56 HARM-JAN VAN DAM
Whether Scriverius was Scaliger’s most industrious pupil or not,
his most brilliant pupil was Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a certified
genius.^39 In one of his earliest works, a Greek Pindaric Ode, eleven-
year old Grotius showed that he was the first poet since Antiquity to
have grasped the workings of Pindar’s metre. Barely fourteen years
old, he finished an edition and commentary of Martianus Capella. At
sixteen Grotius published his edition of Syntagma Arateorum, that is
Aratus and the translations of Cicero, Germanicus and Avienus.^40 His
Lucan appeared in 1614. But Grotius did much more than editing
texts, he was an uomo universale. Born from a patrician family, he
studied in Leiden with Scaliger and received a doctorate of law in
Orléans in 1598, when he had just turned fifteen. In Holland he made
a lightning career in politics, which brought him nearly to the top; but
then he was imprisoned in 1618, as a result of the religious and politi-
cal troubles which tore the Dutch Republic apart in the 1610’s. Con-
demned to life imprisonment he made a famous escape from his cas-
tle-prison in 1621 in a bookchest, a ruse devised by his energetic wife.
Apart from a stay of a few years in Hamburg, in the early 1630’s, he
lived in Paris for the rest of his life, from 1635 onwards as the Ambas-
sador of Sweden, an exile from the distant fatherland, feeling hurt and
wronged. He is often considered a jurist, on account of his world-
famous legal treatise on international conflicts De jure belli ac pacis
of 1625, but he was also a historian—Grotius himself considered his
history of the Dutch Revolt one of his most important books—, an
important and productive theologian—until the 20th century De veri-
tate religionis christianae was his most often printed work—a states-
man, and not least, a poet. In short, he was a true philologist, or so I
like to think.^41
39 On Grotius the new standard biography is Nellen 2007. Nellen 14 cites a 1926
study of 300 geniuses from 1450–1850 by C.M. Cox, where Grotius ranks third, after
Goethe and Leibniz.
40 Scaliger later advised Wower against a new edition of Aratus, because “it is
impossible to surpass the edition of Grotius” (“melior ea, quam Grotius dedit dari non
possit": Scaliger 1627, 718, of 12 December 1602). In his letter from Florence (above
note 29) Wower had also mentioned a manuscript of Germanicus’ Aratea “quem te
auctore aliquando me editurum spero”. See van Dam 1996b, 74–5, 81–2, also n. 21
for the Pindaric Ode.
41 Ter Meulen and Diermanse 1950 have 1135 bibliographical entries, distributed
over nine categories: poetry, philosophy, classical philology, international law, his-
tory, law, politico-religious work, theology, letters.