Joseph Juste Scaliger – Part 13
~Part 1~
In the last article in this series we saw how Joseph Juste Scaliger’s interest in the Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius was revived in 1577 after lying dormant for some years. In his own words to his friend the jurist and bibliophile Claude Dupuy:
The old illness has taken hold of me, that is to say, cacoethes scribendi. For lately while going through [brouillant] my books I found my Manilius corrected by me from the time I was in Switzerland [1572-74]. It seemed to me that there are things in it which are quite appropriate. I will apply myself to work on it as best as I can, and free from error an author so corrupted as this one. And when I am done, you shall be my Aristarchus, if you please, and also Monsieur Houllier [son of the doctor Jacques Houllier], who well knows how difficult it is to correct an author who speaks only of numbers and of equations of planetary hours with equinoctial hours. I know that there are great genethliacs and mathematicians in France today. But (because there is no one listening to us, αὐτοὶ γάρ ἐσμεν [= mum’s the word]) I could grant them an eternity before they would divine Manilius’s meaning in these difficult passages. (Larroque 63-64)
Scaliger had spent about five years working on his edition of the Appendix Vergiliana, an anthology of Latin poems once believed to comprise the juvenilia of Virgil. If Scaliger’s own testimony is to be trusted, he began this work around 1567, probably shortly after he and his patron Louis Chasteigner de la Roche-Posay had returned to France from their travels in England and Scotland:
Confecit Conjectanea in Varronem anna aetatis vigesimo. Et lors, dit-il, étois-je lou comme un jeune lievre. Notas in lib. de Re Rustica anno 25. et in Catalecta Virgili anno 27.
[He completed his Conjectures on Varro at the age of twenty. “In those days,” he said, “I was as mad as a March hare. [He compiled] his notes on De Re Rustica at the age of 25, and those on the Vergilian Appendix at the age of 27. (Desmaizeaux 21 : Grafton 277)
The Vergilian Appendix was first published in Lyon in 1572.
Some of the poems in the Appendix are now attributed to other authors, and even in Scaliger’s day the authenticity of the collection was debated. Among the spurious works is the Aetna a 644-line poem on the origins of volcanism. Scaliger attributes this to Cornelius Severus, an epic poet of the Augustan age, but it has also been attributed to Lucilius Junior, Procurator of Sicily during Nero’s reign, and Marcus Manilius, the poet and astrologer best known for his Astronomica. Perhaps this was how Scaliger’s interest in the Astronomica was first piqued.
After disposing of the Appendix Vergiliana, Scaliger initially turned his attention to the Astronomica, with the intention of producing a corrected edition and a commentary. He must have applied himself diligently to the task, for he claimed in a letter of 10 September 1573 that he had already brought his work on Manilius to fruition. But he put this work aside for the moment and turned his attention to other projects.
It was not until 1577 that Scaliger again came across his unfinished manuscript:
For it was while he was engaged in the polemic over Hippocrates that Scaliger came across the copy of Manilius’ Astronomica that he had worked on while in Geneva. He decided that this text too had been either neglected or mistreated by modern practitioners of its subject. Hence, it too called for the ministrations that only a critic with Scaliger’s gifts could provide. (Grafton 184)
But the completed work would not pass through the printing press until 1579.
