**_Joseph Juste Scaliger – Part 20_** ~[Part 1](https://steemit.com/scaliger/@harlotscurse/joseph-juste-scaliger)~ https://i.postimg.cc/4NjYBp7J/Scaliger-Manilius-Astronomica-Second-Edition1600.jpg**Second Edition of Scaliger’s Manilius** [Joseph Juste Scaliger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger) was a scholar of many talents and interests. As a polyglot and a philologist he was always curious about the evolution of languages and their relationships to one another. The publication of the second edition of his _opus magnum_ _De emendatione temporum_ in 1598 ensured that his fascination with ancient calendars and the marking of time remained undimmed. And work on his second edition of the [_Astronomica_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomica_(Manilius)) of Marcus Manilius―published in Leiden in 1599―reignited his interest in celestial phenomena. Around the same time he wrote a short _Diatribe on European Languages_ for his friend [Paulus Merula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulus_Merula), librarian of the Leiden University Library, who was writing a _Cosmographia generalis_―a general description of the Universe. In this brief treatise―it is barely three pages long―Scaliger applies the comparative method to the word for _God_ in various European languages. Foreshadowing the far-reaching achievements of later linguists, he is led to sketch a family tree of these languages, postulating the existence of four main language families (Italic, Hellenic, Germanic, and Slavic, in modern terminology) and seven minor ones (Albanian, Tatar, Hungarian, Finnish, Irish, Welsh, and Basque). These disparate interests, however, were about to be channelled into another major project: >By 1599 Scaliger finally found a new and larger focus for these scattered themes and interests. He began to establish a critical text of the most substantial ancient chronological text, Jerome’s adaptation of the _Chronicle_ of [Eusebius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius)―a compendium vast enough to give him ample scope for reflection on history, language, chronology, and much else. All the themes we have traced in his correspondence and table-talk would surface again in the course of his work on this text. ―Grafton 501 https://i.postimg.cc/ZYVJQw6Z/Paulus-Merula-Joseph-Juste-Scaliger.jpg**Paulus Merula and His Portrait of Scaliger** # Eusebius and the _Thesaurus Temporum_ # Scaliger would toil on this titanic project for more than half a dozen years: >Meantime the synoptic presentation of world-history which he had proposed was slowly taking shape. Seeking for some central point about which he might group the far-flung researches of his _De Emendatione Temporum_, he selected the so-called _Chronicle_ of an ancient worker in the same field as himself, Eusebius, the fourth-century Bishop of Caesarea. The original Greek [_Chronicle_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicon_(Eusebius)) of Eusebius had completely disappeared except for a few recognizable quotations in Byzantine authors, and a highly abridged Latin rendering by [St. Jerome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome). Scaliger now set himself the incredible task of recovering from every conceivable ancient source the lost material of the original chronicle, and of restoring it completely in the Greek form of the original. From his study of the Byzantine fragments he conceived the boldly original idea that Eusebius’ work had consisted of _two_ books, and that St. Jerome had abridged and translated only the second, which, being in the form of chronological tables, was the more practically useful of the two. The first book Scaliger decided had contained documentary epitomes of the Greek writers on Oriental history and it was this which he particularly determined to recover. Yet despite his microscopic examination of all ancient literature for evidences of Eusebian fragments, his collection was meagre and his task seemed doomed to failure. Then, with the extraordinary good fortune which so often smiles upon bold endeavor, he came in 1601 upon the track of a hitherto unknown Byzantine chronicler of the ninth century, the monk George, _syncellus_, or patriarch’s coadjutor, at Constantinople. To Scaliger’s unbounded delight this work, now well known as the [_Chronicle of Syncellus_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Syncellus), proved to contain far more of the original Eusebius than all the previous fragments which he had collected with so much labor. Thus in the year 1606 he published his restored Greek Eusebius as the central point of his two huge folio volumes of the _Thesaurus Temporum_—or “Treasure-House of Dates”—in which every extant relic of Oriental, Greek, and Roman chronology is arranged in due order and restored to intelligibility. This is the work in which, as [Professor Garrod of Oxford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._W._Garrod) remarked