Fabulae (Aesop's Fables in Latin Verse)
Fabulae Aesopiae
The traditional animal fable, retold in polished Latin verse rather than left as prose folklore, can carry pointed social criticism, including criticism of the powerful, under cover of talking wolves and lambs.
- first Latin verse versions of Aesopic fable material
- fables as cover for pointed political and social criticism
- plain, economical style unlike ornate contemporary poetry
- became a standard medieval and Renaissance schoolbook source
Five books of brief verse fables in the tradition of Aesop, composed by a Thracian-born freedman of Augustus who is the first author known to have versified Aesopic fable material into Latin literature, using animal stories, the wolf and the lamb, the frogs asking for a king, to deliver compressed moral and social commentary, often with an edge directed at the abuse of power by the strong against the weak. Phaedrus claims in his prologues that some fables carried veiled criticism of contemporaries that got him into political trouble, and his plain, economical style, closer to prose than to the ornate poetry fashionable under Augustus and Tiberius, went largely unnoticed in his own time before becoming, through medieval and Renaissance schoolbook use, one of the most widely read sources for the fable tradition in the Latin West.
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