Julius Caesar Scaliger - Works

Works

In 1531 he printed his first oration against Erasmus, in defence of Cicero and the Ciceronians. It is a piece of vigorous invective, displaying, like all his subsequent writings, an astonishing command of Latin, and much brilliant rhetoric, but full of vulgar abuse, and completely missing the point of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus.

The writer's indignation at finding it treated with silent contempt by the great scholar, who thought it was the work of a personal enemy - Meander - caused him to write a second oration (published in 1536), more violent and abusive, with more self-glorification, but with less real merit than the first. The orations were followed by a prodigious quantity of Latin verse, which appeared in successive volumes in 1533, 1534, 1539, 1546 and 1547; of these, a friendly critic, Mark Pattison, is obliged to approve the judgment of Pierre Daniel Huet, who says, "par ses poésies brutes et informes Scaliger a déshonoré le Parnasse"; yet their numerous editions show that they commended themselves not only to his contemporaries, but to succeeding scholars. A brief tract on comic metres (De comicis dimensionibus) and a work De causis linguae Latinae (Lyon, 1540; Geneva, 1580), which was the earliest Latin grammar founded on scientific principles and following a scientific method, were his only other purely literary works published in his lifetime.

Scaliger's Exotericarum exercitationum (Exoteric Exercises, 1557) was a realistic and empirical approach to natural philosophy based upon experience and observation and attacked Gerolamo Cardano's De Subtilitate. It had an influence upon natural historians, philosophers and scientists to include Lipsius, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Johannes Kepler.

His Poetices (Lyons, 1561; Leyden, 1581) appeared after his death. With many paradoxes, with many criticisms which are below contempt, and many indecent displays of personal animosity—especially in his reference to Etienne Dolet, over whose death he gloated with brutal malignity—it yet contains acute criticism based on the Poetics of Aristotle, imperator noster; omnium bonarum artium dictator perpetuus, an influential treatise in the history of literary criticism. Like many of his generation Scaliger prized Virgil above Homer. His praise of the tragedies of Seneca over those of the Greeks influenced both Shakespeare and Pierre Corneille.

It is as a philosopher and a man of science however that Scaliger meant to be judged. Classical studies he regarded as an agreeable relaxation from severer pursuits. Whatever the truth of the first forty years of his life, he had certainly been a close and accurate observer, and had made himself acquainted with many curious and little-known phenomena, which he had stored up in a most tenacious memory.

His scientific writings are all in the form of commentaries, and it was not until his seventieth year that (with the exception of a brief tract on the De insomniis of Hippocrates) he felt that any of them were sufficiently complete to be printed. In 1556 he printed his Dialogue on the De plantis attributed to Aristotle, and in 1557 his Exercitationes on Jerome Cardan's, De subtilitate. His other scientific works, commentaries on Theophrastus' De causis plantarum and Aristotle's History of Animals, he left in a more or less unfinished state, and they were not printed until after his death. They are all marked by arrogant dogmatism, violence of language, a constant tendency to self-glorification, strangely combined with extensive real knowledge, with acute reasoning, with an observation of facts and details almost unparalleled. But he is only the naturalist of his own time.

That he anticipated in any manner the inductive reasoning of the true scientific method cannot be contended; his botanical studies did not lead him, like his contemporary Konrad von Gesner, to any idea of a natural system of classification, and he rejected with the utmost arrogance and violence of language the discoveries of Copernicus. In metaphysics and in natural history Aristotle remained as much a law to him as in poetics, and in medicine Galen, but he was not a slave to the text or the details of either. He thoroughly mastered their principles, and is able to see when his masters are not true to themselves. He corrects Aristotle by himself.

He is in that stage of learning when the attempt is made to harmonize the written word with the facts of nature. His Exercitationes upon the De subtilitate of Cardan (1551) is the book by which Scaliger is best known as a philosopher. Its numerous editions bear witness to its popularity, and until the final fall of Aristotle's physics it continued a popular textbook. The Exercitationes are renowned for their display of encyclopaedic wealth of knowledge, the vigour of the author's style, and the accuracy of his observations; at the same time, as Gabriel Naudé noted, they contain more faults than those Scaliger has discovered in Cardan. Charles Nisard wrote also that his object seems to be to deny all that Cardan affirms and to affirm all that Cardan denies. Yet Leibniz and Sir William Hamilton recognize him as the best modern exponent of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle.