The Recovery of the Classical World
The outstanding work of the universities, academies and humanists of the Renaissance was to translate the works of the great Greeks and Romans and hand them over to modern Europe. This task was fully accomplished, and the discovery of the classical world reached completion.
Guillaume Bude
Two names must be remembered as heralds of this age of discovery. Guillaume Bude spent sixty-two years of his life hoping to make Paris the sole heir of Italian humanism, and saw his hope fulfilled when Francis I founded the Royal College. Bude began his higher education with the study of law and for almost ten years immersed himself in the volumes of the Code of Justinian. To understand better these texts, whose words were Latin but whose concepts were largely Byzantine, he studied Greek under Janus Lascaris, and worked at it with such heart and soul that his teacher, on taking leave of the world, left him his precious collection of Greek books.
When at forty-one Bude published his Annotations on the Twenty-Four Books of the Pandects (1508), the science of jurisprudence in the Renaissance, instead of being distorted as before by literal-minded commentators, for the first time recovered its true meaning and its relation to its setting. Six years later he produced another great fruit of his deep research, On the As and Its Parts, which seemed to be a discussion of ancient coins, weights and measures but was really a close study of the relation between classical literature and economic life. More important still was his Commentaries on the Greek Language (1529), which, although not free of flaws in content, is so rich in linguistic explanation that it alone was enough to put its author at the head of Europe's Hellenists. Rabelais wrote him a letter of homage, and Erasmus paid him envious compliments. Erasmus was a man of the world, for whom scholarship was only part of life, whereas for Bude learning and life were one reality. Bude wrote: "Philology was for a long time my companion, partner and mistress, and was bound to me by all the ties of affection ... but I was forced to break the bonds of such a fiery love ... because I found it harmful to my health." His regret was that he had to steal some of his study time for eating and sleeping.
In moments of inattention to intellectual work Bude married and fathered eleven children. The single portrait that Jean Clouet painted of him (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows him in a grave and pessimistic mood; but Francis I apparently sensed in him something of the zest for life, and made him librarian of the palace of Fontainebleau and wished to have the aging scholar always with him, even on his journeys. On one such journey Bude fell into a high fever; he gave strict orders that his funeral be conducted in complete simplicity, and he died peacefully (1540). The College de France became his monument and tomb.
Humanist Centers and Scaliger
Paris had not yet absorbed all of France's intellectual life. Humanism in France had nearly a dozen bases, such as Bourges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier and, above all, Lyons, a city where love, humanism, language and literature had combined in a soul-nourishing blend. At Agen, another of these bases, a city where no one expected an empire to arise, Julius Caesar Scaliger, after Bude's death, took command of the realm of philology with great authority. Born probably in Padua (1484), he moved at forty-one to Agen and remained there to the end of his life (1558). All scholars were afraid of him, because he had complete mastery of abusive Latin.
Scaliger won fame by his sharp attack on Erasmus, who had mocked the advocates of the Ciceronian style of Latin oratory. He first attacked Rabelais, and then Dolet because he had criticized Rabelais. At another time, in a volume of his literary essays, he dissected the book On Subtlety of Girolamo Cardano and set himself to prove that everything affirmed in it was false and everything denied was true. Scaliger's major work, On the Causes of the Latin Language, was the first Latin grammar founded on scientific principles. His commentaries on Hippocrates and Aristotle were outstanding both in elegance of expression and in learned research. He had fifteen children, one of whom, Joseph, became the scholar of the next generation (the book's text is damaged here). His Poetics, published four years after his death (as the book states), together with the influence of his son's works and the spread of ideas of the Italians who came to France in the train of Catherine de' Medici, caused the attention of French humanists to turn again from the study of Greek civilization to the Latin.
Amyot's Plutarch
One of the precious gifts of the revival of Greek civilization was Amyot's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Jacques Amyot was one of hundreds protected by Marguerite of Navarre, with whose help he rose to be professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Bourges. His translations of Daphnis and Chloe and other Greek love stories were praised and, as a reward, he was given the revenues of a rich abbey, one of the amusing features of that time. With this financial base Amyot began to travel throughout Italy and indulge his taste for philology and antiquities. When he published his translation of the Parallel Lives (1559), he wrote an introduction in which he eloquently defended the need to study history, which in his view was like "the treasury of mankind." In the introduction Amyot compared history to a museum holding thousands of examples of virtue and vice, political progress and decline, for the instruction of humankind, and, like Napoleon, ranked history above every teacher of philosophy as a source of philosophy. Amyot also undertook the translation of another book of Plutarch, the Moralia.
At about that time he was raised to the bishopric of Auxerre, where he died in the maturity of eighty years (1593). His translation of the Parallel Lives was not accurate and flawless throughout, but the work as a whole had literary value in itself, and its ease of expression and simplicity of style matched the original text completely. The reach of its influence was boundless. Montaigne was so captivated and intoxicated by it that France left behind the age of St. Bartholomew and turned toward that chosen and noble antiquity. Shakespeare drew three plays from the capable translation that Sir Thomas North made from Amyot's version. Plutarch's ideal in choosing human heroes shaped the pattern of hundreds of plays and the moral traits of hundreds of revolutionaries; and finally the French translation of Plutarch, titled The Lives of Famous Men, gave that nation a pantheon of great figures and was an effective cause in arousing the manly qualities of the French spirit.