Gaius Julius Hyginus

"Hyginus" redirects here. For other uses, seeHyginus (disambiguation).

Gaius Julius Hyginus(/hɪˈdʒaɪnəs/;c.64 BC – AD 17) was aLatinauthor, a pupil of the scholarAlexander Polyhistor,and a freedman ofCaesar Augustus.He was elected superintendent of thePalatine libraryby Augustus according toSuetonius'De Grammaticis,20.It is not clear whether Hyginus was a native of theIberian Peninsulaor ofAlexandria.

Suetonius remarks that Hyginus fell into great poverty in his old age and was supported by the historianClodius Licinus.Hyginus was a voluminous author: his works included topographical and biographical treatises, commentaries onHelvius Cinnaand the poems ofVirgil,and disquisitions on agriculture andbee-keeping.All these are lost.

Under the name of Hyginus there are extant what are probably two sets of school notes abbreviating his treatises onmythology;one is a collection ofFabulae( "stories" ), the other a "Poetical Astronomy".

Fabulae

TheFabulaeconsists of some three hundred very brief and plainly, even crudely, told myths (such asAgnodice) and celestial genealogies,made by an author who was characterized by the modern editor,H. J. Rose,asadulescentem 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) ofHygini Fabulae,wondered "at the caprices of Fortune who has allowed many of the plays of anAeschylus,the larger portion ofLivy's histories, and other priceless treasures to perish, while this school-boy's exercise has survived to become thepabulumof scholarly effort. "Hyginus' compilation represents in primitive form what every educated Roman in the age of theAntonineswas expected to know of Greek myth, at the simplest level. TheFabulaeare a mine of information today, when so many more nuanced versions of the myths have been lost.

In fact the text of theFabulaewas all but lost: a single surviving manuscript from the abbey ofFreising,in aBeneventan scriptdatablec. 900,formed the material for the first printed edition, negligently and uncriticallytranscribed byJacob 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 15th and 16th 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 5th century is in the Vatican Library.

Among Hyginus' sources are thescholiaonApollonius of Rhodes'Argonautica,which were dated to about the time ofTiberiusby Apollonius' editor R. Merkel, in the preface to his edition of Apollonius (Leipzig, 1854).

De astronomiaorPoeticon Astronomicon

Main article:De astronomia

De astronomiawas first published, with accompanying figures, byErhard Ratdoltin Venice, 1482, under the titleClarissimi uiri Hyginii Poeticon astronomicon opus utilissimum.This "Poetic astronomy by the most renowned Hyginus, a most useful work", chiefly tells us the myths connected with the constellations, in versions that are chiefly based onCatasterismi,a work that was traditionally attributed toEratosthenes.

Like theFabulae,theAstronomiais a collection of abridgements. According to theEncyclopædia BritannicaEleventh Edition,the style and level of Latin competence and the elementary mistakes (especially in the rendering of the Greek originals) were held to prove that they cannot have been the work of "so distinguished" a scholar as C. Julius Hyginus. It was further suggested that these treatises are an abridgment made in the latter half of the 2nd century of theGenealogiaeof Hyginus by an unknown adapter, who added a complete treatise on mythology.The star lists in theAstronomiaare in exactly the same order as inPtolemy'sAlmagest,reinforcing the idea of a 2nd-century compilation.

Legacy

The lunar craterHyginusand the minor planet12155 Hyginusare named after him.

The English author SirThomas Browneopens his discourseThe Garden of Cyrus(1658) with a Creation myth sourced from theFabulaeof Hyginus.

References

• Grant, Mary (transl.),The Myths of Hyginus(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960).
• Marshall, P.K. (ed.),Hyginus: Fabulae(Munich: Saur, 1993 [corr. ed. 2002]).
• Rose, Herbert Jennings (ed.),Hygini Fabulae(Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1934 [2nd ed. 1963]). The standard text, in Latin.
• Smith, R. Scott, "Mythography in Latin", inThe Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography,pp. 97–114, edited by R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, Oxford University Press, 2022.ISBN978-0-190-64831-2.
• Smith, R. Scott & Trzaskoma, Stephen M. (transl.),Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2007),ISBN978-0-87220-821-6.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain:Chisholm, Hugh,ed. (1911). "Hyginus, Gaius Julius".Encyclopædia Britannica.Vol. 14 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 175.

External links

• Online Text: Hyginus,Fabulaetranslated by Mary Grant
• Online Text: Hyginus,Astronomicatranslated by Mary Grant
• Online Text of Hyginus. excerpted(in Latin)
• Online Digital copy of the first Latin edition by Jacob Micyllus (Basel, 1535)
• Poeticon Astronomicon,1482Archived2020-08-05 at theWayback Machine—Full digital facsimile,Linda Hall Library.
• De Mundi et Sphere,1512Archived2019-12-21 at theWayback Machine—Full digital facsimile,Linda Hall Library.
• Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries—High resolution images of works by Hermes Trismegistus in JPEG and TIFF formats
• Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta,Gino Funaioli(a cura di), Lipsiae, in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1907, vol. 1,pagg. 525 sgg.
• Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae,Hermann Peter (ed.), Lipsiae, in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, vol. 1, 1906,pp. 72–77.