H.H. Asquith

It’s been a while since our leading statesmen would be comfortable discussing not just with the wider public the latest developments in Classical research. But a century or so ago, it was quite unremarkable for Herbert Asquith (1852–1928) to deliver such a speech during his prime ministership (1908–16). Here we republish that address to the Classical Association of England, along with a speech that he delivered eighteen years later, to the Classical Association of Scotland, on probably the very greatest of Classical scholars.

Born to a middle-class wool-trading Yorkshire family, Asquith was educated first at home and then at the City of London school, under Edwin Abbott (brother of Evelyn Abbott), who later reflected “I never had a pupil who owed less to me and more to his own natural ability.” Asquith went on to read Lit. Hum. at Balliol College, Oxford, then thriving in the era of Benjamin Jowett. He went on to take a double First in Mods and Greats, as well as winning the Craven Scholarship in 1874. Although elected a Prize Fellow of Balliol, Asquith embarked on a legal career at Lincoln’s Inn, being called to the bar in 1876. Alongside his legal work he became a frequent writer for the Liberal paper The Spectator, as well as a leader writer for The Economist.

His rising legal and journalistic profile, combined with his sympathy for Irish Home Rule, allowed Asquith to stand as a Liberal MP for East Fife, when Gladstone’s support for Home Rule forced the election of 1886. When the Liberals returned to power in 1892, Asquith was appointed Home Secretary. A decade later, after a competent spell as Campbell-Bannerman’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (1905–8), the latter’s death led to his taking over as Prime Minister. Despite holding this post for six years, the first two of which were dominated by the People’s Budget and stand-off with the Lords, the last two of which were taken over by World War I, Asquith found plenty of time for reading, drinking, golfing, bridge, and philandering.

After being ousted by Lloyd George’s Coalition Government in 1916, Asquith continued as Leader of the Liberal Party, acting twice as Leader of the Opposition (1916–18, 1920–2). Amid the Conservative landslide of the 1924 General Election, Asquith lost his seat to Labour opposition, but was promptly elevated to the peerage by King George V. His chosen title, the Earl of Oxford, honoured the university that had given him so much pleasure and possibility.

He died in 1926, aged 75, outliving his eldest son Raymond, who died at the Somme, but leaving four children by his first wife Helen, and two by second wife Margot. Two facts that may or may not interest the Antigone reader: his fourth son Cyril translated Housman’s A Shropshire Lad into Latin (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1929); and his great-granddaughter is Helena Bonham Carter, best known for being President of the London Library.

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Address to the Classical Association of England

from H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Birmingham, 9 October, 1908

That it is my privilege as President for the year of the Classical Association to deliver my address to its members assembled in the Town Hall of Birmingham may be regarded, I think, as a striking illustration of the interdependence in this country of culture and practice.

Birmingham, among all English towns, is perhaps the one most associated in popular thought and speech with the strenuous interests of business and politics. I myself, for a long time past, have been compelled to spend my waking hours — if I may use an ancient phrase without offence — non in Platonis republica sed in Romuli faece.^[1]“Not in Plato’s Republic but in Romulus’ dregs”: this echoes Cicero’s famous comment (Att. 2.1.8) about how Cato the Younger expressed his views as if in Plato’s ideal state rather than the gritty reality of Rome. [Ant.] But Birmingham has set up a University — which of us does not feel to-night the gap on our platform due to the much regretted absence of its illustrious Chancellor? — a University with a Faculty of Arts, and a Professor of Greek and Latin in the person of Dr. [Edward Adolf] Sonnenschein, who has been a pioneer of useful experiments in the art of teaching the ancient languages, and has done as much as any one to organise and develop the work of the Classical Association. And although, when I remember that I am in the chair which was occupied by Dr. [Samuel Henry] Butcher, I am painfully sensible that one who is not even worthy to be called a scribe has stolen into Moses’ seat, yet I can honestly say that I have never wavered in my allegiance to the great writers of antiquity, or ceased to take a lively interest in the progress of criticism and discovery which is every year throwing new light on their meaning, and laying deeper and broader the foundations of their imperishable fame.

The Classical Association has a double side to its activities. It seeks to examine and improve our English methods of studying and teaching the Classics. It seeks also to co- ordinate and bring together the ever-accumulating results of the labours of British and Foreign scholars. Under the first head it has already, in the course of two years, brought about a radical change, which, both in the magnitude of its scale and the rapidity of its execution, may well excite the envious admiration of iconoclasts and revolutionaries in other walks of life. The reformed scheme of Latin pronunciation has been adopted, and is in practical use in our Universities and in most, if not in all, of our public schools. It was recommended for use in secondary schools by the Board of Education in a circular issued in February 1907, which, however, left it open to the schools to retain if they pleased the traditional English pronunciation. It will be interesting to you to know the results, the details of which will be set out in the forthcoming Report of the Board. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the use of the reformed pronunciation has become normal in grant- earning schools. Returns have been received from 577 schools in which Latin is taught. Of these, no less than 550 use the reformed pronunciation. In 24 out of the 550 the scheme of the Association has been adopted with modifications of one kind or another, those most commonly made being (1) the distinction between u the vowel and v the consonant, and (2) the retention of the traditional English consonantal sounds – as, for instance, the soft c and g before the vowels e and i. You have thus, in effect, in the course of two years made a clean sweep of a system of mispronunciation which has prevailed in this country for more than three centuries, and which has done not a little to isolate English scholarship. Encouraged by this success, the Association is now attacking the problem of the pronunciation of Greek. It will be interesting to see whether, in this more broken and difficult ground, it will be found equally easy to rout the forces of Conservatism.

