HARDOUIN, JEAN (1646-1729)

This article appears in Volume V12, Page 944 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HAN-HEG

HARDOUIN, JEAN (1646-1729) , French classical scholar, was born at Quimper in Brittany. Having acquired a taste for literature in his father's book-shop, he sought and obtained about his sixteenth year admission into the order of the

Jesuits

JESUITS

. In Paris, where he went to study theology, he ultimately became librarian of the College Louis le Grand in 1683, and he died there on the 3rd of September 1729. His first published

work

WORK

was an edition of Themistius (1684), which included no fewer than thirteen new orations. On the advice of Jean Garnier (1612-1681) he undertook to edit the Natural History of Pliny for the Delphin

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

, a task which he completed in five years. His attention having been turned to

numismatics

auxiliary

AUXILIARY (from Lat. auxilium, help)

to his

great

GREAT

editorial labours, he published several learned works in that department, marred, however, as almost everything he did was marred, by a determination to be at all hazards different from other interpreters. It is sufficient to mention his Nummi antiqui populorum et erbium illustrati (1684), Antirrheticus de nummis antiquis coloniarum et municipiorum (1689), and Chronologia Veteris Testamenti ad vulgatam versionem exacta et nummis illustrata (1696). By the ecclesiastical authorities Hardouin was appointed to supervise the Conciliorum collectio regia

maxima

MAXIMA

(1715); but he was accused of suppressing. important documents amounts to roo,000, and at the Kumbh-mela to 300,000; in and foisting in apocryphal matter, and by. the order of the
parlement of Paris (then at war with the

Jesuits

JESUITS

) the publication of the

work

WORK

was delayed. It is really a valuable collection, much cited by scholars. Hardouin declared that all the councils supposed to have taken place before the council of Trent were fictitious. It is, however, as the originator of a variety of paradoxical theories that Hardouin is now best remembered. The most remarkable, contained in his Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis restitutae (1696) and Prolegomena ad censuram veterum scriptorum, was to the effect that, with the exception of the works of Homer, Herodotus and Cicero, the Natural History of Pliny, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Satires and Epistles of

Horace

HORACE [QuINTus HORATIUS FLACCUS] (65-8 B.C.)

, all the ancient classics of

Greece

GREECE

and Rome were spurious, having been manufactured by monks of the 13th century, under the direction of a certain Severus Archontius. He denied the genuineness of most ancient works of art, coins and

inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS (from Lat. inscribere, to write upon)

, and declared that the New Testament was originally written in Latin.
See A. Debacker, Bibliothbque des ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jesus (1853).

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