Gaius Julius Hyginus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gaius Julius Hyginus (ca. 64 BC – AD 17) was a Latin author, though whether a native of Spain or of Alexandria it is not clear, a pupil of the famous Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus, by whom he was made superintendent of the Palatine library. He is best-known as the author of Fabulae
Fabulae
Under the name of Latin author Hyginus (ca. 64 BCE - 17 C.E.) 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".
Fabulae consists of some three hundred very brief and plainly, even crudely told myths and celestial genealogies, made by an author who was characterized by his modern editor, H. J. Rose. as adulescentem imperitum, semidoctum, stultum--"an ignorant youth, semi-learned, stupid"-- but valuable for the use made of works of Greek writers of tragedy that are now lost. Arthur L. Keith, reviewing H. J. Rose's edition (1934) of Hygini Fabulae for the Loeb Classical Library wondered "at the caprices of Fortune who has allowed many of the plays of an Aeschylus, the larger portion of Livy's histories, and other priceless treasures to perish, while this school-boy's exercise has survived to become the pabulum of scholarly effort." Hyginus' compilation represents in primitive form what every educated Roman in the age of the Antonines was expected to know of Greek myth, at the simplest level. The Fabulae are a mine of information today, when so many more nuanced versions of the myths have been lost.
In fact the text of Fabulae was all but lost: a single surviving manuscript from the abbey of Freising, in a Beneventan script datable c. 900, formed the material for the first printed edition, negligently and uncritically 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. Another fragmentary text, dating from the fifth century is in the Vatican Library. (Major 2002)
Among Hyginus' sources are the scholia on Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, which were dated to about the time of Tiberius by Apollonius' editor R. Merkel, in the preface to his edition of Apollonius (Leipzig, 1854).
