Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gaius Julius Hyginus was a Latin author and freedman of the emperor Augustus who lived from around 64 BC to AD 17. Augustus appointed him superintendent of the Palatine library, one of Rome's most prestigious scholarly posts. He is also associated, though controversially, with two surviving ancient texts: the mythological handbook known as the Fabulae and the astronomical work De astronomia.
Most scholars now believe the Fabulae was written by a separate, unidentified author who also went by the name Hyginus, not by the freedman of Augustus. The first printed edition of the Fabulae, produced by Jacob Micyllus in 1535, attributed the work to Gaius Julius Hyginus, but it is unclear whether Micyllus added that attribution himself or found it in the manuscript.
All of Hyginus's known personal writings are lost. His output reportedly included topographical and biographical treatises, commentaries on Helvius Cinna and on Virgil, and writings on agriculture and bee-keeping. None of these texts have survived.
Hyginus died in poverty, according to Suetonius, who records that he was supported in old age by the historian Clodius Licinus. Despite having served as superintendent of the Palatine library under Augustus, he had no financial security in his final years.
A lunar crater and the minor planet 12155 Hyginus are both named after him.
The English author Sir Thomas Browne opened his 1658 discourse The Garden of Cyrus with a creation myth sourced from the Fabulae of Hyginus. Browne drew on the text as a source of ancient cosmological imagery.