Joseph Scalgier — Wikipedia

Joseph Juste Scaliger , son of Julius César Scaliger, born on April 4, 1540 To Agen and Death on January 21, 1609 in Leyde, is one of the largest French scholars in XVI ^{It is} century. He survived his father as a philologist, and also made a name as a chronologist and historian. He was long under the friendly protection of the Chasteigner family, and traveled France, Germany, Italy, Scotland. He kissed the reformed religion (1562) and was tutor of this same noble family in the south of Touraine, especially in their castle of Preuilly ^{[ first ]} , he was appointed professor at the Geneva Academy and then called to the Leyde Academy in 1593, as a successor to Just Lipse.

He is considered to be the creator of chronological science and in particular the Julian period (in homage to his father), used in astronomy, which allows an independent dating of the calendar in force. Vain as his father, he claimed, in a letter entitled: The oldest racial scaligerae , bring back its nobility to the kings alains. He also had, like his father, strong quarrels with several of his contemporaries, notably with Scioppius, who had no trouble demonstrating the falsehood of their genealogy ^{[ 2 ]} .

Youth years [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Tenth child and third son of Julius César Scaliger and Andiette de Roques-Lobejac, he was sent, at twelve, with two cadet brothers to the college of Guyenne in Bordeaux, led at the time by Jean Gelida, where he followed Among other things, the teaching of Élie Vinet ^{[ 3 ]} . An epidemic of bubonic plague in 1555 brought the boys back to their family, and in the years that followed, Joseph was the main confidant and amanuensis from his father.

In his last years, the latter was delighted to compose Latin verses, and he dictated each day between 80 and 100 (sometimes even more) to his son. Joseph had to write a theme daily or compose a speech in Latin, although he also seems to have had the rest of his free time. His father made him not only a scholar, but also a critical observer, more turned towards historical studies than the establishment of classical texts.

First trips [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

On the death of his father, he frequented the University of Paris for four years, where he began to study Greek with Adrien Turnèbe. But after two months, he seemed to him that he did not have the level required to profitably follow the conferences of the greatest Hellenist of the time. He read homes in twenty-one days, then devoured all the other Greek authors within reach, poets, speakers and historians, composing for himself a grammar from all the difficulties or singularities that he encountered there. From the Greek, he went to Hebrew on a suggestion by Guillaume Postel, then began to study Arabic; He acquired a deep knowledge of these two languages.

Catechized by Pierre Viret, he kissed the reformed faith in 1562. His most influential master was Jean Dorat, who not only knew how to instill knowledge, but also provoke enthusiasm. It was in Dorat that Scaliger had to have a roof for the following years, since in 1563 the professor proposed his student as a traveling companion to the young lord of La Roche-Posay, Louis de Chasteigner. A narrow friendship attached these two men, and she had to last until the death of Chasteigner in 1595. They first went to Rome and found Marc-Antoine Muret there who, when he lived in Bordeaux then in Toulouse, made Frequent visits to Julius César Scaliger in Agen. Muret quickly noticed the talents of the young Scaliger, and presented it to several Roman scholars.

After visiting a large part of Italy, the two travelers left for England and Scotland, passing through La Roche-Posay ^{[ 4 ]} . Scaliger had a bad impression of the English, to which he reproached their distant attitude and their lack of hospitality towards foreigners. He was also disappointed with the small number of Greek scholars and manuscripts he found across the Channel. He was not to bind to Richard Thomson (in) And other English than years later. Throughout his travels, he made himself Huguenot.

The beginning of the wars of religion [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Back in France, he spent another three years hosted by the Chasteigner, which he accompanied in their various Châteaux du Poitou, to which the civil war pushed them. In 1570, he accepted the invitation of Jacques Cujas and won Valence to study the law with the most famous lawyer. He stayed there three years, taking advantage not only of the lessons, but also of the prodigious library of Cujas, which was pile up no less than seven pieces and had some 500 manuscripts.

The massacre of Saint-Barthélemy (who came when he was going to accompany the bishop of Valencia for an embassy in Poland) had Scaliger and other Huguenots flee from Geneva, where he was appointed professor of the Academy. He gave conferences on the Organ of Aristotle and the About the ends From Cicero to the great satisfaction of his students, without however being satisfied with it. He hated the lecturers and preaching of fanatic pastors bored him: he returned in 1574 to France and spent the next twenty years with the lords of Chasteigner. That year, he published, on the occasion of his visit to Lyon, comments from the translation of Ausone by his former master Étienne Élie Vinet ^{[ 3 ]} , a work which made it a time suspect, wrongly, of indelicacy, if not plagiarism.

