Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/385

Rh SCALIGER 363 possessed in Latin and Greek. The name of Dorat then stood as high as that of Turnebus as a Greek scholar, and far higher as a professor. He has left nothing to justify his reputation as a scholar ; but as a teacher he un- doubtedly possessed the highest qualifications. He was able not only to impart knowledge, but to kindle enthu- siasm for his subject in the minds of his hearers and pupils. It was to Dorat that Scaliger owed the home which he found for the next thirty years of his life. In 1563 the professor recommended him to Louis de Chastaigner, the young lord of La Roche Pozay, as a companion in his travels. A close friendship sprung up between the two young men, which remained unbroken till the death of Louis in 1595. The travellers first pro- ceeded to Rome. Here they found Muretus, who, when at Bordeaux and Toulouse, had been a great favourite and occasional visitor of Julius Ctesar at Agen. Muretus soon recognized Scaliger's merits, and devoted himself to making his stay at Rome as agreeable as possible, intro- ducing 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. Their inhuman disposition, and inhos- pitable treatment of foreigners, especially impressed him. He was also disappointed in finding few Greek manu- scripts and few learned men. It was not until a much later period that he became intimate with Richard Thompson and other Englishmen. In the course of his travels he had become a Protestant. His father, though he lived and died in the communion of the Church of Rome, had been suspected of heresy, and it is probable that Joseph's sympathies were early enlisted on the side of Protestantism. On his return to France he spent three years with the Chastaigners, accompanying them to their different chateaux in Poitou, as the calls of the civil war required their presence. In 1570 he accepted the invita- tion of Cujas, and proceeded to Valence to study juris- prudence under the greatest living jurist. Here he re- mained three years, profiting not only by the lectures but even more by the library of Cujas, which filled no less 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 received with open arms, and was appointed a professor in the academy: He lectured on the Organon of Aristotle and the De Finibus of Cicero with much satisfaction to the students but with little to himself. He hated lecturing, and was bored to death with the importunities of the fanatical preachers ; and in 1574 he returned to France, and made his home for the next twenty years in the chateaux of his friend the lord of La Roche Pozay. Of his life during this period we have for the first time interesting details and notices in the Lettres fran$aises inedites de Joseph Scaliger, edited by M. Tamizey de Larroque (Agen, 1881), a volume which adds much to our knowledge of Scaliger's life. Constantly moving from chateau to chateau through Poitou and the Limousin, as the exigencies of the civil war required, occasionally taking his turn as a guard when the chateau was attacked, 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 in one aspect most unsuited to study. He had, however, what so few contemporary scholars possessed leisure, and freedom from pecuniary cares. In general he could devote his whole time to study ; and it was during this period of his life that he composed and published the books which showed how far he was in advance of all his contemporaries as a scholar and a critic, and that with him a new school of historical criticism had arisen. His editions of the Catalecta (1574), of Festus (1576), of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius (1577), are the work of a man who writes not only books of instruction for learners, but who is determined himself to discover and communicate to others the real meaning and force of his author. Discarding the trivial remarks and groundless suggestions which we find in the editions of nearly all his contemporaries and predecessors, he first laid down and applied sound rules of criticism and emendation, and changed textual criticism, from a series of haphazard and frequently baseless guesses, into a "rational procedure subject to fixed laws" (Pattison). But these works, while proving Scaliger's right to the foremost place among his contemporaries as far as Latin scholarship and criticism were concerned, did not go beyond mere scholarship. It was reserved for his edition of Manilius (1579), and Mvs,De Emendatione Temporum (1583), to revolutionize all the received ideas of the chronology of ancient history, to show for the first time that ancient chronology was of the highest importance as a corrector as well as a supplement to historical narrative, 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 as absolutely worthless, and that of the Jews, hitherto treated as a thing apart and too sacred to be mixed up with the others, and that the historical narratives and fragments of each of these, and their several systems of chronology, must be carefully and critically compared together, if any true and general conclusions on ancient history are to be arrived at. It is this which constitutes his true glory, and which places Scaliger on so immeasurably higher an eminence than any of his contemporaries. Yet, while the scholars of his time admitted his pre-eminence, neither they nor those who immediately followed seem to have appreciated his real merit, but to have considered his emendatory criticism, and his skill in Greek, as constitut- ing his claim to special greatness. " Scaliger's great works in historical criticism had overstepped any power of appreciation which the succeeding age possessed " (Pattison). His commentary on Manilius is really a treatise on the astronomy of the ancients, and it forms an introduction to the De Emendatione Temporum, in which he examines by the light of modern and Copernican science the ancient system as applied to epochs, calendars, and computations of time, showing upon what principles they were based. In the remaining twenty-four years of his life he at once corrected and enlarged the basis which he had laid in the De Emendatione. With incredible patience, some- times with a happy audacity of conjecture which itself is almost genius, he succeeded in reconstructing the lost Chronicle of Eusebius one of the most precious remains of antiquity, and of the highest value for ancient chronology. This he printed in 1606 in his Thesaurus Temporum, in which he collected, restored, and arranged every chronological relic extant in Greek or Latin. In 1590 Lipsius retired from Leyden, where for twelve years he had been professor of Roman history and antiquities. The university and its protectors, the states-general of Holland and the prince of Orange, resolved to obtain Scaliger as his successor. He declined their offer. He hated the thought of lecturing, and there were those among his friends who erroneously believed that with the success of Henry IV. learning would flourish, and