SOURCE: An introduction to Babrius and Phaedrus, Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. lxxiii-xlvii.

[In the essay that follows, Perry surveys the autobiographical information gleaned from Phaedrus's poetry, as well as major stylistic issues of the fables, particularly the innovations Phaedrus contributed to the Aesopic tradition.]

According to the testimony of the principal manuscript P, in which his fables have come down to us, Phaedrus was a freedman of the emperor Augustus.¹ Everything else that can be known or surmised about his life and personality must be inferred from what he himself, a very self-conscious author, tells us in his own book, whether explicitly, or in passages of doubtful meaning, or by innuendo. The detailed accounts of his life drawn up by equally painstaking scholars on the basis of these heterogeneous data vary widely from each other, according to how much is deduced from ideas implicit in the fables themselves, as applied to the author personally, and how the biographer chooses to interpret statements of dubious meaning which admit of more than one interpretation in relation to the known facts of history, or the silence of Seneca and Quintilian about Phaedrus when they speak of fables in verse.

In the prologue to Book III Phaedrus states that he was born on the Pierian Mountain, the birthplace of the Muses (vss. 17-19), that he reckons the Thracian musicians Linus and Orpheus among his fellow-countrymen (56 f.), that he has devoted himself wholeheartedly to poetry, ambitious to carry on in Latin the literary tradition of Greece which he has inherited, but that, in spite of this high qualification, it is only with distaste, if at all, that he is admitted (at Rome) into the company of poets (23). It is evident from his writing that he was well trained in the Latin language and literature; but where he received his schooling, whether at Rome or somewhere in the Roman province of Macedonia, before coming to Italy, is uncertain. He remembers a criminal case tried by the Centumviral Court at Rome in which the emperor Augustus interceded at the request of the judges (III, 10); he gives us what appears to be an eyewitness's account (V, 7) of a scene in the Roman theatre which took place in A.D. 9, when the well-known flutist, Cassius Princeps, was driven off the stage;² and he speaks, in such a way as to suggest that he himself was present on the occasion, of an incident that took place on Cape Misenum in the Bay of Naples when the emperor Tiberius was stopping at his villa there (II, 5).

In the prologue to Book III (41-44) he tells us that Sejanus, who exercised great power under the principate of Tiberius but was overthrown and put to death in the year A.D. 31, had prosecuted him on the ground of what he had, allegedly, insinuated about himself or others in certain of his fables, and that an unfavourable verdict of some kind had been pronounced condemning his fables. The exact nature of this legal verdict, if it was legal, and the penalty that went with it, is not stated and can only be conjectured. Perhaps the first two books of the poet's fables were confiscated, or their publication forbidden. In addition to this handicap put upon his literary success by influential enemies (a noxiorum … insolentiis, III epil. 31), Phaedrus repeatedly complains of jealous and hostile critics who denounced his fables as poor stuff unworthy to be rated as poetry, as in IV, 7 ff.: "You who turn up your nose at my writings and censure them, you (Mr. Critic) who disdain to read jests of this kind, have the patience to put up with my book a little longer, while I try to appease the stern look on your face by bringing Aesop on the stage for the first time in tragic buskins."³ The unfavourable reception thus given to his work at the start may partly account for the fact that Phaedrus as a fabulist seems to have been ignored by Roman critics and writers up to the time of Avianus (ca. A.D. 400), with the doubtful exception of Martial, who calls him improbus.⁴

Phaedrus addresses the third book of his fables to a certain Eutychus, who is otherwise unknown to us. Some would identify this Eutychus with the charioteer so named who is mentioned by Suetonius (Cal. 55) as a favourite of the emperor Caligula (A.D. 37-41); but that seems improbable, in the light of the man's daily occupation as described by Phaedrus, that, apparently, of an administrative official of some kind (possibly the manager of Tiberius' estate on Cape Misenum),⁵ whose time is taken up with attention to a multitude of business affairs. In the prologue of this book Phaedrus expresses the hope that Eutychus, who seems to be unacquainted with the Muses and needs to be told about them, will find the time and patience to read his fables and like them; and in the epilogue, while reasserting his innocence of the charges brought against him by his enemies (vss. 23, 30), he begs Eutychus, as his patron and superior, to vindicate him in the eyes of the public without delay, by making a judgment of some kind in favor of himself and his fables.⁶ This, we infer, is the reward for his brevity which Eutychus had promised him,⁷ and only Eutychus is in a position to help him in this way; previously the matter rested with others, and hereafter, by a similar turn of fortune, still others will have it within their power.⁸ Eutychus is nowhere mentioned beyond Book III, and it does not appear from anything said later whether or not he took the action that Phaedrus had so anxiously urged him to take.

The successor to Eutychus in the role of patron to Phaedrus was a man named Particulo, otherwise unknown to us, to whom the fourth book of fables is addressed. In the prologue of this book Phaedrus speaks of Particulo with warm appreciation as a man of cultivated taste and understanding who likes his fables and takes pains to have copies of them made and circulated, in the belief that they are worthy to live with posterity. "It does me honour," he says, "that you and men like you cherish my fables. I can do without the applause of illiterate men."⁹ The fifth and last book, consisting of only ten fables in its present form, was written perfunctorily and without enthusiasm at a time when the author confesses (V, 10) that he is worn out by old age and too tired to carry on efficiently any longer. This confession is made to a man familiarly addressed as Philetus, who is nowhere else mentioned, in the epimythium of the last fable (V, 10), concerning the old hunting dog whose strength failed him despite his will to hang on to the prey: "Why I have written this, Philetus, you can very well understand." Philetus seems to have been an official sponsor of some kind to whom Phaedrus felt obliged to address the last book of his fables. Perhaps it was written at the request of that sponsor ex officio, who was a man apparently well known to the author but one for whom he had no high regard and from whom he had nothing to expect.

How long the literary activity of Phaedrus continued, when the last three books of his fables were published, and when he died, we have no means of determining. On the basis of negative and unreliable data various conclu sions have been drawn by scholars, according to which two or more books of the fables were first published in the reign of Claudius or that of Nero, or even under Vespasian; but none of these conclusions rests on a secure foundation.¹⁰ The only facts from which dates in the life of Phaedrus can be safely inferred—and these dates will be only approximate, within a range often to twenty years—are, apart from references to events in the reign of Augustus, those which he himself gives us in Book III, namely that he was in advanced middle age (languentis aevi, epil. vs. 15) at that time, hence at least fifty years old, and that he had been prosecuted by Sejanus and was still suffering the effect of it. From this we infer that the prosecution was a recent event; and from the fact that he speaks derogatorily of Sejanus in a book that he expected to publish, we must infer that he is no longer in the power of Sejanus and that he is writing after, but not long after, the latter's death in A.D. 31.¹¹

In the light of these facts one may reasonably conclude, in summary, that Phaedrus wrote the third book of his fables at some time between the years A.D. 31 and 37 in the reign of Tiberius; that he died as an old man some fifteen or twenty years later during the reign of Claudius (41-54), or during that of Nero (54-68); and that he was born shortly after or before the year 18 B.C. He must have gone to school in Italy, or else in a Roman city in the province of Macedonia, a few years before the birth of Christ; for he speaks of having read when a small boy (puer) some lines of Ennius (III epil. 33), and he must have been a slave in the household of Augustus for some years before he was manumitted by that emperor. From this it appears that Phaedrus left Thrace and entered the service of Augustus at about the same time that the philhellenic consul L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, after putting down a serious uprising in Thrace (13-11 B.C.), brought back from that region on his return to Rome the well-known poet and epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica, thenceforth his client.

That Piso brought Phaedrus also to Rome on this occasion, then gave him to Augustus, is conjectured with a high degree of probability by Fr. Della Corte;¹² and, going on from there, another Italian scholar, Attilio De Lorenzi, has recently called attention to the likelihood that Phaedrus, because he was a cultivated Greek-speaking youngster, was employed by Augustus as a personal servant and paedagogus in attendance upon his grandson Lucius (17 B.C.-A.D. 2), for the purpose of giving the latter necessary practice in speaking good Greek.¹³ If this were the case—as it may well have been in the absence of any evidence to the contrary—it would mean, as De Lorenzi further points out, that he attended the school of the famous scholar Verrius Flaccus on the Palatine, where the emperor's two grandsons, Lucius and Gaius, were being educated; and that it was from Verrius, the antiquarian philologist, that Phaedrus learned and took deeply to heart those lines of Ennius declaring it "sacrilege for a man of low birth to murmur in public," which lines have come down to us through having been quoted from a lost book by Verrius Flaccus (De Verborum Significatu) in the epitome of it made by Pompeius Festus in the second or third century.¹⁴ It would have been Lucius, rather than Gaius, whom young Phaedrus served as school companion, since the paedagogus and other personal servants of Gaius were put to death following the death of their master in A.D. 4 (Suet, Aug. 67).

Avianus, in his prefatory letter to Theodosius (ca. A.D. 400), says that the fables of Phaedrus were contained in five books, and such is the framework within which the fables in our principal manuscript P are arranged; although many fables belonging to the original corpus are missing in that manuscript. This is evident from the fact that between fifty and sixty other fables of Phaedrian authorship, either in their original metrical form or in prose paraphrases, are preserved in sources other than codex P, as well as from indications of deficiency in the contents of P itself. Thus in the prologue of Book I Phaedrus alludes to fables of his own in which trees as well as animals speak, but no such fables are found among those preserved in P; Book II as we have it in the manuscript contains only eight fables as compared with thirty-one in Book I; and Book V, in which the author explains why he will put the name of Aesop on some of his fables, contains only ten fables, and Aesop is not mentioned in any of them. The total number of fables preserved in P is ninety-four, but the number of fables contained in the original five books as published by Phaedrus must have been close to 150. To assign the fables known to us from other sources to their original place within the five books as we have them in P has been undertaken by a few scholars, but the speculation is hazardous and the resulting reconstruction rarely acceptable to another editor.

Avianus is the only ancient author other than Martial who even mentions Phaedrus as a writer of fables, and his own work, imitative of the Greek Babrius in substance, shows no signs of being influenced by that of his Latin predecessor. The paraphrasers of Phaedrus in late antiquity, probably in the fifth century, put the poet's words and substance into prose, but they ascribe their fables to Aesop without ever mentioning the Latin author from whose text they are in large part taken. The first writer to mention Phaedrus by name after Avianus is the humanist Perotti in the fifteenth century, but even his heralding of Phaedrus as a classical author, whose fables he copied out for the benefit of his nephew from a MS. now lost, remained unnoticed until the publication of codex P in print by Pithou in 1596. Only after that did Phaedrus attain to that immortality in the literary hall of fame to which he, like other poets of the Augustan Age, consciously aspired. Throughout the Middle Ages the Latin tradition of Aesopic fables, widely propagated in prose paraphrases under the name Romulus or anonymously, consisted mainly, as Joseph Jacobs remarked, of "Phaedrus with trimmings";¹⁵ although the trimmings were numerous and only Avianus and Romulus were known as the Latin fabulists.

Like other Roman authors who work over Greek sourcematerials—Avianus, for example, in relation to Babrius—Phaedrus makes many innovations of his own in retelling the Greek fables, adds fables drawn from various sources other than his primary source, and invents others of his own. The primary source which served as the foundation of his work in Book I, and of which he professes an increasing independence in the later books, was a small collection of fables written in Greek prose which he calls "Aesop," with the implication that this was the one and only source for fables invented by Aesop, as distinguished from fables taken from other sources or invented by himself, which he calls "Aesopic in kind but not Aesop's."¹⁶ Now the only collection of Greek prose fables ascribed to Aesop which is known to have been made before the time of Phaedrus was the one published by the well-known antiquarian scholar Demetrius of Phalerum towards the end of the fourth century B.C. and it was this book, in all probability, that Phaedrus equates with Aesop.¹⁷ In the prologue to his third book he declares that he has thought out for himself more fable-themes than Aesop had bequeathed to posterity, and it is quite evident from the nature of their substance, in comparison with what is elsewhere labelled "Aesopic," that many of his fables, perhaps a third part of them, did not come to him from any collection of fables ascribed to Aesop, but were either invented outright by himself to illustrate an idea born of his own personal experience or observation,¹⁸ or were adapted from widely varied sources: from anecdotes, wise sayings, proverbs, jests, and novelle found in Hellenistic collections or recorded incidentally in other kinds of books,¹⁹ from oral sources perhaps, and from events that had actually taken place in or near Rome or the Bay of Naples.²⁰

As the result of these innovations we find in Phaedrus a greater variety of story-types, and more stories told at length for their own sake as fictional entertainment, rather than for their ethical meaning, than is to be found in any ancient collection of prose fables ascribed to Aesop, or even in Babrius. This was bound to happen once fables in quantity came to be exploited as artistic literature in their own right, independently of the controlling purposes for which previously, with few exceptions, they had been written; that is, either subordinately as illustrations within the context of a classical form of literature, where the fable would be told summarily in only a few lines, as normally in Horace and Plutarch, or else in collections of prose fables such as that of Demetrius, which were intended to serve as repertoires of raw materials for the occasional use of writers and speakers, in which the fable would be told in only so much detail as was necessary to inform the reader of what the action was in its essential outlines. It was expected that the user of such a collection would adapt the fable to a context of his own, in which it might be either contracted, if used as an illustration, or expanded, if told for its own sake as a story.

A fable is naturally expanded when it becomes the subject of a separate poem elaborated artistically on its own account, as with Callimachus, for example, when he describes the contest between the Laurel and the Olive in upwards of ninety lines (Aes. 439). The same subject, or one like it, in an ancient handbook of prose fables, such as the Augustana Aesop, would hardly exceed ten lines in length; for there it would not be literary art in theory, but only information. In creating a new form of polite literature, Phaedrus did with a continuous series of fables the same kind of thing that Callimachus, and before him Archilochus, had done with only a few fables exploited at intervals in epigrams or poems of other types, or, on a more precise analogy, the same kind of thing that Ovid in the Metamorphoses and in the Heroides had done with the Greek myths which had been outlined in dry prose in handbooks of mythology compiled by Alexandrian grammarians. The potentialities of the fable-book as poetic literature, in which the author strives at every point to entertain his readers with artistic narrative involving the psychological portrayal of character with attention to details or dramatic dialogue, as well as by the variety of his themes, were not so fully realized or carried out so far by Phaedrus as later by La Fontaine in his Fables, or earlier by Ovid in his mythological poetry.

