Claudius Salmasius

Claude Saumaise (15 April 1588 – 3 September 1653), also known by the Latin name Claudius Salmasius, was a French classical scholar.

Salmasius was born at Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy. When Salmasius was sixteen, his father – a counsellor of the parlement of Dijon – sent him to Paris, where he became intimate with Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614). In 1606 he went to the University of Heidelberg, where he studied under the jurist Denis Godefroy, and devoted himself to the classics, influenced by the librarian Jan Gruter. Here he embraced Protestantism, the religion of his mother.

Returning to Burgundy, Salmasius qualified for the succession to his father's post, which he eventually lost on account of his religion. In 1623 he married Anne Mercier, a Protestant woman of a distinguished family. After declining overtures from Oxford, Padua and Bologna, in 1631 he accepted the professorship formerly held by Joseph Scaliger at Leiden. Although the appointment in a number of ways suited him, he found the climate trying. He became involved in a vicious controversy, over the Greek of the New Testament, with Daniel Heinsius. The quarrel became both highly personal and widely known, and Heinsius as university librarian refused him access to the books he wished to consult. Salmasius had an ally in Gerardus Vossius, on religious grounds.

Following his polemical Defensio regia of 1649, a flattering invitation from Queen Christina induced him to visit Sweden in 1650. Christina loaded him with gifts and distinctions. Salmasius had enemies there: Nikolaes Heinsius, son of his foe Heinsius, but also Isaac Vossius (son of Gerardus) with whom he had fallen out. They circulated gossip about him.

Salmasius withdrew from Sweden in 1651; Christina sent warm letters and pressed him to return.

Salmasius died on 3 September 1653, at Spa.

He was a prolific author and textual critic. He first published (1608) an edition of a work by Nilus Cabasilas, (archbishop of Thessalonica in the 14th century) against the primacy of the pope (De primatu Papae), and an edition of a similar tract by the Calabrian monk Barlaam of Seminara (ca. 1290–1348). In 1609 he brought out an edition of Florus; a later edition (1638) included also the editio princeps of the Liber Memorialis of Lucius Ampelius.

In 1606 or 1607 Salmasius had discovered in the library of the Counts Palatine in Heidelberg the only surviving copy of Cephalas's 10th-century unexpurgated copy of the Greek Anthology, including the 258-poem anthology of homoerotic poems by Straton of Sardis that would eventually become known as the notorious Book 12 of the Greek Anthology. Salmasius made copies of the newly discovered poems in the Palatine version and began to circulate clandestine manuscript copies of them as the Anthologia Inedita. His copy later appeared in print: first in 1776 when Richard François Philippe Brunck included it in his Analecta; and also when Friedrich Jacobs published the full Palatine Anthology as the Anthologia Graeca (13 vols. 1794-1803; revised 1813-1817). The remains of Straton's anthology became Book 12 in Jacob's standard critical Anthologia Graeca edition. Only in 2001 did a full Greek-to-English translation of Book 12 appear (from Princeton University Press).