Side by side with these large reforms, the Association is prosecuting a less ambitious but equally useful task in seeking to secure that the highest educational value shall be got out of the time which is given in most English schools to the teaching of Latin. It is satisfactory to observe that the best authorities, even those who speak in the name of natural science, are practically unanimous as to the necessity of retaining the study of Latin. When one remembers how few of those who at present are learning Latin in school can by any possibility develop into scholars in any real sense of the term, it is obviously of the first importance that Latin should be taught in such a way as to be a propaedeutic, and a real intellectual discipline. Too often in the past the only permanent mental gain from the hours devoted during many years to the learning of Latin has been one of at least dubious value – a good memory for what is trivial and just as well forgotten.

But, as I said just now, the Association has charged itself with another function – that of bringing together in a coherent and connected form, from time to time, the results of the researches and discoveries of those who are engaged in the different fields of scholarship. How many those fields are, how indefinitely varied is their yield, and yet how important it is that the work done in each should be brought into reciprocal relation with the work done in all the rest, will become at once apparent to any one who looks at the admirable annual compendium which is edited for the Council by Dr. [William Henry Denham] Rouse. The subjects treated are indeed almost bewildering in their number and diversity. Archaeology in all its ramifications, Sculpture, Numismatics, Mythology, Epigraphy, History, Grammar, Textual Criticism – even this comprehensive catalogue by no means exhausts the various forms of activity which the learned of all countries are devoting every year to a better and closer knowledge of the ancient world. It is a perusal of this volume which has suggested to me one or two reflections on the changes which within my own memory, and that of many here present, have been brought about in this country both in the conception and the practice of classical study.

Let me make my meaning clear by an illustration. I was reading the other day a discourse delivered to the Classical Association of Scotland by Professor [William] Ridgeway, whose Early Age of Greece has laid me, among many others, under a deep debt of obligation. Its subject is the relation of archaeology to classical studies. His main thesis appears to be that, after the death of [Richard] Porson [in 1808], English scholarship rapidly degenerated into pedantry and verbalism, of which the highest achievements were a happy guess at a new reading in a corrupt passage, or some tour de force in the elegant and futile trivialities of Greek and Latin versification.

If, as he appears to hold, the field has now been broadened, and English scholarship has recovered, or is recovering, its sense of proportion, the result is in his opinion largely to be attributed to the introduction and acknowledgment of archaeology as a necessary part of the scholar’s equipment. I think that Professor Ridgeway is a little disposed to underestimate both the range and the productiveness of classical scholarship in this country, in what I may call the pre-[Heinrich] Schliemann era, when practically all that we knew of the early history of Mycenae and Crete was to be found in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet these were the days in which, to mention only a few out of many possible examples, such books as [Hugh Andrew Johnstone] Munro’s Lucretius [1864], [John] Conington’s Virgil [1858–71], [Benjamin] Jowett and [William Hepworth] Thompson’s editions and translations of Plato [1860s–80s], and the earlier part, at any rate, of [Richard Claverhouse] Jebb’s Sophocles [1883–96], saw the light. But there can be no doubt that Schliemann and his successors have had what can only be described as a revolutionaiy influence, and have to some extent altered the bearings of English and indeed of universal scholarship. During the last twenty years it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in this domain the pen has become the servant of the spade. We now know that the pre-Homeric civilisation, of which nearly the first traces were unearthed at Mycenae and Tiryns and Hissarlik, stretches back into an almost immeasurable past. It may be, and probably is, the case that it went through stages of development and decadence in the Cyclades and Crete before it crossed to the Argolid. Mr. [Arthur] Evans and his school believe that they can trace no less than eight so-called Minoan epochs, each with a characteristic art of its own, before they reach the era called Late Minoan III., which begins with the sack of the later Palace at Knossos about 1400 B.C., and which, corresponding roughly with the so-called Mycenaean of the mainland, perhaps lasts to 1000 B.C. The revelation of the existence during centuries, possibly during thousands of years, of this almost unsuspected Aegean world, has, of course, compelled a revision of the traditional notion, in which most of us were brought up, that we have in the Homeric poems the first records of historic Greece. There is, no doubt, much that is still obscure, and, if I may venture to say so, still more that is highly conjectural, in the picture which Archaeology has constructed of what may be called, without prejudice, the pre-Achaean ages. The great Palace at Knossos, in its wall decorations and in its sanitary and hydraulic arrangements, was rarely, if ever, surpassed in the later days of Greek art. We gather from that which remains of their art that the men who erected and lived in and about this wonderful building were a dark-skinned and long-headed race, with shaven faces, short in stature and narrow in waist, who were still in the bronze age, and who buried and did not burn their dead. Their language does not help us, for, as I understand, none of the Cretan scripts, whether pictographic or linear, have as yet been satisfactorily deciphered. Can they be properly described as a Greek race? Is their art to be called Greek Art? In the successive waves of migration, of which the origin, the succession, and the effect seem to become more rather than less disputable with the progress of research, were they swept out of existence or absorbed either as a dominant or a contributory factor in the historic Hellenic race? To these questions Professor [Ronald Montagu] Burrows, who has collected in his excellent book^[2]R.M. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete (John Murray, London, 1908). everything that is relevant to the subject, admits that at present no definite answer can be given.