The brevity of Phaedrus in many of his fables is an artistic limitation due to the influence of his source mat erials, which were brief for a practical purpose but not for an aesthetic purpose. He never relates a fable in fewer words than the same fable would have had in his Greek Aesop; but he seems to have lengthened some of those fables in the telling, when the nature of their subject-matter allowed it; and he entertains us with a larger number of relatively long fables (20-60 lines) than is to be found in the collections of Greek fables ascribed to Aesop. In recommending the brevity of his fables and books of fables to his patrons Eutychus and Particulo, Phaedrus is thinking primarily of their convenience, rather than of his own literary virtuosity, lest they be offended with the chore of reading too much verse of doubtful interest or quality.²¹ Whether the telling of a fable without a context is too long or too short from the standpoint of artistic value depends upon the nature of the subject and how it is told. Some fables, consisting in substance of nothing more than a wise or witty remark, like that of the fox commenting on the tragic actor's mask (I, 7), cannot be told in more than a few lines without spoiling their effect; but others, in which the interest of the actions described centres in the portrayal of character, or in the humour of the various incidents of which it is naturally and organically composed, cannot be told briefly in only a few lines without becoming, artistically considered, desiccated and jejune. Phaedrus sel dom errs in either direction, although he might have exploited some of his fables artistically at greater length than he does, or than Ovid or La Fontaine would probably have done in narrating the same matter. He was well aware that some fables need to be longer than others. In one case (III, 10, 59-60), after telling a story at greater length than usual he says that he has done so because he had offended some of his readers by being too brief.

It is characteristic of Phaedrus, as of no other ancient fabulist whose book has survived, to represent a fable now and then as something that Aesop said or related in appropriate circumstances on a particular occasion of his life in conversation with others. This is a purely dramatic device, the use of which by the ancient purveyors of memorable sayings, as here of fables, implies nothing at all about the existence, naively inferred by some scholars, of a written biography, or of any biographical tradition, in which the circumstances so represented were told as part of the historical man's experience.

An Aesopic fable, no less than an apophthegm, may be the presumed utterance of a famous man. As such it may be introduced and framed according to the same purely plasmatic and arbitrary formula as that by which the apophthegm … is regularly introduced: So-and-so (an historical person), on being asked by so-and-so (either another historical person or an unnamed somebody), how, why, or what, replied in these words, or with this fable. Often in our anthologies the same words are attributed to the utterance of different persons speaking on the same or a similar easily imagined occasion. Here there is no intention of reporting biographical facts or traditions about such facts; the thing reported stands out as something told for its own sake as wit or wisdom, and the circumstances under which it is said to have been told, and even at times the identity of the speaker, are of no consequence in terms of tradition but are freely invented as the occasion requires. It is wrong, therefore, to infer from the use made by Phaedrus of this device, in the case of thirteen of the fables, that one of his principal sources was a biography of Aesop which contained those fables within its framework.²²

None of the fables in question is included in the extant Life of Aesop, which was composed in the first century after Christ, and no other biography of Aesop, least of all one written in Ionic prose in the sixth or fifth century B.C., such as Crusius and Hausrath have imagined, is known to have existed in antiquity, or is at all likely to have existed in the light of any testimony that we have in ancient literature concerning Aesop and his fables. The vulgar Life of Aesop which has come down to us and which was probably current in the time of Phaedrus, contains, along with much that is Alexandrian in origin, much also in the way of fables and the locale in which Aesop told them (Samos and Delphi) which belongs to the old fifth-century tradition about him as we know it from Aristophanes and Herodotus; but only one of the fables therein mentioned recurs in Phaedrus, and then with no reference to the place and occasion of its telling.²³ Ten of the thirteen fables which he represents Aesop as having told on a particular occasion have no geographical setting at all;²⁴ and the other three, which are said to have been told by Aesop at Athens (I, 2, III, 14, IV, 5) include only one fable, that about the frogs who asked for a king (I, 2), which is elsewhere recorded as Aesop's, but with no reference to Athens or Peisistratus.²⁵

Of this Athenian Aesop there is no trace in fifth-century tradition, but in the mid-fourth century B.C.. Aesop is staged with Solon at Athens in a comedy of Alexis, and numerous fables relating to Athenians or to Athenian places and institutions (without Aesop) have come down in the Augustana collection and in Babrius, possibly from Demetrius of Phalerum, who may have been responsible for the Athenian orientation of the fables to which we have referred.²⁶ It is unlikely, however, that Demetrius represented any of his fables as having been told by Aesop personally at Athens, and there is no staging of Aesop at Athens either in the Life of Aesop as we have it or in fifth-century tradition. All this brings us once more to the conclusion that Phaedrus made no use of any biography of Aesop, and that what he calls "Aesop" was the small collection of fables headed by promythia which was published by Demetrius the Athenian near the end of the fourth century B.C.

