3 .•Fab! 3 of ] as . . ion Ellis ^ / 'jfi m THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE FABLES OF PHAEDRUS iln Jnauguraf Bcctun BY ROBINSON ELLIS, M.A. CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN LITERATURE Bonfcon HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C. OXFORD: 116 HIGH STREET Price One Shilling net THE FABLES OF PHAEDRUS cHn j(ttAU3utra( > Btctutt BY ROBINSON ELLIS, M.A. CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN LITERATURE Bonbon HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C. OXFORD: 116 HIGH STREET HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY ON PHAEDRUS' FABLES PHAEDRUS, for such seems to have been his name rather than Phaeder, a somewhat rare by-form found in Inscriptions and the palimpsest of Fronto, was born, as he himself tells us, in the mountainous district of the Thracian or Macedonian Pieria. In the prologue to the third book of the Fables which is headed in the earliest MS. Phaedrns ad EutycJuim, he speaks of himself thus : Ego quern Pierio mater enixa est iugo In quo tonanti sancta Mnemosyne Ioui Fecunda nouies artium peperit chorum : and he goes on to explain that his words are meant literally T and cannot be interpreted merely of his being brought up from boyhood in scholastic and literary pur- suits in vv. 52-59 of the same Prologus : Si Phryx Aesopus potuit, si Anacharsis Scytha Aeternam farnam condere ingenio suo : Ego, litteratae qui sum propior Graeciae, Cur somno inerti deseram patriae decus ? Threissa cum gens numeret auctores suos, Linoque Apollo sit parens, Musa Orpheo, Qui saxa cantu mouit et domuit feras Hebrique tenuit impetus dulci mora. At what time he removed to Italy is not known ; but it must have been there that he read, still a boy, as he himself tells us, the verse of Ennius Palam imittire plebeio piaadum est (iii. Epilog. 34). In the two tenth-century MSS. which have preserved his Fables, Phaedrus is called 1 As Ludwig Schwabe proves against Wolfflin (Rh. Mas. xxxix. p. 476). 5W006 Aiigusti libertus. As there is no reason to question the authenticity of this statement, it would seem that he became a slave in the household of Octavianus and was subsequently manumitted, possibly, as Lucian Miiller suggests, for his dextrous manners or literary accomplish- ments. It was probably in the reign of Tiberius that he pub- lished his first two books of fables. I should suppose that Book i. was published by itself ; then Book ii., as in the former Phaedrus restricts himself to purely Aesopian fables or stories of Greek origin 1 (i. 14; i. 18), in the latter introduces stories from his own time, e. g. the story of Tiberius and the Busybody 2 (ii. 5). He apologizes for doing so in the Prologue to Book ii. ' For my self,' he says, ' I shall observe with all possible care the practice of Aesop : still if the humour seizes me to introduce some- thing of my own, just to give variety, I could wish my reader to take it in good part ' {bonus in partes, lector, accipias nelim). It was after the publication of Book ii. that Phaedrus was attacked by Sejanus. Various fables have been singled out as the cause of this prosecution. The passage in which Phaedrus mentions it (iii. Prolog. 38-44)— Ego porro illius semitam feci uiam, Et cogitaui plura quam reliquerat, In calamitatem deligens quaedam me'am. Quodsi accusator alius Seiano foret, Si testis alius, iudex alius denique, Dignum faterer esse me tantis malis, Nee his dolorem delenirem remediis — 1 Ribbeck, Geschichte der Romischen Dichtutig, iii. p. 26. Otto Crusius (Rh. Mm. xxxix. p. 603) shows that several of these stories (e.g. Aesopus et Rusticus Phaed. iii. 3 = Pseudo-Plutarch Conuiuium vii Sapientum 3, Ph. iii. 8 Frater et 6V»w=riut. Coniug. Praecept. 25, Ph. i. 18 Mulier parturiens = Plut. Coniug. Praecept. 39) are also found in Plutarch or in writings attributed to him. Crusius concludes that both writers drew from a common source, possibly the collection of Demetrius Phalereus. See also Rutherford, Babrius, Introd. p. xi. 2 Even if we had not the express statement of Phaedrus that the second book differed from the first, the self-completeness of Book i. would be sufficient reason for publishing it by itself. cannot be said to determine much. Yet the words which immediately follow — Suspitione si quis errabit sua Et rapiet ad se quod erit commune omnium, Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam. Huic excusatum me uelim nihilo minus. Neque enim notare singulos mens est mihi, Verum ipsam uitam et mores hominum ostendere — seem to me not obscurely to indicate that some of the fables were thought to reflect on individuals. Such a per- sonal allusion has been traced by the Pere Desbillons in the fable of the Frogs protesting against the marriage of the Sun (i. 6). There the Frogs finding their pool dried up by the sun's heat, and alarmed by the rumour that the Sun is thinking of marriage, set up a loud croaking. Jupiter inquires the reason, and is told : ' if one Sun can dry up our pool and kill us for want of water, what will he do if he breeds a family ? ' What is this but a trans- parent satire on the intended marriage and actual adultery of Sejanus with Livilla, the sister of Germanicus and wife of Tiberius' son Drusus ? The Sun is of course Sejanus : Jupiter, the Emperor Tiberius : the frogs are the Roman nobles, the object of Sejanus' unremitting attacks. Or again, it might seem that the story of Tiberius' atriensis (ii. 5) was too distinct a reflexion on the Sacred House- hold. Whatever the reason, the freedman of Augustus was accused by the favourite of Tiberius, no doubt of maiestas, and, as we may perhaps infer from the words Nee his dolorem delenirem remediis, condemned, though we have no intimation as to the form of his punishment. To alleviate his distress, Phaedrus wrote his third book of Fables, and addressed it to Eutychus, who has been identified with a freedman of Caligula *, or of Claudius, 1 Bucheler, Rh. Mils, xxxvii. pp. 333 sqq. identifies this Eutychus to whom Book iii. is addressed with the charioteer of Caligula. He was high in favour, and on one occasion received from Caligula at a banquet a gift of 2,000,000 sesterces. He seems to have been employed in building Caligula's stables (Joseph. Antiq. xix. 4, 4). Perhaps identical with the Eutychus who accused A3 but of whom we do not know certainly that he was a freedman at all. In this book Phaedrus generally keeps to Aesopian fables : in one case only he has introduced a story of his own