Prehistoric archaeology in the region of the Aegean has indeed raised more questions than it has solved. To say this is not to disparage or undervalue the service which it has rendered, particularly to Homeric scholarship – in correcting crude theories, in setting aside false interpretations, in giving historic actuality to what used to be regarded as manifestly legendary or fictitious, and generally in recasting the perspective to the Poems. But to the student of ancient literature, archaeology (as Professor Ridgeway rightly says) must be kept in an ancillary position. It must not occupy the foreground and dominate the scene. There may be as much pedantry and waste of time in wrangling over the question to which of our nine hypothetical Minoan epochs a particular potsherd belongs, as in elaborating theories about the different usages of ἄν and οὖν. The shadow of the commentator, whatever may be his particular calling – textual criticism, grammar, excavation – should never be allowed (as it so often has been) to obscure and almost to obliterate the writing of genius. The true scholar values and uses all these aids and lights, each in its due proportion; but the true scholar is rare.

Amidst all the digging and scratching and scraping that have been going on during the last twenty years on all sides of the Mediterranean, it is disappointing, though perhaps it ought not to be surprising, that so few of the lost literary treasuries of the ancient world have been recovered. The caprice of chance, which has preserved so much, and left so much apparently to perish, still seems to mock our hopes. It is tempting to speculate which of the works that we know to have existed would, if rediscovered, be most warmly welcomed by the educated world. The lost Attic tragedies? or the comedies of Menander? or those discourses and dialogues of Aristotle, which, if ancient tradition is credible, reveal him as the master of a readable and even an attractive style? or the Philippica of Theopompus, which, according to [Ulrich von] Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s ^[3]Greek Historical Writings, etc., translated by Gilbert Murray (Oxford UP, 1908). recent Oxford lecture, contained more than the special merits of Herodotus and Thucydides, and his equally remarkable Meropis, which was actually in existence in the ninth century. We would gladly exchange a little early Minoan pottery for some of these masterpieces – or indeed for some genuine product of the chisel of Phidias or Polyclitus. But it may be that these things are still only in hiding, to reward the patience or the good luck of some fortunate member of the indefatigable and undefeated fraternity of the spade.

In truth the great writers of antiquity remain, as they have been and always will be, their own best interpreters. Archaeology has thrown, as it were from outside, new lights upon their environment, which have in not a few instances made real what seemed to be fantastic, and intelligible what was all but meaningless. But perhaps a still greater service has been rendered in our time to English scholarship by the wider knowledge and more comprehensive survey of ancient literature itself which is now required of any one who aspires to be a scholar. Thirty or forty years ago, at both Oxford and Cambridge, the so-called Classical authors were a select, almost an aristocratic body. They were studied with a minute and even meticulous care. I suppose there was not a sentence or even a line in the Ethics or the Republic, every possible interpretation of which was not as familiar to the great Oxford coaches as are the traditional openings in chess to a[n Emanuel] Lasker or a [Siegbert] Tarrasch. The well-regulated student was kept somewhat rigorously within this carefully fenced domain. If he showed vagrant, migratory tastes, which tempted him to roam afield, he was warned against the double danger of a too superficial knowledge of his authors and a vitiated style. Intensive cultivation of the writers of the Golden Age was the rule of life. Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna,^[4]“handle (them) by night, handle (them) by day”, Horace’s advice on what do with Greek authors (Ars Poetica 269). [Ant.] was its motto. It is probable that very few of us who were immersed in the great Augustans ever read a line of Strabo, or of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or of the anonymous author of the treatise on the ‘Sublime’ – though two of them were certainly, and the third may possibly have been, contemporary with Virgil and Horace. There is, I am glad to say, a growing tendency to extend the range of classical reading. There is no fear of the great masters of style and literary charm being dethroned from their seats of power. Homer, the Attic dramatists, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, and, at Rome, Lucretius and Catullus, the Augustan poets, Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus, will always maintain an undisputed ascendency. But, even though a man should put in peril the purity of his elegiacs and iambics, or of his Greek and Latin prose, his scholarship is one-sided and incomplete unless he makes himself at home in less familiar epochs and in fields that have been less assiduously tilled. The two fascinating books of Professor [Samuel] Dill show what a mine of interest, literary as well as historical, lies open for exploration in the later centuries of the Western Empire. And the History of Classical Scholarship by Dr. [John Edwin] Sandys, the accomplished Public Orator of Cambridge, supplies a need from which we have all suffered, and for the first time supplies English readers with a luminous and connected narrative, to use his own words, of ‘”the accurate study of the language, literature and art of Greece and Rome, and of all they had to teach us as to the nature and history of men.” Dr. Sandys reminds us of what, possibly, even some members of the Association may have forgotten –  the true origin of the term ‘Classical’ which forms part of our title and which has given its name to a whole field of  learning and research. In the Noctes Atticae (XIX.8.15) Aulus Gellius describes a certain author as classicus scriptor, non proletarius, a metaphor which apparently goes back as far as the division of the Roman people into classes by Servius Tullius [king of Rome, 578–535 BC]. A citizen in the first class was called classicus; those who made up the last and the lowest were proletarii. There are many authors, ancient as well as modern, who are more read than they deserve to be; for they belong irretrievably to the proletariat of literature. But I venture to think that in days gone by we have been a little too subservient to tradition and convention in refusing to admit the title of original and interesting writers to be ranked with the Classics.

