One of the most curious features of Phaedrus’ fables is his attempt to supply fables about exploitation and injustice with a more pious conclusion than would otherwise be expected from the Aesopic tradition. For example, in the gruesome story of the fox’s murderous vengeance against the eagle for having killed her cubs, Phaedrus supplies an ending in which both the cubs and the eagle’s chicks live happily ever after (Fable 154). This is not to say that Phaedrus does not share the vicious sense of humour that is characteristic of the Aesopic fable tradition. His story of the dog who starves to death while guarding a treasure (Fable 405, not attested in any extant Greek source) is Aesopic storytelling of the highest order, in which the dog not only suffers a fatal punishment, but is also insulted by the vulture after his death. Another notable feature of Phaedrus’ fables is the large number of stories which he tells about Aesop himself: he frequently appears both as a storyteller (see Fable 436, when he tells the story of the frogs and the sun to the foolish people celebrating the thief’s wedding) and as the story’s protagonist (see Fable 537, when Aesop challenges a man with the riddle of the bow).
Babrius
While we know little about the Latin poet Phaedrus, we know even less about Babrius, whose identity will probably always remain in doubt. Current scholarly opinion casts him as a Hellenised Roman who lived and worked in Cilicia (modern Turkey or Armenia) during the reign of a certain ‘King Alexander’ in the late first century CE (see Fable 502). Babrius wrote his fables in an unusual style of Greek verse (choliambics) and there are slightly more than 140 fables extant, of which just short of 100 are included in this book. The most important manuscript of Babrius is the so-called Athoan Codex from Mt. Athos in Greece, which dates from the tenth century and contains just over 120 fables arranged alphabetically. Given that the manuscript breaks off abruptly at the letter ‘O’, scholars speculate that Babrius originally composed something like 200 fables. As in the case of Phaedrus, it is not clear what sources Babrius used for his fables. The two poets tell many of the same fables, but there are also fables in Babrius and in Phaedrus that are not extant in any other ancient source. Of all the fable collections preserved from antiquity, Babrius is probably the most typically Aesopic and the most consistently humorous. Babrius’ fables tend to be brief and sometimes even terse to the point of obscurity, but he also wrote some longer and more intricate fables, including the extraordinary fable of the lion, the fox, and the deer (Fable 600), which is over 100 lines in length. There is considerable debate over the epimythia appended to the fables of Babrius. Many scholars consider these to be the work of later editors of the text and not of Babrius himself. In this book, the disputed epimythia can be found in the notes to the fables.
Aphthonius
Aphthonius was a scholar and teacher of the fourth century CE associated with the school of Libanius. The fables of Aphthonius are forty in number, of which twenty-five are included in this book. In general, Aphthonius’ fables are attested in other ancient sources, although there are a few fables which are otherwise unknown. As a rule, his fables are quite brief and, with few exceptions, he includes both a promythium and an epimythium for every fable. Given this abundance of editorial moralizing, it is not surprising that in the majority of Aphthonius’ fables there is no endomythium, those witty last words spoken by one of the characters inside the fable itself. In his rhetorical treatise, the Progymnasmata (conveniently reprinted as van Dijk G54), Aphthonius states that Aesop was the best of all the writers of fables. Clearly, for Aphthonius, Aesop is no longer a storyteller so much as he is a writer and scholar like Aphthonius himself.
Avianus
There are just over forty fables ascribed to Avianus (written in Latin elegiac couplets), of which fifteen are included in this book. Although there are still some arguments as to Avianus’ historical identity, it seems reasonable to identify him with the ‘Avienus’ who is described as a participant in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, in the early fifth century CE. Avianus dedicates his fables to a certain ‘Theodosius’, who may be this same Macrobius (i.e. Ambrosius Macrobius Theodosius). Although Avianus mentions both Phaedrus and Babrius in the introduction to his poems, it is clearly Babrius who is his model (apparently via a Greek prose version later rendered in Latin prose which Avianus then put into verse). However, Avianus tends to write longer, more intricate fables, without the brevity and wit that is so characteristic of Babrius. The Latin poems of Avianus remained quite popular throughout the Middle Ages and spawned many imitators.
Syntipas
The fables attributed to ‘Syntipas’ are actually the work of Michael Andreopulus, a Greek scholar of the eleventh century who translated a collection of Syriac fables into Greek. Those Syriac fables, in turn, had originally been translated from Greek either in late antiquity or even well into the Middle Ages. There are slightly over sixty fables in this collection, most of which are included in this book. The significance of the Syntipas fables becomes clear when we realize that fifteen, approximately one-quarter of the collection, are not attested elsewhere in the Aesopic corpus. Thanks to their preservation in Syriac, the fables of Syntipas escaped extinction, while we can only speculate about the hundreds or even thousands of other Greek fables that vanished along with their manuscripts (not to mention all the fables that were never even recorded in written form). Although the fables of Syntipas reach us by a roundabout path (from Greek to Syriac and back into Greek again), they remain quite lively. Most importantly, the fables of Syntipas regularly include an endomythium, the witty moral inside the story, in addition to the moralizing epimythium that concludes the tale.