only a few years ago, “one half of modern scholarship has its forgotten source.” ―Blake 89–90 https://i.postimg.cc/jSxy7cfM/vgdDXHB.jpg**Armenian Translation of Eusebius’s _Chronicon_ (1818)** Scaliger was slow to arrive at this realization that Eusebius’s _Chronicon_ had comprised two books, only one of which Jerome had translated in abridgment. Initially he had only set out to produce a critical edition of Jerome’s Latin text. By the end of 1600 he was already boasting that he had restored Eusebius to life. But he had spoken too soon, and the difficulties presented by hopelessly corrupt manuscripts altered his plans significantly: >The text proved terribly corrupt, and ... Further enquiries ... at first turned up only other manuscripts that shared the defects of the first one. When better ones appeared, Scaliger had to rework his text from the beginning. At the same time, he found himself embarked on a parallel task far more ambitious and delicate than any normal edition. [Casaubon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Casaubon) suggested in December 1599 that it would have been wonderful if Scaliger ‛had managed to obtain a Greek text of Eusebius’ _Chronicle_’, though only the Latin had been sighted in modern times. ―Grafton 502 Scaliger first came across the work of the 11th-century Byzantine scholar [Cedrenus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kedrenos), which drew indirectly on Eusebius’s original Greek text. But Scaliger realized that he would require access to George Syncellus’s _Chronicle_ if he wished to do justice to Eusebius. Failing to lay his hands on a good manuscript of Syncellus―he had his eye on an 11th-century manuscript Casaubon had discovered in Paris―he was forced to suspend work on the _Thesaurus Temporum_ from the late summer of 1601 until June 1602. # _Corpus inscriptionum_ # Scaliger was not the sort of man to sit on his hands. He devoted the intervening months to a new project. In 1588 his predecessor at Leiden [Justus Lipsius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_Lipsius) had published an edition of the ancient inscriptions collected by the Flemish theologian Martinus Smetius, to which he had added his own collection, the _Auctuarium_: * [Justus Lipsius, Martinus Smetius](https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=viewer&bandnummer=bsb10141186&pimage=9&v=100&nav=&l=it), _Inscriptionum Antiquarum_, _Auctarium_, Franciscus Raphelengius, Leiden (1588) >... Scaliger studied it extensively. He noted that he and others had collected a great many inscriptions that it lacked. By 1598 he had entrusted these to [the printer Jean] Commelin in Heidelberg, for inclusion in a new _Corpus inscriptionum_. In July he asked [Janus Gruter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gruter), who lived and worked in Heidelberg, to serve as editor, and insisted that he himself need not even be mentioned in the finished work ... ―Grafton 503 https://i.postimg.cc/QtRVbnqk/Jan-Gruter-Justus-Lipsius.jpg**Jan Gruter & Justus Lipsius** Gruter, however, _was_ the sort of man to sit on his hands, so Scaliger ended up doing more of the work himself than he had planned. He was particularly aggrieved to have to slave away at the book’s twenty-four detailed indexes. The result was a tome of encyclopaedic scope: >The finished book filled more than 1,100 large folio pages ... [Gruter’s] dry and straightforward _Corpus_, with its detailed prefatory specification of its sources, remained the standard one for two hundred and fifty years. It was largely the result of Scaliger’s energy and learning, and even more of his prescient belief that inscriptions were particularly revealing, that they could make the texture of ordinary life in the ancient world more concrete and vivid than any other source. ―Grafton 503 ... 504 Scaliger’s indexes alone took up more than 200 of the book’s 1100 folio pages. Scaliger was proud of them and even urged Gruter to draft a commentary on them rather than on the texts: >Modern epigraphers and historians have taken Scaliger exactly at his word. They have described him as the inventor of the systematic subject-index to inscriptions, one of the most powerful tools for information-retrieval that classical scholars had until the twentieth century, and have shown that his work still provided the model for the indexes that finally supplanted Scaliger’s, those of the _Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum_ that followed his example on the still grander scale made possible by public funding and formal collaboration. ―Grafton 505 But, as usual, Scaliger had failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to one of his predecessors: >Smetius too had seen that a systematic index could make a good corpus of inscriptions into a great source of information. He duly composed one and inserted it into the final draft of his compilation ... and Lipsius had it printed along with the corpus itself in 1588. The