Scaliger versus Aristotle on Poetics

THE Poetices libri septem of Julius Caesar Scaliger appeared in 1561, three years after his death in 1558.1 The manuscript, dedicated to his son Sylvius, was left complete among his unpublished papers, and its preparation had apparently occupied the later years of Scaliger's life. Thus the work was composed at a time when, for theorists of the Italian school to which Scaliger belonged, the authority of Aristotle's Poetics was gaining increasingly wide acceptance. Minturno, for example, in his De poeta of 1559, shows himself in complete subservience to the letter and the meaning (as he saw it) of the Aristotelian text. In general, Scaliger too followed the lead of his Italian predecessors and subscribed to the teachings of Aristotle; numerous passages of the Poetice contain citations, discussions, and adoptions of the Poetics.2 The distinction of object, manner, and