SOURCE: Ben Edward Perry, in an introduction to Babrius and Phaedrus, edited by Ben Edward Perry, Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. xi-cii.

[In the following excerpt, Perry discusses the development of fable writing in Classical Greek and Roman literature, the transmission of the text of the fables, what constitutes a fable, and the influence of the ancient Near East on Greek fable lore.]

1. The Aesopic Fable in Antiquity

In the long history of Aesopic fable, generically so called, the publication of a series of fables in verse meant to be read consecutively, each for its own interest and literary value, without a context or a specific application, is relatively late to appear. Phaedrus, in the time of Tiberius, is the first writer whom we know to have produced such a book, and his example was followed soon afterwards by Babrius, writing in Greek verse. The creations of these two poets mark a new epoch in the history of fable-writing and a midway point, as it were, in almost four thousand years of literary practice. Before Phaedrus, fables written in Greek prose were gathered into collections intended to serve primarily as repertoires of rhetorical materials, comparable to a collection of proverbs or apothegms of famous men, which would serve the needs of speakers or writers in quest of illustrations to be used within the context of an oration, a history, or an essay of some kind. Such a fable-collection, written in prose, was informative in theory and purpose, rather than literary or artistic, although its author might, and usually did, take pains in the stylizing of it, so as to give it in reality a literary value apart from its ultilitarian raison d'être. The collection might be read in whole or in part for its own sake as entertainment, in case anyone chose to make that use of it, and some probably did; but it was not put forth by its author in the guise of literature or belles lettres, nor was it looked upon as such by the reading public.

Phaedrus and Babrius were the first writers to bring a disconnected series of Aesopic fables on to that avowedly artistic plane of literature, as an independent form of writing; but necessarily in verse, in order to sanction it as poetic composition. Only as such could it become, in theory, an independent form of literature in its own right, instead of a dictionary of metaphors. Told in verse a fable had the literary rating and recognition of poetry, by virtue of the form alone in which it was written, without regard to the subject matter; but a fable told in prose without a context, or a collection of such fables, was not literature, properly speaking, but raw material meant to be used in the making of literature, or orally. Archilochus in the seventh century B.C. had occasionally made use of beast fables written in iambic verse as a means of satirizing personal enemies, and Callimachus likewise includes a few Aesopic fables in his Iambics, just as he includes myths about gods and heroes; but in both cases it is the artistic verse that constitutes the literary form and the sanction for its publication apart from a context. A myth as such is not a literary form, but may be used as subject-matter in various kinds of poetry or prose, and the same is true of what we call fable. In the early period of Greek literature, and in the Alexandrian Age, fables might be the subject-matter of separate poems, but much more commonly they were used subordinately as illustrations in a larger context, whether of poetry as in Hesiod,¹ Aeschylus,² Sophocles,³ and Aristophanes,⁴ or in prose, as in Herodotus,⁵ Xenophon,⁶ Plato,⁷ and Aristotle.⁸

It was not until late in the fourth century B.C. that the first collection of Aesopic fables in prose which we know to have been made was published by the orator and antiquarian scholar Demetrius of Phalerum as a handbook of materials intended primarily for the use of writers and speakers. This collection, entitled Aesopia and contained in one book-roll…, has not survived, but it was still extant at the beginning of the tenth century when Arethas had it copied, and it must have been one of the principal sources used by both Babrius and Phaedrus, as well as by such sophistic writers in late antiquity as Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, and Themistius in citing fables of Aesop.⁹ There is no evidence that any book of Aesopic fables other than that of Demetrius, either in Greek or in Latin, was in existence before the time of Phaedrus; nor can we know to what extent, if any, the Aesop of Demetrius was altered or revised or incorporated in other collections in the course of its transmission throughout the Alexandrian Age. From the way in which Phaedrus speaks of his principal source as being a book of smaller compass than his own and as containing all the fables that he calls "Aesop's," we should infer that he knew only one book of Aesop and that that book was the official Aesop of Demetrius.¹⁰

Fragments of a collection of Greek fables in prose, in which each fable apparently was indexed with a promythium and ended with a gnomic sentence uttered by the last speaker in the fable, as in Phaedrus I 26 and IV 20, are preserved on the Rylands Papyrus No. 493, which was inscribed, according to its editor, C. H. Roberts, at some time in the first half of the first century after Christ.¹¹ This may well be a fragment of the book of Demetrius; but, whether it is really his text or not, it typifies, by its regular promythia and the absence of epimythia, the collection of Greek fables that must have served as the primary source for Phaedrus and the kind of fable-book that Demetrius himself had inaugurated.

