As we saw in the last article, Joseph Juste Scaliger’s Coniectanea (Conjectures on Varro) was the first of his writings to be published under his own name. But this was not the first time Scaliger’s work had appeared in print. The previous year, 1564, had seen the publication of Novae Lectiones (New Readings) by the Dutch scholar Willem Canter. This compilation included some marginal notes by Scaliger on a recently discovered fragment of Athenaeus of Naucratis.
Like Scaliger, Canter had been a pupil of Jean Dorat at the Collège Royal in Paris:
With younger Paris scholars Scaliger was on even closer terms. Indeed, he set up what amounted to a working partnership with Dorat’s pupil Willem Canter. When Muret came back from Italy, he brought with him a copy of a fragment of the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus from a manuscript in the collection of the Farnese family. This section had been omitted from the printed editions of the full text. Muret passed it on to Canter for publication, and Canter turned to Scaliger for help with the many recondite and problematic words in it. The text appeared in Canter’s Novae lectiones of 1564, with Scaliger’s conjectures in the margin. Scaliger lent Canter his annotated Euripides—a course of action that he later regretted, for Canter copied out and published [Antwerp 1571] some of his conjectures without clearly identifying Scaliger as their author. All Scaliger could do was to decorate the offending passages in his copy of Canter’s work with indignant comments: ‛The man is ashamed to mention me’; ‛He took this from my Euripides, which I made available to him.’ But even this unfortunate incident did not break the friendship; as late as 1572, Scaliger proudly declared his affection for Canter in print. (Grafton 106)
Marc Antoine Muret had taught Latin at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux in 1547-48 before moving to Paris, where he became a prominent member of the city’s humanist movement. Scaliger, himself, attended the Collège de Guyenne between 1552 and 1555.
Scaliger’s marginal notes on Athenaeus were the first fruits of his working relationship with Canter. The second fruits of that partnership would appear in print two years later, in 1566: the Alexander, or Cassandra, of Lycophron of Chalcis.
Lycophron of Chalcis
Lycophron of Chalcis is hardly a household name today. He was a writer of Greek tragedies, who flourished in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284-246 BCE). He was born in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, around 330-325. His early years were probably spent in Chalcis, Athens and Eretria in Greece, and in Rhegium in southern Italy. According to the Suda, the Byzantine encyclopaedia, he was the son of Socles of Athens but was adopted by the historian Lycus of Rhegium. He was also associated with the philosopher Menedemus of Eretria, though one of his earlier works, the satyr play Menedemus, makes fun of the Eretrian School of Philosophy founded by Menedemus.
We do not know when Lycophron settled in Alexandria. It can hardly have been before the fall of Demetrius of Phalerum, who was powerful and influential at the court of Ptolemy I Soter and who bore a grudge against Lycophron’s step-father Lycus. On the accession of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in 284, however, Demetrius fell from grace and was exiled to Upper Egypt. He died the following year or shortly thereafter. It is probably safe to assume that Lycophron moved to Alexandria very early in Philadelphus’s reign, for the new king appointed him as a librarian at the famous Library. Lycophron was entrusted with the section devoted to the works of the Comic Poets. It was probably around this time that he wrote his treatise On Comedy.
According to the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes, who wrote a commentary On Lycophron, Lycophron was the author of 46 or 64 tragedies. Of these, the titles of about 20 have been preserved, along with some scattered fragments. He also wrote several critical and satirical works, fragments of which have been preserved by Athenaeus (Royston 197). Lycophron is also said to have been a skilful writer of anagrams, an art he employed to flatter the members of the royal court at Alexandria.
Lycophron acquired such a standing at the Ptolemaic Court that he was honoured as one of the Seven Pleiads, who were widely acknowledged as the greatest poets and tragedians of the age. Of his death we know little—neither the time nor the place—though two verses in Ovid’s Ibis (531-532) seem to imply that his death was caused by an arrow.
The Alexandra or Cassandra
Lycophron’s most famous work, and the only one that has survived in its entirety, is a long declamatory poem known variously as Alexandra or Cassandra. It comprises a prophecy uttered by the Trojan princess Cassandra—who was also known as Alexandra—and relates the later fortunes of Troy and of the Greek and Trojan heroes. References to events of mythical and later times are introduced, and the poem ends with an allusion to Alexander the Great, who would unite Asia and Europe in his empire.
Although the Alexandra is referred to as a poem, its meter—the iambic trimeter—is the standard meter employed by Ancient Greek tragedy. Is it possible, then, that it is an excerpt from an otherwise lost tragedy? Some scholars have suggested that it was written to be performed in public rather than read privately, but none has gone any further than this. At 1474 verses, it is probably too long to be considered an extract from a larger work.
Lycophron’s authorship of the poem has been recently questioned, though Scaliger and his contemporaries do not appear to have doubted it. Passages in the Alexandra which can hardly have been written as early as 250 BCE have been explained away by some scholars as later interpolations, whereas others believe they prove that the poem was written in the 2nd century BC by another poet, possibly one with the same name (Hornblower 37).
