SOURCE: "Un de 'ces grands hommes'—Phaedrus, a Precursor of La Fontaine," in Papers on French Seventeenth Century, Vol. XXIII, No. 44, 1996, pp. 115-22.

[In the following excerpt, Becher analyzes Phaedrus's influence on de La Fontaine, a seventeenth-century French fabulist who particularly admired Phaedrus's ironic criticisms of social injustice.]

La Fontaine numbers Phaedrus among the great men whose magnificent simplicity he so much admires. In the preface to the 1668 Fables he acknowledges that it is nearly impossible for him, writing in the French language, to imitate the elegance and extreme economy of Phaedrus' style, although he hopes to be able to compensate somewhat by giving his own fables a certain lightness and charm. Furthermore, it is not Phaedrus' style alone that La Fontaine admires, but also his dramatic and philosophical spirit. He claims that if the fables of Phaedrus are read with care, one should be able to discern in them the true genius of the dramatist Terence, and from their excellence, what might have been the quality of the fable Socrates composed before his death.

Today all is utterly changed. Most people, though they may have heard of Aesop and La Fontaine, would have difficulty in distinguishing Phaedrus' name from that of a famous dialogue by Plato. The only modern edition available for the English reader is in the Loeb series, edited by Ben Perry in 1975. Although Phaedrus was the first fabulist to render Aesopian Fables in verse, and has considerable claims to be considered the first proletarian satiric poet, modern British critical opinion is generally dismissive, finding his so-called morals inappropriate, his apparent acceptance of the "status quo" unacceptable, and his supposed didacticism tedious (see The Cambridge History of Classical Literature and The Oxford Classical Dictionary).

In my opinion, these attitudes are largely founded on misunderstandings that originate in the political and philosophical prejudices of the late eighteenth century: the purpose of this paper is to re-evaluate Phaedrus as a precursor to La Fontaine by questioning these attitudes and by offering a fresh approach to his fables.

The decline of Phaedrus' reputation from the late 18th century onwards, and of the fable form in general, may be partly explained by the confusion that has existed about the relationship between Aesop, Aesopian fables and the fables of Phaedrus, an enfranchised slave of the first century A.D. Even today belief still exists in the integrity of Aesop as an author, although it is extremely doubtful whether Aesop, a slave supposedly living in the fifth century B.C., wrote anything down, or had anything published, because he was not a poet….

All we know of Phaedrus, his life and literary ambitions, apart from an ambiguous remark by Martial, have to be deduced from the subtext of his fables, and the autobiographical Prologues and Epilogues which are an original and distinctive feature of this fabulist. He tells us that he was censored and punished by Sejanus, the powerful favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, for inventing more than Aesop ever knew. However, he admits that he did use the name of Aesop to provide protective colouring and authoritative status for his own inventions. That he is able to tell us about Sejanus, probably means that he survived into the reign of Calligula, maybe into that of Claudius. There are five books, clearly written at different stages of Phaedrus' life: the first contains thirty-one fables, principally versions of familiar Aesopian fables; the second only eight, and so is probably the book that was censored. The last three books contain an increasing number of personal references, and original fables, that is, those that have no parallel in other collections of ancient fables: some of these refer to actual historical events, for instance The Buffoon and the Country Fellow (Book 5, fable 5), and Prince the Piper (fable 7), both of which describe happenings on the Roman stage.

The obscure origins of the Aesopian fable probably account for their attraction and influence as a literary form because every fabulist felt free, as did Phaedrus, and later La Fontaine, to use the name of Aesop as a mask of authority, so gaining literary status and protection for their own inventions. However, the lack of an antecedent classical form was to perturb later critics like Richard Bentley and Dr. Johnson (see his Life of John Gay).

Phaedrus' source is thought to be the Aesopica of Demetrius of Phaleron, supposedly one of the books destroyed when the great library in Alexandria, which Demetrius built up, was destroyed…. Sometime in the first century A.D. the manuscript of Phaedrus' Fables, known as Codex P, also disappeared until discovered by Pithou in 1596. Pithou's discovery caused great excitement as the manuscript established a canonical text for a newly discovered ancient author…. Many of the great European scholars and publisher/printers of the seventeenth century were eager to produce their own editions; the learned notes accumulated like the house that Jack built until the volumes were almost too unwieldy to use. Rigault's edition of 1599 was taken as the model by many, including the Master of Sacy who first translated Phaedrus' Fables into French prose in 1646. In his Address to the Reader he praises Monsieur Rigault who, he says, has added great lustre to Phaedrus' name by his learned notes on ancient manuscripts; but for his own part he has attempted to make his edition as useful as possible. He admits that in addition to the titles of the fables, for Codex P did not have titles for the fables, he has added additional titles which he claims give the soul and spirit of the tale; furthermore on occasions he has put in a moral that differs from that of Phaedrus. This kind of silent editing, as frequently happens in translations, is difficult to discern, but can be significant: the Master of Sacy's edition was greatly praised, went into many editions and so exercised an influence over many successive generations. Danet's beautiful 1675 Dolphin edition of Phaedrus, with its frontispiece by Chauveau, is additional evidence of the contemporary prestige of this author.

