SOURCE: Bateman Edwards, "An Aesopic Allusion in the Roman D'Alexandre," in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley, by His Colleagues, Washington University Studies, 1942, pp. 95-100.

[In the following essay, Edwards finds an allusion to Aesop in the "Roman d'Alexandre " that is not based on Phaedrus, Avianus, or any known French Translation, and so may be based on some undiscovered written source.]

The study of fable transmission, with the enormous and complex amount of material of which much is still unknown or imperfectly studied, presents one of the most difficult problems in the history of medieval culture. The Middle Ages received their knowledge of the so-called Aesopic fable in general through the reworkings of Phaedrus and Avianus, which were themselves re-worked in numerous ways.¹ That these were not the sole sources of the medieval knowledge of fable material has, however, long been known, and various possibilities of diffusion have been suggested.² The following pages will show that, in twelfth- or thirteenth-century France, at least one Aesopic tale was known in a form which is similar to that of a Greek version, but which is not found in the usual Latin or French collections.

Three fables in the Greek Prose-Aesop present the jackdaw in a markedly similar light. In each he attempts to abandon his fellow daws for the company of other birds, and in each he is unsuccessful. In spite of these similarities, each fable represents a different type, with different motives, action, and moral.

1. Out of vanity the daw decks himself with feathers of various birds and presents himself at an assembly where he hopes to win the prize for beauty, but he is ignominiously stripped of his borrowed plumage by the birds he had laid under contribution. The moral teaches that those in possession of others' goods may appear to be what they are not, but that once stripped of their borrowed finery their true selves reappear.³

2. Out of vanity a large daw attempts to associate with the crows, but they refuse to accept him, and when he returns to his own kind he is likewise driven off. The moral is that those abandoning their own country are not looked on with favor in their new home and are shunned in their former one.⁴

3. Out of desire to share in the plenteous food of the doves, a daw whitens himself and attempts to pass himself off as a dove. When he utters a sound, however, he is recognized for what he is and driven off, and the daws, in their turn, refuse to allow him a share in their food. The moral is that we should be content with what we have, since avarice not only fails to gain the thing coveted but loses us what we have.⁵

Although in both 2 and 3 the daw finds himself cast out not only from the company of his choice but also from that of his kind, the motive of the desire for food is present only in 3, and only there is the moral directed against avarice. It is this motive and moral to which I find an allusion in a passage of the Roman d'Alexandre. In Branch IV, stanza 47,⁶ Antiocus makes lament over Alexander's body, recalling his prowess and the great loss his death has brought to the world. Since Alexander was, for medieval times, the epitome of liberality, Antiocus finds occasion to commemorate what his dead master had once said to him in blame of illiberal, miserly rulers:

Sire, vos me deïstes sor l'eaue de Dunoe
Qu'eschars rois pereceus tient l'usage a la choe
Qui quiert l' autrui viande et tous jors pert la soe.⁷

The antithetical expressions l'autrui viande and la soe can hardly refer to anything but the food which Aesop's daw sought unsuccessfully to obtain from the doves and that which his own kind subsequently denied him. In no other fable of the Prose-Aesop is the daw presented under similar circumstances. Likewise, the linking of the story with the moral directed against avarice appears in the French, and this fact constitutes additional proof of the latter's dependence upon the Aesopic fable.

Thus the connection between the Greek version and this medieval echo is evident, but what the intermediate links were by which the tradition entered western France cannot be determined. It is, at least, certain that the theme was not transmitted through Phaedrus or Avianus, since neither they nor their derivatives contain this fable.⁸ Lacking any positive testimony, we can only speculate as to the way in which our French author acquired his knowledge of a theme whose meagre literary success is evidenced by the dearth of references to it. It is true that the Crusades offered opportunity for contact with Greek civilization, it is certain that the medieval period was not wholly ignorant of Greek, and it is likely that parts of the Roman d'Alexandre show first-hand knowledge of the Eastern countries. But such facts do not allow us to infer that our author is repeating a fable which he had heard told by voyagers returning from the East, or that he himself had made such a voyage. Oral tradition is certainly not an impossibility in the present case, but utilization of a written source is more strongly suggested by the fact that reference to the story is made in such a way as to emphasize the connection between the story and its moral. Now in both the Greek and the French the moral is a complex one. It is, as might be expected, a warning against greed, but more than that it brings out the point that excessive greed or avarice (… escharseté) defeats its own purpose and loses both the good possessed and that desired. This might well indicate that our French author knew the fable of "the Jackdaw and the Doves" in a written form which appended to the story proper the moral reflection usual in the Latin and French collections of his day.