The promythium, of which we have spoken, is a brief statement concerning the application of a fable made by the author before he begins the narrative, as in the Rylands Papyrus (lines 74 f.):

To a man who is rich, and also a scoundrel, the following fable applies.

Or in Phaedrus III 5:

Success invites many to their ruin.

The function of the promythium was to index the fable under the heading of its moral application for the convenience of a writer or speaker who would consult the fable-repertoire for the purpose of finding a fable that would illustrate an idea that he wished to express effectively; but since the promythium was also a summary of the fable's meaning, in other words its moral, it came to be added after the fable in the form of an epimythium, intended as an explanation…, when the original function of the promythium as an index had been forgotten or ignored,¹² as is the case in the first collection of Greek prose fables to be compiled after the time of Phaedrus, namely in the so-called Augustana collection, where we have epimythia throughout but no promythia. In Phaedrus epimythia appear for the first time along with promythia with increasing frequency; in his first book, where the formal influence of his Greek original is most conspicuous, the proportion of promythia to epimythia is 25 to 4, but in the fifth book it is 2 to 7. Babrius, writing in the last quarter of the first century, has some epimythia but no promythia. The oldest and largest extant collection of prose fables ascribed to Aesop is that which is known as the Augustana, because the manuscript from which it was first published, now codex Monacensis 564, was once at Augsburg. This manuscript, with which the newly recovered tenth-century manuscript 397 in the Pierpont Morgan Library (cod. G) is very closely related, contains some 231 fables from the ancient collection and can be traced to an archetype of the fourth or fifth century. The original compilation was probably made in the second century, if not in the latter part of the first, but it was unknown to Phaedrus and uninfluenced by Babrius except for a few fables which may be later accretions.¹³ The Augustana, known also as Recension I, is the parent stock on which three later editions of "Aesop's fables" were founded in large part, either directly or indirectly, namely Recensions Ia, II (known also as the Vindobonensis), and III (the Accursiana or the Planudean recension). la, consisting of some 143 fables, dates from late antiquity, probably the third or fourth century, and the same may be true, as I now think, also of Recension II,¹⁴ which includes 130 fables in the best representative manuscript of its class, Vindobonensis 130. Some forty of the fables in this collection are in twelve-syllable verse and are derived indirectly from Babrius, but the others, in prose, are badly rewritten on the basis of I. Recension HI, first printed by Bonus Accursius at Milan in 1474, hence known as the Accursiana, was made by Maximus Planudes near the beginning of the fourteenth century. It consists of 127 fables, of which 62 come from Recension II and are freely rewritten, the others mainly from the Augustana (I) with little or no alteration. In modern times this revised and abridged edition of the traditional fables was often printed as the vulgate Greek Aesop before the publication of the Augustana (I) by Schneider in 1812. The fables of Recensions I, II, and III are printed separately in the editions of Chambry¹⁵ and of Hausrath,¹⁶ and likewise such fables of la as are not found in I. What Chambry designates Class IV is the so-called Bodleian Paraphrase of Babrius, consisting of 148 fables briefly summarized in prose, introduced by promythia, and ascribed to Aesop by its unknown compiler. The Augustana fables of Class I and its derivatives are independent of the Babrian tradition, except that many of them are derived from an early source common to both I and Babrius, probably the Aesop of Demetrius. The entire corpus of Greek fables in prose, with the exception of fables depending on the citation of Greek authors other than fabulists, and of a few taken into the collections from unknown sources, is made up of Recensions I-IV, contained in upwards of one hundred MSS., all but three of which are of later date than the thirteenth century. Many of these manuscripts are of mixed contents, containing blocks of fables drawn from two or more of the recensions above mentioned, and in some of them there is much conflation of one textual form with another, and occasionally newly worded paraphrases of older forms. With the exception of Aphthonius, the fourth-century rhetorician whose forty fables, written in a highly artificial style, are not ascribed to Aesop, all the authors of extant fable-collections in Greek or Latin prose are either anonymous, like the authors of Recensions I-IV, or else, like "Romulus," Pseudo-Dositheus, and "Syntipas," obviously pseudonymous. The real author of a collection such as the Augustana (I) does not put his own name on the book he has written, but lets it pass under the name of Aesop, because he is not literarily ambitious in what he is doing. He makes no bid for recognition as a writer. The substance of his fables is presumed to have been invented by Aesop, but the prose in which they are written can be anybody's text other than Aesop's and nobody was likely to claim it for himself. The fables of Babrius and Phaedrus were known and cited under their author's names so long as they remained in the original verse, but neither author's name survived on the prose paraphrases of his fables: Babrius became "Aesop," and Phaedrus "Romulus" translating "Aesop." Likewise in the medieval period we have many books of fables written in prose by unknown authors and a good number of fables in verse bearing the names of the authors who composed them: Avianus, Marie de France, Walter Anglicus, John of Schepey, Alexander Neckam.