time, in order, as he tells us, that the fables of antiquity may escape disparagement. The Epilogue to this book has been displaced in the MSS., and transferred to the end of Book iv. At least such was. the opinion of Brotier and it is accepted by L. Miiller. That Brotier was right is probable (i) from the Epilogue agreeing with the Prologue in describing Phaedrus' friend as immersed in business and with difficulty snatching an hour to read the fables, (2) from the allusion, common to both, of the danger in which the poet was placed, and from which he begs his friend to rescue him without delay. The fourth book is dedicated to Particulo, who is de- scribed as delighting in fables, and so much an admirer of Phaedrus' literary gift as to transcribe his fables with his own hand. In this book there is an increasing ten- dency to introduce stories or myths instead of fables ; in three instances these are Greek ; no. 5 is the story of the Athenian whose will was disputed, 22 of the shipwrecked Simonides, 26 of Simonides' escape from a house falling in ruins, through the intervention of the Dioscuri ; one is an apologue of Phaedrus' own invention, and is explained by himself: it is no. 11, the Thief and the Lamp, an imaginary legend or ainov to account for the fact which we should hardly have known otherwise, that it was unlawful to light a lamp from a sacrificial flame, or to use a lamp for lighting an altar-fire. Book v. contains only ten fables. Of these the first is a story of Demetrius Phalereus and the poet Menander, and is obviously drawn from Greek sources ; the seventh, Princeps tibicen, the flute-player Princeps \ is a story Agrippa to Tiberius {Antiq. xviii. 6, 5). Biicheler thinks that Phaedrus sent Book iii. to Eutychus about 40 a. d. 1 An inscription is extant in which Princeps seems to be mentioned : — L. Mini tibicinis \ Cassia uxor j L. Cassi Principis \ cappae. See Biicheler in A'/i. J\Ins. xxxvii. p. 332. of Augustan Rome; the fifth, Scurra et Rusticus or the Mimic and the Country Clown, might be a Greek, but is perhaps more likely to be a Roman story ; the eighth, Tcmpus, is an allegorical description of Time as Caluus, comosa fronte, nudo occipitio, Quern si occuparis, teneas : elapsum semel Non ipse possit Iuppiter reprenrlere. This book seems to have been dedicated to one Philctus, as the last verse in it shows — Hoc cur, Philete, scripserim, pulchre vides. (where P gives fill te, R fill de). Ribbeck 1 thinks that Phaedrus alludes in this fable to his own old age (v. 10). It is not known at what time Phaedrus died. But the fact that he speaks of his fables as likely to immortalize Particulo, to whom Book iv. is dedicated, is enough to prove that they had won him fame before his death. It is however remarkable that he is ignored by Seneca, who speaks of Aesopian tales as a work unattempted by Roman genius {Aesopios logos intemptatnm Romanis ingeniis opus 2 ). Quintilian is equally silent : nor is any verse from the Fables quoted by Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, or the Grammarians. Even Priscian in a passage 3 , cited by Pithou, the first editor of Phaedrus, in a passage expressly treating of Aesop and the literature of fables, mentions Hesiod, Archilochus, Plautus, Horace, as using them, but has not a word for Phaedrus. In this respect he only shared the fate of several other writers, e.g. Q. Curtius and Manilius. The one inscription 4 in which a line is quoted from him, iii. 17, 12 : Nisi utile est quod facimus, stulta est gloria 1 Geschichte der Rom. Dichtung, iii. p. 27. 2 Consol. ad Polyb. xxvii. 3 Prise. Praeexercitament. I ; vol. ii. ed. Hertz, p. 430. 4 Hervienx, i. p. 142. The inscription, on a stone discovered at Wissemburg in Transylvania by Stephen Zamoyski, was published by him at Padua in 1593 in his Analecta lapidum uetustorum et aliariun in Dacia antiquitatuni, and subsequently in Gruter's Collection, p. 898, no. 16. C. I. L. iii. 58*. 8 is not considered genuine by Mommsen. Martial seems to mean our fabulist, Epigr. iii. 20, 5 : — An aemulatur improbi ' iocos Phaedri ? Prudentius has borrowed the greater part of one of his lines Cathemer. vii. 1 15 : — Alui capacis uiuus hanritur specu 2 . Lastly Avianus, in the Preface to his own elegiac fables, combines Phaedrus with Babrius, and tells us that while Babrius confined his work to two books, Phaedrus expanded his into five. The expression of Avianus Phaedrus partem aliqtiam (fabitlaritm) quinque in libellos resoluit is noticeable. Expan- sion is not the idea which our existing five books convey. On the contrary the shortness of the second and fifth books is remarkable, and even if they equalled in length the other three, they would not be long. The total number of fables in Lucian Miiller's edition amounts to xxxi-f- viii + xix + xxvi 4- x = 94, a sum which as compared with the number of Greek fables in Halm's collection does not reach to one-fourth of the whole. We are therefore prepared in advance to expect that the Fables have not come down to us in their original state. Examination proves that it is so. In the Prologue to Book i. Phaedrus deprecates indignation Quod arbores loquantur, non tantum ferae, whereas no tree is introduced in the fables which now form that book. Again at the beginning of Book iv. Phaedrus tells us he had determined to conclude his fables with the third book, in order that he might leave materials for other fabulists. 1 I would explain i?nprobi, which at first sight is surprising, of fables such as i. 29, iii. 1, iii. 3, iv. 16, iv. 19 ; there were, no doubt, others in the lost portions of the collection. Martial has several direct imitations of Phaedrus, e.g. xi. 69, 9 Fulminco sptimantis apri sum dente perempla, cf. Phaedr. i. 21, 5 Aper fulmincis ad eu»i uenit dcntibus ; Mart. vii. 44, 7 Si victura meis mandantur nomina chartis, cf. Phaedr. iv. Epil. Particulo chartis nomen uicturum meis Hervieux i. p. 166). 