A Neo-Latin writer of considerable talents at the time of the Humanist revival of letters, his first published works appeared in the 1470s and were distinguished by minute scholarship.
[1] The work for which he is principally remembered now is Hecatomythium (1495), a collection of a hundred fables written in Latin and largely of his own invention.
Several of the fables of Abstemius, it is true, relate to Aesop's in various ways, either as variations on his, as in the case of De culice cibum et hospitium ab appetente (94), which is told of a gnat and a bee but relates to The Ant and the Grasshopper; or in the case of De leone et mure (52) it provides a sequel to The Lion and the Mouse, in which the mouse asks for the lion's daughter as a reward for freeing him from the net and is stepped on accidentally by the bride.
One at least, De vidua virum petente (the widow seeking a husband, 31), borrows directly from the collection of Poggio.
[2] A few of these sorts of fable particularly were condemned as ludicrous and licentiously critical of the clergy[3] and the work was added to the Vatican index of forbidden books.