The Arabic version of the so-called "Fables of Bidpai," known as Kalilah wa Dimnah, was translated into Greek by one Symeon Seth about A.D. 1080 and was widely circulated in many copies under the title Stephanites and Ichnelates; but this famous fable-book, derived from the Indian Pañcatantra, exerted thereafter, strange to say, not the slightest influence upon the traditional Greek Aesop. In the entire Greek tradition there is not, so far as I can see, a single fable that can be said to come either directly or indirectly from an Indian source; but many fables or fable-motifs which make their first appearance in Greek or Near Eastern literature are found later in the Pañcatantra and other Indian story-books, including the Buddhist Jatakas.

2. Nature and Origin of Fable

The rhetorician Theon in his Progymnasmata (ch. 3) defines fable in the Aesopic sense of the term … [as] a fictitious story picturing a truth. This is a perfect and complete definition provided we understand the range of what is included under the terms … [story] and … [truth]. The "story" may be contained in no more than a single short sentence, or it may be much longer, or include some dialogue; but it must be told in the past tense, as stories normally are, and it must purport to be a particular action or series of actions, or an utterance, that took place once upon a time through the agency of particular characters…. [Because] a fable "pictures" a truth it is, theoretically, only a metaphor in the form of a past narrative; and when it happens to be very short it is indistinguishable from what we call a proverb, and what the ancient Semitic writers called a "likeness" (Aram, mathla, Heb. mashal, Ar. mathal, likewise Armen. arak). Proverbs are of several distinct kinds, according to the structural form in which they are cast, including precepts in the imperative mood, and generalities stated explicitly in the present tense; but the kind of metaphorical proverb which is identical with Aesopic fable, in respect to both its function as metaphor and its underlying structure as narrative of an event in the past, is peculiarly at home in western Asia and Greece throughout the ancient and medieval periods, in contrast with the various forms of proverb that have prevailed in western Europe, in ancient Egypt, and in the Proverbs of Solomon; which, by the way, betray their Egyptian background or inspiration by the very fact that they include no metaphorical proverbs of the Graeco-Semitic type of which we are speaking.¹⁷

Since fable as we have defined it amounts to nothing more than an indirect and inexplicit way of saying something, the truths that it pictures metaphorically can be, and are in practice, of many different kinds. Often the idea conveyed is a general proposition relating to the nature of things or to types of human or animal character or behaviour, with or without an implied moral exhortation; but often also it is a particular truth applying only to a particular person, thing, or situation. The general proposition implicit in the fable is not always a moral or ethical principle, as is sometimes supposed; on the contrary, the majority of fables in our collections, as W. Wienert in his study of Sinntypen has pointed out, do not teach moral truths, strictly speaking, but rather matters of worldly wisdom and shrewdness (Lebensklugheiten); and even the moral lessons are formulated more often than not on that basis.¹⁸ The particular truth which a fable pictures is descriptive of some one thing and is often purely personal in its application. A fable of this kind may say in effect, for example: "You are (he is) the same kind of fool (or clever fellow) as the creature whose actions I have described," or, in the words of Nathan applying his fable about the unjust conduct of a certain man to King David (2 Samuel 12, 1-6), "Thou art the man." This is typical of many fables the primary aim of which is not instructive but satirical or in the nature of personal denunciation, and of those fables which consist mainly in a jest or a clever bit of repartee.

