The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was
carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name
is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of
the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius
Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him principal keeper
of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek
grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate
acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history,
astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on
mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are
at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics
are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the
second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest
commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a manuscript of
the _Georgics,_ which came from Virgil's own house, though it was not
actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms
on the _Aeneid_ are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A
little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism
was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most
fashionable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin
grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the
most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated
teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for
his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial
residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, entitled _De Verborum
Significatu_, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of
it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth
centuries, by Sextus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among
our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and
institutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was
ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an
encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory,
jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and
medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only
part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written
in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one
of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a
text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science
had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater
perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though
not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or
improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly
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