Lastly, may I not say, without any disparagement of the great scholars of our youth, that what we call the Classics – whether as instrument of education or as field for research – have come to be treated with a larger outlook, in a more scientific spirit, with a quickened consciousness of their relations to other forms of knowledge and other departments of investigation. This is indeed a characteristic of the general intellectual movement of our time. It is more and more recognised that the many mansions which go to form the Palace of Knowledge and Truth open out into each other. There is no longer any question of mutual exclusion, still less of absorption or supersession. I was much struck with this in reading the brilliant address delivered this autumn to the assembled votaries of Natural Science by the President of the British Association [Francis Darwin]. Mechanical theories and explanations no longer satisfy the well-equipped biologist and botanist who has to deal with the problem of living matter even in its most rudimentary forms. In like manner the facile and attractive simplicity of many of the theories which had crystallised almost into dogmas as to Greek origins, Greek religion, the order and development of Greek poetry, and as to a hundred other points, has had to yield to the sapping operations of the comparative method, and is found in the new setting of a larger scheme of knowledge to be hopelessly out of perspective. There is nothing more irksome to the natural man than to have the presuppositions on which he has lived rooted up and cast upon the rubbish heap. But this is the often unwelcome service which Science is always rendering to the world. Aristotle said long ago that the being that could live in isolation was either below or above humanity. There is no form of study – least of all the study of language and literature, which are the vesture of men’s thoughts and emotions – that can afford to isolate itself without incurring the risks of pedantry and sterility.

Here is a work which is worthy of the co-operative efforts of this association of scholars. For the literature of the two great European races of the ancient world can never lose its supreme attraction, its incommunicable splendour; and of them it is true, in the famous words of Roger Bacon, notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae.^[5]“Knowledge of languages is the first gate to wisdom.” [Ant.]

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After a vote of thanks was offered, Asquith remarked:

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you most heartily – first and foremost for the patient and indulgent con-sideration with which you have listened to what I am afraid was a somewhat amateur discourse; and next for the vote of thanks, the value of which, if I may say so, has been enhanced to me by the fact that it was proposed by my old friend and fellow-student, your Bishop, and seconded by so distinguished and illustrious a scholar as my friend Dr. Butcher. It is quite true that when I undertook to perform this duty I could not anticipate either that I should at this time be the occupant of the post which I have the honour to hold, or that the date for the fulfilment of my engagement would take place at a time of considerable international anxiety and difficulty. But none the less I can assure you it has been a very great pleasure to me to divest myself for an hour of all those cares and preoccupations, and to find myself once more in that old companionship, the charm of which never fails, the companionship which unites together those who have once imbibed the taste for the literature and the language of the ancient world.

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scaliger

Presidential Address to the Scottish Classical Association

by H.H. Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith

Edinburgh, 20 March, 1926

It is nearly eighteen years since I had the honour of holding the office of President of the Classical Association of England, which was then still in its early youth. I chose as the subject of my address “The Spade and the Pen”^[6]This may be a faulty recollection of the speaker: the title recorded for his 1908 speech above is “The Function of a Classical Association”. [Ant.] – the relations between Classical Scholarship in the old sense in which I and my contemporaries were brought up to understand it, and the contributions made in our time to our knowledge of the Ancient World by the new and momentous developments in the domain of Archaeology. I referred in particular to the re-creation, through its aid, of our conceptions of pre-Homeric civilization with all its unsuspected stages of rise and decay in Crete and the Cyclades. These revelations have since multiplied in number, and grown in stature and significance. Archaeology has become as indispensable an instrument for the understanding of the Classics as History or pure Scholarship.