It will be seen from what we have been saying that fable, strictly defined according to its structure as fictional narrative in the past tense, and as metaphor, includes a very wide range of stories and brief statements which differ from each other multifariously, when we look at their narrative substance as such, at their brevity or extension, or at the many kinds of "truth" that they picture without stating it explicitly. Such is the theory of fable and the sanction for its inclusion, with all its varieties, in the wisdom books of the ancient Semitic Orient and in the collections of Greek and Latin fables. Considered from the point of view of its narrative substance, an Aesopic fable, which is a rhetorical device from the beginning, may be, at the same time, any one of the following types of story: a fairy tale (Märchen), an aetiological nature-myth, an animal story exhibiting the cleverness or the stupidity of this or that animal, or a series of amusing actions, a novella, like the story of the widow in Phaedrus (App. 15), a myth about the gods, a debate between two rivals (Streitgedicht), or an exposition of the circumstances in which a sententious or a witty remark was made. It is a mistake, often made in the past by literary historians, to look for the origin of fable in the narrative materials out of which fables are made. The history of those materials is something very different from the history of fable as a form of art, as a façon de parler. The latter has not originated until the peculiar purpose and metaphorical orientation which governs the material and shapes it, and thereby makes it fable, is in force. If we look for that rhetorical device in early literary history we shall find it and rightly call it the origin of fable; but if we look for the origin of fable in mere animal story or epic, as many have done, we shall never find it, because stories of that kind, not intended to teach anything by implication, have been told everywhere in the world from time immemorial.

Some of the materials contained in our ancient and medieval collections of fables ascribed to Aesop are not fables at all, but similes or allegorical descriptions of animal nature which fall outside the fundamental form-pattern of narrative in the past,¹⁹ and, apart from the intrusion of such obviously alien forms, many of the stories which are made to look, at least faintly, like genuine fables in our sense of the term, by a tour de force on the part of the fabulist in his epimythium, are in reality nothing more than stories told for their own sake as amusement, with little or no concern for their metaphorical meaning or their application to anything. In their choice of stories to be told, the authors and compilers of fable-books throughout the ages have been guided at many points by motives other than what constitutes a "fable" in any strict sense of the word. They are naturally more concerned with the story itself as a means of entertaining the reader than they are with the matter of literary form, of which they take a very broad and, at times, somewhat dim view. They think of fable loosely as a story told for the purpose of communicating an idea or a truth of some kind dramatically and metaphorically; and, with that in mind, they usually, though not always, add a moral, even when the story itself does not invite one and the moral so given is plainly perfunctory or farfetched. So much they concede to theory. In practice, however, they are intent on entertaining or amusing their readers as much as possible with something interesting, witty, or dramatic; and in the pursuit of this more immediate purpose, they often choose a story for its own sake as entertainment, with scant regard for its ethical or philosophic meaning, which may be anything or nothing and is not self-evident nor the real object for which the story was told.

A writer such as Phaedrus or Babrius seems to feel that his first duty is to be interesting, and that any story can be given a moral of some kind, if necessary, once the story is finished and the entertainment has been delivered. Any responsibility that he may feel for the metaphorical meaning of his story is, in the circumstances, vague and secondary. Because the fables in a collection can have no specific context to which they are subordinated as illustrations, which is the normal function of a Greek fable, but must be put forth as illustrations suitable for use only in imagined situations, accordingly the author is under no pressing obligation to choose a fable that would be effective in inculcating an idea metaphorically by its use. The idea pictured by the story that he brings in for its own interest may be obscure and hard to see in spite of the epimythium that he contrives, or his story may admit of two or more morals; whereas there could be only one moral, and that a very obvious one, to a fable used by a Menenius Agrippa in addressing a Roman crowd in a political crisis (Livy II 32, 9-12; Aes. no. 130), or by a writer such as Horace or Plutarch intent on bringing an idea forcefully to his reader's attention. Fables have a new orientation, and their aim swerves back and forth on the compass of the writer's artistic purpose, when they are brought into a collection and told one after another independently of any definite context. In that independent environment fables tend strongly to be told for their own interest as narratives, whether witty, clever, amusing, dramatic, satirical, sensational, sentimental, or wise. The story itself becomes the main thing, instead of the idea that it is supposed to convey implicitly.

Aetiological myths, of which many are included among the so-called fables of Aesop, are, as a type, ill suited for picturing a truth metaphorically, because they lead up to an explicit statement of how and why this or that reality came into being. Thus the long fable about the "Eagle and the Beetle" (Aes. 3 …), which Aesop is said to have told to the Delphians to persuade them not to violate the little shrine of the Muses at which he had taken refuge as a suppliant, was a nature-myth made up to explain aetiologically why eagles lay their eggs at a season of the year when no beetles are around; and it is only from one of several episodes in this myth, not from the sum of it, that the moral is drawn by Aesop in the Life (ch. 139), and a different moral by the author of the Augustana collection (= Aes. 3). The fable about the lark burying her father in her head, because there was not yet any earth, is ascribed to Aesop's telling by Aristophanes in the Birds (vss. 471 ff. = Aes. 477 = Halm 211), but it has no metaphorical meaning. For the speaker in Aristophanes it proved by explicit statement that the lark was older than the earth, but originally it was told to explain why the lark has a large crest on its head.

