Gaius Julius Hyginus, (c. 64 BC - 17 AD), was a Latin author, a native of Spain (or Alexandria), was a pupil of the famous Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus, by whom he was made superintendent of the Palatine library (Suetonius, De Grammaticis, 20). Centuries: 2nd century BC - 1st century BC - 1st century Decades: 110s BC 100s BC 90s BC 80s BC 70s BC - 60s BC - 50s BC 40s BC 30s BC 20s BC 10s BC Years: 69 BC 68 BC 67 BC 66 BC 65 BC 64 BC 63 BC 62 BC 61... For other uses, see number 17. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... Alexandria Modern Alexandria, from Qaitbays Citadel Alexandria, sphinx made of pink granite, Ptolemaic. ... Lucius Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor was a Greek scholar who was enslaved by the Romans during the war of Sulla and taken to Rome as a tutor. ... The famous statue of Octavian at the Prima Porta Caesar Augustus (Latin:IMP·CAESAR·DIVI·F·AVGVSTVS) ¹ (23 September 63 BC–19 August AD 14), known to modern historians as Octavian for the period of his life prior to 27 BC, is considered the first and one of the most... Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 or 70 AD - after 130 AD ) or known as Suetonius was a prominent Roman historian. ...

He is said to have fallen into great poverty in his old age, and to have been supported by the historian Clodius Licinus. He was a voluminous author, and 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. A sculpture of Virgil, probably from the 1st century AD. For other uses, see Virgil (disambiguation). ...

Under the name of Hyginus what are probably two sets of school notes abbreviating his treatises on mythology are extant:

• Fabulae, some 300 very brief and plainly, even crudely told mythological legends and celestial genealogies, valuable for the use made by the author of the works of Greek tragedians now lost. This represents in primitive form what every educated Roman in the early Empire was expected to know of Greek myth, at the simplest level. The Fabulae are a mine of information today, when so many more sophisticated versions of the myths have been lost. In fact Fabulae was all but lost: a single surviving manuscript, in a Beneventan script formed the material for the first printed edition, 1535. In the course of printing, the manuscript was pulled apart, and only two small fragments of it have turned up. Another fragmentary text from the 5th century is in the Vatican Library. (Major 2002)
• De Astronomia, usually called Poetica Astronomica, containing an elementary treatise on astronomy and the myths connected with the stars, chiefly based on Eratosthenes, in four books.

Both are abridgments and both are by the same hand; but the style and Latinity 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 2nd century) of the Genealogiae of Hyginus by an unknown grammarian, who added a complete treatise on mythology. Rule of St. ... Eratosthenes (Ἐρατοσθένης) Eratosthenes (Greek ) (276 BC - 194 BC) was a Hellenistic mathematician, geographer and astronomer. ... The 2nd century is the period from 101 - 200 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian Era. ...

His authorship of the Poeticon astronomicon star atlas is disputed, though during the Renaissance this attribution was commonplace. Two pages from the Ratdolt edition of the Poeticon astronomicon showing woodcuts of the constellations Cassiopeia and Andromeda. ... A Star Atlas is a variant of the traditional geographic atlas, ie. ... Raphael was famous for depicting illustrious figures of the Classical past with the features of his Renaissance contemporaries. ...

External links

• Online Text: Hyginus, Fabulae translated by Mary Grant
• Online Text: Hyginus, Astronomica translated by Mary Grant
• Review by Wilfred E. Major of P.K. Marshall, Hyginus: Fabulae. Editio altera. 2002

Bibliography

• P.K. Marshall, ed. Hyginus: Fabulae 1993; corrected ed. 2002.

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.