PREFACE
THE TALE, the Parable, and the Fable are all common
and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished
by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the
narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by
the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching
of any moral lesson. The Parable is the designed use of language
purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than
that contained in the words themselves; and which may or may not
bear a special reference to the hearer, or reader. The Fable partly
agrees with, and partly differs from both of these. It will
contain, like the Tale, a short but real narrative; it will seek,
like the Parable, to convey a hidden meaning, and that not so much
by the use of language, as by the skilful introduction of
fictitious characters; and yet unlike to either Tale or Parable, it
will ever keep in view, as its high prerogative, and inseparable
attribute, the great purpose of instruction, and will necessarily
seek to inculcate some moral maxim, social duty, or political
truth. The true Fable, if it rise to its high requirements, ever
aims at one great end and purpose representation of human motive,
and the improvement of human conduct, and yet it so conceals its
design under the disguise of fictitious characters, by clothing
with speech the animals of the field, the birds of the air, the
trees of the wood, or the beasts of the forest, that the reader
shall receive advice without perceiving the presence of the
adviser. Thus the superiority of the counsellor, which often
renders counsel unpalatable, is kept out of view, and the lesson
comes with the greater acceptance when the reader is led,
unconsciously to himself, to have his sympathies enlisted in behalf
of what is pure, honorable, and praiseworthy, and to have his
indignation excited against what is low, ignoble, and unworthy. The
true fabulist, therefore, discharges a most important function. He
is neither a narrator, nor an allegorist. He is a great teacher, a
corrector of morals, a censor of vice, and a commender of virtue.
In this consists the superiority of the Fable over the Tale or the
Parable. The fabulist is to create a laugh, but yet, under a merry
guise, to convey instruction. Phaedrus, the great imitator of
Aesop, plainly indicates this double purpose to be the true office
of the writer of fables. Duplex libelli dos est: quod risum movet,
Et quod prudenti vitam consilio monet. The continual observance of
this twofold aim creates the charm, and accounts for the universal
favor, of the fables of Aesop. "The fable," says Professor K. O.
Mueller, "originated in Greece in an intentional travestie of human
affairs. The 'ainos,' as its name denotes, is an admonition, or
rather a reproof veiled, either from fear of an excess of
frankness, or from a love of fun and jest, beneath the fiction of
an occurrence happening among beasts; and wherever we have any
ancient and authentic account of the Aesopian fables, we find it to
be the same." l The construction of a fable involves a minute
attention to (1) the narration itself; (2) the deduction of the
moral; and (3) a careful maintenance of the individual
characteristics of the fictitious personages introduced into it.
The narration should relate to one simple action, consistent with
itself, and neither be overladen with a multiplicity of details,
nor distracted by a variety of circumstances. The moral or lesson
should be so plain, and so intimately interwoven with, and so
necessarily dependent on, the narration, that every reader should
be compelled to give to it the same undeniable interpretation. The
introduction of the animals or fictitious characters should be
marked with an unexceptionable care and attention to their natural
attributes, and to the qualities attributed to them by universal
popular consent. The Fox should be always cunning, the Hare timid,
the Lion bold, the Wolf cruel, the Bull strong, the Horse proud,
and the Ass patient. Many of these fables are characterized by the
strictest observance of these rules. They are occupied with one
short narrative, from which the moral naturally flows, and with
which it is intimately associated. "'Tis the simple manner," says
Dodsley, 2 "in which the morals of Aesop are interwoven with his
fables that distinguishes him, and gives him the preference over
all other mythologists. His 'Mountain delivered of a Mouse,'
produces the moral of his fable in ridicule of pompous pretenders;
and his Crow, when she drops her cheese, lets fall, as it were by
accident, the strongest admonition against the power of flattery.