Notes

¹ Phaedrus, so spelled in the nominative by Avianus and in titles of fables in the manuscript P, is a Greek name ending inos. The form Phaeder, adopted by the French editor L. Havet, appears in Latin inscriptions: but there is no need of Romanizing a familiar Greek name, the original form of which has been sanctioned by centuries of tradition.

² Concerning the identity of this Princeps, who is mentioned in inscriptions, see Havet's note on fable 100 in his large critical edition of Phaedrus. The line sung by the chorus at the opening of the performance (vs. 27), Laetare incolumis Roma salvo Principe, must have had reference to the very recent return of Tiberius, already named by Augustus as his successor and collega imperii (Tac. Ann. I 3), from his victorious campaigns in Pannonia and Dalmatia in A.D. 9. See Attilio de Lorenzi, Fedro, p. 75.

³ Note also III, prol. 23, fastidiose tamen in coetum recipior (i.e. in the company of poets); ib. 60, abesto, Livor, ne frustra gemas, quom iam mini sollemnis dabitur gloria; IV prol. 15 f., hunc [Book IV] obtrectare si volet malignitas, imitari dum non possit, obtrectet licet; IV 22, Quid iudicare cogitas, Livor, modo? Here one must reckon with the fact that putting a series of unconnected fables into verse was something new that had never before been done or approved by literary fashion, and that the inventor and sponsor of this new literary form was not a Roman poet of standing when he put it out, but an obscure Greekling in a servile position. In those circumstances some opposition and disapproval was to be expected, and the opponents, while they might envy the poet's work, would look upon the author as an upstart.

⁴ See p. li, note 2. We cannot be sure that the Phaedrus mentioned by Martial in Epigr. III, 20 is our fabulist; he may have been, as Friedländer suggests, a writer of mimes.

⁵ This is suggested, very plausibly, by Attilio de Lorenzi in his Fedro (Firenze, 1955), p. 145.

⁶ III epil. 26 f.: decerne quod religio, quodpatitur fides, / ut gratuler me stare iudicio tuo.

⁷ Iii, epil. 8-9 and 13: brevitatis nostrae praemium ut reddas peto / quod es pollicitus; exhibe vocis fidem … si cito rem perages, usus fiet longior.

⁸ III, epil. 24-26: tuae suntpartes; fuerunt aliorum prius; / dein simili gyro venient aliorum vices, /decerne quod religio, etc.

⁹ IV, prol. 17-20: mihi parta laus est quod tu, quod similes tui, / vestras in chartas verba transfertis mea, / dignumque longa indicatis memoria. / inlitteratum plausum non desidero. In speaking of illitterati Phaedrus may be thinking of Eutychus among others.

¹⁰ The principal consideration which has led scholars to suppose that all the fables of Phaedrus were published later than the reign of Caligula is the fact that Seneca, writing from exile in Corsica about the year A.D. 43, in his Consolatio ad Polybium (ch. viii), remarks that putting Aesopic fables into literature is something hitherto unattempted by Roman talents, which implies that Seneca knew nothing about Phaedrus and his work. It is quite possible that he was in fact aware of what Phaedrus had done, but chose to ignore the work of an obscure, half-Greek author as not to be reckoned among Romana ingenia, or too poor to deserve recognition. Quintilian also ignores Phaedrus when he speaks of fables in verse some fifty years later (cf. p. li above). On the other hand, Seneca could have been just as unaware of fables published by Phaedrus since the time of Sejanus as he appears to be of the two books of fables written by Phaedrus which Sejanus had condemned in a public prosecution. In short, the silence of Seneca concerning the fables of Phaedrus is worthless as a criterion for dating the publication of any of those fables. In the passage to which we refer Seneca speaks of Aesopic fables as a somewhat frivolous and comic variety of literature, not to be taken seriously, in contrast to the more severe kinds, which are better suited to occupy the attention of Polybius at a time when he was mourning for his brother: Non audeo te eo usque producere, ut fab ell as quoque et Aesopeos logos, intemptatum Romanis ingeniis opus, solita Ubi venustate connectas. Difficile est quidem, ut ad haec hilariora studia tam vehementer perculsus animus tam cito possit accedere: hoc tamen argumentum habeto iam conroborati eius et redditi sibi, si poterli a severioribus scriptis ad haec solutiora procedere … haec, quae remissa fronte commentanda sunt, non feret, nisi, etc.

