Julius Caesar Scaliger

Julius Caesar Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; 23 April or August 1484 – 21 October 1558), or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France.

[2] Scaliger himself was known in his youth by the family name Bordone, but later insisted that he was a scion of the house of La Scala, for a hundred and fifty years lords of Verona.

[1] In 1512 at the Battle of Ravenna, where his father and elder brother were killed, his conduct earned him Order of the Golden Spur, augmented with the collar and the eagle of gold.

[1] He left the service of Maximilian, and after a brief employment by another kinsman, the duke of Ferrara, he decided to quit the military life, and in 1514 entered as a student at the University of Bologna.

(One of them, Mark Pattison, agreed with the judgment of Pierre Daniel Huet, who said: "par ses poésies brutes et informes Scaliger a déshonoré le Parnasse".)

He also published a brief tract on comic metres (De comicis dimensionibus) and a work De causis linguae Latinae (Lyons 1540; Geneva 1580; Frankfurt 1623), in which he analyzes the style of Cicero and indicates 634 mistakes of Lorenzo Valla and his humanist predecessors, claimed to be the earliest Latin grammar using scientific principles and method.

They contained many paradoxes and some elements of personal animosity (especially in his reference to Étienne Dolet), but also contain acute criticism based on the Poetics of Aristotle, "imperator noster; omnium bonarum artium dictator perpetuus" ("our Emperor, dictator forever of all good qualities in the arts"), an influential treatise in the history of literary criticism.

His other scientific works, commentaries on Theophrastus' De causis plantarum and Aristotle's History of Animals, he left in a more or less unfinished state, and they were not printed until after his death.

[4] He is best known for his critical Exotericarum Exercitationes on Cardan's De Subtilitate (1557), a book approaching natural philosophy and which had a long popularity.

They had an influence upon natural historians, philosophers and scientists such as Lipsius, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Johannes Kepler.

[4] In 1829, botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle published Scaligeria, a genus of flowering plants from Europe and Asia, belonging to the family Apiaceae and named in Julius Caesar Scaliger's honour.