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Phaedrus (fabulist)

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Phaedrus, 1745 engraving
Phaedrus, 1745 engraving

Gaius Julius Phaedrus (/ˈfiːdrəs/; Greek: Φαῖδρος; Phaîdros) was a 1st-century CE Roman fabulist and the first versifier of a collection of Aesop's fables into Latin. Few facts are known about him for certain and there was little mention of his work during late antiquity. It was not until the discovery of a few imperfect manuscripts during and following the Renaissance that his importance emerged, both as an author and in the transmission of the fables.

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Greek language

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, and was ruled by emperors. From the accession of Caesar Augustus as the first Roman emperor to the military anarchy of the 3rd century, it was a Principate with Italia as the metropole of its provinces and the city of Rome as its sole capital. The Empire was later ruled by multiple emperors who shared control over the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The city of Rome remained the nominal capital of both parts until AD 476 when the imperial insignia were sent to Constantinople following the capture of the Western capital of Ravenna by the Germanic barbarians. The adoption of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire in AD 380 and the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings conventionally marks the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Because of these events, along with the gradual Hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire, historians distinguish the medieval Roman Empire that remained in the Eastern provinces as the Byzantine Empire.

Late antiquity

Late antiquity

Late antiquity is the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, generally spanning the 3rd–7th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin. The popularization of this periodization in English has generally been credited to historian Peter Brown, after the publication of his seminal work The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate, but Brown proposes a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Generally, it can be thought of as from the end of the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century (235–284) to the early Muslim conquests (622–750), or as roughly contemporary with the Sasanian Empire (224–651). In the West its end was earlier, with the start of the Early Middle Ages typically placed in the 6th century, or earlier on the edges of the Western Roman Empire.

Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.

Biography

A recent statement of the few facts that past scholars have tried to deduce from autobiographical hints given by Phaedrus in his poems has summarised them as follows:

He was born in Macedonia, probably in Pydna, about 15 BCE, came to Rome as a slave and was freed by Augustus. He probably had some teaching function between then and the time of Tiberius, under whom the first book of his poems appeared. Envious competitors interpreted the morals of some fables as being critical of the regime and he was tried by Sejanus, probably at the time of the latter’s fall. In the prologue to his third book, we find Phaedrus pleading with a certain Eutychus to intercede on his behalf. Surviving the turbulent times into old age, possibly under Caligula and Claudius, he produced two more books and died towards the middle of the first century CE.

There is, however, no evidence to support any of this and certain facts conflict with the traditional account. What Phaedrus had to say about himself might as plausibly be reinterpreted to prove that he was born in Rome and spent the whole of his life there as a free citizen.[1]

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Pydna

Pydna

Pydna was a Greek city in ancient Macedon, the most important in Pieria. Modern Pydna is a small town and a former municipality in the northeastern part of Pieria regional unit, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Pydna-Kolindros, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 105.059 km2, the community 41.334 km2. Pydna is situated in fertile land close to the Thermaic Gulf coast. The main village of the former municipality is Kitros. It lies 6 km north of Korinos, 8 km south of Methoni and 13 km northeast of Katerini. Motorway 1 and the Piraeus–Platy railway pass east of the village.

Augustus

Augustus

Caesar Augustus, also known as Octavian, was the first Roman emperor; he reigned from 27 BC until his death in AD 14. He is known for being the founder of the Roman Principate, which is the first phase of the Roman Empire, and is considered one of the greatest leaders in human history. The reign of Augustus initiated an imperial cult as well as an era associated with imperial peace, the Pax Romana or Pax Augusta. The Roman world was largely free from large-scale conflict for more than two centuries despite continuous wars of imperial expansion on the empire's frontiers and the year-long civil war known as the "Year of the Four Emperors" over the imperial succession.