There is no need of a separate sentence to explain it; no
possibility of impressing it deeper, by that load we too often see
of accumulated reflections." 3 An equal amount of praise is due for
the consistency with which the characters of the animals,
fictitiously introduced, are marked. While they are made to depict
the motives and passions of men, they retain, in an eminent degree,
their own special features of craft or counsel, of cowardice or
courage, of generosity or rapacity. These terms of praise, it must
be confessed, cannot be bestowed on all the fables in this
collection. Many of them lack that unity of design, that close
connection of the moral with the narrative, that wise choice in the
introduction of the animals, which constitute the charm and
excellency of true Aesopian fable. This inferiority of some to
others is sufficiently accounted for in the history of the origin
and descent of these fables. The great bulk of them are not the
immediate work of Aesop. Many are obtained from ancient authors
prior to the time in which he lived. Thus, the fable of the "Hawk
and the Nightingale" is related by Hesiod; 4 the "Eagle wounded by
an Arrow, winged with its own Feathers," by Aeschylus; 5 the "Fox
avenging his wrongs on the Eagle," by Archilochus. 6 Many of them
again are of later origin, and are to be traced to the monks of the
middle ages: and yet this collection, though thus made up of fables
both earlier and later than the era of Aesop, rightfully bears his
name, because he composed so large a number (all framed in the same
mould, and conformed to the same fashion, and stamped with the same
lineaments, image, and superscription) as to secure to himself the
right to be considered the father of Greek fables, and the founder
of this class of writing, which has ever since borne his name, and
has secured for him, through all succeeding ages, the position of
the first of moralists.7 The fables were in the first instance only
narrated by Aesop, and for a long time were handed down by the
uncertain channel of oral tradition. Socrates is mentioned by Plato
8 as having employed his time while in prison, awaiting the return
of the sacred ship from Delphos which was to be the signal of his
death, in turning some of these fables into verse, but he thus
versified only such as he remembered. Demetrius Phalereus, a
philosopher at Athens about 300 B.C., is said to have made the
first collection of these fables. Phaedrus, a slave by birth or by
subsequent misfortunes, and admitted by Augustus to the honors of a
freedman, imitated many of these fables in Latin iambics about the
commencement of the Christian era. Aphthonius, a rhetorician of
Antioch, A.D. 315, wrote a treatise on, and converted into Latin
prose, some of these fables. This translation is the more worthy of
notice, as it illustrates a custom of common use, both in these and
in later times. The rhetoricians and philosophers were accustomed
to give the Fables of Aesop as an exercise to their scholars, not
only inviting them to discuss the moral of the tale, but also to
practice and to perfect themselves thereby in style and rules of
grammar, by making for themselves new and various versions of the
fables. Ausonius, 9 the friend of the Emperor Valentinian, and the
latest poet of eminence in the Western Empire, has handed down some
of these fables in verse, which Julianus Titianus, a contemporary
writer of no great name, translated into prose. Avienus, also a
contemporary of Ausonius, put some of these fables into Latin
elegiacs, which are given by Nevelet (in a book we shall refer to
hereafter), and are occasionally incorporated with the editions of
Phaedrus. Seven centuries elapsed before the next notice is found
of the Fables of Aesop. During this long period these fables seem
to have suffered an eclipse, to have disappeared and to have been
forgotten; and it is at the commencement of the fourteenth century,
when the Byzantine emperors were the great patrons of learning, and
amidst the splendors of an Asiatic court, that we next find honors
paid to the name and memory of Aesop. Maximus Planudes, a learned
monk of Constantinople, made a collection of about a hundred and
fifty of these fables. Little is known of his history. Planudes,
however, was no mere recluse, shut up in his monastery. He took an
active part in public affairs. In 1327 A.D. he was sent on a
diplomatic mission to Venice by the Emperor Andronicus the Elder.
This brought him into immediate contact with the Western Patriarch,
whose interests he henceforth advocated with so much zeal as to
bring on him suspicion and persecution from the rulers of the
Eastern Church. Planudes has been exposed to a two-fold accusation.
He is charged on the one hand with having had before him a copy of
Babrias (to whom we shall have occasion to refer at greater length
in the end of this Preface), and to have had the bad taste "to
transpose," or to turn his poetical version into prose: and he is
asserted, on the other hand, never to have seen the Fables of Aesop
at all, but to have himself invented and made the fables which he
palmed off under the name of the famous Greek fabulist. The truth
lies between these two extremes. Planudes may have invented some
few fables, or have inserted some that were current in his day; but
there is an abundance of unanswerable internal evidence to prove
that he had an acquaintance with the veritable fables of Aesop,
although the versions he had access to were probably corrupt, as
contained in the various translations and disquisitional exercises
of the rhetoricians and philosophers. His collection is interesting
and important, not only as the parent source or foundation of the
earlier printed versions of Aesop, but as the direct channel of
attracting to these fables the attention of the learned. The
eventual re-introduction, however, of these Fables of Aesop to
their high place in the general literature of Christendom, is to be
looked for in the West rather than in the East. The calamities
gradually thickening round the Eastern Empire, and the fall of
Constantinople, 1453 A.D. combined with other events to promote the
rapid restoration of learning in Italy; and with that recovery of
learning the revival of an interest in the Fables of Aesop is
closely identified. These fables, indeed, were among the first
writings of an earlier antiquity that attracted attention. They
took their place beside the Holy Scriptures and the ancient classic
authors, in the minds of the great students of that day. Lorenzo
Valla, one of the most famous promoters of Italian learning, not
only translated into Latin the Iliad of Homer and the Histories of
Herodotus and Thucydides, but also the Fables of Aesop. These
fables, again, were among the books brought into an extended
circulation by the agency of the printing press. Bonus Accursius,
as early as 1475-1480, printed the collection of these fables, made
by Planudes, which, within five years afterwards, Caxton translated
into English, and printed at his press in West-minster Abbey, 1485.
