Political circumstances and bitter religious controversies forced the southern Netherlands to remain under Spanish control, while the northern part acquired its freedom. This caused the two parts to diverge more and more from one another during the centuries to come. While the south would decline, economically as well as culturally, for centuries, the north experienced its Golden Age, which approximately spanned the seventeenth century. To start with, a new university was established in 1575 at Leiden to counter the influence of Catholic Louvain. One of the founding members, the poet and humanist Janus Dousa (1545-1604), was even able to convince his friend Justus Lipsius to accept a chair there, which greatly contributed to the fame of the young university. So did his successor Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), with his innovative research in the field of chronology and his new edition of Manilius. From the southern Netherlands came a host of talented teachers, often prompted by religious reasons. The first professor of Greek was Bonaventura Vulcanius from Bruges (1538-1614), who devoted himself to Hellenistic and Byzantine authors (Callimachus, Moschus, Bion, Agathias, Theophylactus). Another Greek scholar was his fellow-countryman Franciscus Nansius (1525-95), who applied himself to Nonnus’ hexameter version of St. John’s Gospel and taught in Leiden and Dordrecht. Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), born in Ghent, was most influential in the field of literary theory, thanks to his De tragoediae constitutione (On the structure of tragedy), which appeared as an appendix to his Latin translation of Aristotle’s De poetica (On poetry, 1611). In collaboration with Hugo Grotius he contributed to the rise of Senecan tragedy (Auriacus, sive libertas saucia [Auriacus, or liberty afflicted] 1602, treating of the death ofWilliam of Orange; and Herodes infanticida [Herod the baby-slayer] 1642). At the Synod of Dordrecht (1618-19), where the controversy introduced by Arminianism into the Dutch Reformed Church was discussed, Hein-sius was appointed to watch over the quality of the Latin used. Heinsius also edited several Greek authors, providing them with an excellent Latin translation, but his edition of Ovid has proved to be of especially lasting value. He was, moreover, a poet himself, in Latin, Greek, and also in Dutch ( Nederduytsche poemata, Dutch poems), thus considerably stimulating the development and renewal of vernacular poetry.
Born of Antwerp parents, Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) was the most prominent poet and playwright in Dutch literature. In his most popular play, Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637), which was produced more than a hundred times during his lifetime, Vondel borrowed several features from the second book of the Aeneid. The translation of Vergil’s entire oeuvre, first in prose (1646), later in verse (1660), was a high point of his literary career, but he also translated Horace and Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses in his Heldinnebrieven (1642) and Herscheppinghe (1671). His biblical epic Johannes de Boetgezant. Begrepen in zes boeken (John the preacher of penitence. Contained in six books, 1662) was intended to compete with the first part of Vergil’s Aeneid, and even to surpass it by Christianizing it. Biblical drama was, however, his main and most important commitment. After a tragicomic play, treating of the exodus of Israel from Egypt (Het Pascha, 1612), he turned to Flavius Josephus for the subject of Hierusalem verwoest (Jerusalem destroyed, 1620). These were followed by many others. The most exalted of these and the most original in conception is Lucifer, being entirely set in heaven, from which Milton may have drawn inspiration. He reworked a classical theme for only three of his dramas: Palamedes oft Vermoorde onnooselheyd (Palamedes or murdered innocence, 1625), Salmoneus (1657), and Faeton of Reuckeloze stoutheit (Phaethon or reckless rashness, 1663). He produced, however, many translations of classical tragedies in the 1620s and 1630s: the Amsteldamsche Hecuba and Hippolytus, renderings of Seneca’s Troades and Phaedra; Elektra and Herkules in Trachin, vernacular versions of Sophocles; and Ifigenie in Tauren (Iphigenia in Taurus) and Feniciaensche (the Phoenissae), renderings of Euripides. For the Greek plays he depended heavily upon Latin versions, as, for example, the Phoenissae by Hugo Grotius.
Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581-1647), born at Amsterdam, made a journey through Italy in 1600, during which he addressed to the Chamber of Rhetoric a metrical letter called In Liefd’ Bloeyende (In love flowering), in which he expressed his admiration for the achievements of Latin and Italian literature. Perhaps already before that date he produced the first classical tragedy in Dutch, Achilles ende Polyxena (Achilles and Polyxena), based essentially on Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, and stylistically indebted to Seneca. It was followed by several other plays of classical inspiration, such as Theseus ende Ariadne (Theseus and Ariadne, 1602 or 1603), Paris oordeel (The judgment of Paris), and Degewonde Venus (The wounded Venus, 1607). Again in Senecan style, he dramatized the origin of the Batavi (who lived between the Rhine and the Meuse) in his Baeto, and in the same year 1617 he also adapted Plautus’ Aulularia in his Warenar. In 1628 Hooft started his masterpiece, his
Neederlandsche Histoorien (History of the Netherlands), voicing personal judgments on persons and their actions and pointing out lessons to be drawn from history. In the first 20 books, published in 1642, he dealt with the period from the abdication of Charles V in 1555 to the death of William of Orange in 1584. The last seven books (21-7) were published posthumously. The deliberate imitation of classical historians, especially Tacitus, as well as the solemnity of its manner made it into a model of Dutch prose style.