2 Phaedr. iv. 6, 10 Capacis alui mersit Tartareo specu. Could he have said so if the fifty-eight fables which now represent the first three books, were all they originally con- tained ? It seems impossible in face of the large number of extant Greek fables, even if some of these were invented later. Moreover, the frequency with which the regular series of the fables in this book is interrupted by sudden interpositions of the writer's personality — indicated in the MSS. by the repeated Poeta, PJiaednts, Phaedrus, Poeta — seems to me to point to an originally larger total, sections of which were perhaps marked off from the rest, by the poet thus re-presenting himself personally '. I say nothing here of the thirty-one Perottine fables, first published by Jannelli at the beginning of this century, because they are not certainly by Phaedrus, though much in his manner. If the five books of Fables which we now have are not in the same condition in which they were read by Avianus, when did this abridgment or mutilation begin? We can only answer vaguely : it must fall between the fourth century, in which Avianus wrote, and the ninth or early tenth, in which the most ancient MS. of Phaedrus, the Pithoeanas, was written. But as Avianus must have read the fables in the verse form in which they were written, i.e. with the intervals between each line marked, whereas in the Pithoeamis they are written with no such distinction and look like prose, we must suppose a considerable period to have elapsed in which (i) the above-mentioned abridgment or mutilation took place, (2) the iambics of the poet were 1 This question is of course quite distinct from that of lacunae in particular parts of the archetype as transmitted in PR, e. g. in Book iv. The three lines which precede the thirteenth fable Vtilius homini nihil est quam recte loqiti. Probanda cunctis est quidem sententia, Sed ad pernicicm solet agi sinceritas do not agree with the story of the Lion feigning righteousness and then returning to his old nature, which immediately follows them in PR, but to a lost fable perhaps, as L. Miiiler thinks, Romul. iv. 8. The lacunose condition of both MSS. at this part of Book iv. is best discernible by a glance at Berger de Xivrey's facsimile of the page (the seventieth) in the codex Pithoeanus. The first line is Postquam lanare cepit fenitentia, which is followed, without any break, by the two verses, obviously of a perfectly distinct fable, A fictione u. I. m., Adfinitatem traxit i. o. IO no longer distinguished as verse, but written continuously as prose. Such a barbarous transformation can hardly have happened in the Carlovingian period, which was an age of learned revival, and, speaking comparatively, of illumination. But it does not follow that it belongs to the Merovingian. It seems possible that the abridgment, if any abridgment was made, may have been executed in the fifth or sixth century, and that the gradually declining knowledge of ancient language and metre, which the un- settled state of Europe produced, caused the iambics of Phaedrus to be written in prose. As prose they were probably read by the Carlovingian scholars: they did not introduce the transformation, but handed it on as it had come to them from an age of illiteracy. It must be left to the researches of a Traube or a Manitius, to state positively whether the fables in their iambic form were known to any writer of the Middle Age. At one time I believed that Rather, Bishop of Verona in the latter part of the tenth century, quoted the first fable. His words are Fluuiiis cnim malignae operationis illorum ab eis ad vie decurrit, which might be taken direct from Phaedrus, i. I, 8, A te decurrit ad meos haustas liquor. But the words ad me decurrit, are found also in Romulus and several others of the prose paraphrases 1 brought together by the laborious researches of Hervieux ; and from one of these Rather may well have derived his knowledge of the Fable. Yet there is nothing outrageous in supposing that the learned prelate, who, as we know from his Sermon on Martha and Mary, had read Catullus and Plautus at Verona, and who frequently cites other classical poets, may also have had access to a MS. of the fables, similar to Pithou's or to the Remcnsis. 1 Of these prose versions the oldest yet known is contained in a MS. of the eleventh century, written in the Abbey of S. Martial de Limoges, seemingly by the chronicler Ademar de Chabanais, a monk of the Abbey who died in Palestine after 1030. See Hervieux, Fabulistes Latins, ii. 121-145, Gaston Paris in his Review of Ucrvizwx, Journal des Savants, 1KS4-5. Hervieux has also pub- lished a resume of his researches in his Notice Historique ct Critique snr les fables Latines de Phidre et de ses anciens imitateurs, Paris, Didot, 1 S84. 1 1 So far however as research has yet been carried, it is through the prose paraphrases mainly, if not alone, that Phaedrus was known throughout the Middle Age. The investigations of Hervieux, who has made this part of the question the special object of a minute and prolonged study, have so widely extended our knowledge of this prose fable literature, as to require a separate treatment, which cannot be included in the present lecture. It is enough to say here, that no one who thinks to restore the text of Phaedrus, often very much corrupted, can dispense with Hervieux' elaborate and unique volume, which forms the second part of his work PJiedre et ses anciens imitatenrs. The fact, if it is one, that the name of our fabulist was as unknown as were his verses from the time of Avianus to the fifteenth century, is the more remarkable because among the five MSS. which have been discovered of the fables, two, the Pithocanns and Remcnsis, were written in the ninth or at latest tenth century, one, the Codex of Daniel, containing only a few fables, in the eleventh ; the other two, the Perot tine codex and its duplicate the Vati- canns, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is quite as remarkable that though Perotti, Archbishop of Siponto, not only knew of the existence of Phaedrus, but transcribed many of his fables with his own hand in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first printed edition was not given to the world till the very end of the sixteenth, in September of the year 1596. The editor 1 of this editio princeps of Phaedrus was a man of no little celebrity in the religious and literary history of that time. Pierre Pithou was born at Troyes, on Nov. 1, 1539. His father, himself a distinguished avocat in that city, chose the same profession for his son, and sent him to be trained by Cujas, the great jurist and friend of Scaliger, at Bourges and Valence. He began pleading at Paris in 1564, but retired in 1567 to Troyes, hoping to succeed better in a provincial town, where his want of words and 1 See Hervieux, i. pp. 35 sqq. A4 12 readiness would stand less in his way. But he had been trained a Protestant, and the Catholic party, which was the stronger, would not allow him to appear at the bar. He re- tired to Basel in Switzerland, and remained there