All Scholars

Gronovius (Jacob Gronow) was educated by his learned father before attending Leiden, Oxford, and Cambridge. Upon his return from England in 1670, he declined a professorship at Deventer to tour France, visit Spain with the Dutch ambassador to Madrid, Adriaen Paedts (1631-86), and Italy. In Florence he met the leading scholar and literary figure, Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714), which led to a meeting with Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642-1723), who arranged a professorship at Pisa for the talented young man. Gronovius returned to Leiden in 1676 and assumed his father’s professorship in 1679. 

His early career was devoted to philology, revising his father’s editions of Tacitus, Aulus Gellius, Phaedrus, and Seneca’s tragedies and editing authors widely read in schools (Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Livy) as well as less well-known authors (Ammianus Marcellinus, Harpocration and Stephanus Byzantinus). In 1689 he published the editio princeps of Manetho.

      In 1657 he turned to gemstones, translating Agostini’s Gemme antiche figurate (1657), an arrangement of engravings with notations on the design and material of the gems. He revised and expanded this beautiful and popular book in 1694. In 1695 he published an expanded edition of the 1609 catalogue of the collection of Abraham Gorlaeus (1549-1608). 

       Following the publication in 1694-9) of Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum by Johann Georg Graevius (1632-1703) in 12 volumes, Gronovius three years later began publishing his Thesaurus Graecorum antiquitatum, also in 12 volumes. Graevius and Gronovius corresponded on many issues. In terms of the arrangement of topics, Gronovius adopted Varro’s division of culture into four categories: public, private, religious, and military. There had been little in the way of archaeology in Greece and relatively little was known of architecture and plastic arts, which made Gronovius’s compendium all the more valuable for collecting what was then known of the Hellenic world from its beginnings through Roman times. The work comprises over 300 essays covering nearly every known aspect of Greek culture, including literature, history, epigraphy, numismatics. The volumes are arranged by general subject beginning with origin stories of the Greek race.

      The various collections of Gronovius’s letters show a bitter and disagreeably argumentative personality. He was known to argue so fiercely in caustic diatribes that he even roiled the great Richard Bentley (1662-1742).