xviii AESOP'S FABLES 



R. Jochanan ben Saccai, and a number of the Fables trans- 

 lated into Aramaic which are still extant in the Talmud and 

 Midrash. 



In the Roman world the two collections of Demetrius and 

 " Kybises " were brought together by Nicostratus, a rhetor 

 attached to the court of Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier 

 part of the next century (c. 230 a.d.) this corpus of the 

 ancient fable, iEsopic and Libyan, amounting in all to some 

 300 members, was done into Greek verse with Latin 

 accentuation (choliambics) by Valerius Babrius, tutor to 

 the young son of Alexander Severus. Still later, towards 

 the end of the fourth century, forty-two of these, mainly 

 of the Libyan section, were translated into Latin verse 

 by one Avian, with whom the ancient history of the 

 Fable ends. 



In the Middle Ages it was naturally the Latin Phaedrus 

 that represented the iEsopic Fable to the learned world, but 

 Phaedrus in a fuller form than has descended to us in verse. 

 A selection of some eighty fables was turned into indifferent 

 prose in the ninth century, probably at the Schools of 

 Charles the Great. This was attributed to a fictitious 

 Romulus. Another prose collection by Ademar of Cha- 

 bannes was made before 1030, and still preserves some of the 

 lines of the lost F'ables of Phaedrus. The Fables became 

 especially popular among the Normans. A number of them 

 occur on the Bayeux Tapestry, and in the twelfth century 

 England, the head of the Angevin empire, became the home 

 of the Fable, all the important adaptations and versions of 

 i^sop being made in this country. One of these done 

 into Latin verse by Walter the Englishman became the 