It is important to realise however that Phaedrus' work has had a greater and more widespread influence than might be thought when first studying the reception of his text. Through the workings of an irony Phaedrus himself would have appreciated, his fables survived throughout the Middle Ages, in a prose solution so to speak, in a collection of Fables known as Romulus; Romulus is the principal source for the medieval Aesop. (Phaedrus is the author of the phrase "to add insult to injury" Book 5, Fable 3.) As Terence Allott has pointed out (in a personal communication), the source of fable collections may be determined by the order of the fables: Phaedrus begins with The Wolf and the Lamb, Romulus with The Cock and the Pearl. For this reason, among others, I consider that Corrozet's Fables 1542 and Haudent's Apologues descend from Phaedrus via Romulus.

Isaac Neveletus, Pithou's nephew, made the outstanding contribution to Aesopian mythology with his compendium of 1610 for he brought together in one volume, for the first time, fables from Phaedrus, Romulus, and from two Greek sources: the Augustana manuscript and the fables of Babrius which descended to the Renaissance Aesop via the Latin verse versions of Avienus and Perotti. From Neveletus' collection I consider the verse fabulists of original material, like Ogilby and La Fontaine, descend.

Since the eighteenth century, as with other fable collections, appreciation of the poetic art of Phaedrus has been adversely affected by anthologising. Only when each book is read "in toto" as the author intended, can Phaedrus' art of contextualisation, and the satirical, frequently subversive, message of his subtext be comprehended. However, in order to confine my argument within the limits of this paper, I have had to restrict my description and analysis of his Fables to a general appraisal of Book One and a particular analysis of three fables: Book 1 Fable 1, The Wolf and the Lamb, Fable 2, The Frogs desiring King and Fable 13 The Fox and the Crow. For the same reason comparisons with the art of La Fontaine will, on the whole, have to be implicit rather than explicit.

Phaedrus' general themes are the misuse of power, the oppression of the humble and the weak, and the abuse of justice. The tenor of his advice is that one should never endeavour to distinguish oneself through vanity, foolish ambition and greed; that one should recognise self-interest as a chief motivating force in life and be vigilant to protect one's own interests. As with La Fontaine, the working out of themes may be discerned from the choice of familiar fables for the first book and their order. I think Phaedrus' strategy is to manipulate the reader's response by arousing expectations of some conventional sequentiality and then defeat them: for instance many Aesopian collections follow an alphabetical order which at first Phaedrus may appear to be following. The first line of the first two fables begins with A but there is no overtly obvious order after this. The message comes through in the juxtaposition of the concluding comment, or epimythium. Phaedrus says that the first fable was written for those people who invent charges in order to oppress the innocent, and he makes Aesop conclude the second fable by telling the people of Athens that they must bear with the oppression they have, lest worse befall them. There are other subtle linkings of theme or reference, sometimes verbal as in fables 27 to 30 where the word humilis (poor, insignificant in birth or station) is strategically placed in each of the four fables. While it is true that Phaedrus generally advises acceptance of the "status quo" as a means of survival in an injurious world, this does not mean he approves, as his method of contextualisation within a book, and within the books insinuates. In Phaedrus' fables the lion usually behaves as he does in the fable of The Cow, the Goat, the Sheep and the Lion (Book 1 Fable 5—La Fontaine Book I Fable 6). He takes "the lion's share" of this motley hunting party—that is, all of it, not just the largest part as the phrase is sometimes taken to mean. But, for the first fable in Book 2, Phaedrus invents a fable of The Bullock, the Lion and the Robber. The lion generously allows an innocent man a share of his spoil because, unlike the robber, he is modest and does not take what does not belong to him. Phaedrus comments ironically that the lion here is setting a most praiseworthy example, but that unfortunately this is not what happens in reality, where the greedy grow rich and the modest poor.

Other aspects of Phaedrus' art which I hope to illustrate from the three chosen fables are: from The Wolf and the Lamb (La Fontaine Book I Fable 10)—the shaping spirit of Phaedrus' dramatic imagination; from The Frogs asked for a King (La Fontaine Book III Fable 4)—his use of Aesop as a framing device; and from The Fox and the Crow (La Fontaine Book I Fable 2)—the deliberate ambiguity of the so-called moral.

In the well-known fable of The Wolf and the Lamb appreciation of the "mise en scene" is essential for an understanding of the fable. Phaedrus uses innovative metrical variations of the iambic line, alliteration and antithesis in order to clarify the relative position of the animals and so emphasise the complete injustice of the wolf's accusation.

"Superior stabat lupus" [High upstream stood the wolf].
"Longeque inferior agnus" [Far away downstream the lamb].