¹¹ III, prol. 41-44: quodsi accusator alius Seiano foret, /si testis alius, iudex alius denique, /dignum faterer esse me tantis malis, / nee his dolorem delenirem remediis. Grammatically interpreted, as a contrary-to-fact condition in present time, this sentence says ostensibly that the prosecution is in the process of being made, and hence that Sejanus is still living; but this is only a dramatic way of speaking meant to picture the situation in a close-up view. It is clear from the context that the verdict has already been pronounced and that Phaedrus is now suffering the consequences of it. Since the prosecution is already a thing of the past, the prosecutor, Sejanus, may or may not still be living, so far as the implications of this sentence are concerned; but in view of the circumstances in which Phaedrus is writing, and the fearless way in which he speaks of Sejanus, one must suppose that the latter is dead, otherwise Phaedrus could not expect to publish his third book.

¹² In Rivista di Filologia, 17 (1939), p. 136.

¹³ De Lorenzi, Fedro, pp. 52 ff.

¹⁴ See Warmington, Remains of Old Latin (Loeb Library), I, pp. xi and 344.

¹⁵ Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop, London, 1889, I, p.l.

¹⁶ IV, prol. 10-11 : fabulis / quas Aesopias, non Aesopi nomino, / quia paucas Me ostendit ego pluris sero / usus vetusto genere sed rebus novis; III prol. 38 f.: ego illius pro semita feci viam / et cogitavi plura quam reliquerat.

¹⁷ For the literary-historical evidence pointing to the conclusion that Phaedrus must have used the Aesop of Demetrius as his primary source, see pp. 321 f. and 325 ff. of my article "Demetrius of Phalerum and the Aesopic Fables" in TAPhA, 93 (1962). It is possible and, I think, quite probable that the fables on the Rylands papyrus, which was written in the early years of the first century after Christ (see above p. xiv), represent the text of Demetrius; but, however that may be, the stereotyped formula by which fables are presented in this papyrus text, in view of the function of its promythia and the antiquity of the device of putting the moral epigrammati cally in the form of a gnomic sentence in the mouth of the last speaker in the fable, must have originated with the founder of the fable-collection as such, that is, with Demetrius. His book was intended to serve as a repertory of literary raw materials for the use of writers and speakers, hence the promythium. The prominence of promythia in Phaedrus, especially in Book I, and the occasional use of a gnomic sentence put in the mouth of the last speaker, as in I, 26, show that his primary source was a collection of Greek fables which had the same conventional formulas that we find in the Rylands papyrus, but in none of the later collections. The author's epimythium following a fable, which appears for the first time in Phaedrus, is derived from the earlier promythium through a misunder-standing or disregard of the latter's function. See this editor's "Origin of the Epimythium" in TAPhA, 71 (1940), 391-419.

¹⁸ The following fables may be reckoned, among others, as the outright ad hoc inventions of Phaedrus himself, in view of the emotional reactions to personal experience and observation of Roman conditions that they reflect, their artificial and unreal hypotheses in some cases, which Havet (p. 237, art. 150) aptly calls pseudapologi in contrast with genuinely Aesopic apologues, and the fact that none of them is attested or has any parallel elsewhere in Greek or Roman fable-lore: I, 16, stag asks sheep to lend him a peck of wheat with a wolf as his sponsor; I, 17, dog sues a sheep for a loaf of bread which he claims to have loaned her, a wolf summoned as witness testifies that ten loaves instead of one were owed, the sheep is forced to pay and a few days later sees the wolf lying dead in a ditch, punished by the gods; I, 27, dog afflicted with avarice by the gods guards a treasure of gold until he dies of starvation; II, 1, lion refuses a share of his spoil to a robber, but very politely offers a share to an innocent wayfarer—a laudable example, we are told, of something that is not true to life; III, 1, old woman and the wine jar; III, 5, Aesop persuades a petulant fellow to throw a stone at a rich and influential man with the expectation of receiving a reward in cash for so doing; III, 11, eunuch retorts to the personal abuse of a scurrilous fellow with a play on the double meanings of the Latin words testes and integritas; III, 13, bees and drones, a fable well invented by Phaedrus to call the bluff of his imitators or detractors; IV, 11, a thief lights his lamp from the altar of Juppiter; V, 10, the hunting dog whose strength failed him in old age, applied to the author himself; App. 20, Aesop's advice to a fugitive slave.

