All Scholars

Daniel Heinsius (Heins) came from a Protestant family. While he was young the family fled first to England and then the Netherlands to avoid persecution by Spanish Catholics. He composed Latin verse in his boyhood on classical models, and would write elegies (many addressed to a “Rossa”) and tragedies in the style of Seneca. His Auriacus centered on the death of William of Orange and his Herodes on the Slaughter of the Innocents in Matthew’s Gospel. He published two of the first Dutch erotic emblem-books under a pen name, essentially ekphrases in which allegorical illustrations are provided with interpretive texts. Throughout his life he revised and expanded his Poemata. 

         His father sent him to Franeker on the promise of studying law, but learning that his son was more interested in classics, he called him home for two years after which Heinsius returned to Leiden where he came under the influence of the great philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609). Despite his lack of a degree, Heinsius showed such prodigious talent (he published an edition of Silius Italicus at 20) that he was given a lectureship in Latin. He remained Scaliger’s friend and colleague and wrote three memorial notices for Scaliger after his death. This quickly led to a professorship and within a decade Heinsius held the chair of Greek. 

      As a composer of tragedies himself, Heinsius produced an edition with Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1611 and explicated his notion of tragedy in De Tragoediae constitutione appended to his edition of Horace, drawing parallels from Horace’s Ars Poetica and Seneca. His view of the nature of tragedy influenced playwrights from Corneille and Racine to Ben Jonson. He edited major Latin authors, and had a particular affinity for Horace, whom he edited and whose Satires he studied with the same goal of elucidating the nature of their genre as he had for tragedy. His textual emendations in editions of Latin authors “are not much more valuable than those on Horace,” wrote Sandys (314). He was more given to generic explication than to textual correction. Wilamowitz wrote of Heinsius that “his achievements as a scholar were no more than average.”

      He nevertheless enjoyed an international reputation as a leading Dutch classicist and was employed by Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632) of Sweden, honored by the Republic of Venice, and brought to Rome by Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644) to teach learned Italians to be scholars on a par with those in Northern Europe. He fell out with his friend Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) over his role in the Synod of Dordrecht in which Dutch Calvinists excluded and ultimately branded as heretics the followers of the Dutch Reform pastor Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). 

       After this upheaval, he turned to the Church Fathers in whom he detected a singular dialect which he termed Hellenistic. His edition of Clement of Alexandria was of lasting value. He contributed to the edition (1624, 1633) of the Greek New Testament (1624, 1633) prepared by the Elzeviers publishing house in Leiden. He edited Aristarchus Sacer (1627) which contained Nonnus’s paraphrase of John’s gospel.  

       Late in his career he fell into a heated dispute over the Greek of the New Testament with his French colleague Claudius Salmasius (1588-1653), who succeeded Scaliger at Leiden. The quarrel was bitter and protracted. Heinsius at one point as University Librarian refused Salmasius access to the library. Heinsius at length tired of the quarrel and retired from academics altogether. As late as 1935 dueling dissertations supported Heinsius (Peppink) or attacked him (ter Horst).  

       As adviser to the Elsevir publishing house he oversaw a series of classical texts and other publications. Heinsius’ own bibliography consists of over 300 items.