In the late summer of 1574, following the conclusion of the Fourth War of the Huguenots, Joseph Juste Scaliger returned to France via Basle. For the most part, the next two decades of his life were spent in the service of Louis Chasteigner de la Roche-Posay. The Wars of Religion continued to rage during this period, and Scaliger and his patron were constantly on the move throughout the provinces of Poitou, Touraine, La Marche, and Limousin. In times of peace, they moved from one château to another. In times of war, they retreated to the Château du Lion, Chasteigner’s stronghold at Preuilly-sur-Claise in Touraine. Scaliger’s library was kept at the Château d’Abain in Thurageau, another Chasteigner stronghold in Poitou, of which only a tower survives. Other Chasteigner strongholds included the Château de Chantemille near Ahun in La Marche, the Château de Touffou on the Vienne in Poitou, the Château de Malval in Marche, and the Château de La Roche-Posay, of which only the 11th-century donjon survives. And this list does not come close to the full tally of places in which Scaliger dwelt, if his voluminous correspondence is any guide (Wild 116).
During his brief sojourn in Geneva between 1572 and 1574, Scaliger had been gradually turning against the methods of the French school of philology in which he had been trained. This tendency was accelerated by a humiliating incident in 1575:
Probably in 1565 or 1566, Muret had passed on to Scaliger two poems in archaic Latin, which he had attributed to Trabea and Accius [or Attius]. Scaliger accepted them as authentic and printed them in his notes on Varro’s De re rustica of 1573, praising them as gems of old Latin. ‛Who is so hostile to the Muses’, he wrote, ‛and so devoid of humanity as to be displeased by the publication of these verses?’ In 1575, however, Muret included them in a collection of his own orations and poems. In a dry preface he explained that they were not archaic Latin at all, but compositions of his own, adapted from a Greek comic fragment: For a joke, therefore, I assigned the name of Accius to the former set of verses, that of Trabea to the latter, in order to test the judgements of others and see if there was any savour of antiquity in them. I found no one who did not take them for ancient. Indeed, I found one man, endowed with extraordinary learning and very acute judgement, who took them from me and published them as ancient poems. (Grafton 161)
Marc Antoine Muret was a notable Classical scholar of the day. He taught Latin at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux in 1547-48, a few years before Scaliger attended that school, and was acquainted with Scaliger’s father Julius. Michel de Montaigne was among his pupils at Bordeaux.
The public humiliation which Muret’s joke occasioned Scaliger must have been unbearable for a man of Scaliger’s conceit. As Grafton eloquently puts it:
Muret had shown him up as a scholar, by fooling him, and as a poet, by surpassing him ... Some public response was called for. Scaliger, after all, was an aristocrat. During the later 1570s, he was also trying very hard to behave like one. He dressed in a short cloak, wore a ruff, and refused to let himself be seen reading or working. But during the sixteenth century, an aristocrat, at least in France, had to preserve an untarnished public face. If he allowed himself to be defeated without fighting back, his honour was damaged. Physical blows could be avenged by a challenge to a duel. But how could one reply to literary treachery? (Grafton 161 ... 162)
Scaliger’s response was to try and outdo Muret by applying the philological methods of the Italian school, which he was growing to admire, to a text Muret had edited after the French school. In this endeavour Scaliger’s principal models were Politian, the founder of the Italian school, and Piero Vettori, whose work he had come to respect:
Muret had edited Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Accordingly, Scaliger chose them as his subject. (Grafton 161)
Scaliger’s personal motives were made clear in a letter he wrote to his colleague Claude Dupuy when a rumour—false, as it happened—reached him that Muret had died:
Monsieur Cujas wrote to me recently that Monsieur Muret had died ... I would very much like to know the truth of it, and I humbly implore you to enlighten me, for I would be very sad if he passed away before I had repaid him for his verses by Attius and Trabea. I shall set about transcribing my little annotations on Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius, and will send them to you without delay, so that you may be my Aristarchus. (Larroque 44-45)
The Latin Elegists
Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus are among the best-known writers of elegiac poetry in the Latin language—only Ovid outshone them in this field. Their preferred form of expression, the elegy, was characterized by the use of the elegiac couplet, which consists of two verses: a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter.