till 157°- Returning to Paris he published his edition of forty-two Nouellae of the Emperors Theodosius the younger, Valen- tinian, and Anthemius, and dedicated it to Cujas. Shortly after this he visited England in the suite of the Due de Montmorenci, who had been sent on an extraordinary mis- sion to Queen Elizabeth. After a brief stay of two months, he returned to France. He was in Paris during the St. Bartholomew massacre, and barely escaped assassination. Later he became a Catholic and lived on terms of intimacy with both parties. The high estimation in which he was held is shown by his being selected in 1581, to reply to the letter in which Pope Gregory XIII had complained of the Ordonnance of Blois, as contravening the decrees of the Council of Trent ; and by his appointment as Procureur- General to the temporary Court of Justice which Henri IV established in 1594. In this office his chief task was that of a pacificator ; a congenial function which he seems to have discharged with success. During the legal vacation of 1595 (I am here translating from Grosley's biography), which following his usual custom Pithou spent at Troyes, his brother, Francois, had given him a unique copy of the Fables of Phacdrus, which up to that time had escaped the researches of antiquarians ; the very existence of the work was hardly suspected. Pithou had already transcribed them and given them to his pub- lisher Patisson, when the plague broke out in Paris and obliged him to retire with his family to Troyes. He with- drew the work from Patisson and published it at Troye-;. It is a little volume in duodecimo, containing seventy pages. The title-page has these words Phacdri Aug. liberti Fabidarum Aesopiantm libri V, nunc primum in lucem editi. Augustobonae Tricassium excudebat Io. Odotius, typograpluis regins Anno CID. ID. XCVI. cum priuilegio. 13 In a short prefatory letter, addressed to his brother Fran- cois, Pithou says : ' to you Phaedrus owes his existence, since, when he had almost been buried by the injury of time, thanks to the copy discovered by you, I have endeavoured to bring him back to life.' The book is now rare : Hervieux knew of only eleven copies, one of which is in the Bodleian. I have found it of great utility for restoring the text of the fables by the closeness with which it reproduces the MS. Pithou only survived the publication of his Phaedrus by two months. It is disappointing that we do not know certainly where Francois found the MS. The only indica- tion of its provenance is supplied by a note at the end of Pithou's edition ' uet. ex. Cat.' Orelli supposed, not improbably, that this means ' uetus exemplar Catalaunense (Chalons-sur-Marne) or Catuacense (Douai). The hypo- thesis of Adry that it came from the Abbey of S. Benoit- sur-Loire has been shown by Hervieux to be wrong. The MS. shortly after Pithou's death was re-collated by Rigault for his edition of 1599 l , and by Bongars 2 , Henri IV's minister plenipotentiary in Germany and intimately connected with Pierre and Francois Pithou. Bongars' collation is now in the library of Bern. That he made it very carefully and was fully aware of the MS.'s unique importance is shown by his note at the end of the last Fable ' Seq. in v. c. libellus de uariis monstris ac portentis ex fabulis Graecorum et al. 3 '. The MS. passed eventually into the family of Le Pelletier. In 1780, M. Le Pelletier de Rosambo seems to have allowed Brotier to examine it. During the French Revolution it lay perdu, and for some time was not known to be in existence. It was however still in the possession of the Le Pelletiers, and in 1830, its then owner, the Vicomte de Rosambo, allowed M. Berger de Xivrey to re-edit it, 1 Second edition 1617, 3rd 1630. 2 Jacques de Bongars, born at Orleans 1546, died at Strasburg 161 2. 3 Hervieux, i. p. 47. A5 14 with a full description, facsimiles, and a new and very- careful collation. The work of M. Berger dc Xivrey, an octavo of 268 pages, was limited to 200 copies and is very- difficult to procure. I have not been able to find it in the Bodleian or in the British Museum. In these exacting days of palaeographical minutiae, it is more than probable that many scholars will ask to have the MS., or at least some portion of it, photographed. I believe that this natural wish is likely to be, at least in part, gratified. It would be a real boon to philologers should M. Chatelain include it in his invaluable facsimiles of ancient Latin MSS. Nearly 300 years have elapsed since Pithou first edited the MS. ; but it still remains unique, the single perfectly trustworthy exemplar in which the iambics of Phaedrus have come down to us. There was however up to the year 1774 in existence a second MS. of much the same age and equal goodness, the Rewtensis. It was so called from the Abbey of S. Remi at Rheims, where it was discovered in 1608 by the learned Jesuit Sirmond, then returned from Rome and making a tour of research in Champagne and Lorraine. The read- ings of this codex were first used by Rigault, an elbve of the Jesuits, in the second edition of his Phaedrus published in 1617. It was also used by Gude x . It is believed, though the fact is not absolutely certain, to have been burnt in 1774, when the Abbey of S. Remi was destroyed by fire. Fortunately for us, Dom Vincent, the librarian of the Abbey, had made a facsimile of one page of the MS. for a M. de Foncemagne in 1769, and had also entered its variants for most of the Fables in the margin of an edition of 1743, published by Widow Brocas at Paris. This book containing Dom Vincent's variants was sent by him to the Royal Library of Paris, and there seen and used by Brotier and Adry ; later by Berger de Xivrey, who included in his volume of 1830, with the collation of the 1 Gude does not seem to have himself seen the Remensis, for he says of Rigault ' idemquc accidit Rigaltio cjui MS. Remense uiderat.' f 5 Pit/ioeanns, a careful transcript of the variants of the Remensis noted by Dom Vincent. The volume itself dis- appeared not long after it had been examined by de Xivrey, and neither Hervieux nor Lucian Muller have been able to retrace it 1 . However, the facsimile executed by Dom Vincent on tracing-paper in 1769, once in possession of Lord Stuart de Rothesayand subsequently bought by M. Hervieux 2 , enables us to pronounce with some certainty that the Remensis was written in the tenth century. It agrees very closely with the PitJiocanus, not only in having the same lacunae and as a rule identical readings, but