The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Aesop
Aesop
(6th cent.
BC
), to whom tradition attributes the authorship of the whole stock of Greek fables, is probably a legendary figure. The fables were orally transmitted for the most part, but some were put into verse by
Babrius
(3rd cent.
AD
), while some were translated into Latin by
Phaedrus
(1st cent.
AD
) and
Avianus
(?4th cent.
AD
). They became known to the West in the Renaissance through the 14th-cent. prose version compiled by the Byzantine scholar
Maximus
Planudes
.
Erasmus
produced a Latin edition in
1513
which was then widely used in schools. They were widely imitated and adapted throughout the 18th cent.
Richard
Bentley
's attack on the antiquity of the ‘Aesopian’ fables in his Dissertations (
1697
,
1699
) was one of the notable contributions to the controversy satirized in
Swift's
The Battle of the Books
.
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