I will venture to quote a few sentences from my address because they may be regarded as a not inappropriate preface to what I have to say to-day of the life and achievements of the greatest scholar of the 16^th century – Joseph Justus Scaliger. “Thirty or forty years ago” – it ought now to read fifty or sixty – “at both Oxford and Cambridge, the so-called Classical authors were a select, almost an aristocratic body.” (I added a citation by Sir John Sandys from the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, who describes a certain author as classicus scriptor, non proletarius.) “They were studied at our old Universities with a minute and even meticulous care… The well-regulated student was kept somewhat rigorously within this carefully-fenced domain. If he showed vagrant migratory tastes, which tempted him to roam afield, he was warned against the double danger of a too superficial knowledge of his authors, and a vitiated style. Intensive cultivation of the writers of the Golden Age (if it be stretched to include Tacitus and Juvenal) was the rule of life. Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna, was its motto.”

To the student of the history of Scholarship few things are more interesting than the order in which, after the invention of printing, and during the second stage of the Revival of Learning, the remains of Ancient Literature were put into circulation. In Sandys’s Short History of Classical Scholarship^[7]Cambridge UP, 1915, pp.198–9. there are two convenient tables giving the dates of publication of the Editiones Principes of Latin and Greek authors. A more apparently capricious and haphazard succession it is difficult to imagine.

In Latin, the order from 1465 to 1470 is as follows:—

1465: Cicero, De Officiis.

    Cicero, De Oratore.

    Lactantius: Augustine (Civ. Dei).

1467-9: Cicero, Ad Familiares.

   Cicero, Orator.

   Apuleius.

   Aulus Gellius.

   Caesar.

   Lucan (First Latin poet).

1469: Virgil.

   Livy.

1470: Several more of Cicero’s works.

   Sallust.

   Juvenal and Persius.

   Suetonius.

   Terence.

   Valerius Maximus.

   Boethius.

It was not till 1471 that we have a printed Horace, nor a Lucretius till 1473, following after such writers as Ausonius and Calpurnius.

There are two comments which are at once suggested by this chronological catalogue. First, the priority and preponderance of Cicero is noteworthy; and indicates, or at any rate presages, his primacy among the Renaissance Humanists as the model and the supremely great master of Latin style. It was into this almost servile cultus, which flourished especially among the dilettanti of Italy, that fifty years later [Desiderius] Erasmus, in his Ciceronianus (1528), poured his destructive shafts of ridicule.

The other point which seems worthy of notice is the relatively late appearance of the first edition of Virgil – “Degli altri poeti Onore e Lume” (Inferno I, 82)^[8]“The Honour and Light of other poets” [Ant.] – who throughout the Middle Ages, and long before what is technically called “the Revival of Learning,” was, as we all know, a great legendary figure, regarded by the vulgar as a magician, and by not a few of the Church teachers and writers, on the strength of his 4^th Eclogue, as a precursor of Christianity worthy to be ranked with the Hebrew prophets. It is strange that his works should not have been printed at Rome until after those of second-rate writers like Lactantius (who, however, had been enthusiastically admired by Petrarch) and Apuleius; or even, a more considerable author than either, the poet Lucan, who is described (not, I think, without justice) by Scaliger in one place as “pater taedii,”^[9]“Father of boredom” [Ant.] and in another as possessing “violentissimum et terribilissimum ingenium.”^[10]“The most violent and terrible intellect” [Ant.] Scaliger adds, relapsing into French, “Il en avoit trop, et ne se pouvant retenir, il n’a sceu que c’estoit que faire un Poeme.”^[11]Scaligerana, p.248. (“He had too much, and being unable to restrain himself, he didn’t know what to do to make a poem.” [Ant.]

The Greek Editiones Principes begin some ten or twelve years later than the Latin. The list opens with Aesop, or possibly with the Batrachomyomachia (1478), and it is not until ten years later that we have [Demetrios] Chalcondyles’ Homer, printed at Florence in 1488, closely followed by Isocrates, Theocritus, Hesiod, and the Anthology. A volume containing four plays of Euripides, the first printed text of any of the Greek tragedians, saw the light in 1495; but there is no Sophocles, Thucydides, or Herodotus till they were produced at Venice by the Aldine Press in 1502.

Here, again, though Homer is placed well in the front rank, one cannot but wonder at the caprices, whether of choice or chance, which gave priority to Isocrates and Theocritus over Sophocles and Thucydides.

I have said nothing – because my main subject centres round the life and work of a great Scholar of the sixteenth century – of the early stages of the Renaissance, before the printing-press had profaned the Holy of Holies, and when keen-scented and adventurous sleuth-hounds, of whom Poggio [Bracciolini] had the acutest flair, and perhaps the best luck, were scouring the monasteries of Europe for Classical manuscripts. The story is well told in the 19^th Chapter of Sandys’s Short History. At the same time (1400–50) we see the dawn of Classical archaeology, and the first attempts at a systematic collection of Inscriptions.

The ground was in these various ways made ready for the men of the sixteenth century – Erasmus, the two Scaligers, and [Isaac] Casaubon.

The life of Erasmus, and his contributions to scholarship, of which the most famous is the Editio princeps of the Greek Testament, are so well known that I pass at once to the Scaligers – Julius Caesar (1484–1558) and his more illustrious son, Joseph Justus (1540–1609), whose name I have chosen as the title of this paper.