also in the fact that the verses of Phaedrus are written continuously as prose. The handwriting however is completely different ; a detail which I mention, because there have not been wanting critics who asserted that the two MSS. were identical. Another difference between the two MSS. was that whereas in the Pithoeanus the Fables were followed by a treatise de monstris, in the Remensis they were followed by the late Latin Comedy known as Qnerolus or Aidularia. A third MS. known now as codex Danielis, earlier as uetus Danielis chartula, or codex Petanii, or scJicdae regiae z , or Vossiamis, is more interesting from its vicissitudes than for its intrinsic value. It seems to have been originally in the Abbey of S. Benoit Fleury at Orleans. When the Abbey was pillaged by the Huguenots in 1562, Pierre Daniel, the well-known philologist 4 , a native of Orleans, 1 Another collation of the Remensis, made by the Jesuit Denys Roche of Rheims for Pere Vavassour of Paris in the seventeenth century, has been published by Chatelain in Revue de Philologie for 1887, pp. 80, sqq. 2 Hervieux has published this facsimile, as well as facsimiles of the four other MSS., vol. ii. pp. 75-83. 3 I. e. in the library of Queen Christina of Sweden. See Elton's notice of this collection in Bibliographica, i. (1894). 1 Daniel edited the Qnerolus at Orleans in 1564. It is strange that so learned a man should have taken no step in publishing the eight fables of Phaedrus which his MS. contained. Hervieux suggests that he did not think it worth his while to print a mere fragment. Against this it may be urged that the eight fables are not only written in their proper verse form, but headed in large and distinct i6 where his distinction as an advocate had raised him to the dignity of baillioi the Abbey, had the adroitness to recover or buy back most of the MSS. in the library, amongst them the codex in question. At his death in 1603 it was bought by another erudite Orleanois, Paul Petau, an antiquarian and collector of rare medals, books, and MSS. At the sale of his son Alexander Petau's library in 1650 or 1651, it was obtained by Isaac Voss, at this time librarian and instructor in Greek to Christina of Sweden, for the royal library. When Christina abjured Lutheranism and became a Catholic her library followed her to Rome, and after her death in 1689 was secured for the Vatican. Here the codex remained till 1797, when, after the occupation of Rome by Napoleon and the army of the French Republic, it was sent to Paris as one of 500 MSS. which the Papal government ceded to France. When Cardinal Mai published in 1831 vol. iii. of his Classici auctores e Vaticanis codicibus editi, it had returned to the Vatican, where it was re-collated by Hervieux in 1869. It is a composite MS. containing several distinct works. The fragment of Phaedrus, eight fables in all, fills three pages, the recto and verso of fol. 17, and the recto of fol. 18. The fables are all from Book i., 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 1 in the ordinary numeration. The writing, of which Hervieux gives a facsimile (ii. p. 77), is assigned by him to the eleventh century. This MS. was used by Rigault; but does not appear to have been seen by the other early editors of Phaedrus. Gude often quotes its readings, probably as reported by Rigault and Salmasius. It remains to speak of the two fifteenth century MSS., capitals PHEDI. AVG. LIBER. J". AESOP | 2IARV. INCIPFELICITER. From this it would seem that they were called Acsopiae : the 2 (r) after AESOP is an error of the scribe. 1 They are headed De Leone et Asino, Ceruus ad fontem laudat cornua, Vulpis ad Contum, Cam's ad Ouem, Luptts testis commodassc contendit, Mutter pdrturiens ad uirum, Cams parturiens ad alteram, 20 without heading, 21 Leo dejee tens, Aper, Taurus, Asellus (Hervieux, i. p. 93). 17 one at Naples, the other in the Vatican. They are identical in contents, but the latter was written after the former. The earlier of the two is sometimes called Perottinus y from Niccolo Perotti, born in 1430, called to Rome 1456, and there appointed Apostolic Secretary, made Archbishop of Siponto or, as the see was re-named after the destruction of Siponto, Manfredonia, in 1458, afterwards successively governor of Umbria and Perusia. He died in 1480. He was the author of many works ; the best 'known is perhaps his Cornu Copiae: not the least interesting is his commentary on the Siliiae of the poet Statius, a work which was re-discovered by Poggio in Switzerland only a few years before Perotti was born. Early in life, as he tells us in his Cornu Copiae, and in the letter addressed to his compatriot Titus Mannus Veltrius, which forms the first section of the codex Perottiuus I am now describing, Perotti employed his leisure moments in copying into a note-book, with no regular order or sequence, 32 of the fables of Phaedrus, 36 of Avianus, 31 of a third iambic fabulist of whom we know nothing except that his style is very like Phaedrus. With these fables which he must have taken from a MS. or MSS. now lost, Perotti intermingled compositions of his own, some- times epigrams, sometimes letters to his friends. The whole collection he dedicated to his nephew Pyrrho Perotti in the following words: — Nicolai Perotti Epitome fabcllarum Aesopi Auiani et PJiedri ad Pyrrhuvi Perot turn fratris filium adolcscentcm siiauissimum incipit foeliciter. This MS. remained unknown and unnoticed till 1727 when Jaques Philippe d'Orville, then travelling in Italy, saw it at Parma and made a copy of it which he sent to Burmann who was preparing a new edition of his Phaedrus. Burmann only availed himself of the variants in the 32 fables of Phaedrus which the MS. contained: these variants he mentions in his preface. About ten years later 1 1 Hervieux, i. p. 120. i8 the MS. was transferred with the rest of the Farnese library to Naples. At Naples it was re-discovered by the Abbe Andres, and the 31 new fables, now generally known as Perottine or Appendix Perottina, were published for the first time in 1808 by Cassitto, and shortly afterwards in 181 1 by Jannelli, whom Cassitto seems to have forestalled. The result was an acrimonious controversy which may be read in Hervieux, i. pp. 1 1 1 sqq. The real victory rests with Jannelli, a scholar of the best type, whether as a decipherer of obscure and often oblite- rated writing, or as a restorer of the erased original by happy and judicious conjecture. I am making no random assertion: Jannelli's emendations of the