So far, all attempts to find a contemporary version, either in Latin or French, have been unsuccessful. The earliest Latin version with which I am familiar occurs in the early printed collections of fables containing those translated by Lorenzo Valla in 1438 together with others translated by various Renaissance scholars. In the copy which I have examined, printed by Sebastian Gryphius in 1554⁹ the fable reads as follows:

Monedula, et Columbae.

Monedula in columbario quodam columbis visis bene nutritis, dealbavit sese, ivitque, ut et ipsa eodem cibo impertiretur. Hae vero, donee tacebat, ratae cam esse columbam, admiserunt: sed cum aliquando oblita vocem emisisset, tune eius cognita natura, expulerunt percutiendo: eaque privata eo cibo, rediit ad monedulas rursum: et illae ob colorem, cum ipsam non nossent, a suo cibo abergerunt, ut duorum appetens, neutro potiretur.

Adfabulatio. Fabula significat, oportere e nos nostris contentos esse, consyderantes avaritiamm praeterquam quod nihil juvat, auferre saepe et quae adsunt bona.¹⁰

Although the fable is found in the only anonymous collection—incerto interprete—which the book in its present state contains, it would be rash to assume a date for the version sufficiently early for it to have served as source for the Old French allusion. If such were the case, this collection would be the only material in the book which is not due to Renaissance scholarship. Furthermore, the collection is dissimilar to the usual medieval productions because its extreme fidelity to the Greek amounts in the above fable, and in general throughout the seventy-seven others, almost in a word-for-word transposition.

Notes

¹ See Léopold Hervieux, Les Fabulistes latins, 2d ed., 5 vols., Paris, 1893-96; the article "Phaedrus" by August Hausrath in the Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie, XIX (1938), cols. 1475-1505; Julia Bastin, Recueil général des Isopets (SATF), I (1929), pp. i-viii.

² George C. Keidel, "Problems in Mediaeval Fable Literature," Studies in Honor of A. Marshall Elliott (Baltimore, 1911), I, 281-303, especially pp. 284-286.

³ Ed. K. Halm, Fabulae Aesopicae Collectae (Leipzig, 1901), No. 200^b; ed. E. Chambry, Ésope, Fables (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1927), No. 162; ed. A. Hausrath, Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum (Leipzig, 1940), No. 103. A variant of this type is given by Halm, No. 200. This theme has been exhaustively studied by Herbert D. Austin, "The Origin and Greek Versions of the Strange-feathers Fable," Studies in Honor of A. Marshall Elliott (Baltimore, 1911), I, 305-327, to whose article I am indebted for the present classification of types.

⁴ Halm, No. 201; Chambry, No. 161; Hausrath, No. 125.

⁵ Halm, No. 201^b; Chambry, No. 163; Hausrath, No. 131….

⁶The Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre (Elliott Monographs, Nos. 36 and 37), II (1937), 340.

⁷ Branch IV, ll. 882-884.

⁸ Phaedrus (I, 3) gives the story of the daw adorned with peacock feathers—a version related to type 1 above. Some manuscripts of the Roman d'Alexandre read poe for choe, probably in the attempt to connect the allusion to the Phaedrine fable of "Juno and the Peacock" (III, 18), but it is evident that the details of the two stories are incompatible.

⁹ This copy is in the possession of the Library of Princeton University. A title-page, printed "apud haered. Seb. Gryphii," and giving the date of 1561, has been substituted for the original one, but the colophon furnishes the correct information. The Princeton copy is defective, lacking pp. 177-254 which contained the fables of Laurentius Abstemius. The Index Fabularum which follows (pp. 255-263) gives refereences to fables on these lacking pages, although an attempt has been made to disguise the imperfect condition of the book by tearing off the page numbers of the Index and by cutting off that part of p. 255 which contained the final lines of the text. The fraud, however, is evident from the signature on pp. 257-263. The last signature preserved before the Index is l, while that on 257 is r. Thus all of m, n, o, p, and seven folios of q are lacking—a number which exactly makes up for the number of pages which, from the references in the Index, must have belonged in the complete book. One further peculiarity about the copy is the fact that the pagination of the Index Auctorum printed on the reverse of the substituted title-page does not agree with the paginatio of the book itself. It does, however, agree with that of an earlier Lyons edition, printed by I. Giunta in 1535. Of this last the British Museum possesses a copy which, like the Princeton volume, is incomplete, and lacks exactly the same material.

¹⁰ P. 10.