Isaac Casaubon

Isaac Casaubon was one of the leading classical scholars of his time. Born in Geneva to Huguenot refugees, he taught in Geneva and Montpellier, worked in Paris as royal librarian under Henry IV, and moved to England in 1610 at the invitation of Archbishop Richard Bancroft, with the support of James I. He died in London in 1614 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

In his last book, a critique of the church historian Baronius published in 1614, he examined the Greek of the Corpus Hermeticum. He showed that its vocabulary and ideas belonged to the Christian era, which he placed around the third or fourth century CE, not to a sage contemporary with Moses. This undercut the Renaissance belief, promoted since Ficino, that Hermes Trismegistus was a primeval teacher. Modern scholars date the texts to roughly the first to third centuries CE, while recognizing some Egyptian elements in them.