Authors

    Babrius.

    Babrius | Babrius | Βάβριος

    At present, we cannot say with conviction precisely who Babrius was or where and when he lived. No ancient source mentions him, and he himself provides no biography. Even his name, reported variously in confused manuscripts as Babrius, Valerius Babrius, Babrius Valerius, and Valebrius, is reported without true surety. We can, however, offer compelling inferences from his extant work and what we know about ancient onomastics, literary culture, and linguistics. The name itself, Babrius, is not Greek, but is well attested in Italy and Italian epigraphy. Furthermore, his verse bears several hallmarks of Latin choliambic metrics, especially that of Martial,...

    Phaedrus.

    Phaedrus | Gaius Julius Phaedrus | Φαῖδρος

    15 BCE - 50 CE

    Phaedrus—or perhaps Phaeder—is the first author we know to have produced a published collection of Aesopic fables meant to be read one after another, purely for literary enjoyment. Not much can be said with certainty about his life or person. A testimony in the principle manuscript reports that he was a freedman of Augustus; everything else we can hope to ascertain about Phaedrus and his life comes from his own work. He was Greek speaking and claimed a Greek literary heritage (Phaed. 3 prologue). If the prologue to his third book can be taken at face-value, he was “all but...

    Aesop.

    Aesop | Aesopus | Αἴσωπος

     - 564 BCE

    Aesop, like Homer, was probably as mythical as his tales. Although he was widely known and celebrated in the ancient Greek world, his biography has many of the hallmarks of a pseudo-historical folk-hero. There is no agreement on where he was from, he was afflicted with one or more disabilities (e.g. he was mute, ugly and misshapen), and his death is said to have been tragic and noteworthy. As a writer of fables, he was known already in the 5th C BCE by Herodotus, who believed him (“Αἰσώπου τοῦ λογοποιοῦ”) to have lived in the 6th C and been a...