Tiberius

Tiberius

Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was the second Roman emperor. He reigned from AD 14 until 37, succeeding his stepfather, the first Roman emperor Augustus. Tiberius was born in Rome in 42 BC. His father was the politician Tiberius Claudius Nero and his mother was Livia Drusilla, who would eventually divorce his father, and marry the future-emperor Augustus in 38 BC. Following the untimely deaths of Augustus' two grandsons and adopted heirs, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Tiberius was designated Augustus' successor. Prior to this, Tiberius had proved himself an able diplomat, and one of the most successful Roman generals: his conquests of Pannonia, Dalmatia, Raetia, and (temporarily) parts of Germania laid the foundations for the empire's northern frontier.

Sejanus

Sejanus

Lucius Aelius Sejanus, commonly known as Sejanus, was a Roman soldier, friend and confidant of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Of the Equites class by birth, Sejanus rose to power as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, of which he was commander from AD 14 until his execution for treason in AD 31.

Caligula

Caligula

Caligula, formally known as Gaius, was the third Roman emperor, ruling from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41. He was the son of the Roman general Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, Augustus' granddaughter. Caligula was born into the first ruling family of the Roman Empire, conventionally known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Claudius

Claudius

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the fourth Roman emperor, ruling from AD 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Claudius was born to Drusus and Antonia Minor at Lugdunum in Roman Gaul, where his father was stationed as a military legate. He was the first Roman emperor to be born outside Italy. Nonetheless, Claudius was an Italian of Sabine origins.

Work

Phaedrus is now recognized as the first writer to compile entire books of fables in Latin, retelling the Aesopic tales in senarii, a loose iambic metre.[2] The dates of composition and publication are unknown. However, Seneca the Younger, writing between 41 and 43 CE, recommended in a letter to Claudius' freedman Polybius that he turn his hand to Latinising Aesop, 'a task hitherto not attempted by Roman genius' (Ad Polybium 8.3). This suggests that nothing was known of Phaedrus' work at that date. By the mid-80s Martial was imitating him and mentions his mischievous humour (improbi jocos Phaedri). The next reference is a homage by his fellow fabulist Avianus near the start of the 5th century, who claims the five books of fables as one of his sources in the dedication of his own work.[3]

A 9th century manuscript of the fables of Phaedrus was only discovered in France towards the end of the 16th century. This was published in 1596 by Pierre Pithou as Fabularum Aesopiarum libri quinque and was followed by two more editions before century's end. Near the beginning of the 18th century, a manuscript of the 15th-century bishop Niccolò Perotti was discovered at Parma containing sixty-four fables of Phaedrus, of which some thirty were previously unknown. These new fables were first published in 1808, and their versions were afterwards superseded by the discovery of a much better preserved manuscript of Perotti in the Vatican Library, published in 1831. Scholars realised that Phaedrus' work had also served as the basis for Mediaeval fable collections that went by the name of Romulus and at the start of the 20th century the Swedish scholar Carl Magnus Zander (1845–1923) reconstructed 30 additional fables from their prose recensions there.[4]

What had survived of Phaedrus' five books in Pithou's manuscript was of unequal length and seemed to indicate that material has been lost. This was supported by the apology in the prologue to the first book for including talking trees, of which there are no examples in the text that survives although there was one in the Perotti appendix. In fact only 59 out of 94 in the Pithou manuscript were even animal fables. The author's aim at the start was to follow Aesop in creating a work that "moves one to mirth and warns with wise advice".[5] As the work progressed, however, he widened his focus and now claimed to be "refining" Aesopic material and even adding to it. In later books we find tales of Roman events well after the time of Aesop such as "Tiberius and the slave" (II.5) and "Augustus and the accused wife" (III.9), as well as the poet's personal reply to envious detractors (IV.21); there are also anecdotes in which Aesop figures from the later biographical tradition (II.3; III.3; IV.5; and items 9 and 20 in Perotti's appendix). Finally he makes a distinction between matter and manner in the epilogue to the fifth book, commenting that