10 It must be mentioned also that the learning of this age has left
permanent traces of its influence on these fables, ll by causing
the interpolation with them of some of those amusing stories which
were so frequently introduced into the public discourses of the
great preachers of those days, and of which specimens are yet to be
found in the extant sermons of Jean Raulin, Meffreth, and Gabriel
Barlette. 12 The publication of this era which most probably has
influenced these fables, is the "Liber Facetiarum," l3 a book
consisting of a hundred jests and stories, by the celebrated Poggio
Bracciolini, published A.D. 1471, from which the two fables of the
"Miller, his Son, and the Ass," and the "Fox and the Woodcutter,"
are undoubtedly selected. The knowledge of these fables rapidly
spread from Italy into Germany, and their popularity was increased
by the favor and sanction given to them by the great fathers of the
Reformation, who frequently used them as vehicles for satire and
protest against the tricks and abuses of the Romish ecclesiastics.
The zealous and renowned Camerarius, who took an active part in the
preparation of the Confession of Augsburgh, found time, amidst his
numerous avocations, to prepare a version for the students in the
university of Tubingen, in which he was a professor. Martin Luther
translated twenty of these fables, and was urged by Melancthon to
complete the whole; while Gottfried Arnold, the celebrated Lutheran
theologian, and librarian to Frederick I, king of Prussia, mentions
that the great Reformer valued the Fables of Aesop next after the
Holy Scriptures. In 1546 A.D. the second printed edition of the
collection of the Fables made by Planudes, was issued from the
printing-press of Robert Stephens, in which were inserted some
additional fables from a MS. in the Bibliotheque du Roy at Paris.
The greatest advance, however, towards a re-introduction of the
Fables of Aesop to a place in the literature of the world, was made
in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the year 1610, a
learned Swiss, Isaac Nicholas Nevelet, sent forth the third printed
edition of these fables, in a work entitled "Mythologia Aesopica."
This was a noble effort to do honor to the great fabulist, and was
the most perfect collection of Aesopian fables ever yet published.
It consisted, in addition to the collection of fables given by
Planudes and reprinted in the various earlier editions, of one
hundred and thirty-six new fables (never before published) from
MSS. in the Library of the Vatican, of forty fables attributed to
Aphthonius, and of forty-three from Babrias. It also contained the
Latin versions of the same fables by Phaedrus, Avienus, and other
authors. This volume of Nevelet forms a complete "Corpus Fabularum
Aesopicarum;" and to his labors Aesop owes his restoration to
universal favor as one of the wise moralists and great teachers of
mankind. During the interval of three centuries which has elapsed
since the publication of this volume of Nevelet's, no book, with
the exception of the Holy Scriptures, has had a wider circulation
than Aesop's Fables. They have been translated into the greater
number of the languages both of Europe and of the East, and have
been read, and will be read, for generations, alike by Jew,
Heathen, Mohammedan, and Christian. They are, at the present time,
not only engrafted into the literature of the civilized world, but
are familiar as household words in the common intercourse and daily
conversation of the inhabitants of all countries. This collection
of Nevelet's is the great culminating point in the history of the
revival of the fame and reputation of Aesopian Fables. It is
remarkable, also, as containing in its preface the germ of an idea,
which has been since proved to have been correct by a strange chain
of circumstances. Nevelet intimates an opinion, that a writer named
Babrias would be found to be the veritable author of the existing
form of Aesopian Fables. This intimation has since given rise to a
series of inquiries, the knowledge of which is necessary, in the
present day, to a full understanding of the true position of Aesop
in connection with the writings that bear his name. The history of
Babrias is so strange and interesting, that it might not unfitly be
enumerated among the curiosities of literature. He is generally
supposed to have been a Greek of Asia Minor, of one of the Ionic
Colonies, but the exact period in which he lived and wrote is yet
unsettled. He is placed, by one critic, l4 as far back as the
institution of the Achaian League, B.C. 250; by another as late as
the Emperor Severus, who died A.D. 235; while others make him a
contemporary with Phaedrus in the time of Augustus. At whatever
time he wrote his version of Aesop, by some strange accident it
seems to have entirely disappeared, and to have been lost sight of.