It is possible that Scaliger first became acquainted with Lycophron through Athenaeus, an Egyptian-born Greek rhetorician and grammarian, who flourished in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries of the Christian era. He is remembered today almost exclusively for his fifteen-volume set of symposia the Deipnosophistae, which is mostly extant. Scattered among these essays are the majority of the surviving fragments from Lycophron’s other works.
Book 2, Chapter 17 [Pages 101-104] of Canter’s Novae Lectiones bore the title The Collected Fragments of Lycophron. Book 3, Chapter 11 [Pages 127-173] was devoted to the newly discovered fragment from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, for which Scaliger provided a list of conjectures.
But why did Scaliger choose this little-known work as his next project:
The style is so enigmatical as to have procured for Lycophron, even among the ancients, the title of “obscure” (σκοτεινός). The poem is evidently intended to display the writer’s knowledge of obscure names and uncommon myths; it is full of unusual words of doubtful meaning gathered from the older poets, and many long-winded compounds coined by the author. (Chisholm 153)
It is now clear why this work should have attracted the attention of a scholar like Joseph Scaliger. What better way to impress his contemporaries and rivals with his mastery of Ancient Greek than by elucidating such an obscure text as this?
Scaliger chose the iambic senarius for his translation. This was the commonest metre employed by Plautus and Terence in their Latin comedies.
Scaliger’s Lycophron was a close collaboration with Canter:
Around 1564 he collaborated with Canter on an edition, of Lycophron’s Alexandra, perhaps the most learned and certainly the most obscure Hellenistic Greek poem. Canter prepared the Greek text, a commentary, and a literal Latin translation. Scaliger devised emendations and interpreted difficult words. But his main share in the venture was a rendering of Lycophron’s deliberately recherché Greek into equally recherché Latin. He used so many archaic or rare terms that he had to provide glosses in the margin to explain them to the ordinary educated reader. To be sure, he was not able fully to reproduce the qualities of his original. Where Lycophron had used more than 1,350 rare words, including 326 not found elsewhere, Scaliger was able to find only 140 Latin equivalents so arcane as to need explanation. Even of these, ‛between a quarter and a third are conveniently taken’ from one source, Festus’ De verborum significatu. The work nevertheless conveyed at least something of the ghoulish obscurity of the original. More important, it read—at least in the 1560s—like a genuine piece of archaic Latin, the sort of thing that might have been written by a Roman poet in Lycophron’s own time. ‛This is my opinion’, wrote Canter: ‛had you written this in Latin when the poet wrote it in Greek, it would be very hard to tell which was the other’s translator.’ (Grafton 114)
Canter and Scaliger’s Alexandra was first published in May 1566 in Basel, Switzerland, by Johannes Oporinus & Pietro Perna:
- Lycophron, Lycophron of Chalcis, Alexander or Cassandra, Literal Translation by Willem Canter, Verse Translation by Joseph Scaliger, First Edition, Johannes Oporinus & Pietro Perna, Basel (1566)
Johannes Meursius
More than thirty years later, a new edition of the work was published, edited and with a commentary by the Dutch scholar Johannes Meursius. Jan Van Meurs was just sixteen years old when he wrote his commentary. Scaliger took a lively interest in this precocious young scholar, whose complete works would fill twelve volumes in-folio. But Scaliger later expressed the opinion that early success had ruined Meursius:
Meursius est un pédant, fils d’un Moine, il en tient encore; & celuy qui a fait sur Arnobe, qui n’a que l’édition Romaine qu’il a dediée à Monsieur de Lescalle, c’est Elmenerst. Meursius lors qu’il estoit jeune, donnoit bonne esperance; mais il est si superbe que les servantes de là où il demeure, se mocquent de lui à cause de son arrogance. C’est un ignorant, il a voulu mettre en Festus familia aurea, pour familia antea dicebatur : c’est un autre Titius.
Meursius is a pedant, the son of a monk, whom he still takes after; & the one who made a commentary on Arnobius, which has only the Roman edition, which he dedicated to Monsieur de Lescalle, that is Gerverhart Elmenhorst’s edition. Meursius, when he was young, showed great promise. But he has become so proud that the servants where he lives make fun of him on account of his arrogance. He is an ignoramus; he wanted to put in Festus familia aurea, for familia antea dicebatur; he is a second Titius.