There are many details and several stories on this period of his life thanks to the Tamizey edition of Larroque Unpublished French letters from Joseph Scaliger published in Agen in 1881. Understanding constantly Poitou, Touraine and Marche ^{[ 5 ]} Because of the insurrectional climate that would tear the provinces, taking his turnover himself on occasion, even after the spade during an expedition against the men of the league, deprived of access to libraries and even often Separated from his books, this episode of his life seems most sterile for the study. Scaliger still enjoyed what very little of his fellow citizens could have: free time and the detachment of financial contingencies.

Academic production [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

It was around this time that he composed and published his books of historical criticism. His editions of Catalecta (1575), from Festus (1575), from Catululus, Tibulle and Properce (1577) are the work of a researcher determined to understand and gauge the authors. The first, Scaliger posed and implemented the firm rules of textual criticism and mounted. He reformed the practice of criticism of texts by substituting the hazardous lessons a “rational method subject to invariable rules ^{[ 6 ]} ».

But these works, if they confirmed Scaliger as the first Latinist and criticism of his time, did not go beyond the stage of simple erudition. It is thanks to its edition of Astronomical De Manilius (1579), et and Son The amendment of the season (1583), which he was going to move to posterity by revolutionizing the received ideas about the chronology. He showed that ancient history could not be confined to that of the Greeks and the Romans, but also had to include that of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, hitherto neglected, and that of the Jewish people, treated then as a branch biblical studies; He invited to make a comparative criticism of historical stories and fragments of the history of these peoples, with their own chronology systems. This innovation distinguished Scaliger from his contemporaries, who, failing to note the importance of this approach, made his skills of grammarian and Hellenist strongly. His commentary on Manilius alone is a treaty of old astronomy, and it serves as an introduction to The amendment of the season . In this book, Scaliger is interested in old dating systems by eras, calendars and dates calculations. Building on the system of Nicolas Copernicus (a curiosity for the time) and on other authors, he tries to clarify the principles used by the ancients.

He spent the last twenty-four years of his life increasing his The amendment . This is how he managed to reconstruct the Chronic Lost Eusebius, one of the most precious documents in antiquity, particularly from the point of view of chronology. He published it in 1606 in his Thesaurus , book where he had compiled, restored and put in order all the facts known by Greek and Latin literatures.

The United Provinces [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

When in 1590, just Lipse retired from the University of Leiden, the University and its protectors, the Estates General of the United Provinces and the Prince of Orange, decided to appoint Scaliger as his successor. Scaliger refused; He hated, as was said, lectures, and some of his friends imagined that with the advent of Henri IV, the Belles-Lettres were going to be reborn in France and that Protestantism would be more the subject of discrimination. The university authorities renewed their invitation with all the desirable diplomacy the following year: it was assured of it that he would not even have to give lessons, that the university would be satisfied with his presence, and that he would have his leisure as he pleases. Scaliger accepted this offer for all useful purposes. In the middle of 1593, he left for the Netherlands, where he was going to spend the last thirteen years of his life, never returning to France. Its reception in Leiden filled its hopes. It was provided with a comfortable pension, and treated with the highest consideration. He was not discussed his alleged titles of aristocrat of Verona (which he alleged in reference to the family of Scaligeri; see below). Leyde being halfway between The Hague and Amsterdam, Scaliger could benefit, in addition to the intellectual circles of Leiden, the advantages of the best world of these two metropolises: because Scaliger was not really a hermit plunged in his books; He reveling in worldly relationships and passed for a kind blacker.

The first seven years of his stay in Leyde, his reputation was maintained at the Zenith. His literary judgment was without reply. From his Leyde pulpit, he reigned over the world of letters; He made and defeated the reputations, was surrounded by an areopling of young people in a hurry to hear his conversation. He encouraged Grotius (who was only sixteen) to edit Martianus Capella. When the young Franciscus Dousa ^{[ 7 ]} died prematurely, he cried him like a son. Daniel Heinsius, his favorite student, became his friend.

But at the same time, Scaliger created many enemies. If he despised ignorance, he felt a fierce hatred towards half arition, and above all bad faith in the argument or approximate quotes. Built of honor and loyalty, he did not tolerate the wobbly arguments or the inaccuracies of those who claimed to defend a thesis or plead a bad cause. His aggressive sarcasm eventually arrived at the ears of his victims, and still was his pen, no less hard than his language. Imbruized with his magisterium, he handled the mockery without nuance, and moreover was not always right on the bottom: as he gave himself up a lot in his memory, he was not immune to an error. And his mounds, if they were generally good, were sometimes absurd. Similarly, as a pioneer of the scientific chronology, he has reached it to incorrect or even ridiculous hypotheses, often as a result of abusive inductions; To be mistaken about the astronomical knowledge of the ancients, not to understand exactly the words of Copernicus or Tycho Brahe: because in truth, he was not a surveyor, which a François Viete made him understand ^{[ 8 ]} .