Another form of story that is alien by nature to Aesopic fable as we have defined it, although it is interspersed with Aesopic fables in literary texts from Sumerian times onward in the East, as well as in the Greek and Latin fable-books, is the literary debate between two rivals, each of whom claims to be superior in some way, or more useful to man, than the other, praising himself and belittling his opponent. The rivals may be seasons, trees, plants, animals, members of the body, material substances or implements, or human institutions. A familiar example is the contest between the laurel tree and the olive in the Iambics of Callimachus (Aes. 439), which the author, a studious antiquarian, attributes to the ancient Lydians. This is over 90 lines long. Other, much shorter, specimens of the same type which we find in the fable-collections are "Stomach and Feet" (Aes. 130), "Winter and Spring" (271), "Peacock and Crane" (294 = Babrius 65), "Fir Tree and Bramble" (304 = Babrius 64), "Ant and Fly" (521 = Phaedrus IV 25), "Butterfly and Wasp" (556 = Ph. App. 31), etc.²⁰

Like attracts like, even when the likeness that brings things together is inherent in only one part or one aspect of a thing, rather than in the whole of it. Around a nucleus of proverbs and fables that picture a truth metaphorically, with the gnomic idea clearly outstanding, a large number of only partially and externally similar narratives, both short and long, have accumulated, by a kind of snowballing process, in the Greek and Latin fable-books, with the result that many fables, loosely so called, make their appeal to the reader primarily as something clever or amusing in itself, while the gnomic ideas or morals that they convey, if any, are not easily discernible.

Similar in many particulars is the heterogeneity of content which we find in the wisdom books of the ancient Semitic Orient, which books must claim our attention henceforth as the historical background of Greek fable. These Oriental wisdom-books, written in cuneiform script on clay tablets, belong in a continuous literary tradition that extends from Old Babylonian times down to the fall of the Assyrian empire, from around 1800 B.C., or earlier, to the end of the seventh century B.C., in Sumerian texts at first, then later in Akkadian, Assyrian, and Aramaic texts, including the Book of Achiqar. Most of the Akkadian wisdom-texts now known were published and interpreted by Orientalists before the year 1930; but since then, and indeed within the last decade, great advances have been made in the publication and interpretation of Sumerian literary texts of many kinds, and among these the proverbs and fables recently published and explained by Dr. Edmund Gordon have the closest bearing on the early history of Aesopic fable in the Near East. In a long and very informative review-article written in I960,²¹ Dr. Gordon tells us that he "has now identified some 106 Sumerian fables and parables of 'Aesopic' type," so called with explicit reference to the definition of the type as we have given it…. "These include," he continues, "fifty-six fables containing quoted speeches (or even dialogues), twenty-five short fables without speeches, and twenty-five parables."²² The clay tablets on which these fables and proverbs are written come mainly from Nippur and Ur, are dated by the Sumerologists to the eighteenth century B.C. or earlier, and are divided into upwards of twenty different collections of proverbs, which are designated by numbers, such as Collection One, Collection Two, etc.

The examples quoted below from the translations published by Kramer, Gordon, Ebeling, and others will serve to illustrate the nature of fable in the old Mesopotamian literature, and its fundamental similarity to Greek fable in the matter of form and sometimes even in substance. The following abbreviations are used to indicate the sources of our quotations:

Kramer = S. N. Kramer's From the Tablets of Sumer; Twenty-five Firsts in Man's Recorded History, Indian Hills, Colorado (The Falcon's Press), 1956.

Gordon (1958) = "Sumerian Animal Proverbs and Fables: Collection Five," by Edmund I. Gordon in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, XII (1958), pp. 1-75.

Gordon (1959) = Gordon's Sumerian Proverbs, Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, published by the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 1959. Contents described by Perry in Am. Jour. Arch., 66, 205-207.

