Scaliger, JOSEPH JUSTUS, the tenth child and third son of the foregoing, was born at Agen, in the district of France then known as Guyenne, in 1540. At the age of eleven he was sent to the Collège de Guyenne at Bordeaux, then, according to Montaigne (himself one of its scholars), the best institution of its kind in France. Owing to the outbreak of one of the many plagues which then devastated that part of the country, in 1555 he returned home, where he remained till his father's death some three years later. Julius Scaliger was too old to give his son methodical instruction; but indirectly the boy profited by his father's attainments. In accordance with the practice of almost all the scholars of the 16th century, the elder Scaliger was an indefatigable writer of Latin verse. Almost daily he was in the habit of dictating from 80 to 200 lines of his own composing, which it was the business of his son to copy. Daily also the boy had to present to his father a Latin theme on any subject which he himself might choose. Thus, without the regular training of other boys, Joseph early acquired that mastery of the mechanism of Latin prose and verse in which he surpassed all the scholars of his time.
Shortly after his father's death Scaliger proceeded to the university of Paris with the special purpose of acquiring the Greek language, with which he had as yet no acquaintance. The teacher whom he sought was Adrian Turnebus, since the death of Budæus the first Greek scholar in Europe. After two months' attendance in the class of Turnebus, Scaliger discovered, to his mortification, that he was too ignorant to profit by it. With the invincible resolution which was the basis of his character, he shut himself up in his own room and set himself to master the elements of the language. His method of procedure and its extraordinary result have a place among the anecdotes of scholarship. With the help of a Latin translation he read through Homer in twenty-one days, making a grammar for himself as he went along. From Homer he proceeded to the other Greek poets, and in four months he had gone through the whole series. Encouraged by his success with Greek, he next attacked Hebrew, but of Hebrew, according to his best biographer, Bernays, he never acquired that mastery which he showed in the case of Latin and Greek. Eventually he boasted that he spoke thirteen languages, ancient and modern. It is to be noted, however, that he acquired these languages, not in the vain spirit of a mere polyglot, but with the aim of a scientific scholar, who realised that the language and literature of one people are indispensable to the thorough understanding of another. Scaliger remained four years at the university of Paris, but of this period of his life only one notable circumstance is related. It was at this time that he adopted the Protestant faith, a change which eventually proved of the first importance in the subsequent direction of his life.
In 1563 he was invited by Louis Chastaigner de la Roche-Pozay to join him in the capacity of travelling companion, and with the family of this noble he was more or less closely connected for the next thirty years. In 1565 he accompanied Roche-Pozay to Italy, of whose scholarship and religion he received the most unfavourable impression. Of England, which they next visited, Scaliger formed an equally unfavourable opinion. Scotland was also included in their tour, but of the Scots he speaks more kindly, specially mentioning the beauty of their ballads. In 1570 he settled at Valence in Dauphiné, where for about two years he studied under the great jurist Cujacius. From 1572 to 1574 he was in Geneva in the capacity of professor in the academy established there by Calvin. Returning to France, he found a home in the family of Roche-Pozay for the next twenty years. It was the period of the Huguenot wars, and Scaliger, like the rest of his countrymen, suffered from the confusions of the time. It was during these years, however, that he produced a series of works which placed him at the head of European scholars. Among them may be mentioned his editions of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, his commentaries on which are equally remarkable for their learning and spirit of vain-glorious assumption. But the works which definitively established his reputation were his edition of Manilius in 1579 and his De Emendatione Temporum in 1583. By these works he founded the science of modern chronology, an achievement unsurpassed in the history of scholarship. This labour he crowned by his edition of Eusebius in 1606.
In 1593, on an invitation from the Netherlands in the highest degree flattering to his vanity, Scaliger went as successor to Justus Lipsius in the university of Leyden, where he remained for the rest of his life. Though his connection with the university was almost nominal, it is to his example and inspiration that Holland owes her long line of scholars during the 17th and 18th centuries. Scaliger's last years were embittered by controversies which he had himself largely provoked by his indifference to the feelings of others. His chief enemies were the Jesuits, who regarded him as the most formidable foe of their order. In Gaspar Scioppins they found a match for Scaliger himself in the use of trenchant Latin, and one, moreover, who carried the qualities of a hired bravo into the domain of letters. The vulnerable point in Scaliger's coarse nature was his pride in his descent from the family of La Scala. In what is perhaps the most unscrupulous lampoon in literature, Scioppins, in his Scaliger Hypobolimæus ('The Supposititious Scaliger'), held the great scholar up to Europe as a baseborn impostor, a profligate, and an atheist. Scaliger wrote a reply; but it was ineffectual against the poisoned weapons of Scioppins. It is generally accepted that the attack of Scioppins hastened Scaliger's death. He still continued his labours, indeed, but his spirit was broken, and he died in 1609, in the arms of his favourite scholar Heinsius.
By his combined knowledge, sagacity, and actual achievement, Scaliger holds the first place among the scholars of all times. 'More than any one before or after him,' says Bernays, 'he approached to a complete conception of the life of antiquity.' To the same effect is the statement of Niebhr, that 'Scaliger stood on the summit of real and universal knowledge, as no one after him has done.' In his personal character Scaliger was vainglorious, overbearing, and exacting to the verge of absurdity. It was his single-minded devotion to learning, his love of truth, his noble independence of spirit that redeemed a nature essentially coarse and unlovable.
See Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin, 1855); Charles Nisard, Juste Lipse, Joseph Scaliger, et Isaac Casaubon (Paris, 1852); Tamizey de Larroque, Lettres françaises inédites de Joseph Scaliger (Agen, 1881); Mark Pattison, Essays, edited by Henry Nettleship, M.A. (vol. i. Oxford, 1889). It was Pattison's intention to write a biography of Scaliger; but the fragments that appear among these essays are all that he actually accomplished of his book. A list of Scaliger's works and their various editions is given by Bernays.