Marcus Manilius was a Roman poet and astrologer of the early 1st century CE. He is remembered solely for his unfinished didactic poem in five books, known variously as the Astronomica or the Astronomicon. Little or nothing is known of the author. Even his name is uncertain. The entry in William Smith’s New Classical Dictionary of Biography, Mythology, and Geography reads:
- Also called Manlius or Mallius, a Roman poet of uncertain age, but is conjectured to have lived in the time of Augustus. He is the author of an astrological poem in five books, entitled Astronomica. The style of this poem is extremely faulty, being harsh and obscure, and abounding in repetitions and in forced metaphors. But the author seems to have consulted the best authorities, and to have adopted their most sagacious views. The best edition is by Bentley, London, 1739. (Smith 1850:412)
Richard Bentley, an English classicist and theologian of the 18th century, edited the Astronomica in 1739. In his biographical note on the poet he makes him an Asiatic Greek, but William Ramsay, Professor of Humanity at the University of Glasgow and author of the article on Manilius in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, does not place much faith in this or in any of the many other speculations that have arisen concerning Manilius:
The greatest uncertainty prevails on every point connected with his personal history ... The notion of Bentley that he was an Asiatic, and that of Huet that he was a Carthaginian, rest upon no stable basis. Farther we cannot proceed, and the great difficulty still remains untouched, how it should have come to pass that a piece possessing a character so singular and striking, discussing a science long studied with the most eager devotion, should have remained entirely unknown or neglected. One solution only can be proposed. We can at once perceive that the work is unfinished, and the portion which we possess wears occasionally a rough aspect, as if it had never received a final polish. Hence it may never have been published, although a few copies may have passed into private circulation; some of these having been preserved by one of those strange chances of which we find not a few examples in literary history, may have served as the archetypes from which the different families of MSS. now extant originally sprung. (Smith 1849:918 ... 919)
The Scottish academic John William Mackail numbered Manilius among the Lesser Augustans:
Another, and a more important work of the same type, but with more original power, and less a mere adaptation of Greek originals, is the Astronomica, ascribed on doubtful manuscript evidence to an otherwise unknown Gaius or Marcus Manilius. This poem, from the allusions in it to the destruction of the three legions under Varus, and the retirement of Tiberius in Rhodes, must have been begun in the later years of Augustus, though probably not completed till after his death. As extant it consists of five books, the last being incomplete; the full plan seems to have included a sixth, and would have extended the work to about five thousand lines, or two-thirds of the length of the De Rerum Natura. Next to the poem of Lucretius it is, therefore, much the largest in bulk of extant Latin didactic poems. The oblivion into which it has fallen is, perhaps, a little hard if one considers how much Latin poetry of no greater merit continues to have a certain reputation, and even now and then to be read. The author is not a great poet; but he is a writer of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his Astronomica shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill-judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the common material for hexameter poems, subjects from the Greek heroic cycle, or from Roman history. His total want of narrative gift, as shown by the languor and flatness of the elaborate episode in which he attempts to tell the story of Perseus and Andromeda, would have been sufficient reason for this decision; but he justifies it, in lines of much grace and feeling, as due to his desire to take a line of his own, and make a fresh if a small conquest for Latin poetry. (Mackail 157-158)
George Patrick Goold, who edited and translated the Astronomica for the Loeb Classical Library, used internal evidence to deduce that Books 1 and 2 were written when Augustus was still on the throne and Books 4 and 5 after Tiberius had succeeded him (Goold xii). Roland Mayer, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of London, placed Manilius’s floruit around 14 CE, the year Augustus died, and sees the Astronomica as:
a sort of Stoic counterblast to Lucretius’ Epicurean De Rerum Natura ... but this accomplished work sank virtually without trace. It is good, but not quite good enough to have lodged in the literary memory ... and Manilius (already referred to) entered the lists with a substantial work on astrology with a strong Stoic bias (the Epicurean Lucretius is covertly put down) (Harrison x, 58, 66)
In another chapter of the same book Monica Gale, Lecturer in Classics at Trinity College Dublin, also sees the Astronomica as a reply to Lucretius:
Both the style of Lucretius’ poem and the Epicurean world view expounded in it provide the major stimulus for the didactic poets of the next two generations. Virgil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris and the Astronomica of Manilius can each be seen to respond in different ways to the challenges presented by the De Rerum Natura ... the Astronomica of Manilius. Composed probably during the early years of the first century AD, this five-book poem on astrology rivals the De Rerum Natura in scale, and frequently echoes Lucretian (and, to a lesser extent, Virgilian) language and imagery ... Whereas, for Lucretius, the movements of the atoms are essentially random, Manilius regards the universe as the product of rational design. Human intelligence, moreover, is able to ‘conquer’ the secrets of the heavens and even to look into the future, precisely because the stars—which, for Manilius, control our destinies—are informed by the same divine spirit which endows us with ratio (rationality). (Harrison 107, 111, 112)
Like Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Manilius’s Astronomica was largely forgotten during the Middle Ages. Both poems were rediscovered around 1416–1417 by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini. Poggio came across a manuscript of the Astronomica near Konstanz when the Council of Constance, which he was attending, was in recess. He had a copy of this manuscript made from which our modern text derives. This copy, which Poggio himself acknowledged was very inaccurate due to the incompetence of his scribe, is M, Codex Matritensis 3678 (formerly M31). It is now held in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.