I write in Esop’s style, not in his name,
And for the most part I the subject claim.
Tho' some brief portion Esop might indite,
The more I from my own invention write,
The style is ancient but the matter’s new.[6]

He also claims a place in the Latin literary tradition by echoing well-known and respected writers. It is to be noticed, however, that where Phaedrus and the slightly earlier poet Horace adapted the same fable to satirical themes, they often used different versions of it. In Horace a crow (cornicula) is the subject of The Bird in Borrowed Feathers; in Phaedrus it is a jackdaw (graculus). In the case of The Horse that Lost its Liberty, Phaedrus has it disputing with a boar and Horace with a stag. Neither do they agree in their account of The Frog and the Ox. Horace follows the story found in Greek sources; the frog's motivation is different in Phaedrus, and it is his version that Martial follows later.[7] Moreover, in following the model of Aesop, the enfranchised slave, Phaedrus' satire is sharper and restores "the ancient function of the fable as a popular expression against the dominant classes".[8] Another commentator points out that "the Aesopian fable has been a political creature from its earliest origins, and Phaedrus, (who was La Fontaine's model), though more openly subversive, has claims to be the first proletarian satiric poet".[9]

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Iamb (poetry)

Iamb (poetry)

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable. This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Thus a Latin word like íbī, because of its short-long rhythm, is considered by Latin scholars to be an iamb, but because it has a stress on the first syllable, in modern linguistics it is considered to be a trochee.

Seneca the Younger

Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and, in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.

Polybius (freedman)

Polybius (freedman)

Gaius Julius Polybius was a freedman of Emperor Claudius who was elevated to the secretariat during his reign. He assisted Claudius in his literary, judicial and historical pursuits as a researcher before the emperor's accession and this became Polybius' official role in the imperial bureaucracy, with the title a studiis. Suetonius, the biographer and secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, claims that Claudius was so appreciative of his help that Polybius was allowed to walk between the consuls when on official business.

Martial

Martial

Marcus Valerius Martialis was a Roman poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.

Avianus

Avianus

Avianus a Latin writer of fables, identified as a pagan.

Pierre Pithou

Pierre Pithou

Pierre Pithou was a French lawyer and scholar. He is also known as Petrus Pithoeus.

Niccolò Perotti

Niccolò Perotti

Niccolò Perotti, also Perotto or Nicolaus Perottus was an Italian humanist and the author of one of the first modern Latin school grammars.

Parma

Parma

Parma is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, music, art, prosciutto (ham), cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,292 inhabitants, Parma is the second most populous city in Emilia-Romagna after Bologna, the region's capital. The city is home to the University of Parma, one of the oldest universities in the world. Parma is divided into two parts by the stream of the same name. The district on the far side of the river is Oltretorrente. Parma's Etruscan name was adapted by Romans to describe the round shield called Parma.

Romulus (fabulist)

Romulus (fabulist)

Romulus is the author, now considered a legendary figure, of versions of Aesop's Fables in Latin. These were passed down in Western Europe, and became important school texts, for early education. Romulus is supposed to have lived in the 5th century.

Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."

The Bird in Borrowed Feathers

The Bird in Borrowed Feathers

The Bird in Borrowed Feathers is a fable of Classical Greek origin usually ascribed to Aesop. It has existed in numerous different versions between that time and the Middle Ages, going by various titles and generally involving members of the corvid family. The lesson to be learned from it has also varied, depending on the context in which it was told. Several idioms derive from the fable.

Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.