Ebeling = E. Ebeling, Die babylonische Fabel und ihre Bedeutung für die Literaturgeschichte (= Mitteilungen der altorientalischen Gesellschaft, Bd. II, Heft 2), Leipzig, 1927.

Achiqar = the Assyrian Book of Achiqar in the fragmentary Aramaic version edited and translated by A. Cowley in Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford, 1923, pp. 222-226.

Kramer p. 157: "The smith's dog could not overturn the anvil; he therefore overturned the water pot instead." Ibid., p. 158: "Upon my escaping from the wild ox, the wild cow confronted me." Gordon (1959), p. 274: "The house built by the upright man was destroyed by the treacherous man." This metaphorical type of proverb, which is technically a fable in spite of its brevity, is common in Greek proverb lore, as was pointed out above…. Consider the following Greek specimens in comparison with the Sumerian in regard to form: Diogenian VIII 7, "The mountain laboured and gave birth to a mouse." We recognize this as a fable when Phaedrus (IV, 24) adds a few circumstantial details: "emitting tremendous groans, and the lands about were filled with the greatest expectations." Zenobius, V, 42, "Someone told a story to an ass and he wiggled his ears." Iliad, 17. 32: "The fool learned after the event." … Theognis, 329 f.: "The prudent man was slow-moving, but he overtook the swiftfooted man in the pursuit, Kyrnos, by the righteous decree of the immortal gods." This is a fable as truly as the story of "the Hare and the Tortoise" (Aes. 226), which has the same meaning metaphorically. No. 105 in the medieval Greek proverbs ascribed to Aesop (Aes. pp. 261-291): "Even the sheep bit the man who was helpless"; cf. Phaedrus 121, where an ass attacks a disabled lion.

Gordon (1959), p. 222: "The fox having urinated into the sea said, 'The whole of the sea is my urine.'" Compare Francis Bacon's summary of Abstemius 16 (= Aes. 724) in his essay Of Vainglory: "The fly sate upon the axle-tree of the chariot-wheel and said, 'What a dust do I raise!'" The identity of proverb and fable in such cases was recognized by Quintilian, who speaks of it as follows (Inst. Or. V 11, 21): πα̜̑ροιμία̜̑ς illud genus, quod est velut fabella brevior et per allegoriam accipitur: "Non nostrum, inquit, onus; bos clitellas."

Gordon (1958) p. 69, no. 5. 116: "The dog went to a banquet, but when he looked at the bones (which they had for him to eat) there, he went away, saying, 'Where I am going now, I shall get more to eat than this.'" The point seems to be that it is foolish to let go the profit that one has in his hand in order to pursue a larger one that is not yet within reach; as in the fable of the dog with a piece of meat in his mouth going after his shadow in the water (Babrius 79, Phaedrus I 4).

Gordon (1958), p. 46, no. 55: "The lion had caught a helpless she-goat. 'Let me go, [said the she-goat and] I will give to you a ewe, a companion of mine.' … 'If I am to let you go [said the lion, first] tell me your name.' The she-goat [then] answered the lion: 'Do you not know my name? My name is You-are-Clever.' When the lion came to the sheep-fold he roared out: '[Now] that I have come to the sheep-fold, I am releasing you.' She [then] answered him from the other side [of the fence?]: '[So] you have released me! Were you [so] clever? Instead of (?) [giving you] the sheep [which I promised you] even I shall not stay [here].'" As Gordon observes, the she-goat seems to have out-witted the lion by flattering him, and the lion to have learned the familiar lesson that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

Ebeling, p. 42: "A mouse (?), fleeing from a … entered a snake's hole and said, 'The snake-charmer sent me here. Greetings!'"

Ebeling p. 50: "When the gnat had settled on the elephant he said, 'Brother, have I been a burden to you? [If so], I will go away, over there by the pond.' Said the elephant to the gnat, I was not aware that you had settled on me. What are you anyhow? And if you have left, well, I didn't notice your departure either.'" This is exactly the same fable as Babrius 84…, except for the elephant in place of a bull. Note the reference to a pond in the Babylonian fable, corresponding to the river in Babrius. After quoting the Babrian fable Ebeling remarks that "here for the first time we can make out for sure that not only the substance of a Greek fable corresponds with that of a Babylonian fable but even the wording down to matters of detail. In this case one may almost speak of the translation of a Babylonian original into Greek or at least of a paraphrase." The fable of "the Gnat and the Bull" in the Augustana collection (Aes. 137) omits note-worthy details which Babrius has in common with the Babylonian version. The latter, according to its colophon, was "copied" in 716 B.C. "from an older original."—Gordon (1958), p. 1.

