SCALIGER, JULIUS CAESAR

(1484-1558)

Italianhumanist, fa-ther ofJosephus Justus Scaliger. Born Giulio Bordone, the son of a painter of miniatures who settled inVenice, he claimed to be de-scended from the dellaScalafamily that had formerly ruledVerona. For a time he was a Franciscan friar, then worked for the Venetian printerAldus Manutius, served for a time as a soldier, and studied medicine atPadua. 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 aclassicalscholar. 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 onCiceronianLatin even though Scaliger himself did not write in a strictly Ciceronian style. He also published attacks onGirolamo CardanoandFrançois Ra-belais. His criticisms of Cardano and his works on botany and zool-ogy reveal him to be a philosophical follower ofAristotle, and he wrote an influentialPoetics(1561) that expounds a strongly Aris-totelian theory of literature.