The last of the Amsterdam triad that should be mentioned is Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero (1585-1618), who was probably the least influenced by the classics. His comedy Moortje (‘‘Blackie,’’ 1615), however, goes back to Terence’s Eunuchus, or rather to a French version of it.
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) has already been cited for the metrical version of Euripides’ Phoenissae that he produced in 1630. He started his literary and political activities, however, much earlier. At the age of 15, he graduated in law from the University of Orleans; in that same year he ventured to comment upon the contemporary political situation with his Scutum auriacum (Shield of orange) and Pontifex Romanus (Roman priest). In 1598, he published an edition with a commentary of Martianus Capella’s handbook of the seven liberal arts, as well as the Phaenomena of Aratus of Soli, for which he could make use of the manuscript holdings of the rich Leiden library. He produced a Latin translation of Theocritus in collaboration with Daniel Heinsius, and in 1614 edited Lucan. As early as 1601 he was appointed by the States of Holland as their Latin historiographer. During that same period he also worked on a comparison between the Athenian, the Roman, and the Batavian societies, producing in reality a eulogy of the Dutch nation (Parallelon rerumpublicarum, a parallel among republics). In this work his clear preference for the style and method of Tacitus is evident, as it also was in his De antiquitate reipublicae Batavae (On the antiquity of the republic of the Batavi, 1610) and, especially, in his Annales et historiae de rebus Belgicis (Annals and histories of ‘Belgian’ affairs), a description of the Dutch Revolt from 1559 until the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21). In his main works, De iure praedae (Commentary on the law of prize and booty, 1604/5) and the expanded version De iure belli etpacis (On the law of war and peace, 1625) he laid the foundations of modern international law.
Another child prodigy was Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), who wrote Latin poetry at the age of 11 and French poetry from 16 onwards. In 1625 he published a witty collection of Latin, French, Italian, and Dutch poems (Otiorum libri sex, Products of leisure, in six books). As a real ‘‘universal man,’’ he designed his own residence at The Hague, his own country house (Hofwijck), and the decoration for the ‘‘Oranjezaal’’ in the Ten Bosch residence at The Hague, representing the stadholder Frederik Hendrik in the company of the Muses and the gods of Olympus. In 1647 he published 39 of his own musical compositions (Pathodia sacra etprofana, Songs of passion, sacred and profane); he also wrote thousands of epigrams in Latin and Dutch, as well as a Latin panegyric of Oxford and a Latin autobiography (De vita propria sermonum inter liberos libri duo. Two books of conversations concerning my own life among my children). He gave his son Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) a many-sided education, enabling him to grow into one of the most famous mathematicians and physicists of his time. Christiaan unraveled (part of) the many secrets surrounding the planet Saturn (Systema Saturnium, Saturnian system, 1659), published the first book on probability theory (1657), and constructed the first pendulum clock in 1656, discussing the theory of the pendulum motion in his Horologium oscillatorium (1673). While in previous generations Latin had been predominant in the field of literary as well as scholarly and scientific output, C. Huygens’s oeuvre, written partly in Latin and partly in the vernacular - as was the case for Descartes or Newton - is typical of the period in which European culture was moving more and more towards the vernacular and increasingly freeing itself from the long predominance of classical antiquity. Still, it can be pointed out that the Treaty of Munster (1648), which ended the Eighty Years’ War and officially secured independence from Spain for the northern Netherlands, was drafted in Latin.
At a scholarly level the flowering of the Dutch Golden Age also involved the establishment of many new institutions of higher learning. Not so in the south, where the only newly established university, that of Douai (1559), was lost to the French in 1667, together with the rest of southern Flanders. Only a few colleges of monastic orders, especially the Augustinians and the Jesuits, grew into strongholds of the Counter-Reformation. Nevertheless, West Flanders produced a trio of gifted poets, Sidronius Hosschius (1596-1653), Jacobus Wallius (1599-1690), and Gui-lielmus Becanus (1608-83), who could even, in the opinion of some, compete with Ovid or Vergil. In the north, however, high schools and universities appeared in almost every province: a university at Franeker (1585), Groningen (1614), and Utrecht (1636); at Harderwijk (1648), Deventer (1630), and Amsterdam (1632), a Gymnasium or Athenaeum Illustre, all these becoming thriving centers of classical learning and literature.
World History