Other Greek and Latin Sources
Aesop’s fables are widely reported in various Greek and Latin authors, and in some cases the fables translated in this book have been taken directly from these literary sources. Not infrequently a fable first reported in a literary source later makes its way into one of the Aesopic collections, sometimes verbatim. In such cases, preference has been given to the version reported in the collections, although the notes provide references to the literary sources as well.
Poetry and Prose
While Phaedrus and Babrius appear to have been the first authors to have considered the Aesopic fable to be a literary genre, there are Aesopic fables attested in Greek and Roman literature reaching as far back as the archaic Greek poets Hesiod and Archilochus. There are also fables in the fragments that survive of the archaic Roman poet Ennius. The Greek Anthology (a collection of poetry which includes Greek poets of all periods) contains a number of fables. The most significant literary source for the fables is the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes. In Latin, the most important source is Horace, who frequently recounts or alludes to Aesopic fables in his poems. In prose, there are Greek fables found in the satirist Lucian and the novelist Achilles Tatius, as well as numerous fables included in the novel known as the Life of Aesop (discussed above).
Oratory and Rhetoric
As a form of public discourse, Aesop’s fables were used by the orators of Greece and Rome and were a subject of rhetorical study. There are fables included here which were reportedly used by the classical Greek orators Demosthenes and Demades, as well as by the orators of later periods such as Maximus of Tyre, Themistius, and Dio Chrysostom. Some fables can also be found in the rhetorical treatises of classical authors such as Aristotle and later authors such as Hermogenes and Diogenian, among others.
Historiography
Accounts of Aesopic fables can be found in the historical writings of the Greek historians Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch and also in the Roman historian Livy. These historians recount specific fables that were reportedly used in speeches by historical figures, providing further evidence for the orators’ performance of the fables. For example, the famous speech by Menenius Agrippa to the plebeians of Rome in 494 BCE (Fable 66) is reported in Livy’s history of Rome and is also found in Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus.
Symposiastic Writing
Anoth
er important source for Aesopic fables is the ‘symposiastic’ or ‘table talk’ literature of such writers as Xenophon, Plutarch, and Athenaeus in Greek, and Aulus Gellius in Latin. Unlike the fables used by the orators and politicians, the speakers at a symposium provide a glimpse into a somewhat more private mode of ‘going over’ the fables. Plutarch’s Banquet of the Seven Sages is a symposiastic composition in which Aesop himself appears as a character.
The Medieval Latin Fables
During the Middle Ages, the Aesopic tradition remained popular in the Greek East (and there are several fables included in this book that come from Byzantine sources, such as the ninth-century Aesopic poetry of Ignatius Diaconus), but it was in the Latin West that the fables truly thrived, thanks largely to the prose paraphrases of the Roman poet Phaedrus. As mentioned earlier, only a portion of Phaedrus’ actual poems have reached us intact, but there are prose paraphrases made of the missing poems which are preserved in the medieval tradition under the name of ‘Romulus’. The manuscripts of the Romulus tradition date to the tenth century and later, although it is unclear exactly how and when the first versions of the Romulus collection were assembled. Do all the materials in the early Romulus collections derive from Phaedrus? By what intermediary stages did the poems of Phaedrus reach the form that we find in these later prose paraphrases? These are subjects of much debate among scholars. In any case, there are a number of poems in the Romulus manuscripts which are almost certainly based on poems of Phaedrus, so much so that some scholars have attempted to reconstruct the lost poems on this basis.
Over time, however, new fables were clearly added to the Romulus collections, and as a result the collections vary considerably in contents and style. The new additions include both fables that were taken from other collections as well as some added by the medieval authors who both retold familiar fables in markedly new variations and recorded the oral stories that were circulating in their own communities. Later versions of the Romulus collections were also versified, putting the prose back into poetry (although using medieval poetic forms that are quite different from Phaedrus’ own iambic senarii). Slightly fewer than twenty fables from the Romulus collections are included in this book, and each reference indicates the particular version of Romulus which is being translated. When the reference ‘Romulus’ appears by itself, it refers simply to the so-called Romulus vulgaris, or common edition. The Romulus ad Rufum refers to a collection dedicated to an otherwise unknown ‘Rufus’. There are also a few fables taken from the Romulus collections which circulated in England (the Romulus Anglicus and the more extensive Romulus Anglicus cunctis) as well as the Romulus Monacensis, or ‘Munich Romulus’.
