Scaliger, Julius Caesar

(1484-1558)

   Italian humanist, fa-ther of Josephus Justus Scaliger. Born Giulio Bordone, the son of a painter of miniatures who settled in Venice, he claimed to be de-scended from the della Scala family that had formerly ruled Verona. For a time he was a Franciscan friar, then worked for the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, served for a time as a soldier, and studied medicine at Padua. By about 1525 he was practicing medicine. In 1524 Scaliger moved to southwestern France and entered the service of Antonio della Rovere, bishop of Agen. There he married and be-came successful both as a physician and as a classical scholar. He wrote several books on scientific and philosophical subjects. He en-gaged in polemics against the leading northern humanist, Erasmus, criticizing the Dutch humanist's attack on Ciceronian Latin even though Scaliger himself did not write in a strictly Ciceronian style. He also published attacks on Girolamo Cardano and François Ra-belais. His criticisms of Cardano and his works on botany and zool-ogy reveal him to be a philosophical follower of Aristotle, and he wrote an influential Poetics (1561) that expounds a strongly Aris-totelian theory of literature.