His name is mentioned by Avienus; by Suidas, a celebrated critic,
at the close of the eleventh century, who gives in his lexicon
several isolated verses of his version of the fables; and by John
Tzetzes, a grammarian and poet of Constantinople, who lived during
the latter half of the twelfth century. Nevelet, in the preface to
the volume which we have described, points out that the Fables of
Planudes could not be the work of Aesop, as they contain a
reference in two places to "Holy monks," and give a verse from the
Epistle of St. James as an "Epimith" to one of the fables, and
suggests Babrias as their author. Francis Vavassor, 15 a learned
French jesuit, entered at greater length on this subject, and
produced further proofs from internal evidence, from the use of the
word Piraeus in describing the harbour of Athens, a name which was
not given till two hundred years after Aesop, and from the
introduction of other modern words, that many of these fables must
have been at least committed to writing posterior to the time of
Aesop, and more boldly suggests Babrias as their author or
collector. 16 These various references to Babrias induced Dr.
Plichard Bentley, at the close of the seventeenth century, to
examine more minutely the existing versions of Aesop's Fables, and
he maintained that many of them could, with a slight change of
words, be resolved into the Scazonic l7 iambics, in which Babrias
is known to have written: and, with a greater freedom than the
evidence then justified, he put forth, in behalf of Babrias, a
claim to the exclusive authorship of these fables. Such a seemingly
extravagant theory, thus roundly asserted, excited much opposition.
Dr. Bentley l8 met with an able antagonist in a member of the
University of Oxford, the Hon. Mr. Charles Boyle, 19 afterwards
Earl of Orrery. Their letters and disputations on this subject,
enlivened on both sides with much wit and learning, will ever bear
a conspicuous place in the literary history of the seventeenth
century. The arguments of Dr. Bentley were yet further defended a
few years later by Mr. Thomas Tyrwhitt, a well-read scholar, who
gave up high civil distinctions that he might devote himself the
more unreservedly to literary pursuits. Mr. Tyrwhitt published,
A.D. 1776, a Dissertation on Babrias, and a collection of his
fables in choliambic meter found in a MS. in the Bodleian Library
at Oxford. Francesco de Furia, a learned Italian, contributed
further testimony to the correctness of the supposition that
Babrias had made a veritable collection of fables by printing from
a MS. contained in the Vatican library several fables never before
published. In the year 1844, however, new and unexpected light was
thrown upon this subject. A veritable copy of Babrias was found in
a manner as singular as were the MSS. of Quinctilian's Institutes,
and of Cicero's Orations by Poggio in the monastery of St. Gall
A.D. 1416. M. Menoides, at the suggestion of M. Villemain, Minister
of Public Instruction to King Louis Philippe, had been entrusted
with a commission to search for ancient MSS., and in carrying out
his instructions he found a MS. at the convent of St. Laura, on
Mount Athos, which proved to be a copy of the long suspected and
wished-for choliambic version of Babrias. This MS. was found to be
divided into two books, the one containing a hundred and
twenty-five, and the other ninety-five fables. This discovery
attracted very general attention, not only as confirming, in a
singular manner, the conjectures so boldly made by a long chain of
critics, but as bringing to light valuable literary treasures
tending to establish the reputation, and to confirm the antiquity
and authenticity of the great mass of Aesopian Fable. The Fables
thus recovered were soon published. They found a most worthy editor
in the late distinguished Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and a
translator equally qualified for his task, in the Reverend James
Davies, M.A., sometime a scholar of Lincoln College, Oxford, and
himself a relation of their English editor. Thus, after an eclipse
of many centuries, Babrias shines out as the earliest, and most
reliable collector of veritable Aesopian Fables. The following are
the sources from which the present translation has been prepared:
Babrii Fabulae Aesopeae. George Cornewall Lewis. Oxford, 1846.
Babrii Fabulae Aesopeae. E codice manuscripto partem secundam
edidit. George Cornewall Lewis. London: Parker, 1857. Mythologica
Aesopica. Opera et studia Isaaci Nicholai Neveleti. Frankfort,
1610. Fabulae Aesopiacae, quales ante Planudem ferebantur cura et
studio Francisci de Furia. Lipsiae, 1810. ??????????????. Ex
recognitione Caroli Halmii. Lipsiae, Phaedri Fabulae Esopiae.
Delphin Classics. 1822. GEORGE FYLER TOWNSEND
FOOTNOTES
1 A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, by K. O. Mueller. Vol. i, p. l9l. London, Parker, 1858. 2 Select Fables of Aesop, and other Fabulists. In three books, translated by Robert Dodsley, accompanied with a selection of notes, and an Essay on Fable. Birmingham, 1864. P. 60. 3 Some of these fables had, no doubt, in the first instance, a primary and private interpretation. On the first occasion of their being composed they were intended to refer to some passing event, or to some individual acts of wrong-doing. Thus, the fables of the "Eagle and the Fox" and of the "Fox and Monkey' are supposed to have been written by Archilochus, to avenge the injuries done him by Lycambes. So als...