Bridging the Continental divide: neo-Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637)

Jacques Camille, or Jacobus Camillus, on record as a possible professor at the university in 1578 (Prosper Boissonade, Histoire de L'Université de Poitiers (Poitiers, 1932), p. 253), was the author of several philological and philosophical texts, including a two volume edition of Cicero's Academic Questions, an edition of the first book of On the Ends of Good and Evil, and philosophical tracts dealing with Ramist and scientific method. Rollock's epitaph to Camille suggests that he died at some point in 1578 or early 1579, and Rollock praised him for his achievements as a Cicero scholar. The poem makes a clever play on Camille's name, linking him to Marcus Furius Camillus (ca.446-365BC) the Roman military leader who forced the Gauls to withdraw from their occupation of Rome in 387BC and was thus credited as the 'second founder' of the city, and to the term for acolytes in ancient Rome, who had to be free-born children with both parents living. Metre: elegiac couplets.