Anthony Grafton 1. Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo A Scientific Prelude Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a mon- ster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: "My father didn't fear the Devil, neither do I. I'm worse than the devil." 1 Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. "Devil Tempts Man" was no headline to excite the Renaissance public; but "Amphibian Creates Culture" was something very far out of the ordinary. The fish who gave us civilization appeared at the beginning of the ac- count of Babylonian mythology and history written by Berosus, a priest of Bel, early in the third century Be. Berosus drew on genuine Babylonian records but wrote in Greek, for the benefit of the Seleucid king Antiochus I Soter. He and other Near Eastern writers, like the Egyptian Manetho and many Jews, tried to avenge in the realm of the archive their defeat on the battlefield, using documents and inscriptions to show that Babylon, Israel, and Egypt were older and wiser than Greece. Jewish and Christian writers preserved his Babyloniaca. It was in the unpublished world chron- icle of one of them, George Syncellus (c. AD 800), that Scaliger met Berosus and his fishy pet, in 1602-1603. 2 The most remarkable thing about the encounter was Scaliger's reac-