Ademar of Chabannes
Ademar of Chabannes was a monk and scholar who is best known as the author of the Chronicon, a history of France covering the years 399 up to 1030. He was also the author of sermons and liturgical works as well as devotional Christian poetry. Fortunately for us, he also produced a collection of sixty-seven Aesopic fables, about half of which are included in this book. Ademar’s work has a special place in the medieval Latin tradition because the fables he included are rather different from the usual Romulus corpus. Of the sixty-seven fables, there are thirty which follow the Romulus paraphrase of Phaedrus, but there are fourteen fables based on extant poems of Phaedrus that are not found elsewhere in the Romulus collections (along with an additional five fables which seem to be a combination of the Romulus version with the original of Phaedrus, or with a markedly different paraphrase of Phaedrus). Clearly, Ademar had at his disposal either the original poems of Phaedrus or, at a minimum, some paraphrase of Phaedrus that was both more complete than the paraphrase represented by the Romulus collections and, for that matter, more complete than the surviving poems of Phaedrus which are known to us. This makes it highly tempting to suppose that at least some of the other eighteen fables in Ademar which are not attested in any other source could, in fact, represent additional fables of Phaedrus that we can recover from the medieval tradition. However, it is also entirely possible that these fables are Ademar’s rendering of stories that he heard or read elsewhere. As the anonymous Greek collections show, the fable collections were extremely fluid, growing and expanding to accommodate new material. Yet, given Ademar’s probable access to some more extensive version of Phaedrus, it is at least possible that some of his ‘original’ fables date back almost exactly a thousand years, to the reign of the first Roman emperors.
Odo of Cheriton
In addition to the anonymous Romulus collections and the fables of Ademar, there is another extremely important source for the medieval Latin Aesop: the parables of Odo of Cheriton, a notable scholar and cleric of the thirteenth century. Of the 120 parables included in this collection, approximately ninety can be considered Aesopic fables of a sort, although the majority of Odo’s stories are not attested in earlier fable collections. There are eighteen of Odo’s fables included in this book, some of which are variations on traditional fables and some of which are attested only in Odo. Unlike Ademar and the other authors of the medieval Romulus tradition, Odo situates his fables in a strongly Christian context, arming his stories with allegorical sermons which occasionally go on longer than the stories themselves. The sermons have not been included here, although the following can serve as a typical example of Odo’s interpretive style (Fable 328):
A fable against people who boast that they have something they do not.
There was a crow who saw that she was ugly and black, so she complained to the eagle. The eagle told her to borrow some feathers from her fellow birds. The crow did as the eagle suggested, taking feathers from the tail of the peacock, from the wings of the dove, and so on and so forth, appropriating the other birds’ feathers. When the crow decided that she was sufficiently well dressed, she began to laugh at the other birds and yell at them. The other birds then went and complained to the eagle about the boastful crow. The eagle replied, ‘Let every bird take back her feathers, and thus humiliate the crow.’ This is what they did, and so the crow was left ugly and naked.
In the same way man, that miserable creature, boasts of his adornment. But let the sheep take back her wool, and the earth its clay, and the cattle and the goats their hides, and the porcupines and the rabbits their pelts, and that miserable man will be left naked and ugly, and this indeed is how he will be on the day of his death, when he will be unable to carry away with him any of his earthly goods.
This fable can also be used against wealthy men who boast of the extent of their riches: the Lord will take everything away in time and thus the rich are humiliated.
Odo’s approach to the fables has clearly been influenced by the Christian allegorical and exegetical traditions of the Middle Ages. Far more than the traditional moralizers of the fables, Odo seizes on specific words and images from the text of the story in order to craft his sermon, as when he carefully echoes the ‘crow left ugly and naked’ with the ‘man left naked and ugly’. Yet at the same time that Odo’s commentaries exceed the bounds of the Aesopic epimythium, he is nevertheless a master storyteller (see, for example, Fable 105, the wonderful story of the cat and the stork, a variation on the traditional story of the fox and the crow). In addition, Odo appears to be the first collector of fables who tries to arrange at least some of his fables in thematic groups. The opening fables of his collection, for example, are all concerned with the process of choosing a ruler: Odo begins with the biblical fable of the trees electing a king (Fable 26), followed by fables of animals electing a king (ants, frogs, birds), and finally a human story of monks choosing their abbot (Fable 28). It is also worth noting that Odo includes a number of natural-history anecdotes in his parables, such as the story of the phoenix who is born out of the fire and the pelican who revives his chicks by letting them drink his blood. These are again markedly Christian allegories (often derived from the Physiologus or the later bestiary tradition), but their presence in a book of fables parallels the inclusion of natural-history anecdo
tes in the ancient Greek and Roman collections.
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