Corporate on the quadrature [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

From 1590 to 1592, while just Scaliger came into negotiations with the University of Leiden, he announced in his work ( New Cyclometry , 1592) that he could do the duplication of the cube and the trisection of the angle, that is to say, build a cubic root, using the only rule and the compass, and claimed to have found for value Archimedes √ ten ^{[ 9 ]} , which resolved the quadrature of the circle. From Tours, the mathematician François Viete, whom Scaliger had already attacked for his canon and his other works, and who held the post of deciphering with King Henri IV, contradicted him by the publication of his Eighth book of various answers (1593). The May 8, 1593 , Just scaliger writing to his friend Baudius, doctor of theology and law, declared, speaking of Viete:

“I will move heaven and earth to force my opponent to descend into the arena, not to take an easy triumph over him, I who defeated Archimedes, not to remind deceased, as a helpless man could desire, but only To make him measure how reckless it is to compare his genius with mine. »»

The following year, Viete triumphed over this claim in Memenima against the new cyclometrica .
For their part, the Belgian mathematicians Adrien Romain and German Christophorus Clavius, had also highlighted the falsity of the reasoning of just scaliger and his ignorance of the very principles of geometry, which lost him in the eyes of those who heard mathematics ^{[ ten ]} .

With his usual arrogance, Scaliger dealt with Viete to “Moucheron” ^{[ 11 ]} , Ludolph van Ceulen de ‘ Pugil » (“boxer”) ^{[ twelfth ]} , he even tried to ban Geneva the dissemination of a Roman book which destroyed his false cyclometry ^{[ 13 ]} .

‘ A few Honests people from Geneva, who made me long told as it was all happened in the impression of Dudict Book, and as Monsieur de Bèze and all you AMYS went twice at the town hall for S ‘ Oppose this and prevent the book with printed , assures him Jacques Esprinchard le, 23 mars 1597 de Frankfurt. »»

These controversies and actions earned him these words from the Jesuit Mathematician Clavius ^{[ 14 ]} : “Here is my last word, it is possible for me to love you delivered from your faults, even as a man without any quality, as they say, and also it would not be very difficult for me not to hate you Remaining dishonest, but neither men, nor God, of which you accumulate immense anger against you, will be able to endure someone who, liar and false mathematician, trouble, without faith, barks against good people and people estimated and irritates quiet people. »» .

Two centuries later, Pierre-Laurent Wantzel (1837) will actually show the impossibility of trying any angle or double a cube using a rule and a compass.

The Jesuit Cabal [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

His enemies were not only those whose mistakes he had denounced and that his outrage had indignant. The results provided by its chronological approach shook the theses of the controversy of the counter-reform and questioned the authenticity of part of their documentation. The Jesuits, who landed in holders of learned authority, found in scaliger and his writings a challenge to their demands. Now at the end of his life, Muret had put himself under the banner of the strict Orthodoxy, just Lipse had reconciled with the church of Rome, and if Isaac Casaubon still hesitated on the party to be taken, Scaliger remained an irreconcilable Huguenot. As long as his intellectual influence remained intact, the Protestants would keep the advantage in the Republic of Letters. This is why his enemies sought, not so much to take it back in the field of literary criticism or its positions, as on that of private life and condition: it was not an easy task, however, Because he had a big composure.

Aristocratic origins [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

After various diatribes as lively as it is sterile of the Jesuits, a safer approach was undertaken in 1607. The weak point of Scaliger was pride: had he not published in 1594 a The letter of the oldest and splendor of the race Scligerae and J. C. Scaliger life (“Letter on antiquity and the size of the Scaliger family …”)? Also, in 1601, Gaspar Scioppius, stipendied by the Jesuits, he wrote a pamphlet entitled Scaligeri hypololymaeus (“The alleged scaliger”), a work inquarts of more than four hundred pages, written with an art consumed in an incisive style, with all the bad faith of which the author was capable, and all the vigor of his ruthless sarcasm . Everything you can find shocking on Scaliger and his family is picked up there. The author is strong to note more than five hundred lies in the Letter of the older De Scaliger, but the main target of the book is the falsity of the claims to a kinship with the della Scala of Verona, and the story of the childhood of Scaliger’s parents. “There is no,” said Pattison ^{[ 15 ]} , better proof of the impression aroused at the time by this acerbic Philippic, that the fact that it constitutes the essential source of the biographies of Scaliger which have been used until today. »»