The pentameter consists of two half-lines separated by a caesura. Each half-line comprises two-and-a-half feet: (1) a dactyl or spondee (2) a dactyl or spondee (3) a longum. Traditionally, the final syllable is always considered long, though in practice it may be short.
Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona around 84 BCE. Shortly after his arrival in Rome in 62 BCE he met Clodia Metelli, the beautiful, intelligent and dissolute wife of the proconsul Metellus Celer. She became his lover and much of his poetry recounts the history of their doomed affair. She is the Lesbia mentioned in 25 BCE of his 116 extant poems. More than 50 of these are written in elegiac couplets. Catullus died around 54-51 BCE, when he was in his early thirties.
Albius Tibullus was born around 55 BCE, shortly before the death of Catullus. Very little is known of his life. In Rome he was patronized by the wealthy general Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He died in his thirties around 19 BCE. Two books of elegies are extant under his name—Delia and Nemesis—but a third book, which Renaissance editors divided into two, consists of spurious poems. According to Apuleius, Delia was a married woman with whom Tibullus conducted an affair. Her real name was Plania. Three of the poems in Delia are devoted to Tibullus’s love for a young boy called Marathus. Nemesis is very short, comprising only 428 verses. It was possibly left unfinished at the time of the poet’s death and published posthumously. The identity of Nemesis has never been established, but it is thought that she was a courtesan.
Sextus Propertius was born in Assisi—130 km north of Rome—around 50-48 BCE, shortly after the death of Catullus. His surviving work comprises four books of Elegies. Like those of Catullus and Tibullus, many of his poems were inspired by a love affair. His beloved, known in the elegies as Cynthia, was a courtesan. Her real name was Hostia. According to the seventh elegy of Book IV, she died in obscurity and was buried near Tibur, 30 km northeast of Rome. Propertius’s final book of Elegies was published in 16 BCE or later. The poet is thought to have died shortly after its publication. He was certainly dead by 2 BCE, when Ovid speaks of him in the past tense (Remedia Amoris 1:764).
Scaliger’s Edition
Scaliger’s choice of the Latin elegists for his revenge was partly motivated by the fact that he had access to good manuscripts which had not been available to Muret. His old teacher Jacques Cujas, with whom he had studied in the early 1570s, lent him a 15th-century manuscript that contained the works of all three elegists. This manuscript is now in the British Library, where it is catalogued as MS Egerton 3027. It was created in Perugia in 1467 by the poet Pacificus Maximus. Cujas also possessed an older fragment of Tibullus which had never been published (Grafton 162-163).
To make clear to the reader that he was breaking new ground, Scaliger gave his edition of the elegies the following title (Grafton 178):
Catulli, Tibulli, Properti Nova Editio
A New Edition of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius
In the preface he was anxious to give the reader the impression that this new edition was little more than something knocked off in his spare time over the course of a few weeks. But as Anthony Grafton shows, this was simply not true:
Nothing could be farther from the truth, as Scaliger’s private letters to his friends, written in French, clearly show. His work on the commentary began as early as November 1575. He was still at it in early February 1576; on 11 May he hoped to be able to put it into final form in the near future; on 29 June he was busy doing so; and he did not send the completed work to Dupuy for publication until 8 August. The work, then, took more than half a year to write. (Grafton 163)
The work was published in Paris on 19 February 1577, and it had the effect Scaliger had hoped for:
... it became highly controversial within months after its appearance. In July 1577 Scaliger wrote to Dupuy that ‛there are many men, and others who look like men, and others who are not men at all, who are complaining about my Catullus’. It has continued to attract attention ever since. [Scaliger’s biographer] Jacob Bernays saw it as Scaliger’s most methodical edition, the one that marked his complete triumph over the vanity and incompetence of Italian correctors. And more recently, Sebastiano Timpanaro has shown that Scaliger’s Catullus was one of the most remarkable anticipations of Lachmann’s method before the eighteenth century. (Grafton 163-164)
According to Grafton, by distancing himself to some extent from the French school of philology and adopting the methods of the Italian school, Scaliger was effectively striking out on a previously untrodden path:
