Funeral Oration Delivered in Honour and Memory of Joseph Justus Scaliger, Greatest of Men

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Original title: Oratio funebris dicta honori & memoriae maximi virorum Iosephi Iusti Scaligeri A Latin academic funeral oration (oratio funebris) for Joseph Justus Scaliger. It was delivered in the theological auditorium of the University of Leiden at ten in the morning on 26 January 1609, the day after Scaliger's burial. It was printed at Leiden the same year as a pamphlet of about twenty-three pages, offered for sale by Louis Elzevier and Andries Clouck. The oration opens on the topos of inexpressibility and the duty of pietas. It praises Scaliger's lineage, with particular reference to his father Julius Caesar Scaliger, and his self-taught mastery of languages. It casts him in Roman civic terms as perpetual Dictator of the republic of letters, ranks his chronology and criticism above philology, and presents his learning as a public good. In a polemical digression it denounces the libel 'Scaliger hypobolimaeus' and its unnamed author while defending Scaliger's noble descent. It then narrates his pious deathbed, joining Roman constancy and Reformed Christian hope. It closes with consolation, holding that his writings are a truer likeness than any painting or sculpture. The pamphlet includes a prefatory Latin epigram by Janus Dousa the Younger on the likeness of Julius Caesar Scaliger, a printed delivery notice, and a French acrostic sonnet signed R. I. de Nerée. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

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