Recently I started seeing references to Joseph Justus Scaliger(1484–1558), and how he learned Greek, by comparing the Greek Iliad with a translation.
Here is an instance:
After his father’s death, he spent four years at the university of Paris, where he began the study of Greek under Turnebus. But after two months he found he was not in a position to profit by the lectures of the greatest Greek scholar of the time. He determined to teach himself. He read Homer in twenty-one days, and then went through all the other Greek poets, orators and historians, forming a grammar for himself as he went along. > https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Scaliger
The above is from the article on Scaliger in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Note that Scaliger is said to have taught himself Greek using a translation of the Iliad.
Is this report truthful concerning a successful three-week self-instruction in Homeric Greek? Is there a more detailed, internet-accessible account of how Scaliger did this?
Hi Hugh, I don’t know any more about this sorry, but I suspect that someone saying that they’ve “read” two books of Homer a day from scratch, using a translation (word for word I’m guessing), may have a different understanding of “read” than others (such as myself)…
Learning classics feels somewhat like digging a tunnel: there’s no great flash of insight, just all the past work behind one. Someone who says they’ve finished their tunnel in 21 days has probably just dug less deeply than what others were expecting from a tunnel.
I’d say it’s credible, thanks to his father (Julius Caesar), and he was phenomenally smart. But it does seem dubious. I seem to recall it’s his own claim and that Anthony Grafton doesn’t credit it; it could well be exaggerated.
Grafton is the expert on Scaliger. I don’t know if much of his work is internet-accessible. Some of his chapter on Young Scaliger in his “Joseph Scaliger: Textual criticism and exegesis” book is available on Google. Beyond that I can’t say, but I know I’ve seen more.