Why did Scaliger take an interest in this obscure poem? Three different scholarly opinions have been put forward. Warren E Blake saw it as preparatory work for a greater task, his masterpiece De Emendatione Temporum:
[In 1577] He turned instead to a project so titanic, so stupendous in the amount of labor involved, that no one except a genius of the highest order would have dared even to attempt it. This was nothing less than to assemble, correct, and coördinate all the systems of chronology of the ancient world—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Babylonian, Phoenician, Persian, Arabic, Syrian—each with its own manifold variations, and to equate them all according to the newly discovered astronomical principles established by Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. In partial preparation for this tremendous task he produced in 1579 an edition of the five extremely difficult books on astronomy by the Latin poet Manilius, solely with the purpose of acquiring an intimate first-hand knowledge of the astronomical theories of the first century after Christ and their relations to the new science. (Blake 87-88. See also Pattison 162)
But according to his biographer, Jacob Bernays, Scaliger’s work on Manilius was not a product of his chronological studies but, rather, their provenance. In preparing his commentary on Manilius, he was obliged to study ancient sources on astronomy and chronology, and this research convinced him of the need for a comprehensive treatment of dates and calendars (Bernays 49).
Scaliger’s latest biographer, Anthony Grafton, has questioned both interpretations, pointing out that chronology had been on Scaliger’s mind long before he conceived of De Emendatione Temporum (Grafton 1993:22-25). In August 1573 Scaliger set about editing three classical texts that dealt with the astronomical basis of the Roman calendar—the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, and the De Die Natali of Censorinus—although none of these ever came to fruition (Grafton 1993:36).
Grafton proceeds to argue that in resurrecting his manuscript of Manilius, Scaliger was motivated by much more personal considerations. His ongoing altercation with the medical profession had spread from purely medical matters to more general questions of French philology:
Jean Passerat, lecteur royal and friend of Ronsard, ridiculed Scaliger’s Catullus all over Paris. Scaliger, confined as he was to Touffou, could only foam impotently at the mouth. He was livid at the thought that a mere teacher, ‛who had read only eight books’, should dare to defame un homme bien nourri. ‛So long as I live’, he promised Dupuy, ‛I shall make war on pedants.’ (Grafton 1983:184)
To make an uncomfortable situation intolerable, even Piero Vettori, the Italian philologist whom Scaliger had praised in his Catullus, turned against him. Vettori was sharply critical of the French school of philologists, in which conjectures—educated guesses—weigh more heavily than the authority of the extant manuscripts. Scaliger was singled out for special criticism, his conjectures in editing Marcus Terentius Varro’s De Lingua Latina being so bold as to lead one to suppose that he had spoken with Varro himself (Grafton 1983:184).
As usual, Scaliger could not allow such a slight to go unanswered:
Accordingly, Scaliger set out to make his Manilius a declaration of yet another change of editorial principles. In a caustic preface he said just what he now thought of the Italians. But he wanted to dedicate the edition to Henri III. Sensible men did not present attacks on Florentine scholars to the son of Catherine de’ Medici. So he suppressed the preface, which survives only in a summary of it by Corbinelli. The work itself nevertheless clearly reveals his intentions. It is both an assertion of the critic’s supremacy in the study of ancient texts and a rejection of Vettori’s critical method. (Grafton 1983:185-186)
Scaliger was justly proud of his Manilius, and was still boasting of it twenty years later. Anthony Grafton believes that this pride was justified:
His Manilian emendations show him very nearly at his best—inventive, resourceful, and, for the most part, patiently attentive to the details of the text before him. (Grafton 1983:187)
Scaliger’s response to Vettori’s attack on his philology was not to amend his ways but, rather, to double down:
Scaliger’s work seems even more remarkable when one considers that he claimed to have completed it under a stringent self-denying ordinance. He deliberately refused to consult any manuscript evidence ... His refusal led Bernays and Pattison to see him as relatively uninterested in textual problems. But their judgement was the result of insufficient attention to the work’s immediate context. In fact, Scaliger’s refusal stemmed from what he saw as his mistreatment at the hands of the Italians. He relied on conjectural emendation rather than manuscript evidence because he wanted to defy those who had criticized his rashness. (Grafton 1983:190-191)