Perottine fables were confirmed twenty years later, by the discovery of the duplicate codex in the Vatican. This second codex was edited by Cardinal Mai in 1831. It minutely reproduces the codex of Perotti, but with this difference, that instead of the obliterations and unreadable words which disfigure Perotti's MS., it is written in a perfectly clear handwriting of the early sixteenth century. Lucian M tiller, who has examined the variants of these two late MSS. with some minuteness, considers that they are of very little value for restoring the text of Phae- drus, and that the earlier codices, the PitJioeamts and Remensis, are so far superior in antiquity, and therefore in orthography and freedom from interpolation, as to be nearly always paramount where there is any question of readings. There are however a few places in the fables, where the two fifteenth-century MSS. seem to have preserved the right tradition against P and R. The most noteworthy of these is ii. Epil. 1,' where P gives Aesopo ingentem {in. pr. Aesopi ingento) statuam posucrc Attici R had Aesopi ingentem s. p. Attici N and V agree in giving Aesopi ingenio s. p. Attici. 19 This ingcnio was conjecturally restored by Gude, and is clearly right. iii. 7, 2-4, are thus given in PR : Cani perpasto macie confectus lupus Forte occurrit dein salutantes inuicem Ut restiterunt. The Perottine and Vatican MSS. give — Forte occucurrit ; dein salutati inuicem, where occucurrit is obvious, and had been restored by Bentley; salutati seems to me as certainly right, conveying as it does a quasi-middle use of the passive participle, which has other analogies, lb. 15, 16:— dnm procedunt, aspicit Lupus a catena collum detritum canis. So PR : the Perottine and Vatican MSS. have cam, which is better. The publication of the thirty-one new fables in Perotti's codex raised a controversy which is not yet settled. Are they by Phaedrus, or by some imitator? It is a necessary preliminary to any discussion of this point, to attempt a characterization of the undoubtedly genuine fables. These may be considered under two heads : — (1) As to their exhibition of the writer's idiosyncrasies. (2) As to their literary merit. (1) The genuine fables present Phaedrus to us, notably, as (a) indifferent to money, {b) supremely conscious of his greatness as a writer. (a) He says of himself in the Prologue to Book iii. that he had utterly banished from his heart the care of gain : Curamque habendi penitns corde eraserim ; and in v. 4, 7, 8 moralizing on the fable of the ass refusing the barley on which pigs were fed, because he observed that they had their throats cut after eating it, he says — Huius respectu fabulae deterritus Periculosum semper uitaui lucrum ; 20 and the undesirableness of great wealth is the lesson which he himself draws from his apologue of Hercules turning his back on Plutus in heaven (iv. 12). (/;) Phacdrus, if indifferent to money, — one of the greatest of virtues at a time when rich liberti were becoming the most powerful class in Rome, — was supremely self-satisfied as an author. In the Epilogue of Book ii. he compares himself with Aesop, to whose genius the Athenians erected a statue, openly professes himself his rival, and declares that his fables will swell the list of writers comparable with the great writers of Greece. In the Epilogue to Book iii. he takes a higher tone. ' If you wish to read me, you must allow yourself some leisure. The Muses' threshold is not open to all. Even I, born in their native home, Pieria, bred from my infancy in the lecture-room, indifferent to money, find only jealous admission to the circle.' He goes on to explain the origin of fables, and his own purpose in writing them : not to reflect on individuals, but to por- tray the actual life and manners of mankind. ' If Aesop the Phrygian, Anacharsis the Scythian, could immortalize themselves by writing fables, why should not I, born in Thrace, and a compatriot of Linus and Orpheus, who charmed the beasts and the forests with his song ? ' In Book iv. his self-satisfaction has obviously increased. ' If jealousy seeks to disparage my new volume, it may go on disparaging, provided it cannot imitate.' Again, in the twenty-second fable, ' I well know that envy will ascribe all that is good in me to Aesop, and declare anything poor to be mine. I have one answer to make : Aesop invented, Phaedrus perfected.' And in the Epilogue, he rises to the self-satisfaction of Horace, Vergil, Ovid, and Statius, prophesying his own immortality and assuring Particulo that their two names would be associated for ever. (2) This self-satisfaction was however founded on real literary merit. Whether in language or in the general 21 style of his fables, Phaedrus may be ranked among the best writers of Rome ; the Latin of the fables is the pure undebased Latin of the best period of the golden, not the silver age. It is doubtful whether the few exceptions which occur, such as v. i, 15, 16 l Quisnam cinaedus ille in conspectu meo Audet uenire? for in conspectum menm is not an error of our MSS. In i. 8. 7 :— Tandem persuasa est iureiurando gruis for tandem persuasum est iureiurando gmi ; iii. 5, 8 :— Persuasus ille fecit the unusual construction of ' pcrsuadeor may be defended from the use of the treatise ad Herennium, i. 6, 9 ; and Ovid, A. A. iii. 679 ; as well as from the analogy of inuideor. Bentley denies the Latinity of Quis for uter in i. 24, 8 {Quis maior essct). Of the Greek words which appear in the fables some were already naturalized in Roman speech, e.g. cinacdns, mains, triclinium, or familiar through the comic poets, as toxicum, mnsiens, stropha : others were new and became classical partly owing to their employment by Phaedrus, e. g. xystus, basis, antidotum, pegma, and perhaps sopkus. The curious word ardelio, or as my lamented predecessor, Prof. Nettleship, inclines to write it, ardalio 2 , 'a busy-body,' which Phaedrus defines as Gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil agens, is remembered less perhaps from Phaedrus, than from Martial's magnns es ardelio. The style of the Fables is admitted to be excellent 3 . 1 L. Midler, De Phaedri et Auiani Fabulis, p. 4. 2 Contributions to Latin Lexicography, p. 267. Nettlesbip states that three spellings are found in glossaries, ardalio, ardelio, ardidio. 