Chapter 10 PH DRUS AND BABRIUS.

'United, yet divided, twain at once-

sit two kings of Fable on one throne.'

Cowper: The Task (altered).

Ph?drus, who wrote the fables of ?sop in Latin iambics, and added others of his own, was born at the very source of poetic inspiration, on Mount Pierius, near to the Pierian spring, the seat of the Muses, in Thrace, at that time a portion of the Roman province of Macedonia, and of which Octavius, the father of Augustus C?sar, was Proconsul, during the last century before the Christian era. Like ?sop, he too was a slave in early youth, but being taken to Rome, he was manumitted by Augustus, and occupied a place in the household of that Emperor. Here he acquired the pure Latinity of his style, and in later years wrote the well-known fables in the collection that bears his name. His fables are in five books, and were published during the reign of Tiberius and subsequent emperors.

In the prologue to his third book, addressed to Eutychus,[38] he thus alludes to his birthplace, and disavows all mercenary aims in his literary pursuits:

'Me-whom a Grecian mother bore

On Hill Pierian, where of yore

Mnemosyne in love divine

Brought forth to Jove the tuneful Nine.

Though sprung where genius reigned with art,

I grubb'd up av'rice from my heart,

And rather for applause than pay,

Embrace the literary way-

Yet as a writer and a wit,

With some abatements they admit.

What is his case then, do you think,

Who toils for wealth nor sleeps a wink,

Preferring to the pleasing pain

Of composition, sordid gain?

But hap what will (as Sinon said

When to King Priam he was led),

I book the third shall now fulfil,

With ?sop for my master still,

Which book I dedicate to you

As both to worth and honour due.

Pleased, if you read; if not, content,

As conscious of a sure event,

That these my fables shall remain,

And after-ages entertain.'[39]

His object, as he declares, was to expose vice and folly; in pursuing it he did not escape persecution, for Sejanus, the arbitrary minister of Tiberius (who had now succeeded to the imperial purple), took mortal offence at certain of the apologues which he suspected applied to himself, and, 'informer, witness, judge and all,' laid the iron hand of power heavy upon the fabulist. Ph?drus, whose early years of slavery had left no taint of servility upon his character, was too independent to stoop to insolent power, and resented the treatment to which he was subjected. Thus beset, and probably largely owing to this cause, his last years were spent in poverty. Amidst the infirmities of age he compares himself to the old hound in his last apologue, which being chastised by his master for his feebleness in allowing the boar to escape, replied, 'Spare your old servant! It was the power, not the will, that failed me. Remember rather what I was than abuse me for what I am.' A lesson which even at the present day may sometimes find its application. Ph?drus prophesied his own immortality as an author, and his boast was that whilst ?sop invented, he (Ph?drus) perfected.

Babrius,[40] a Latin, did for the ?sopian fable, in Greek choliambics, what Ph?drus, a Greek, accomplished for them in Latin iambics. He is believed to have lived in the third century A.D., and to have composed his fables in his quality of tutor to Branchus, the young son of the Emperor Alexander Severus.[41] His collection of ?sopian fables in two books was known to ancient writers, who refer to him and quote his apologues, but, like other literary treasures, it was lost during the Middle Ages. Early in the seventeenth century, Isaac Nicholas Neveletus, a Swiss, published (1610) an edition of the fables of ?sop, containing not only those embraced in the work of Planudes, but additional fables from MSS. in the Vatican Library, and some from Aphthonius and Babrius. He further expressed the opinion that the latter was the earliest collector and writer of the ?sopian fables in Greek. Francis Vavassor, a French Jesuit, followed with comments on Babrius on the same lines; so also another Frenchman, Bayle, in his 'Dictionnaire Historique'; Thomas Tyrwhitt and Dr. Bentley in England, and Francisco de Furia in Italy, also espoused the idea first suggested by Neveletus, and adduced further proofs in support of it. Singularly enough, the accuracy of the forecast of these scholars was established by the discovery in 1840, by M. Minoides Menas, a Greek, at the Convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos, of a veritable copy of Babrius in Greek choliambic verse. The transcript of Menas was first published in Paris in 1844. The first English edition was edited by Sir George Cornewall Lewis in the original Greek text, with Latin notes, and afterwards (1860) translated into English by the Rev. James Davies, M.A., and they now form the most trustworthy version of the ?sopian fables.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] 'The Charioteer of Caligula,' Bücheler.

[39] From the translation of the fables of Ph?drus into English verse by Christopher Smart, A.M.

[40] Sometimes spelt 'Gabrias.'

[41] Jacobs: 'History of the ?sopic Fable,' p. 22.

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