“From Mist came Chaos.”
Fabulae, preface
The Fabulae is a set of some three hundred short entries — who someone was, who killed whom, which god did what. There is no style and very little comment, which is exactly what makes it useful: it records plots that survive nowhere else.
It is attached to Gaius Julius Hyginus, a freedman of Augustus who ran the Palatine library, but the Latin is too late for him. The text is now dated to the first or second century CE and its author called Pseudo-Hyginus.
Legacy
Alongside the De Astronomia, it underlies how later Europe read both the constellations and the myths attached to them.