Achiqar (Cowley), p. 224: "The leopard met the goat and she was cold. The leopard answered and said to the goat, 'Come, and I will cover thee with my hide.' The goat answered and said to the leopard, 'What hast thou to do with me, my lord? Take not my skin from me.' For he does not salute the kid except to suck its blood."

Ibid., 226: " … one to the wild ass, 'Let me ride upon thee and I will feed thee' … '[keep for thyself] thy feeding and thy saddle, but I will not see thy riding.'" Here we have essentially the same story with the same moral as in the fable of "the [wild] horse and the stag," which Stesichorus, according to Aristotle in his Rhetoric (II 20 = Aes. 269a), told to the people of Himera.

Ibid., 225: "The bramble sent to the pomegranate saying, 'Bramble to Pomegranate, what is the good of thy many thorns to him who touches thy fruit?' … the pomegranate answered and said to the bramble, 'Thou art all thorns to him who touches thee.'"

Old Testament, 2 Kings 14. 9: "And Jehoash the king of Israel sent to Amaziah king of Judah, saying, 'The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife'; and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down the thistle.'"

Aesopic fable in the sense in which we have defined it, as a rhetorical form of expression, was one of the cultural inheritances which the Greeks were bound to receive almost subconsciously from their western Asiatic neighbours; who, under the influence of the Sumerian-Babylonian-Assyrian literary tradition, had been morally minded and thoroughly literate for many centuries before the Greeks themselves had begun to write anything or to think philosophically. The narrative substance which came to the Greeks from the Babylonians and Assyrians is less significant for the history of fable than the traditional form-pattern which we have described; but it is noteworthy that form and substance have been transmitted together in some cases, as in the fable of the gnat and elephant quoted above, and that, regardless of form, the ideas implicit in the proverb-lore of the Babylonians ofter recur in Greek fables and proverbs. The story of the eagle and the vixen (= Aes. 1), for example, which was used in a fable by Archilochus, seems to be descended from the old Babylonian legend of Etana concerning the eagle and the serpent….²³

Notes

¹Works and Days, 202-212, "Hawk and Nightingale" (Aes. 4a).

² In Fragment 139 from the Myrmidons, "Eagle shot by an Arrow winged with his own Feathers" (Aes. 276a);Agamemnon 716-736, Man who reared a Lion's Cub in his house, told to illustrate what Helen's coming to Troy meant for the Trojans.

³Ajax, 1142-1158, two short fables used by Menelaus and Teucer respectively in their altercation with each other.

⁴Birds, 474 ff. (Aes. 447), "Lark burying her Father"Wasps, 1401 ff., "Aesop and the Bitch" (Aes. 423); ib., 1427 ff., "The Sybarite Man" (Aes. 428); ib., 1435 ff., "Sybarite Woman" (Aes. 438).

⁵History, I, 141, "Fisherman pipes to the Fish" (Aes. lia).

⁶Mem. II, 7. 11, "Sheep and Dog" (Aes. 356a).

⁷Alcib. 123a, "One-way Traffic into the Lion's Cave"Aes. 142, Babrius 103); Phaedo 60b, "Pleasure and Pain" (Aes. 445).

⁸Rhetoric, II, 20, "Horse and Stag" (Aes. 269a), said to have been told by Stesichorus; ib. "Fox and Hedgehog" (Aes. 427); Meteor. II 3, "Aesop at the Shipyards" (cf. Aes. 8); Polit. III 13.2, "Lions and Hares"(Aes. 450).

⁹ See pages 288-290 and 304 ff. of my article "Demetrius of Phalerum and the Aesopic Fables" in Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPhA), 93 (1962), 287-346.

¹⁰ Cf. p. lxxxiv below in the section on Phaedrus.

¹¹ C. H. Roberts, Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 1938, III, 119 ff.

¹² This is explained more fully in my article "The Origin of the Epimythium" in TAPhA, 71 (1940), 408-412, and in the article "Fable" in Studium Generale, XII (1959), 35.

¹³ Concerning the dating of the original Augustana collection, see TAPhA, 93 (1962), 288 f., note 8, where the matter is discussed in detail.