Phaedrus also uses these devices to enliven the ensuing dialogue which La Fontaine follows fairly closely in his version of the fable.

La Fontaine recounts just the tale itself in the fable of "Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi" but Phaedrus tells the tale as if told by Aesop to the people of Athens when they were complaining about their loss of liberty under the tyrant Peisistratus. Perry makes it clear (p. xcv) that this is an outright invention of Phaedrus as no other ancient version of this fable has this framing device, nor is there any possibility that Aesop could have been in Athens in the time of Peisistratus, although this seems to have been accepted by many authors of the life of Aesop, notably by Mezeriac, whose Life (1632) was the most popular and acceptable until the end of the eighteenth century, in Britain as in France. Robert Dodsley acknowledges his debt to Mezeriac's Life for his own highly successful, influential Select Fables (1761) praising him as a "most ingenious and learned Frenchman". However, in the 1760s the tide of opinion was beginning to turn against the fable form: Robert Dodsley's brother James asked a friend, also "learned and ingenious", to supply a new life of Aesop for the posthumous third edition of Select Fables. This anonymous friend objected that Mezeriac, "like a true Frenchman" seemed to be pleased with Aesop for his compliance with the humour of princes, and comments disapprovingly that "Aesop on this occasion, instead of inventing a fable to show Peisistratus how glorious it would be for him to restore liberty to the Athenians, composed one to persuade that people to submit quietly to the power he had usurped over them". Perhaps Aesop would have advocated this policy had he been around in the dawn of democracy, but not Phaedrus, who lived when the reign of the Emperor Gods was just beginning, and most probably invented this framing device to escape persecution.

Failure to distinguish a distinctive canon of Phaedrus' fables, and a growing dislike of the political content of the Aesopian fable, either through ignorance or through fear of the power of the fable form for propagation of political propaganda, partially account for some of the growing reaction against the fable form towards the end of the eighteenth century. Also, the ideas of Rousseau on education were gradually gaining ground after the publication of Emile in 1762, and his critique of La Fontaine's "Le Corbeau et le Renard" became particularly influential. Rousseau and other critics complained of the application of the moral and sought to impose one where none was intended. Similarly with glosses on Phaedrus's fable of The Fox and the Crow; commentators sought to find what they wished to find, and found a moral suitably applicable to this fable peculiarly elusive. Phaedrus places this fable after the Stag at the Spring, an outspoken warning against flattery, and before the tale of The Cobbler turned Physician which emphasises the need to use common-sense, and be continually on guard against mountebanks.

The epimythium to Phaedrus' fable, found in Codex P, "Haec re probatur quantum ingenium valet;/virtute semper praevalet sapientia" ["This affair shows how much ingenuity can accomplish; knowledge always prevails over virtue"] has always caused great difficulty. Discerning critics find it inapplicable to the sense of the fable and inconsistent with Phaedrus' art as Phaedrus has already placed a moral in the promythium: "Qui se laudari gaudet verbis subdolis/fere dat poenas turpi paenitentia" ["He who delights in insinuating flattery pays the price in disgrace and repentance"]. Some critics, like Richard Bentley, think the epimythium to be a medieval gloss; others, like Perry, to be the epimythium of a lost fable. The Master of Sacy attempts an additional moralising gloss. Less discerning critics find this just one more example of Phaedrus' "inappropriate" moralising; I find it but one example among many where Phaedrus' meaning, and so an appreciation of his art, has been distorted, intentionally or unintentionally, for a variety of motives.

Phaedrus probably ended his fable with the line 'Turn demum ingemuit corvi deceptus stupor" ["Too late the crow regretted having been deceived by his own folly"], so emphasising, as does La Fontaine, the cost of listening to flattery. Unlike Chanticleer, who in Chaucer's tale has some reason to believe the fox's flattery of his plumage and voice, the crow deserves all he gets for being so ridiculously vain and gullible. His life isn't threatened; all he loses is a piece of cheese which, in Phaedrus' version, he had stolen anyway. Surely the lesson learned is well worth the cheese?

La Fontaine's famous version of this fable, in my opinion, illustrates vividly his appreciation of Phaedrus' use of strategic irony. Furthermore I suggest that La Fontaine's response to Phaedrus' fables went beyond admiration for Phaedrus' economy and elegance of language; that La Fontaine truly understood Phaedrus' satirical strategies, his innovative use of verse form for dramatic purposes, his use of contextualisation and juxtaposition and his use of Aesop's name to conceal a subtle, potentially subversive subtext. An extended and detailed comparison of the fable collections of Phaedrus and La Fontaine could well enlarge our knowledge and appreciation of both of these "grands hommes".

Ad huc supersunt multa quae possim loqui,
et copiosa abundat rerum varietas.
(Phaedrus, Poeta ad Particulonem. Perry, p. 346)

["There remain many matters of which I might speak, and an abundant variety of subjects."]