Phaedrus (fabulist)
The poet describes himself as born in the Pierian Mountains,[1] perhaps in Pydna, and names the Thracian musicians Linus and Orpheus as his countrymen.
[3][4] Some have inferred from these data that Phaedrus was brought to Rome in his childhood as a slave following the Thracian campaign of L. Calpurnius Piso.
[9] There is no external evidence by which to judge whether the poet spoke truthfully of himself, and scholars have assigned different degrees of significance to the biographical hints contained in the poems.
[10] Attilio de Lorenzi's biography Fedro is reviewed by Perry as a "consistent and convincing all-round picture of the man" with "nothing unreasonable or improbable in any of the author's conclusions,"[11] but derided by another reviewer as "a romance" born of "de Lorenzi's ingenious imagination" which is "entertaining to read, but not always easy to believe.
[13] Edward Champlin, while acknowledging that the traditional account of Phaedrus's life is "handed down through the scholarly literature," derides even the broad outlines of it that are most commonly accepted as "complete fantasy" and argues that 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.
"[15] Léon Herrmann [fr] purported to find new biographical information in the fables in the form of acrostics, many of which could not be found in the text without novel editorial interventions.
[26] Some sources therefore give the poet's full name as Gaius Julius Phaedrus (or Phaeder), with the praenomen and nomen of Augustus.
[46] Each of them is printed in Hervieux 1894, and the fables they contain which have no equivalent in the extant metrical text of Phaedrus are translated or summarized in Perry 1965.
[51] The remains of Phaedrus's five books transmitted in the Pithoeanus and Remensis are of unequal length and seem to indicate that material has been lost.
This is 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.
Some scholars have attempted to restore these fables to their places within the five books with divergent conclusions,[52] but usually they are printed separately in the order in which they are found in Perotti's Epitome.
Perotti omitted the epimythia and promythia, sometimes transferring their wording into titles of his own stating the moral, which he added to all the fables.
[54] A number of editors have undertaken to restore their original metrical form, and these reconstructions are conventionally referred to as the fabulae novae, or "new fables."
[56] Postgate defends the procedure of "exhuming" Phaedrus's poems from the prose collections by versification, though conceding that "in these reconstitutions ... we tread on treacherous ground" and "in some cases the metrical form cannot now be restored with completeness or with certainty.
"[62][63] Demetrius's collection was a handbook of material that writers and speakers could adapt to make a point in the context of a work of another genre.
[28] 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".
Finally he makes a distinction between matter and manner in the epilogue to the fifth book, commenting that He also claims a place in the Latin literary tradition by echoing well-known and respected writers.
[72] Moreover, in following the model of Aesop, the enfranchised slave, Phaedrus's satire is sharper and restores "the ancient function of the fable as a popular expression against the dominant classes".
[73] 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".
Interpreting the adjective improbi as modifying jocos, Johann Friedrich Fischer [de] argued that Phaedrus's fables cannot rightly be called joci because they are not apt to provoke laughter, nor are they improbi (interpreted in the sense that they required hard work to accomplish) because Phaedrus wrote light verse about common, everyday things.
[95] The next literary reference is a homage by Phaedrus's 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.
"[108] Johann Caspar von Orelli plausibly took this to be an abbreviation of vetus exemplar Catalaunense ("an ancient copy from Châlons-en-Champagne") or Catuacense ("from Douai").
P. F. Widdows' translation also includes the fables in the Perotti appendix and all are rendered into a free version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.
[124] 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.