¹⁴ This recension, based primarily on I, has three interpolated episodes in the Life and many odd readings in both Life and Fables which cannot be Byzantine in origin, but must have been taken from an ancient and variant version of both texts. Because the manuscripts containing this Rec. II—what I have called SBP in the Life—are all later than the twelfth century, I had supposed that the interpolations that it contains were taken from an ancient text in the twelfth century; cf. Aesopica, I, pp. 22 and 308, note 30. Recently, however, a fragment of the Life in this recension has come to my attention written in an eleventh-century hand on a parchment leaf bound in a manuscript at Saloniki; and from this I infer that Rec. II with all its interpolated readings was made in late antiquity, in the fourth or fifth century.

¹⁵ Aemilius Chambry, Aesopi Fabulae, Paris (Les Belles Lettres), 1925, 2 vols.

¹⁶ A. Hausrath, Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum, Vol. I, fasc. 1, Leipzig (Teubner), 1940; fasc. 2, ib. 1956; fasc. 2, second edition by H. Hunger, ib. 1958.

¹⁷ Krumbacher (Byz. Lit² 906 f.) states the matter truly, as follows: "Orientalisch ist … die Form: 'Einem schenkte man einen Esel und er schaute ihm auf die Zähne', occidentalisch die Form: 'Einem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul.' Durch diese Eigentümlichkeit scheidet sich das byzantinischneugriechisch-südslavisch-orientalische Sprichwort prinzipiell von den abendländischen." This form of proverb is common in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Byzantine period. See the examples cited below on p. xxxi. Proverbs of this kind are common in Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian literature, but I have looked in vain for examples in Erman's Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (English translation by Blackman, London, 1927), where, amid the numerous ethical and didactic writings of both the older period and that of the New Kingdom, one might expect to find them. For the literal dependence of a series of Solomon's proverbs in the Old Testament upon the Egyptian book of Amen-em-ope, see Erman in Oriental. Literaturzeitung, 1924, no. 5, and Gressmann in Ztschr. für alttestam. Wiss., 42 (1924), 272 ff.

¹⁸ W. Wienert, Die Typen der griechisch-römischen Fabel, Helsinki, 1925, p. 86.

¹⁹ This is true, for example, of the statement about the way of the beaver in Aes. 118 (Augustana) and in Phaedrus App. 30; about the ape's twin offspring in Babrius 35; the description of the allegorical statue of Time in Phaedrus, V, 8; and how bears fish for crabs, ib., App. 22.

²⁰ S. N. Kramer in his book From the Tablets of Sumer … p. 161 informs us that seven such "literary debates," all relatively long, are preserved wholly or in part on Sumerian tablets. Much shorter specimens of the same type also occur in the Sumerian and Neo-Babylonian proverb collections, and in;Achiqar for example, the contest between the el ephant and the wren in No. 1 of Gordon's "Collection Five"…, which consists of one short speech by each of the characters, and that between the bramble and the pomegranate in Achiqar. The widespread use of this form in the medieval and early modern literature of Europe, and in Arabic and Hebrew texts, is described by M. Steinschneider in a monograph entitled "Rangstreit-Literature" in Sitzungsb. d. Wien. Akad., 155 (1908). Many of these disputes are between plants or trees, and this type seems to be favoured more in the Orient, from the earliest times onward, than in the West; cf. A. Wiinsche, Die Pflanzenfabel in die Weltliterature, Leipzig, 1905. The Mesopotamian origin of this literary form, in relation to its Greek derivatives, was first pointed out by Hermann Diels in an article entitled "Altorientalische Fabeln in griechischen Gewande" in Internationale Wochenschrift für Kunst und Wissenschaft, IV (1910), 993-1002.

²¹ "A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad" in Bibliotheca Orientalis, XVII, 122-152, Leiden, 1960. This study deals with the subject matter of J. J. A. van Dijk's important book entitled La sagesse suméroaccadienne; Recherches sur les genres littéraires des textes sapientiaux avec Choix de textes, Leiden, 1953. W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Wisdom Literature, which was still in press when Gordon wrote, is described as "a new and complete edition of all the Akkadian wisdom compositions, as well as the Sumero-Akkadian bilingual material." I have not yet seen this book, but it is bound to be one of great value for students of the history of fable in the ancient Near East.

²² By parable Gordon understands what I should clas-sify as a subdivision of fable, namely the kind in which "the action is possible, in contrast with fables in which the action is unreal."

²³ See R. J. Williams "The Literary History of a Mesopotamian Fable," in Phoenix 10 (Toronto, 1956), 70-77.