3 Hare, in his damaging attack on Bentley's emendations of Phaedrus, says {Epist. Crit. p. 7) : Semper Phaedrum inter optimos Jatinitalis auctores ant optimis proximum habui. The Epistola Critica is now a rare book ; but no lover of Phaedrus should omit to read it. 22 The story is told naturally and without effort or parade of words, contrasting very favourably with Avianus, whose aim is to show off his command of Vergilian diction and the grand style. While Avianus is diffuse and artificial, Phaedrus is succinct and simple : in Avianus the rudeness of Latin in its decadence is palpable through all his trap- pings ; in Phaedrus the narrative is uniform, equable, and with a certain charm which lingers in the memory. At times he is undeniably witty. Take the fable of the Lion taking the four shares (i. 5) — Vacca et capella et patiens ouis iniuriae Socii fuere cum leone in saltibus. Hi cum cepissent ceruum uasti corporis, Sic est locutus partibus factis leo : Ego primam tollo, nominor qnoniam leo ; Secundam, quia sum fortis, tribuetis mihi; Turn, quia plus ualeo, me sequetur tertia ; Malo adticietur, si quis quartam tetigerit. Most vivid is the description of a donkey bursting into a sudden bray — Hie auritulus Clamorem subito totis tollit uiribus Nouoque turbat bestias miraeulo : patJietic the sick lion's noble rage at the ass's kick (i. 21)— At ille exspirans : fortis indigne tuli Mihi insultare : te, naturae dedecus, Quod ferre cogor, certe bis uideor mori : comic the reflexion of the fox when he could not reach the grapes (iv. 3, 4)— Nondum matura est : nolo acerbam snmere : concise the fable of the fox and the mask (i. 7) — Personam tragicam forte uulpis uiderat. O quanta species, inquit, cerebrum non habet ! sarcastic the reply of Tiberius to the officious atriaisis, who kept watering the garden path at Misenum to lay the dust before him — Mnlto maioris alapae mecnm ueneunt. 23 No small part of Phaedrus' success lies in his dextrous management of the iambic senarius. He is very judicious in combining lines where, in accordance with the older licence of Roman comedy, spondees, dactyls, and anapaests are freely introduced, with lines of the stricter type familiar to us from Greek Tragedy and the Epodes of Horace 1 , in which the iambus is the predominant, and the spondee the only other frequent rhythm. In his best fables, especially in Book i., he is careful to make the second foot an iambus more often than not ; a remark which does not apply equally to the fourth or a fortiori the fifth foot. Indeed one of his strictest rules, just as it has been thought to be with Plautus and Terence, is to exclude iambi from the fifth foot if the last word in the line is a cretic. Such a verse as — Canis parturiens cum rogasset alteram is of very rare occurrence. On the other hand the anapaest in the fifth, so normal in Seneca's tragedies, is frequent also in Phaedrus. It is usual with him, especially in his longer flights, when the verse has run on for some time with the freedom of the laxer iambic, to arrest the attention suddenly by one artfully constructed, sometimes highly elaborated, line. Such are — Ex alticinctis unus atriensibus (ii. 6, 1 1) in the story of Tiberius and the Atriensis, or Silentium ipsa fecit exspectatio (v. 5, 15) in the story of the Mimic and the Country Clown. Such occasional felicities give a sparkle to the narrative and make us recur to the fables with pleasure. Lessing, as is well known, criticized Phaedrus' accuracy on a matter of fact. In one of the fables (i. 4) a dog, while swimming, sights his own reflexion in the water, and thinking he sees another dog carrying another piece of flesh, drops the piece he holds in his own mouth. 1 The/»7V iambic does not exist in Phaedrus. 24 But water, to give a reflexion, must be undisturbed ; the motion produced by swimming would not permit the dog to see his own image. This is true ; but the fable is older than Phaedrus, and the inaccuracy is perhaps attributable to the first inventor 1 . I have myself noticed in the fable of the Eagle, the Cat, and the Boar a similar misrepresentation. The eagle and boar, each with its family of young, die of hunger through the machinations of the cat, and the cat thereupon uses them as food for itself and its own young. That the animal described is identical with our own cat is proved by the allusion to its nocturnal prowlings — Inde euagata noctu suspenso pede ; but no cat, I imagine, would nowadays be supposed to feed on young pigs, particularly if, instead of being killed, they had died a natural death. Possibly the habits of the undomesticated animal 1900 years ago did not correspond in every point with those of the creature as known to ourselves. If indeed we might trust Hartman 2 , the Fables abound with similar mistakes : Phaedrus' only care, he says, was to versify his story in good senarii : if he effected this, he did not scruple to corrupt the original apologue of Aesop by unnecessary or unsuitable changes. To which I would reply that Aesop is a mere name 3 , and that in most cases we do not know with certainty what the original form of any fable was. After a conscientious study of our Roman fabulist I have arrived at an opinion the very reverse of Hartman 's : I suspect that if we knew the earliest shape which any given fable took, we should find 1 See Appendix. 2 De Phaedri /adult's commentatio, Lugduni Balavorum, 1S90. An inte- resting dissertation by a pupil of Cobet's, whose manner of instructing his students is humorously sketched, pp. 90, 91. Hartman has some good remarks about Hare's criticism of Bentley, pp. 92 sqq. Pentley's emendations of Phaedrus were published separately, with the Sententiae of P. Syrus, by Pinzger in 1833, at Breslau. 