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But these works, while proving Scaliger's right to the foremost place among his contemporaries as Latin scholar and critic, did not go beyond mere scholarship. It was reserved for his edition of Manilius (1579), and his De emendatione temporum (1583), to revolutionize all the received ideas of ancient chronology - to show that ancient history is not confined to that of the Greeks and Romans, but also comprises that of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, hitherto neglected as absolutely worthless, and that of the Jews, hitherto treated as a thing apart, and that the historical narratives and fragments of each of these, and their several systems of chronology, must be critically compared, if any true and general conclusions are to be reached.
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