The father, Julius Caesar, need not detain us for more than a few moments. An Italian by birth, who claimed kinship with the ancient house of Della Scala of Verona, he did not come, till he was over forty, to France, where his fifteen children – of whom Joseph was the tenth – were born. According to his son, he was a man of fine appearance and imposing carriage, who added to his vast, if irregular and miscellaneous, erudition the gifts of a beautiful penman and an artist. He began life as a Catholic, and aspired in his youth to become one day Pope, but he soon quarrelled with the monks, and before his death he was (says his son) “ demi-Lutherien,” though he never formally abjured his original faith. He was a great linguist, being proficient in no less than eleven languages. “Sane Latine et Romane loquitur, styloque Pliniano et vere Philosophico. Multus erat in etymologiis, saepe falsis, ut Varro etiam.”^[12]“Of course he speaks Latin and Greek, and in a Plinian, truly philosophical style. He’s very involved in etymologies, often false ones, as Varro was too.” [Ant.]

Joseph had little schooling, except such as was given him at home by his father, who had a passion in the interludes of study for writing Latin verses, of which the son had to take down sometimes a hundred at a time, in addition to composing a daily declamation in Latin prose. This unsystematic kind of education continued till he was eighteen, when the father died. Joseph does not appear then to have had any knowledge of Greek. Such, however, was his ambition and his power of application that, according to his own statement, with the aid of a Latin translation, he read through the whole of Homer and the Greek poets in four months. He had no Grammar except what he formed for himself as he went along, and neither then nor afterwards did he use a Lexicon. In this respect his example was followed by Casaubon, of whom he says: “Casaubonus non utitur Thesauro,”^[13]“Casaubon doesn’t use a dictionary.” [Ant.] adding the generous tribute, “C’est le plus grand homme que nous ayons en Grec: je lui cede: est doctissimus omnium qui hodie vivunt.”^[14]“He’s the greatest man we have in Greek: I yield to him: he’s the most learned person of everyone alive.” [Ant.] With the exception of some time at the University of Paris, of which we know nothing, Scaliger spent the greater part of his life in France – some thirty years – in the household of a great nobleman, M. de la Roche Pozay, or travelling with him and his family over Europe. “Magna est Providentia Dei in rebus meis. Ego ab obitu Patris semper eleemosynis vixi.”^[15]“Great is the providence of the God in my affairs. I have always lived on alms since my father’s death.” [Ant.] Scaliger came once, at any rate, to England and penetrated as far as Edinburgh. He became a correspondent of the best scholars in all the countries through which he passed; but though he was an expert in modern as well as in ancient languages, Latin remained his epistolary vehicle. Of English he had a peculiarly low opinion. “Linguam habent (Angli): sed mixtam ex colluvie aliarum linguarum; nam est mera loquendi farrago.”^[16]“Their language is a medley of the sweepings of other tongues: in fact, a hodgepodge of a language.” An improvident dictum. Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare (amongst others) were at the time showing, or about to show, to what uses this mongrel dialect could be put. Nor had he a more flattering estimate of our nation and its component factors. The Saxons, he says, “fuerant summi latrones in mari… Nulli melius Pyraticam exercent quam Angli: les Irlandois sont grands brigans, et les Escossois, Scoto-brigantes, unde vox Brigand adhuc retinetur.”^[17]“Were the greatest sea-bandits… no-one practises piracy better than the English: the Irish are great brigands, and the Scottish, the Scoto-Brigantes, from which the word “brigand” is still in use.” [Ant.]

As a set-off to this lampoon upon your countrymen, we must record Scaliger’s tribute to George Buchanan, the most accomplished scholar that Scotland in those days produced. “Buchananus unus est in tota Europa, omnes post se relinquens, in Latina poesi.”^[18]“Buchanan is number one in all of Europe in Latin poetry, leaving all others behind him.” [Ant.]

Joseph Scaliger was from first to last an un-compromising and inflexible Protestant. For some reason or other he was disliked and disparaged by Henri IV, who, after his own conversion, did what he could to protect his old co-religionists. The unrelenting hostility of the Jesuits at last made Scaliger’s life in France intolerable, and compelled him to take refuge at Leyden, where, despite the continuous fusillades and the venomous and unscrupulous slanders of the Catholic janissaries, he spent the last fifteen years of his life in undisputed authority as the Grand Master of European Scholarship. Casaubon, his junior in age by nearly twenty years, and his only possible rival in erudition and accomplishment, was also a Protestant.^[19]They never met, but corresponded for years. The younger man had for the elder unbounded admiration and reverence. He was, however, a man of weaker character, and having secured the favour of the French King, who made him his sub-librarian, and come to be on terms of scholarly intimacy with some of the leading Catholic propagandists, in particular with the adroit Cardinal du Perron, who did everything possible to bring about his conversion, he incurred grave suspicion among his Huguenot friends. But although his wide reading and impartial judgment led him to question some of the cruder tenets of the Calvinist theology, and he became in his last years what would now be called “an Anglo-Catholic,” he never bowed his knees to Rome, and suffered in the end, like Scaliger, the penalty of exile from his country. England supplied him with the refuge which Scaliger had found in Holland.