For the most part, Scaliger tried to fuse French methods with Italian ones. On the one hand he wished to adopt and naturalize in France the Italians’ method of manuscript recension ... On the other hand, he did not wish to reject the heart of the Parisian method along with the polemical excrescences that Muret had affixed to it. Literary texts had to be interpreted in a literary fashion; textual criticism was not enough. In away, his Catullus amounted to a re-uniting of the sundered halves of Poliziano’s original programme. Scaliger did more than put existing methods together. He also invented a completely new one. (Grafton 172)
One way in which he broke new philological ground was in attempting to reconstruct the hypothetical lost archetype from which the surviving mansucripts were believed to be derived:
Here too what Scaliger tried to do was more important than whether he succeeded or failed. His attempt to reconstruct the characteristics of a lost archetype was highly original. The Italians had shown how to identify an extant archetypus by putting manuscripts in genealogical order, but none of them had tried in print to project the idea of the archetype into the past, or to draw analogies from extant manuscripts in order to reconstruct a lost one. (Grafton 175)
Jurists such as Cujas had attempted something similar with respect to legal documents—for example, the Digest of Justinian—but Scaliger was the first philologist to apply this method to works of literature (Grafton 175). This technique of literary archaeology would serve Scaliger in later endeavours:
In his De emendatione temporum of 1583, he would reconstruct each ancient calendar from the references to it, often fragmentary, in ancient historians, poets, and scholiasts—just as he reconstructed a lost archetype on the basis of errors preserved in extant manuscripts. In the 1590s he would try to reconstruct the original ‛linguae matrices’ [mother tongues] from which the European languages of his own time had developed. In the Thesaurus temporum of 1606, he would argue that all ancient alphabets arose out of the Phoenician. All these reconstructions rested on the same ‛demand for a genetic causal link’. All rested on the same principle: that all things, poetic texts as well as alphabets, change in the course of time, giving rise to apparently different progeny, and that it is the scholar’s duty to uncover the identical origin of these progeny by identifying their real similarities. (Grafton 176)
Scaliger’s Nova Editio is a large volume of over 500 pages. The first half comprises the new edition of the works of the three elegists—including the spurious Books III & IV of Tibullus—while the second half is devoted to Scaliger’s emendations and notes (Castigationes):
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| i | Fronstispiece |
| iii-xii | Scaliger’s Preface |
| xiii-xvi | Commendatory Verses |
| 1-76 | Catullus |
| 81-143 | Tibullus |
| 145-274 | Propertius |
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| 1 | Frontispiece |
| 3-109 | Emendations on Catullus |
| 110-166 | Emendations on Tibullus |
| 167-253 | Emendations on Propertius |
| 255-260 | General Index |
| 261-264 | Index of Authors |
Scaliger was not allowed much time to rest on his new-won laurels. Before 1577 was out he had become embroiled in another controversy and had experienced further public humiliation.
References
- Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger, Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin (1855)
- Pierre Desmaizeaux (editor), Scaligerana, Thuana, Perroniana, Pithoeana, et Columesiana, Volume 2, Prima Scaligerana, Secunda Scaligerana, Covens & Mortier, Amsterdam (1740)
- Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Volume 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1983)
- Philippe Tamizey de Larroque (editor), Lettres Françaises Inédites de Joseph Scaliger, Alphonse Picard, Paris (1884)
- Joseph Juste Scaliger, The Elegies of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Albius Tibullus, and Sextus Propertius, A New Edition, Mamert Patisson, Paris (1577)
- Francine Wild, Le Prima Scaligerana: Registre d’une amitié savante, Albineana, Cahiers d’Aubigné, Number 7, Pages 115-130, Classiques Garnier, Paris (1996)
Image Credits
- Château d’Abain, Thurageau: © jm.durand (photographer), Creative Commons License
- Donjon de la Roche-Posay: © Lechat84 (photographer), Creative Commons License
- Marc Antoine Muret: Pieter Hendrik Jonxis (engraver), Public Domain
- Scaliger in an Aristocratic Ruff: Hendrik Goltzius (engraver), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Public Domain
- Tibullus at Delia’s House: Lawrence Alma-Tadema (artist), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Public Domain
- MS Egerton 3027 (Folio 113v): British Library, Public Domain
- Angelo Poliziano (Politian): Domenico Ghirlandaio (artist), Tornabuoni Chapel, Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Public Domain
- Joseph Juste Scaliger: Nicolas Eustache Maurin (original painter), François-Séraphin Delpech (engraver), Bibliothèque de Genève, Public Domain