The innovations made by Phaedrus in retelling Greek fables, or in building new fables on the basis of older source materials, are numerous and seldom felicitous from the point of view of plausibility and good taste. His fable telling how a crow showed an eagle how to kill a tortoise that he had carried off (II, 6), along with the moral that force combined with rascality always wins, is a poor invention made up on the basis of the Greek fable told by Babrius (115) and in the Augustana collection (Aes. 230), in which an eagle pretends to teach a turtle how to fly. The substance of II, 8, telling how a stag who had taken refuge in an ox-stall remained hidden and undetected by all the servants until the owner of the cattle made his rounds of inspection, is a good story told in twenty-eight lines to illustrate the well-known proverb that the master's eye sees more than any other where his own interest is concerned. Fable III, 15, relating to the lamb who was looking for his mother in a flock of shegoats, appears to have been made on the basis of a Greek proverb to the effect that the real father is not (necessarily) the one who begets the child, but he who nourishes it (Menandri Monostichi, no. 452 … and Aes. Prov. 19, p. 267). The fact that Phaedrus speaks of a foster mother, instead of a father, and of the child as a male born by accident and so abandoned, has led to the plausible interpretation proposed by De Lorenzi (pp. 37 ff.) that Phaedrus is here thinking of his own experience as the unwelcome child of a courtesan who had left him on the doorstep of a Greek teacher in Macedonia, hence his statement that he was "all but born in a school" (III, prol. 29).

Smaller changes made by Phaedrus in retelling the Greek fables may be noted in I, 3 (peacocks in place of doves in Aes. 129); I, 5, where a cow, a she-goat, and a sheep are introduced as carnivorous partners of the lion in hunting, in place of a wild ass in Babrius 67; I, 8, crane in place of heron in Babrius 94 and in the Augustana (Aes. 156); I, 26, stork in place of crane in the Greek Aesop according to Plutarch (Quaest. Cony. 614 E); IV, 10, Juppiter for Prometheus in Babrius 66. In II, 3 a man bitten by a dog tosses out to the dog a piece of bread dipped in his own blood as a remedy for his wound, and Aesop, standing by, warns him not to let other dogs see him doing this "lest they devour us alive"; but in the corresponding Greek fable (Aes. 64) it is the bitten man who says as much in replying to someone who recommended the supposed remedy. In IV, 2 a weasel, in order to trap mice, disguises himself as a pile of flour lying in an obscure corner; but in the Greek fable as told by Babrius (17) and in the Augustana (Aes. 79) the weasel pretends to be a bag suspended from pegs on the wall.

¹⁹ Historical anecdotes from unidentifiable sources: IV, 26, the story of Simonides' narrow escape from a falling house, and the occasion of it, is related by Cicero in De Orat. II, 352, by Quintilian XI, 2, 11, and by Valerius Maximus in Facta et Dicta Mem. I, 8, 7; V, 1, Demetrius and Menander; App. 10, Pompey and his Soldier.

From wise or witty sayings reported in various kinds of books: In I, 10, what Phaedrus relates about an ape sitting in judgment on two litigants, a wolf and a fox at a courtroom trial, is elsewhere (Diog. Laert. VI, 2, 54 and Gnomologium Vat., ed. Sternbach no. 190) told of Diogenes the Cynic in passing judgment on a complaint of theft brought by one scoundrel against another—that the plaintiff seemed not to have been robbed of anything, and that the defendant seemed to have stolen it. The promythium by which this jest is preceded in Phaedrus, to the effect that one who has come to be known as a liar is not believed even when he speaks the truth, belongs more properly to the famous fable about the shepherd boy who repeatedly cried "Wolf!" in jest and was not believed when he called for help in earnest (Aes. 210). This fable, as I have shown in TAPhA, 93 (1962), 292 f., was almost certainly among the fables included in the collection of Demetrius of Phalerum. It was from that source, in all probability, that Phaedrus took his promythium, but he omitted the fable about the shepherd boy to which it belonged and substituted in its place an animal fable of his own built on the reported saying of Diogenes. App. 9, what Aesop said to an author who praised his own book, has no connection with any Aesopic tradition, but is a witticism drawn from an unknown source.

From proverbs: IV, 24, Mountain in Labour; cf. Horace Ars Poet. 139. V, 6, Two Bald Men; cf…. Corp. Paroem. Gr. I, p. 459. App. 14, Ass and Lyre, involves a different idea, but is reminiscent of the familiar proverb … (Diogen. VII, 33).

Jests: III, 4, how ape-meat tastes; IV, 19, Dogs send an Embassy to Juppiter, source unknown.

Novelle or short stories adapted from unknown sources: I, 14, From Cobbler to Physician; App. 16, The Two Suitors. App. 15, Widow and Soldier (cf. Petronius 111, 112), is descended through an unknown Roman version of relatively late date from the story of the Widow and Ploughman as told in the Life of Aesop (ch. 129 = Aes. 388), the author of which in the first century may have taken it from the Aesopica of Demetrius of Phalerum; see TAPhA, 93 (1962), 329 f.

From books of various kinds in which the habits of animals were described: I, 25, Dogs drinking on the run in the River Nile; App. 22, Bear fishing for Crabs; App. 30, How the Beaver saves himself from Pursuing Hunters.

