VOSSIUS, Gerardus Johannes (1577-1649), classical scholar and theologian, was born near Heidelberg in 1577. His father Johannes Vos, a native of the Netherlands, had fled as a Protestant from the persecutions in his own country into the Palatinate, and became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerard was born; but, as he was a Calvinist, the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him once more to become a wanderer. In 1578 he settled at Leyden as student of theology in the university, and finally as pastor at Dort, where he died in 1586, leaving Gerard an orphan. Here the boy received his education, until he entered the theological college and then the university of Leyden. He there became the lifelong bosom friend of Hugo Grotius, and pursued with great zest the study of the classics, Hebrew, ecclesiastical history, and theology. In 1600 he was made rector of the high school at Dort, where he devoted himself to philology and historical theology. From 1614 to 1619 he filled the office of director of the theological college at Leyden. The moderation of his theological views and his abstention from controversy brought him under the suspicion of heresy, in consequence of which he escaped expulsion from his office only by resignation (1619). The year before he had published his valuable work the Historia Pelagiana, which his enemies considered favoured the views of the Arminians or Remonstrants. But in the year 1622 he received the appointment of professor of rhetoric and chronology, and subsequently of Greek, in the university. In 1624 the university of Cambridge offered him a professorship, which he declined. Two years afterwards another unsuccessful effort was made to induce him to settle in England, but he accepted from Archbishop Laud a prebend in ...Canterbury cathedral of the value of £100 per annum, without residence, coming over to England to be installed in 1629, when he was made LL.D, at Oxford. In 1632 he left Leyden to take the post of professor of history in the newly founded Athenaeum at Amsterdam, which he held till his death, March 17, 1649.
He was one of the great scholars of the world, and his character added lustre to his learning. His works, of which a complete edition appeared at Amsterdam, 1695-1701, in 6 vols, fol., are philological, historical, and theological. He made invaluable contributions to the correct study of Latin grammar and of the Greek and Latin historians. He was amongst the first to treat theological dogmas and the heathen religions from the historical point of view. His principal works are Historia Pelagiana (1618); Etymologicum Linguae Latinae (1662); Commentariorum Rhetoricorum Libri VII. (1606); De Historicis Graecis Libri III. (1624); De Historicis Latinis Libri III. (1627); De Theologia Gentili (1642); Dissertationes Tres de Tribus Symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano, et Constantinopolitano (1642).
See Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire des Hommes Illustres, vol. xiii., Paris, 1730; Herzog’s Realencyklopädie, art. “Vossius.”
VOSSIUS, Isaac (1618-1689), son of the preceding, was born at Leyden in 1618, and was carefully educated by his father. After three years spent on a learned tour through England, France, and Italy, which he used in making the acquaintance of the first scholars and the great libraries of those countries, and from which he brought back many valuable MSS., he accepted in 1648 an invitation to the court of the brilliant Queen Christina of Sweden, whom he taught Greek. He declined the offer of the chair of history at Amsterdam vacated by his father’s death, and continued for some years in Sweden, with occasional visits to Holland. In 1658 he finally left Sweden. His father’s merits and his own learning procured him favour with Louis XIV. of France and in England. In 1670 he came to reside in England, was made LL.D, of Oxford, and in spite of notorious looseness of morals and levity of character received a canonry at Windsor from Charles II. in 1673, residing in the castle, where he died in February 1689.
His learning was great, and he rendered valuable services in connexion with ancient history, antiquities, chronology, and geography, though they were marred by the admixture of great levity and want of judgment. To him is owing the first Greek text of the six shorter epistles of Ignatius (1646). He published valuable editions of the geographer Scylax (1639), of Justin (1640), of Pomponius Mela (1648), and of Catullus (1684). In his various dissertations on chronology he maintained the greater accuracy of the system of the Septuagint in comparison with that of the Hebrew text, and generally asserted the greater genuineness of the Greek translation as compared with the Massoretic text. He inherited his father’s valuable library, which, to the great sorrow of Evelyn, went after his death back to Holland.
Comp. Nicéron’s Mémoires, vol. xiii.
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