To scaliger, it was a blow. Whatever the convictions of his Father Jules had been, Joseph had all his life imagined being really a prince of Verona, and his Epistle Explained with naive good faith and without proof everything he had heard from his father. He immediately responded to the Scioppius pamphlet, by a writing entitled Confutal of the story Burdonum . It is written with an inaccuted moderation and politeness at home, and perhaps for this very reason, this replica had much less echo than its author would have liked it. Pattison believes that as a refutation of Scioppius, it is very complete, but there are reasons to doubt some of his arguments because, if Scaliger shows that inductable Scioppius has made more errors than it has corrected, that his book is teeming with pure lies and baseless slanders, he does not provide any evidence of his father’s allegations on family origins, nor any information on what his parents did before arriving in the city of Agen. He does not even undertake to deny the essential point established by Sciopius, namely that Guillaume, the last prince of Verona, had no son by the name of Nicolas, the supposed grandfather of Jules Scaliger…

Whether they are exhaustive or not, the fact remains that this Confutation had no success: the Jesuit cabal had finally resulted, and far beyond their own hopes. Scioppius boasted that his book would have “killed” Scaliger; He certainly darkened the last months of the scientist, and perhaps shortened his existence, because the Confutation was to be his last book. Five months after its publication, the January 21, 1609 , at four in the morning, he returned the soul in the arms of Heinsius. By will, he bequeathed his library (“All my books of foreign, Hebbic, Syrians, Arabic, Ethiopian”) books at the Leyde university library.

We will find a complete list of Joseph just scaliger’s works in the biography composed by Bernays. See also John Edwin Sandys , History of Classical Scholarship , vol.  ii, 1908 , p. 199-204 . A more technical biography is that of Anthony Grafton in two volumes:
Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger. A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship . vol. first, Textual Criticism and Exegesis , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983. (Oxford-Warburg Studies). (ISBN  0-19-814850-X ) .

• 1583: Need a new amendment season in eight books tax, Paris, at Mamertia Patissonium printer royalty. The worksheet Robert Stephen. M. D. 83. With a privilege.

Bibliography [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• (the) Paul Colomiès, France oriental or French language Hebrew or other Orientalus , Adrien Ulacq, La Haye, 1665, p. 112-144 ( read online )
• Joseph Juste Scaliger , in Charles Perrault, The illustrious men who appeared in France during this century , at Antoine Dezallier, 1700, volume 2, p. 61-62 ( read online )
• On Joseph Scaliger, the only valid biography was for a long time that of Jacob Bernays (of) Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger: mit Scaligers Porträt , Berlin, publisher of W. Hertz, 1855 , in-8° .. Pattison gave a review to the XIX ^{It is} century in the Quarterly Review ( vol. VIII, 1860), later reprinted in volume I of Essays of the same author (1889), p. 132-195 . To write the article translated above, Richard Copley Christie had access to the collection of manuscripts gathered by this same patison, and which includes a biography of Julius Caesar Scaliger. In addition to the letters published by Tamizis de Larroque (Agen, 1881), the two former collections of letters in Latin and French, and the two SCUISIGANZA are the main sources.

• See Paul Botley (EId.), DIKE VAN MIArts (EiThony Grafton, Henk Jan the Joni Joni’s Honye (Supervisory Editors), The correspondance of Joseph Justus Scaliger , vol. 8, Geneva, Droz, coll. “Work of humanism and Renaissance; 507 ”, 2012 (ISBN  978-2-600-01638-4 ) .

• The letters published by the son of Scaliger, those published in 1620 by the president of Maussac, the SCUISIGANZA , and his own writings are the most reliable documents. I’ Study on Julius Caesar of Lescale of Jules de Bourousse de Laffore (Agen, 1860) and the Documents on Julius Caesar Scaliger et SA Adolphe Magen (Agen, 1873) provide details on the biographies of his father and son. The biographies composed by Charles Nisard ( Julius and the Gladiators of the Republic of Letters on Jules, and The literary triumvirate in the sixteenth century on Joseph) does not do justice to the character. Jules passes there for ridiculous, and Joseph’s life is only based on the book of Scioppius and the SCUISIGANZA .

• Eugène Haag, Émile Haag, Protestant France, or lives of French Protestants who have made a name for themselves in history from the early days of reformation to the recognition of the principle of freedom of worship by the National Assembly; work preceded by a historical notice on Protestantism in France; Monitoring of supporting documents and written on large -part documents , Joël Cherbuliez, Paris, 1857, volume VII, L’Escale-Mutonis , p. 1-26 ( read online )

• Henry of the city of Mirmont, ” Joseph Scaliger and Elie vinet », Historical review of Bordeaux and the Gironde Department , 1911 , p. 73-89 ( available on Internet Archive ) .

• Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger. A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship : Historical chronology , vol.  2, Clarendon Press, coll.  « Oxford-Warburg Studies », 1993 , 766 p. (ISBN  978-0-19-920601-8 ) .

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