indexes as well as the texts immediately caught Scaliger’s eye ... On the face of it, then, one might wonder if Scaliger really drew up his own indexes _de novo_. ―Grafton 505 As Grafton goes on to demonstrate, Scaliger clearly had Smetius’s indexes at his elbow when he was drafting his own. His first draft was even accomplished by a sort of copy-and-paste technique, though when he came to revise the work, he went well beyond what Smetius had done (Grafton 505). https://i.postimg.cc/gjnCm8ng/Eusebius-Artists-Impression.jpg**Eusebius of Caesarea (Artist’s Impression)** # George Syncellus # In June 1602 Scaliger finally got his hands on the Paris manuscript of George Syncellus’s Ἐκλογὴ Χρονογραφίας, or Extract of Chronography: * **[Codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. Graecus 1711](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10723005g/f4.item)**, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris This 11th-century manuscript contained a complete text of Syncellus’s chronicle. It had been discovered by Isaac Casaubon, who arranged for its loan to Scaliger: >The history of the MS ... is curious. It was preserved in the library of the patriarch at Constantinople. It reappeared in the Royal Library of France [the Bibliothèque du roi, which was then located at the [Collège de Clermont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Louis-le-Grand) in Paris]. A notice, in Greek, appended to the MS states that it was purchased at Corinth, for four pieces of gold (χρυσινοῦς), by John Abrami (or Abrams), in the month of November, 1507 ... It was probably one of the many waifs from the Ottoman capture of Constantinople. For some time it was believed to have been lost from the Royal Library. It reached Scaliger’s hands. It was, in time, restored to the royal repository, where it still remains, if it did not perish in the fires of the Commune. ―McClintock & Strong 85 Unlike the Tuileries Palace, the manuscript did survive the Paris Commune of 1871 and is still held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the successor of the Royal Library, at its Richelieu Site: https://i.postimg.cc/SK4W3KrL/Bn-FDepartment-Of-Manuscripts-Reading-Room-Richelieu-Site.jpg**Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des manuscrits (Reading Room)** >The Chronicle of Georgius Syncellus (_ca_ 800), covering the period from Creation to the first year of the emperor Diocletian [284 CE], is unique among such works of Byzantine chronography for its detailed treatment of antiquity, with frequent and often lengthy citation of sources. Syncellus is consequently our best and sometimes our only source for significant fragments of a number of ancient works otherwise wholly or partially lost. Of the many manuscripts that attest to the work of Syncellus, most contain only the latter third of the chronicle, from the time of Julius Caesar, followed by the continuation written by [Theophanes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophanes_the_Confessor). This portion of Syncellus derives chiefly from Josephus and the _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Eusebius, and is of less interest and importance than the pre-Roman sections. The only complete manuscript of the entire work hitherto known is the famous Paris manuscript (Bibliotheque Nationale _gr._ 1711) written in the year 1021 and discovered by Isaac Casaubon about 1600. From this manuscript Joseph Scaliger in 1606 published much of the material that he believed Syncellus had derived from the then lost first book of the chronicle of Eusebius. ―Mosshammer 289 Syncellus opened Scaliger’s eyes to the disparity between Jerome’s Latin epitome and the original Greek _Chronicon_ of Eusebius. And while Scaliger was contemplating the vast amount of work required to do justice to Eusebius, he had not lost sight of his earlier masterpiece _De emendatione temporum_, which also required his attention: >... Scaliger found that his editorial task bulked even larger than he had realized. The Latin text of the _Chronicle_ was only a corrupt fragment of the Greek original, and that in turn posed difficult problems of analysis and reconstruction. Yet Scaliger set to work ... He drew up a vast commentary on his texts. And he decided that he had to undertake anotter, complementary task. He saw that even the second edition of _De emendatione_ had not met the needs of the readers he respected most. It was just too hard ... Scaliger began to compose another systematic work on calendars and epochs to accompany his texts and notes. ―Grafton 506–507 https://i.postimg.cc/DZq9R7zf/0PvjP5q.jpg**_Thesaurus Temporum_ (1606)** This new work was the _Isagogicorum chronologiæ canonum libri tres_ [_Three Books of Introductory Rules of Chronology_], a systematic introduction to _De emendatione temporum_. It would be published between the same covers as the _Thesaurus temporum_ in 1606, taking up the last 382 pages of the volume’s 1460 pages. >But by now texts