(Le Fèvre & Colomiès 265-266)
In 1597, however, Meursius was still a scholar of great promise and Scaliger was clearly happy to have his Latin translation of Lycophron republished with Meursius’s commentary as an appendix (pages 103-354). The Greek text of Lycophron, edited by Scaliger, was printed parallel to his translation:
- Lycophron, Lycophron of Chalcis, Alexandra, Edited with a Commentary by Johannes Meursius, Corrected by Joseph Scaliger, Lodewijk Elzevir, Leiden (1597)
A second edition of Scaliger & Meursius’s Lycophron, aucta & innovata—enlarged and revised—appeared just two years later in Leiden. Meursius’s commentary runs from page 99 through page 350, which is just as long as in the first edition. But the first edition has 30 lines per page, while this one has 32, so the commentary has been enlarged. And a glance through the text is sufficient to show that Meursius’s commentary has also been revised:
- Lycophron, The Alexandra of Lycophron, Second Edition, Commentary by Johannes Meursius, Emendations by Joseph Scaliger, Lodewijk Elzevir, Leiden (1599)
Posthumous Publication
In 1615, six years after the death of Joseph Juste Scaliger, his colleague at the University of Leiden Petrus Scriverius brought out an anthology of The Collected Poems of Joseph Juste Scaliger. Pages 75-112 reprint Scaliger’s Latin translation of Lycophron’s Cassandra. This is followed by a two-page glossary of obscure words. These glosses are taken from Scaliger’s marginal notes in his earlier editions of Lycophron:
- Collected Poems, [The Collected Poems of Joseph Juste Scaliger, Edited by Petrus Scriverius, Franciscus Raphelengius, Leiden (1615):
(27) The Cassandra [Alexandra] of Lycophron
Scaliger’s translation of Lycophron’s obscure poem has been described as being every bit as impenetrable as the original Greek (The Warburg Institute)—but that was the point of the exercise. Notwithstanding this difficulty, the work must have been popular in its day to have gone through three printed editions in Scaliger’s lifetime. And the regard in which the work is held by classical scholars long outlived Scaliger. For example, when the German philologist Ludwig Bachmann brought out his edition of Lycophron in 1830, he included Scaliger’s Latin translation as an appendix (pages 455-504):
- Ludwig Bachmann (editor), Lycophronis Alexandra, Volume 1, Johann Conrad Hinrichs, Leipzig (1830)
Even today, Scaliger’s translation is seen as remarkable (West 132, fn 58).
References
- Ludwig Bachmann (editor), Lycophronis Alexandra, Volume 1, Johann Conrad Hinrichs, Leipzig (1830)
- Willem Canter, Novae Lectiones [New Readings], Johannes Oporinus, Basel (1564)
- Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Volume 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1983)
- Simon Hornblower, Lykophron: Alexandra. Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, & Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2015)
- Lycophron of Chalcis, Alexander or Cassandra, Literal Translation by Willem Canter, Verse Translation by Joseph Scaliger, First Edition, Johannes Oporinus & Pietro Perna, Basel (1566)
- Lycophron of Chalcis, Alexandra, Edited with a Commentary by Johannes Meursius, Corrected by Joseph Scaliger, Lodewijk Elzevir, Leiden (1597)
- Lycophron of Chalcis, The Alexandra, Second Edition, Commentary by Johannes Meursius, Emendations by Joseph Scaliger, Lodewijk Elzevir, Leiden (1599)
- Tanneguy Le Fèvre & Paul Colomiès (editors), Scaligerana ou Bons Mots, Alphabetized Edition of the Prima Scaligerana and the Secunda Scaligerana, Les Huguetans, Amsterdam (1695)
- Alexander William Mair, Gilbert Robinson Mair, Callimachus and Lycophron, Aratus, The Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London (1921)
- Stephanie West, Notes on the Text of Lycophron, The Classical Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 1, Pages 114-135, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009)
- Philip Yorke (Viscount Royston) et al, Lycophron, in Hesiod, Bion, Moschus, Sappho, Lycophron, Musaeus, A J Valpy, London (1832)
Image Credits
- Lycophron, Cassandra: Michael Burghers (engraver), John Potter (editor), Lycophron: Alexandra, cum Graecis Isaacii Tzetzis Commentariis, Oxford (1697), Public Domain
- Jean Dorat: Nicolas de Larmessin (engraver), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain
- Willem Canter: Philip Galle (engraver), Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, Public Domain
- Marc-Antoine Muret: Cornelis Cort (engraver), The New York Public Library Digital Collections, Public Domain
- An Artist’s Impression of the Library of Alexandria: © Guy Hendrix Dyas (artist), Concept Sketch for the Movie Agora (2009), Fair Use
- Cassandra Prophesying the Death of Hector: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (artist), British Museum, London (Public Domain)
- Johannes Meursius: After Jacob Marci & Justum a Colster, Illustrium Hollandiae et Westfrisiae Ordinum Alma Academi Leidensis, Page 216, Leiden (1614), Public Domain
- Petrus Scriverius: Bartholomeus van der Helst (artist), Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, Netherlands Institute for Art History (photograph), Public Domain
- Joseph Juste Scaliger: Antoine Calbet (artist), La Salle des Illustres de l’Hôtel de Ville d’Agen, Agen, Public Domain
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Online Resources