3 See however Rutherford, Babrius, Introd. p. xxxv. 25 that it came from the hands of Phaedrus improved and dignified. It remains to say a few words about the thirty-one new fables published at the beginning of the century. Jannelli in the second of his three dissertations tried to prove that they must be by Phaedrus ; almost at the same time Adry repudiated them. Jannelli's opinion has found most support : Cardinal Mai, Orelli, Lachmann, L. Miiller, Hervieux, Ribbeck, all believe them to be the genuine work of Phaedrus. On the other hand Heyne of Gottingen, the editor of Vergil and Homer, basing his opinion however on the imperfect edition of Cassitto, pronounced them to be a work of antiquity, assignable to some rival of Phaedrus, but greatly inferior to Phaedrus in genius and purity of diction. This is also the opinion of Riese 1 . At the risk of dissenting from so many scholars of eminence, I am inclined to side with the minority. Looking at the thirty-one Perottine fables as a whole, their general resemblance to the genuine collection in style, language, and metre is undeniable. More than a third of the Perottine collection does not fall below the average goodness of Phaedrus : some few are in his very best manner, e.g. ix Dc mulierum libidine or the apologue of the hen's scratching, xix Equus qaadrigalis in pistriniim nemundatus or the horse in reduced circumstances, xxv Seruus et dominus or the good-for-nothing slave reproved, xxix Papilio et Vespa or Past and Present. The story of the Ephesian widow xiii, which is also in Petronius, is told well, and the introduction of an artistic alliterative line like Cotidiana capta consiteUidirie is in an especial manner Phaedrian. Even more distinctly in his style is the recurrence of one of his most often observed characteristics, the use of abstracts 2 for concretes in such combinations as tua calamitas for tu calamitosus, or corni deceptus stupor for deceptus stultus cortuts, or colli longitudinem for collum 1 Anthol. Lai. ii. Praef. p. xxxi. 2 L. Midler, De Phaedri et Attiani Fabulis, p. 5 ; Hervieux, i. p. 176. 26 praclongum, which last has its exact counterpart in the third of the Perottine fables : — Emungere igitur se nolens p rend it manu Traxitque ad terram nasi longitudinem. But these points of similarity in no way prove identity : an imitator reproduces the saliences of his model ; and if Phacdrus had called the crane's long neck colli longitu- dinem, that is the very reason why he would not borrow from himself l , and talk of nasi longitudinem. Again, though, as I said, a section of the Perottine fables is up to the level of Phaedrus 2 , it is equally true, that a larger section is not. Many of them are weak ; many end in a way which is unlike Phaedrus, e.g. xviii Aesopns et serum prof ugus ; xxiii Serpens et Lacerta ; xxvi Lepus et Bubulcus ; xxx Tcrraneola et Vulpes ; some contain allusions which we should not expect from him. One of the most notable of these is in the fable of the Beaver (xxviii). The writer, observing that the Greeks called this animal Castor, takes occasion to scoff at their poverty of language, which could find nothing better to call it by than the name of a God: — Canes effugere cum iam non potis est fiber, Graeci loquaces quern uocarunt Castorem Et indidernnt bestiae nomen dei, Illi, qui iactant se uerborum copia. In a word, these Perottine fables leave on the mind a total impression very like the various imitations of Ovid, the Nux, or the Epicedion Drusi, or the spurious Heroides. They are often so similar as to seem to come from the same hand ; yet the difference is perceptible, and the whole effect not quite the same. External grounds point to the same conclusion. Perotti ascribes his fables to three sources, Aesop, Avianus, and 1 L. Miiller, De Phaedri et Auiani Fahulis, p. 1 2, collects a number of such parallelisms of expression. 2 One of the stories in the Perottine Appendix (the Ass and the two Suitors) is in the Decameron (Ribbeck, Geschichte der Rbmischen Dic/i/itnt;, iii. p. 31). 2 7 Phaedrus. Our MSS. of Avianus and Phaedrus correspond with his : what was his Aesop ? probably a collection in Latin iambics of fables which were not included in Phaedrus, and were ascribed to Aesop, because their real author was unknown, or because the name of Aesop is the figure-head in Romulus and the other prose versions. From this non- Phaedrian or Aesopian collection in Latin iambics was derived that part of Romulus, and the prose-paraphrases of the Middle Age, which deals with the same stories or fables as are extant in the Perottine collection. For just as the actual fables of Phaedrus (those contained in the Pithoeanus and Remensis), after their reduction to prose in Romulus and the other paraphrases, preserve the traces of their original iambic form ; so the Perottine fables, where they have undergone a similar transfusion in the prose of Romu- lus and the rest of the paraphrasts, betray the manifest presence of the same iambic metre : this is particularly clear in the prose versions of the xxviith, Meretrix et luuenis, which a skilful writer of Latin verses might almost restore to its original iambic shape. It may be said, ' But these prose versions, wherever they point to iambic metre, were probably drawn either from a more complete Phaedrus than we possess, or from a MS. which had preserved (perhaps by themselves) such of the genuine fables as had been rejected from the abridged Phaedrus of Pi?.' To this I would reply : ' Your hypothesis is gratuitous, and not that to which facts most naturally point. If Phaedrus was abridged, the abridged work would be likely to supersede the original ; but if the completer original still lingered on, it would survive as an unabridged whole. But that it did not so survive, is proved by Perotti's ascribing part of his collection to Aesop ; which he would not have done, if anything had indicated that they belonged to Phaedrus.' As Perotti in definite terms ascribes his collection to Phaedrus, Avianus, Aesop, as we have no proof of a completer 28 Phaedrus existing then, than that we now possess, it seems most natural to believe that when he speaks of Aesop, he does not mean Phaedrus, but a perfectly distinct source, which in his MS. was, for want of better knowledge, labelled with the name of the old Greek fabulist. APPENDIX LESSING. See his Abhandlungen iiber die Fabeln, vol. v. pp. 415-418, ed. Lachm. Lessing criticizes four fables of Phaedrus from this point of view. Of the first (i. 4, The dog and his shadow) Coraes gives no less than six Greek versions. In the first two, the dog Ttorafxav StePaive : in the third, fourth, and sixth, as he passes along a river sees his reflexion and drops the meat ; in the fifth, comes to a river, and while crossing it (Trepaiovfjuvos), sees the reflexion of the meat magnified in the water : it is not certain therefore (as nothing is said anywhere of a bridge) that the Greek versions are free from the same error as Phaedrus. (2) The fable of the cow, she-goat, and sheep going shares with the lion. Lessing criticizes such a partnership as absurd, and says it is not found in the original Greek form, where an onager or wild ass shares with a lion the prey they capture in the chase. Moreover, the reasons assigned by Phaedrus are weak : the original has rrjv fiiv tiiav eine X-rjif/o^cu as irpairos' &acn\evs yap ilpu. rrjv 8k SevTtpav, &>s «f icrov kolvSjv. 'H Se rpir-q fioipa' avrrj kolkov fiiya (Toi voir/aet, d pi) «0«Ae