Julius Caesar Scaliger

Julius Caesar Scaliger (born April 23, 1484, Riva, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died Oct. 21, 1558, Agen, Fr.) was a French classical scholar of Italian descent who worked in botany, zoology, grammar, and literary criticism. He claimed to be a descendant of the Della Scala family, whose Latinized name was Scaligerus and who had ruled the Italian city of Verona during the two preceding centuries.

Scaliger became known as a scholar through two virulent orations in 1531 and 1536 against the Ciceronianus of Erasmus, written in vigorous and trenchant Latin. The views on Ciceronianism with which Scaliger countered Erasmus, however, are considered narrow and shortsighted; Scaliger largely misunderstood the purpose of Erasmus’ ridicule of the stylistic excesses of contemporary Ciceronians.

Little is known of Scaliger’s early life. In 1525 he left Italy to become physician to the bishop of Agen at Quienne, where he spent the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen. Except for a tract on Hippocrates’ De insomniis (1539; “Concerning Bad Dreams”), his scholarly work was published late in his life and consisted largely of discussions of standard authors.

His dialogue De plantis (1556) is a commentary on the book on plants wrongly ascribed to Aristotle, and his Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate (1557; “Esoteric Exercises in Subtlety”) discusses scientific and metaphysical problems raised in De subtilitate rerum (“On the Subtlety of Things”) by the eminent naturalist Geronimo Cardano. An unfinished commentary on Aristotle was published in 1619 and one on Theophrastus in 1644.

His De causis linguae latinae (1540; “On the Subject of the Latin Language”) was an interesting early attempt to discuss the principles of Latin grammar. His Poetice (1561; “Poetics”) became his most widely read book. In it Greco-Roman rhetoric and poetics are used as a foundation for literary criticism, and his exposition of Aristotelian criteria for tragedy did much to turn his contemporaries toward Classicism. Thoroughly conversant with Latin and Greek writers, a competent textual critic, and a prolific composer of Latin verse, Scaliger was chiefly interested in developing an understanding and critical evaluation of the ancients. His teaching impressed a whole generation of savants in the great age of French classical scholarship.