From miscellaneous sources other than fables ascribed to Aesop: I, 18, Woman in Childbirth, the substance of which is told by Plutarch in Coniug. Praec. 143 E. without being ascribed to any author. III, 3, Aesop and the Farmer, concerning the birth of lambs with human heads; the advice here given by Aesop is attributed to Thales in conversation with Periander in Plutarch's Sept. Sap. Conv. 149 C-E, although Aesop himself is represented as being present at this banquet and as telling three fables of his own which are elsewhere ascribed to him. III, 8, Brother and Sister before the Mirror; the advice here given by a father to his son and daughter, the former of whom is good-looking, the latter homely, is attributed to Socrates by Plutarch (Coniug. Praec. 141 D) and by Diogenes Laertius (II, 5, 33), but it appears among the sayings of Bias of Priene quoted from the Apophthegms of the Seven Wise Men by Demetrius of Phalerum in Stobaeus III, 1, 172. V, 8, Time, is derived from a description of the famous statue by Lysippus known as Kairos, concerning which see our note on the translation of V, 8, below.

²⁰ Fable II, 5, Tiberius Caesar to a Flunkey, on Cape Misenum. III, 10, On Believing and not Believing, concerning a criminal case tried by the Centumviral Court at Rome in the reign of Augustus. V, 5, Buffoon and Country Fellow, an event said to have taken place on the stage (at Rome?). The same story is told by Plutarch in Quaest. Conv. 674 c about a buffoon named Parmeno and a rival mimic as the origin of a Greek proverb …, but Plutarch does not say on what stage this act took place, and it may have been at Rome before his time. V, 7, Princeps the Flutist, an event that took place on the Roman stage in the time of Tiberius.

²¹Cf. IV, epil. 7-9: si non ingenium, certe brevitatem adproba; quae commendari tanto debet iustius, I quanto cantores sunt molesti validius. Cantores, long-winded poets, is Postgate's emendation of the manuscript reading poetae.

²² So A. Hausrath, in his article on Phaedrus in RE, 19 (1938), 1480, names as the primary source used by our fabulist "Das Volksbuch vom Weisen Aesopus, in der Gestalt wie es zu Beginn der Kaiserzeit umlief." This folkbook, presumed to have been written in prose and thumbed by a reading public in the sixth or early fifth century B.C., is unhistorical. No such book dealing with the career and amusing antics of a clever slave, would have been written or read in the Greek world of that time, when prose-writing was about important matters and not given to trifles, nor to the biography of individuals; and there is no positive evidence tending to show that such a Volksbuch was written. Its quondam existence was deduced by Hausrath (Neue Jahrbücher für d. Class. Altertum, 1898, 305-322), with the approval of Crusius, from the misleading practice of Phaedrus described above, and on the analogy of the extant Life of Aesop, within the framework of which a dozen fables are told on various occasions by Aesop in person at Samos, Delphi and Sardis. Hausrath supposes that the Life which we have is a late derivative of the hypothetical Volksbuch of early times; but the greater part of its substance, perhaps two-thirds, is clearly the invention of Alexandrian times, and the older traditions that it retains, relating mainly to Aesop at Delphi, would have been transmitted to Aristophanes and his contemporaries not from a biography but indirectly from the accounts given of him by such local chroniclers as Eugeon of Samos and other logographers, including Herodotus, in whose books Aesop was mentioned in a larger context of history. Hausrath's theory of an early popular biography of Aesop is opposed by this writer in Aesopica, I, p. 5, in TAPhA, 93 (1962), 293 f., in the article "Fable," in Studium Generale, XII (1959), 31, by Chambry in Supplément Critîque au Bull. de I 'Assoc. Guill. Budé, I (1929), 183, and by F. R. Adrados in Emerita, 20 (1952), 344 f.

²³ This is the fable about the sheep and the wolves that Aesop tells to the Samians in Ch. 97 of the Life. It is found also in the paraphrases of Phaedrus (see Appendix below under no. 153), in the Augustana collection, and in Babrius (93); but nowhere except in the Life is any reference made to the time and place of its telling.

²⁴ These are I, 6, II, 3, III, 3, and 19, IV, 17; App. 9, 12, 13, 17, and 20.

²⁵ Neither of the other two fables in which Phaedrus represents Aesop as giving advice to people at Athens belongs in the Aesopic tradition; one of them, about the unstrung bow (III, 14) is referred to King Amasis by Herodotus (II, 173), and the other, about the solving of an enigmatic will (IV, 5), is obviously late and of Roman invention.

²⁶ This was suggested by O. Keller in his valuable essay on the history of Greek fables in Jahrbücher für Class. Philologie, Supplementband 4 (1862), 361 f., where the relevant data are cited. I have recently commented on the subject in TAPhA, 93 (1962), 338. Some of the fables in our collections may well have been given their Athenian orientation by Demetrius, but the tendency to locate dramatic events in Athens and to write about well-known Athenians and Athenian institutions was strong in later times also, and also in Phaedrus himself, whose knowledge of Greek history appears to have been hazy, judging from what he says about Demetrius of Phalerum in V, 1.