We may now turn to the question – what were the attainments, and what the actual contribution to scholarship, of Scaliger, which in spite of cavils and calumnies, secured him his acknowledged ascendancy, and justified the tribute of Casaubon in describing him when he died as “lumen literarum, saeculi nostri lampas, ornamentum unicum Europae.”^[20]“The light of letters, the lamp of our age, the unique adornment of Europe.” [Ant.] His career may be divided into two stages, in each of which he was the pioneer of modern scholarship. The first was given to textual criticism, and culminated in his edition of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius (1577). His achievements in this field are summarized by [Mark] Pattison as follows:^[21]Essays, Vol. I, p.130.

“Scaliger first showed the way to that sound notion of textual criticism, in which the genuine tradition is considered as the basis, and alteration is only permitted on condition of establishing itself by vigorous proof.”

He, in fact, reclaimed the art of conjectural emendation from “haphazard guesswork, and made it a rational procedure subject to fixed laws.”

The second stage, when he passed from textual criticism to the reconstruction of the chronology and history of the ancient world, began with the publica-tion of his edition of Manilius (1579). I confess it has often been a puzzle to me why such a writer as Manilius could offer so many attractions to great scholars. A week or two ago, I put the question to my friend Professor Gilbert Murray, and you may be interested in his answer:

“Manilius,” (he writes to me,) “does fascinate people, for instance, Robinson Ellis and [Alfred Edward] Housman and [Heathcote William] Garrod, and you perhaps remember that [Charles] Boyle took [Richard] Bentley to task for saying that Manilius and Ovid were the only ancients who had wit. Bentley’s chief defence is that ‘he knows not that ever he said it, but he sees no reason why he that said this should be ashamed of it.’ There are beautiful phrases and passages in Manilius – perhaps nothing quite so good as the introductory elegiacs by Housman in the first volume of his edition. There is something Lucretian about Manilius, the sort of grandeur of conception in the background – but I think scholars are largely attracted to him by his difficulties.”

I am inclined to think that the concluding words of Professor Murray’s last sentence contain the key to the problem. Manilius has indeed been described as “the most difficult of the Latin classics.” The greater part of his poem is devoted to one of the most barren and repulsive of topics – Astrology; yet in the hands of Scaliger it served as an introduction to his epoch-making book, “De Emendatione Temporum” (1583), to be followed twenty years later by the “Thesaurus Temporum” (1606). By these works Scaliger may be said, without exaggeration, to have created the Science of Chronology. They display a width of erudition and a thoroughness of research which have rarely been equalled, and never surpassed.

These achievements placed him at the head in Europe of ancient learning, and strange to say set on foot against him perhaps the most protracted and poisonous vendetta which has ever disgraced the annals of scholarship. It was engineered for the most part by the Society of Jesus, of whom Scaliger had said, “Jesuita nullus hodie doctus… Casaubonus unus plus potest quam tota Societas.”^[22]“No Jesuit today is learned… Casaubon alone can do more than the whole Society.” [Ant.] They enlisted in their campaign a former enemy of their own, now a convert to Romanism, the infamous literary bravo [Caspar] Scioppius – described by Sir Henry Wotton as “semicoctus grammaticaster.”^[23]“A half-baked petty-schoolmaster” [Ant.] The history of this shameless persecution is given in detail in Pattison’s Essay. I may perhaps quote what I have written elsewhere of its final stage:^[24]In a paper on Sir H. Wotton, Studies and Sketches, p.101.

“Scioppius gave himself with fiendish malignity to embittering the last years of that greatest of scholars and most high-minded of men (Scaliger) by almost incredible vilifications and scurrilities. It was in vain that Scaliger, then near his death, vindicated himself in one of the most pungent and most brilliant of his writings. The lies had got the start, and there was no overtaking them. It was another illustration of [Francis] Bacon’s grim aphorism: ‘Audacter calumniare: semper aliquid haeret.’”^[25]“Slander boldly: something always sticks.” [Ant.]

It may not be out of place here to quote from his Table Talk, the famous “Scaligerana,” with its curious medley of Latin and French, a few of his obiter dicta on the more famous ancient writers:

LATIN:

Cicero: C’est le plus bel Auteur Latin que nous ayons.^[26]“He’s the most beautiful Latin author we have.” [Ant.]

Virgil: Omnes laudes superat.^[27]“He surpasses all praise.” [Ant.]

Ennius: Utinam hunc haberemus integrum, et amisissemus Lucanum, Statium, Silium Italicum—et tous ces garçons là.^[28]“If only we had him in his entirety, and lost Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus—and other such boys.” [Ant.]

Catullus: Observantissimus puritatis Latinae linguae.^[29]“A most faithful observer of the purity of the Latin language.” [Ant.]

Tibullus: Tersissimus ac nitidissimus.^[30]“The cleanest and brightest.” [Ant.]

Propertius: Castigatissimus.^[31]“The most refined.” [Ant.]

Silius Italicus: Dixit quod alii omnes, et male.^[32]“He said what all the rest had, and badly.” [Ant.]