Editions

The fables of Phaedrus soon began to be published as school editions, both in the original Latin and in prose translation.[10][11] Since the 18th century there have also been four complete translations into English verse. The first was by Christopher Smart into octosyllabic couplets (London 1753).[12] Brooke Boothby's "The Esopean Fables of Phedrus" were included in his Fables and Satires (Edinburgh, 1809)[13] and also used octosyllables but in a more condensed manner:

What Esop taught his beasts in Greek,
Phedrus in Latin made them speak:
In English, I from him translate,
And his brief manner imitate.[14]

It was followed by the Reverend Frederick Toller's A poetical version of the fables of Phædrus (London, 1854).[15] These were translated more diffusely into irregular verses of five metrical feet and each fable was followed by a prose commentary. The most recent translation by P. F. Widdows also includes the fables in the Perotti appendix and all are rendered into a free version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.[16]

Phaedrus versions were translated individually by a variety of other poets into different languages. A small selection in various poetic forms appeared in the Poems & Translations (London 1769) of Ashley Cowper (1701–88).[17] There were many more poems distinctively styled in La Fontaine's Fables; others followed by Ivan Krylov in Russian; Gregory Skovoroda and Leonid Hlibov in Ukrainian; and a more complete collection by Volodymyr Lytvynov in 1986.[18]

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Christopher Smart

Christopher Smart

Christopher Smart was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.

Octosyllable

Octosyllable

The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a line of verse with eight syllables. It is equivalent to tetrameter verse in trochees in languages with a stress accent. Its first occurrence is in a 10th-century Old French saint's legend, the Vie de Saint Leger; another early use is in the early 12th-century Anglo-Norman Voyage de saint Brendan. It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry. While commonly used in couplets, typical stanzas using octosyllables are: décima, some quatrains, redondilla.

Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet

Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet

Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet was a British linguist, translator, poet and landowner, based in Derbyshire, England. He was part of the intellectual and literary circle of Lichfield, which included Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin. In 1766 he welcomed the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ashbourne circles, after Rousseau's short stay in London with Hume. Ten years later, in 1776, Boothby visited Rousseau in Paris, and was given the manuscript of the first part of Rousseau's three-part autobiographic Confessions. Boothby translated the manuscript and published it in Lichfield in 1780 after the author's death, and donated the document to the British Library in 1781.

Foot (prosody)

Foot (prosody)

The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.

Alliterative verse

Alliterative verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principle ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.

La Fontaine's Fables

La Fontaine's Fables

Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered classics of French literature. Humorous, nuanced and ironical, they were originally aimed at adults but then entered the educational system and were required learning for school children.

Ivan Krylov

Ivan Krylov

Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best-known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent.

Leonid Hlibov

Leonid Hlibov

Leonid Ivanovych Hlibov was a Ukrainian poet, writer, teacher, and civic figure.

Source: "Phaedrus (fabulist)", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 14th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(fabulist).

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Further Reading

Aesop's Fables

The Frog and the Ox

Belling the Cat

The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian

Aesop

The Mountain in Labour

Gabriele Faerno

The Trees and the Bramble

The Elm and the Vine

The Old Woman and the Wine-jar

The Dog and the Sheep

The Bald Man and the Fly
References
  1. ^ Edward Champlin (2005), pp. 97–117
  2. ^ Charles Anthon, A Classical Dictionary, New York 1845, p.1022
  3. ^ Michael von Albrecht, A History of Roman Literature, Brill 1996, pp.1002-6
  4. ^ Hanna Vámos, "The Mediaeval Tradition of the Fables of Romulus", Graeco-Latina Brunensia 18.1, 2013, pp.185-6
  5. ^ Text online
  6. ^ Frederick Toller's translation (see below), p.217
  7. ^ Champlin 2005, pp.117-18
  8. ^ Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable Brill 2000, II, p.173
  9. ^ Anne Becher, “Phaedrus, a new found yet ancient author”, Paradigm 23 (July, 1997)
  10. ^ Æsops fables, with the fables of Phaedrus moralized, London 1646
  11. ^ The Fables of Phaedrus translated into English prose, London 1745
  12. ^ Gutenberg
  13. ^ Google Books
  14. ^ "Prologue", p.3
  15. ^ Google Books
  16. ^ The Fables of Phaedrus, University of Texas 1992
  17. ^ pp.83-112
  18. ^ Osnovy Publishing
Further reading
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