Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetics

Abstract

Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst, Unter Mitwirkung von Manfred Fuhrmann, gen. ed., ed. and tr. Luc Deitz and Gregor Vogt-Spira. 5 vols. Vol. I: Books 1-2, xciv + 633pp.; Vol. II: Book 3.1-94, 575pp.; Vol. III: Book 3.95-126 and Book 4, 653pp.; Vol. IV: Book 5, 733pp.; Vol. V: Books 6-7, 647pp. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994-2003. Individual volumes, €214; entire set €890. ISBN 3 7728 1501 4. Years ago, as an undergraduate struggling with a senior thesis on Edmund Spenser's Shepheards Calendar, I was looking for a work that would summarize what a learned poet might know in the 1580s about the ancient tradition of pastoral poetry. After reviewing a number of Renaissance treatises on poetics I found a work that seemed perfect: the compendious summa of classical poetry offered by Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetices libri septem. Despite my inexperience I had located a text that explained in the richest detail practically everything that sixteenth-century scholars knew about pastoral poetry or for that matter about practically any other aspect of classical literature. Scaliger discusses pastoral poetry in two chapters titled "Pastoralia" (1.4 and 3.98) as well as in his comparison between passages in Virgil's eclogues and their models in Theocritus (5.5). Indeed, I was reassured that Scaliger's erudite compendium constituted a "definitive" summary of Renaissance poetics precisely because it had been surpassed and displaced in the next generation by the rigorous early-modern philology of his younger son Joseph Justus. (In fact Julius Caesar dedicated his poetics to his eldest son Sylvius.) In retrospect Scaliger's ars poetica, eclipsed by the emerging ars critica, seemed to prefigure Bach's Art of Fugue, an impressive recapitulation of a cultural system that was fast becoming obsolete. After J. S. Bach the fugue was often regarded as a sterile academic exercise, and the future belonged to the popular Italianate style of his sons. After Scaliger senior had so painstakingly delineated the rules for writing Latin eclogues, georgics, and epics, European poets like Milton tended to view such compositions as mere gradus ad Parnassum preliminary to their [End Page 667] achievements in the vernacular. It would appear that Latin poetry, as Charles Rosen has written about the classical sonata, "could not be defined until it was dead."1 Or were obituaries premature? The Poetics exercised considerable if sporadic influence over neo-classical literary theory until 1700. Once literary criticism declared its autonomy from textual philology surely Scaliger had something to offer the modern reader. Restored and resuscitated for the new millennium, is there life in the old dinosaur yet? The Poetices libri septem of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) was first published posthumously in 1561, was reprinted in 1586 and 1594, and then appeared in a revised edition (1607, 16172 ), which may have been edited by Scaliger's son Joseph Justus. In the past twenty years the German publishing house Frommann-Holzboog has undertaken the disinterment and perhaps the resurrection of this massive encyclopedia of classical poetics. In 1964 they published a facsimile of the 1561 edition with an introduction by August Buck.2 Now, after nearly a decade of editorial gestation, they have produced a five-volume edition with German translation and notes. (A final volume of indexes is promised.) Given the vast proportions of Scaliger's work—it has taken the editors nearly a decade to exhume the text—and in light of its role in the emergence of modern literary criticism, some post mortem reflections on the recent boom in Scaliger scholarship appear indispensable. This monumental new edition represents a Herculean labor—or, rather, a Dioscurean feat—divided between the two editor-translators. Books 1-4 and 7 were edited and translated by Luc Deitz, and Books 5 and 6 by Gregor Vogt-Spira. Each editor introduces the single...