Pliny: Fere omnia tractavit: nil exacte.^[33]“He tackled almost everything: nothing with precision.” [Ant.]

 

GREEK:

Sophocles: Primus Poeta Graecus: fere Virgilium superat.^[34]“The best Greek poet: he almost surpasses Virgil.” [Ant.]

Aristophanes: Ne quisquam jactet Atticismum intelligere qui hunc ad unguem non teneat. Nullus est qui melius apud Graecos loquatur <ipso Aristophane>, ut nec apud Latinos Terentio.^[35]“Let no-one boast that he understands the Attic dialect unless he knows Aristophanes to perfection. There is no-one who speaks better among the Greeks <than Aristophanes himself>, as there’s no-one better amoing the Romans than Terence.” [Ant.] 

Plutarch: Totius sapientiae ocellus.^[36]“The darling of all wisdom.” [Ant.]

Scaliger, who rarely allowed himself more than three hours’ sleep out of the twenty-four, diversified his Herculean labours in the domain of chronology and history, by what for him may be regarded as jeux d’ esprit – editions of Caesar and Apuleius. One cannot help wishing that instead of wasting his leisure over a verbal and stylistic contortionist like Apuleius^[37]“The ‘disgusting jargon’ of an ‘African aesthete.’” Such was Henry Jackson’s estimate. Life, by St. John Parry, p.127. he had given the time to one of the great classical writers. The truth is that the illustrious scholars of that era seem to have been more attracted by the by-ways than by the high-roads of the ancient world. Casaubon, admittedly the first Greek scholar of the time, was in this matter a more heinous offender than Scaliger. He spent six of the best years of his life in compiling his “Animadversiones” on Athenaeus; he speaks with disgust in his diary of his task, “catenati in ergastulo labores”^[38]“Labours chained in the workhouse” [Ant.]; and “prays God day by day that he may get away from such trifles to better reading.”^[39]Pattison, Life of Casaubon, p.123. He then took up Polybius – no doubt a much better author – and devoted no less than four years to a Latin translation, but without the commentary or notes, which he contemplated, and never published. In his final retreat in London, when he had become immersed in the theological and ecclesiastical controversies which were the favourite pastime of James I, he wasted much time in writing pamphlets of ephemeral interest; and was finally induced to squander most of the last two years of his life on a learned but ineffectual criticism of the Annals of Baronius. He is indeed a pathetic figure; a man of weak health, almost always in pecuniary straits, encumbered (unlike Scaliger, who never married) with a wife and nineteen – for the most part unsatisfactory – children, and his interest all his life divided between theology and scholarship. His industry was prodigious, and his memory almost if not quite unrivalled. Two of his maxims are worth recording: “Tantum quisque scit, quantum memoria tenet,”^[40]“Each person knows only what their memory holds.” [Ant.] and “τὸ μεταδιδάσκειν χαλεπώτατον ait alicubi Chrysostomus.”^[41](“‘To learn something anew is the hardest thing,’ says Chrysostom somewhere.” [Ant.]) It would seem that Casaubon’s memory was for once at fault, if it was Dio Chrysostom that he had in his mind. An accomplished lady has kindly sent me the following passage: χαλεποῦ δέ ὄντος τοῦ διδάσκειν, τῷ πάντι χαλεπώτερον τὸ μεταδιδάσκειν (Dio Chrysost. Or. xi.) (“But although it’s difficult to learn, it is in every way more difficult to learn something anew”). He died soon after his fifty-fifth birthday, the ruffian Scioppius boasting that he had killed him by his book “Holofernes.”

These two illustrious figures, whom I have grouped together, decorate what may be called the sunset of the Revival of Learning. The bright, vivid, eager hopefulness and zest of its early hours had faded – the hours when Greek, of which Dante knew not a word and Petrarch very little, was beginning to be newly discovered; and the hunt for manuscripts of the Classical authors was in full cry; and [Robert] Browning’s “Grammarian” was a typical figure. After Scaliger and Casaubon, I suppose the next name (with an interval of nearly a century) in the Apostolic succession of Scholarship is that of our fellow-countryman Bentley, who may be said to open a new era. It was Bentley who wrote of Bishop [William] Warburton that he had “a monstrous appetite and a very bad digestion.” Warburton, with all his industry and ingenuity, had no pretensions to real scholarship, and was not only a bully, but came very near to being an impostor. He was not worthy of Bentley’s sarcasm, which would have had some point, though not perhaps much justice, if it had been applied to the disciples of Scaliger and Casaubon. But Scaliger himself remains, alike by the wealth of his erudition, his ceaseless industry, the dignity and independence of his character, his absolute disinterestedness in the pursuit by the best methods of the best ideals, an example and an inspiration for all scholars deserving of the name.

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After a vote of thanks, Oxford responded:

I am not going to add to the strain which I have already imposed on your attention except to express my gratification that we can find here on a Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh , where there are so many counterattractions , so large a body of men and women who are really interested in Classical learning and letters. It has been a great pleasure to me to have had the opportunity of speaking to you on one side, one chapter only, in that great process. I conclude by proposing a very hearty vote of thanks to the Chairman.

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