Gaius Julius Hyginus (ca. 64 BC – AD 17) was a
Latin author, a pupil of the famous
Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of
Caesar Augustus. He was by Augustus elected superintendent of the Palatine library according to
Suetonius' De Grammaticis, 20.
[1] It is not clear whether Hyginus was a native of
Spain or of
Alexandria.
Suetonius remarks that he fell into great poverty in his old age, and was supported by the historian Clodius Licinus. Hyginus was a voluminous author his works included topographical and biographical treatises, commentaries on Helvius Cinna and the poems of Virgil, and disquisitions on agriculture and bee-keeping. All these are lost.
Under the name of Hyginus there are extant what are probably two sets of school notes abbreviating his treatises on mythology; one is a collection of Fabulae ("stories"), the other a "Poetical Astronomy".
In fact the text of Fabulae was all but lost a single surviving manuscript from the abbey of Freising[4], in a Beneventan script datable c. 900, formed the material for the first printed edition, negligently and uncritically[5] transcribed by Jacob Micyllus, 1535, who may have supplied it with the title we know it by. In the course of printing, following the usual practice, by which the manuscripts printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely survived their treatment at the printshop, the manuscript was pulled apart only two small fragments of it have turned up, significantly as stiffening in book bindings.[6] Another fragmentary text, dating from the fifth century is in the Vatican Library. (Major 2002)
