Part I: Quintus Curtius and the Gordian Knot of tradition

In the years around 1700, a roomy but fragile imaginary mansion housed the citizens of the Republic of Letters. Scattered geographically from Edinburgh to Naples, they were connected intellectually by their shared passion for the central issues of the day: Newton's physics, Locke's politics, the chronology of ancient Egypt, and the mythology of ancient Greece. Touchy, alert, and fascinated by learned gossip, they scanned the new review journals for every reference to their own work or that of their friends and enemies. Public arguments repeatedly flared up. Many of those who dwelled in this ample new house of learning feared that it was in danger of going up in flames. And no one tried more systematically to resolve these conflicts than Jacob Perizonius, professor of ancient history at Franeker and Leiden. Perizonius dedicated himself to putting out fires in the Republic of Letters – or at least in its philological and historical wing. In detailed essays, couched in the serpentine Latin of late humanism and larded with quotations from sources in many languages, he did his best to show that a sensible historian could rescue the early histories of Egypt, Babylon, and Rome from the attacks of historical skeptics, without making dogmatic assertions of the reliability of ancient writers. He tried to save as much as he could of the Greek and Latin writers' fides historica, even as a new set of writers sharpened a new set of weapons and prepared to mount a merciless attack on the scholarly and rhetorical traditions he held dearest.