Hyginus Gromaticus
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Hyginus, usually distinguished as Hyginus Gromaticus, was a Latin writer on land-surveying, who flourished in the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117). Fragments of a work on boundaries attributed to him are found in Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, a collection of works on land surveying compiled in Late Antiquity.
The cognomen gromaticus means "agrimensor" or "surveyor" and derives from groma, one of their common tools in antiquity. Its application to Hyginus derives from the Codex Arcerianus,[1] whose copy of the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum reads in part exp[licit] Kygini gromatici constitutio feliciter ("The establishment of Kyginus the Surveyor explains well..."). Other manuscripts of the text like the Palatinus Vatic. Lat. 1564 have instead explicit liber Hygini gromaticus ("The book of Hyginus on surveying explains..."), in which the adjective gromaticus is grammatically attached to the book rather than the author.[2] For this reason, some scholars like Brian Campbell avoid the epithet and instead call him simply Hyginus or Hyginus 1 (to distinguish him from another Hyginus whose work appears in the same text).
