Gaius Julius Hyginus (ca. 64 BC – AD 17) was a
Latin author, but whether a native of Spain or of Alexandria is not sure, a pupil of the famous Cornelius Alexander
Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus, by whom he was made superintendent of the
Palatine library, according to Suetonius, De Grammaticis, 20.[1]
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".
Fabulae consists of some three hundred very brief and plainly, even crudely told myths and celestial genealogies,
valuable for the use made by an author characterized by his modern editor as adulescentem imperitum, semidoctum,
stultum[2] of the works of Greek writers of tragedy
that are now lost. This school-boy[3] 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[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 suvived their
treatment at the printshop, the manuscript was pulled apart, and 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)
De Astronomia was first published, with accompanying figures, by Erhard Ratdolt
in Venice, 1482, under the title Clarissimi uiri Hyginii Poeticon astronomicon opus
utilissimum This "Poetic astronomy by the most renowned Hyginus, a most useful work," lists the stars in each
constellation, but chiefly tells the myths connected with the constellations, in versions that are chiefly based on
Catasterismi, a work that was traditionally attributed to Eratosthenes.
Both works are abridgments; and the style and level of Latin competence and the elementary mistakes (especially in the
rendering of the Greek originals) are held to prove that they cannot have been the work of so distinguished a scholar as G.
Julius Hyginus. It is suggested that these treatises are an abridgment made in the latter half of the second century of the
Genealogiae of Hyginus by an unknown adapter, who added a complete treatise on mythology.[7]
Notes
- ^ Not everyone is sure that the Hyginus of Fabulae was this freedman
of Augustus; for one, Edward Fitch, reviewing H. I. Rose,Hygini Fabulae in The American Journal of Philology
56,4 (1935), p 422.
- ^ "an ignorant youth, semi-learned, stupid" according to H.I. Rose 1934
- ^ Arthur L. Keith, reviewing H. I. Rose Hygini Fabulae 1934 in The
Classical Journal 31.1 (October 1935) p. 53, 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."
- ^ A Codex Freisingensis, noted by Fitch, reviewing Rose, Hygini
Fabulae 1934:421.
- ^ A. H. F. Griffin, "Hyginus, Fabula 89 (Laomedon)" The Classical
Quarterly New Series, 36.2 (1986), p. 541 note.
- ^ One was discovered at Regensburg in 1864, another in Munich, 1942. Both
fragments are conserved in Munich. See M.D. Reeve on Hyginus, Fabulae in L.D. Reynolds, ed., Texts and Transmission
(Oxford) 1983, pp 189f.
- ^ This paragraph almost literally from the 1911 Britannica article on Hyginus, which is unsigned. See this comparison between the present text and that of a wikilinked version of the Britannica.
External links
Bibliography
- P.K. Marshall, ed. Hyginus: Fabulae 1993; corrected ed. 2002.
- Rose, H. I. Hygini Fabulae (1934) 1963. The standard text, in Latin.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public
domain.
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