His pride, however, may have got the better of him:
Unfortunately, with Scaliger’s early ideals there came a return to his early vice. His need to show his brilliance in conjectural emendation again led him to be less than candid about the extent to which he had drawn on the work of others and, though indirectly, on manuscript evidence ... These plagiarisms—if that is the right term—detract relatively little from the originality of Scaliger’s work. His own ingenuity supplied the vast majority of the emendations that have continued to win acceptance or attract serious interest. (Grafton 1983:191-192)
Scaliger’s recent editions had all attracted vituperation and contumely, and he did not expect his Manilius to fare any better. He did, however, write an open letter to the Flemish astrologer Johannes Stadius, and implored him to defend the work (Heinsius 58-69)—but in vain:
Nothing Stadius could have done would have been enough. Scaliger had begun and carried through his great spasm of commentary-writing in order to win the glory that his name deserved. He had failed. He was moving ever farther from the sorts of interests that could appropriately be pursued in commentaries on texts. To write the history of aspects of ancient culture he would have to abandon the commentary for the treatise. (Grafton 1983:223-224)
While it is probably true that Scaliger did not work on the Astronomica as preparation for De Emendatione Temporum, it is surely significant that between 1597 and 1599—immediately before he embarked upon another titanic project, his Thesaurus Temporum, or Treasure-House of Dates—he took up his Manilius again and began to revise it. By that time he had been working in Leiden in the Dutch Republic for four or five years:
In 1599 to 1600 Scaliger published a second, much revised edition of the Manilius. To this he added Prolegomena de astrologia veterum Graecorum [Preliminary Remarks on the Astrology of the Ancient Greeks] ... (Grafton 1983:214)
In preparing this new edition of Manilius, Scaliger was careful to examine the manuscript evidence, something he had deliberately avoided doing when working on the first edition. In particular he is known to have had access to Jacob Susius’s collation of the oldest of the thirty or so extant manuscripts of the Astronomica (Reeve 12):
A posthumous third edition of Scaliger’s Manilius, corrected and enlarged from Scaliger’s manuscript notes, was published in Strasbourg in 1655 by Johann Joachim Bockenhoffer (Housman 1903:xiii). To this edition were appended about twenty-five pages of notes and observations by two contemporary scholars: the German doctor Thomas Reinesius and the French astronomer Ismaël Bullialdus.
Between 1903 and 1930 the English poet and classical scholar A E Housman produced what is still considered the definitive edition of Manilius’s Astronomica. If the opinion of Latinist Katharina Volk is to be trusted, Housman was clearly a scholar cut from the same cloth as Scaliger:
The work is famous—some might say notorious—for its bold handling of the text, its incisive commentary, and its merciless (and often very amusing) invective against other scholars. (Volk 3)
Housman described Scaliger’s editions of Manilius as the only avenue to a study of the poem before the 20th century (Goold cxiii : Housman 1903:xiv). But he also wrote:
Scaliger at the side of Bentley is no more than a marvellous boy. (Housman 1903:xvii)
1579 marked another important turning point in the life and career of Joseph Scaliger. He had failed to win the respect of the leading scholars of the day, but he had established a fearsome reputation for himself among the lesser lights of humanism:
Among the less learned Scaliger’s name stood immensely high. He enjoyed great respect in the pleasant Poitevin salon of Madame and Mademoiselle des Roches. And the ordinary bourgeois of Poitou saw him as an awesome figure, ‛celuy qui n’ignore rien’ [he who knows everything]. Most of this recognition was still in the future when Scaliger wrote to Stadius. No amount of uninformed praise could have satisfied his monstrous, wounded pride. In the circumstances it was almost fortunate for him that his dear friend and patron François de Chasteigner fell ill in the summer of 1579 and died on 9 September. Scaliger’s efforts on behalf of his friend exhausted him; Chasteigner’s death filled him with a grande melancholie. For a time, he ceased to work. When he began again, he pursued a new set of interests which derived but differed widely from his earlier ones. At last he was to win his glory, but as a chronologer rather than a critic. And that is another story. (Grafton 1983:226)
François de Chasteigner was an older brother of Louis Chasteigner de la Roche-Posay, Scaliger’s principal patron and protector. He was buried in the Abbaye Notre-Dame de la Merci-Dieu at La Roche-Posay, where Louis raised a tomb for him.
Itaque hic finem faciam.