and treatises had multiplied far beyond the original plan. Even Scaliger confessed in September 1603 that he had written a ‛longum & operosum volumen’ [_a lengthy & laborious volume_]. It was no longer an edition [of Jerome or Eusebius] but a vast compendium―a _Thesaurus temporum_ [_A Treasure House of Dates_] ―Grafton 507 As Scaliger laboured on this mighty tome, he did not labour in isolation. These years were marked by the usual controversies and polemics that dogged Scaliger’s career, as we shall see in the next article. **_Itaque hic finem faciam._** --- ## References ## * [Jacob Bernays](https://archive.org/details/josephjustussca02berngoog/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater), _Joseph Justus Scaliger_, Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin (1855) * [Warren Blake](https://archive.org/details/sim_classical-journal_1940-11_36_2/page/82/mode/2up?view=theater), [_Joseph Justus Scaliger_](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3291178), _**The Classical Journal**_, Volume 36, Number 2, Pages 83-91, The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc, Chicago (1940) * [Anthony Grafton](https://archive.org/details/josephscaligerst0000graf/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater), _Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship_, Volume 2, _Historical Chronology_, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1993) * [Justus Lipsius, Martinus Smetius](https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=viewer&bandnummer=bsb10141186&pimage=9&v=100&nav=&l=it), _Inscriptionum Antiquarum_, _Auctarium_, Franciscus Raphelengius, Leiden (1588) * [John McClintock & James Strong](https://archive.org/details/cyclopaediabibl01whitgoog/page/84/mode/2up?view=theater), _Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Knowledge_, Volume 10, Harper and Brothers, New York (1881) * [Alden A Mosshammer](https://grbs.library.duke.edu/index.php/grbs/article/download/6881/5043/0), _The Barberini Manuscript of Georgius Syncellus (Vat. Barb. Gr. 227)_, _**Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies**_, Volume 21, Number 3, Pages 289–295, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina (1980) * [Joseph Juste Scaliger](https://archive.org/details/thesaurustemporu00euse/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater), _Thesaurus Temporum_, Johannes Janssonius, Amsterdam (1658) * [Joseph Juste Scaliger](https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_kHZQCe3x6LoC/page/118/mode/2up?view=theater), _Diatribe on European Languages_, _**Opuscula Varia**_, Pages 119–122, Adrien Beys, Paris (1610) ## Image Credits ## * [Second Edition of Scaliger’s Manilius](https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2020/06/josephus-scaliger-famous-scholar-and-grouch): Joseph Juste Scaliger, _Castigationes et notae in M Manili Astronomicon_, Christoph Raphelengius, Leiden (1600), Anonymous Engraving, Public Domain * [Paulus Merula](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portret_van_de_geleerde_Paulus_Merula_(1558-1607)_op_44-jarige_leeftijd._NL-HlmNHA_1477_53010834.JPG): Jacob Matham (engraver), Daniel Heinsius (text), Collection of Carl Gottfried Voorhelm Schneevoogt, Haarlem (1602), Public Domain * [Portrait of Scaliger](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scaliger.jpg): Paulus Merula (artist), _Icones Leidenses_, Number 28, Leiden (1597), Public Domain * [Armenian Translation of Eusebius’s _Chronicon_ (1818)](https://archive.org/details/EusebiiPamphiliChroniconBipartumGraeco-armeno-latinumVol.2/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater): Giovanni Battista Auchèr (translator & editor), _Eusebii Pamphili Chronicon Bipartitum Graeco-Armeno-Latinum_, Part 2, Auchèr, Venice (1818), Public Domain * [Jan Gruter](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Gruter_-_Imagines_philologorum.jpg): Johann Jacob Haid (engraver), Alfred Gudeman, [_Imagines Philologorum_](https://archive.org/details/imaginesphilolog00gudeuoft/page/8/mode/2up?view=theater), B G Teubner, Leipzig (1911) Public Domain * [Justus Lipsius](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Justus_Lipsius_by_Peter_Paul_Rubens.jpg): Peter Paul Rubens (artist), After Abraham Janssens I (artist), Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, Public Domain * [Eusebius of Caesarea](https://www.learnreligions.com/eusebius-biography-4582544): Charles Joseph Hullmandel (lithographer), Public Domain * [Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des manuscrits (Reading Room)](https://www.facebook.com/bibliothequebnf/photos/a.468470067879/10155454808232880/?type=3): © Jean-Christophe Ballot (photographer), OPPIC/BnF, Fair Use * [_Thesaurus Temporum_ (1606)](https://www.biblio.com/book/thesaurus-temporum-scaliger-joseph-justus/d/1323180028): Joseph Justus Scaliger, _Thesaurus Temporum_ (1606), Titlepage of a First Edition, Leiden, Public Domain https://i.imgur.com/7kq532u.png