Author: MUSAEUS
Biography:
MUSAEUS (fl c. 500)
More than one Greek poet is known by the name Musaeus. The relevant one is the author of Hero and Leander, the only work attributed to Musaeus in this bibliography. Francis Fawkes, the translator of four of the poets in the 1832 collection (three of them reprinted from 1810), provides an introductory life of Musaeus which is all about the legendary priest of Ceres, the supposed disciple or perhaps mentor of Orpheus, who composed hymns. The attribution to him of Hero and Leander was by Fawkes’s time known to be incorrect, the real author being a much later poet of the same name. Modern scholarship identifies the author as the virtually unknown Musaeus “Grammaticus” and dates the work to the early sixth century. Of the translators of the poem in this bibliography, Edward Burnaby Greene and Edward Taylor, qq.v., have headnotes of their own. Francis Fawkes (1770-77) as a poet in his own right is a “prior” author active 1745-65, but he was better known in his own day and later as a translator of Greek, classical and modern Latin, and Old Scots writers. His parents Frances Broughton and Jeremiah Fawkes had married at Warmsworth, Yorkshire, where Jeremiah was the rector, in 1818. Francis was baptised there on 4 Apr. 1720. Educated at Leeds and at Bury, Lancashire, he proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge (matric. 1738, BA 1742, MA 1745), and then to ordination (1742). Following several curacies, his highest position in the Church was as rector of Hayes, Kent (1774-7); he was also chaplain to the Princess Dowager of Wales. On 24 July 1755 he married Ann Purrier at St. Peter’s, Leeds; they seem not to have had children. After producing a collection of his own Original Poems and Translations (1761), Fawkes was a collaborator in the 12 volumes of the Poetical Calendar (1763) and in the Poetical Magazine (1764). He left his translation of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius (q.v.) incomplete when he died on 26 Aug. 1777. His widow of necessity sold his library and had the translation published in 1780. (Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911], 19: 43; Harvey; ODNB 15 Feb. 2025; ACAD; findmypast.com 16 Feb. 2025) HJ