It is written, for Scaliger, with unusual moderation and good taste, but perhaps for that very reason had not the success which its author wished and even expected. 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, or of any single event narrated by Julius as happening to himself or any member of this family prior to his arrival at Agen. Nor does he even attempt a refutation of the crucial point, which Scioppius had proved, as far as a negative can be proved—namely, that William, the last prince of Verona, had no son Nicholas, the alleged grandfather of Julius nor indeed any son who could have been such grandfather's.

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. In his will Scaliger bequeathed his renowned collection of manuscripts and books (tous mes livres de langues étrangères, Hebraiques, Syriens, Arabiques, Ethiopiens) to Leiden University Library.