Throughout his life, Johnson’s heroes were the humanist scholars – Erasmus, Roger Ascham, and above all Joseph Scaliger – who had pioneered the close textual analysis of classical texts. Unlike Swift and Pope, Johnson was not satirical about true scholarship, and he produced two major feats of scholarship in their own right: The Dictionary of the English Language and The Plays of William Shakespeare. The Dictionary’s innovation was that, following the example of the humanist lexicographers of Latin, it was compiled by reading books and recording their use of English words. The book’s most striking feature is its more than 100,000 quotations; its weakest is Johnson’s etymologies. Compiling it helped to Johnson to cement his close knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, and so to edit them – sometimes proposing imaginative emendations, but with the caution his humanist exemplars recommended. Some of his comments, meanwhile, amount to moralistic mini-essays.

This chapters examines the motivation and method of reuse of early Latin in the translations from Greek poetry of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the scholar to whom the study of fragmentary Republican Latin owes more than to anyone else in classical scholarship. The analysis focusses on the translations of Sophocles’ Ajax and of Lycophron’s Alexandra, which the young Scaliger produced a decade before his memorable edition of Festus’ De significatu uerborum (1576). The ancient lexicon was the main source of the obscure vocabulary that characterises Scaliger’s archaic Latin, the artificial construct of a style aimed at achieving a high register in the translation of Greek poetry. Recourse to the diction of the early Roman dramatists as a means of elevating the style had an authoritative precedent in Cicero. To latinise Lycophron’s exoteric diction Scaliger drew extensively on Festus’ glosses for rare usages and recondite synonyms. Other early-modern scholars who were engaged in the study of fragmentary Latin texts and their sources also used that variety of Latin for the purpose of translation of the Greek classics, and even for creative versification. ‘Early Latin’ is a style.

Jean de Sponde’s commentary of Homeric poems, published in Basel (1583), appears as a defense of Homer against Jules César Scaliger’s criticisms, by showing the Greek poet as a master of both virtue and rhetoric.