(First Century A.D.)
Babrius, also referred to as Babrias and Gabrias, was the
writer of that metrical version of the folk-fables, commonly
referred to Aesop, which delights our childhood. Until the
time of Richard Bentley he was commonly thought of merely as
a fabulist whose remains had been preserved by a few
grammarians. Bentley, in the first draft (1697) of the part
of his famous 'Dissertation' treating of the fables of Aesop,
speaks thus of Babrius, and goes not far out of his way to
give a rap at Planudes, a late Greek, who turned works of
Ovid, Cato, and Caesar into Greek:--
"... came one Babrius, that gave a new turn of the fables
into choliambics. Nobody that I know of mentions him but
Suidas, Avienus, and Tzetzes. There's one Gabrias, indeed,
yet extant, that has comprised each fable in four sorry
iambics. But our Babrius is a writer of another size and
quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be
opposed, if not preferred, to the Latin of Phaedrus. There's
a whole fable of his yet preserved at the end of Gabrias, of
'The Swallow and the Nightingale.' Suidas brings many
citations out of him, all which show him an excellent
poet.... There are two parcels of the present fables; the
one, which are the more ancient, one hundred and thirty-six
in number, were first published out of the Heidelberg Library
by Neveletus, 1610. The editor himself well observed that
they were falsely ascribed to Aesop, because they mention
holy monks. To which I will add another remark,--that there
is a sentence out of Job.... Thus I have proved one-half of
the fables now extant that carry the name of Aesop to be
above a thousand years more recent than he. And the other
half, that were public before Neveletus, will be found yet
more modern, and the latest of all.... This collection,
therefore, is more recent than that other; and, coming first
abroad with Aesop's 'Life,' written by Planudes, 'tis justly
believed to be owing to the same writer. That idiot of a monk
has given us a book which he calls 'The Life of Aesop,' that
perhaps cannot be matched in any language for ignorance and
nonsense. He had picked up two or three true stories,--that
Aesop was a slave to a Xanthus, carried a burthen of bread,
conversed with Croesus, and was put to death at Delphi; but
the circumstances of these and all his other tales are pure
invention.... But of all his injuries to Aesop, that which
can least be forgiven him is the making such a monster of him
for ugliness,--an abuse that has found credit so universally
that all the modern painters since the time of Planudes have
drawn him in the worst shapes and features that fancy could
invent. 'Twas an old tradition among the Greeks that Aesop
revived again and lived a second life. Should he revive once
more and see the picture before the book that carries his
name, could he think it drawn for himself?--or for the
monkey, or some strange beast introduced in the 'Fables'? But
what revelation had this monk about Aesop's deformity? For he
must have it by dream or vision, and not by ordinary methods
of knowledge. He lived about two thousand years after him,
and in all that tract of time there's not a single author
that has given the least hint that Aesop was ugly."
Thus Bentley; but to return to Babrius. Tyrwhitt, in 1776, followed this
calculation of Bentley by collecting the remains of Babrius. A
publication in 1809 of fables from a Florentine manuscript foreran the
collection (1832) of all the fables which could be entirely restored. In
1835 a German scholar, Knoch, published whatever had up to that time
been written on Babrius, or as far as then known by him. So much had
been accomplished by modern scholarship. The calculation was not unlike
the mathematical computation that a star should, from an apparent
disturbance, be in a certain quarter of the heavens at a certain time.
The manuscript of Babrius, it became clear, must have existed. In 1842
M. Mynas, a Greek, who had already discovered the 'Philosophoumena' of
Hippolytus, came upon the parchment in the convent of St. Lama on Mount
Athos. He was employed by the French government, and the duty of giving
the new ancient to the world fell to French scholars. The date of the
manuscript they referred to the tenth century. There were contained in
it one hundred and twenty-three of the supposed one hundred and sixty
fables, the arrangement being alphabetical and ending with the letter O.
Again, in 1857 M. Mynas announced another discovery. Ninety-four fables
and a prooemium were still in a convent at Mount Athos; but the monks,
who made difficulty about parting with the first parchment, refused to
let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold
to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the
work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be--the tinkering of
a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek
and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas
himself. And there were scholars who accounted the manuscript
as genuine.
The discovery of the first part added substantially to the remains which
we have of the poetry of ancient Greece. The terseness, simplicity, and
humor of the poems belong to the popular classic all the world over, in
whatever tongue it appears; and the purity of the Greek shows that
Babrius lived at a time when the influence of the classical age was
still vital. He is placed at various times. Bergk fixes him so far back
as B.C. 250, while others place him at the same number of years in our
own era. Both French and German criticism has claimed that he was a
Roman. There is no trace of his fables earlier than the Emperor Julian,
and no metrical version of the Aesopean fables existed before the
writing of Babrius. Socrates tried his hand at a version or two. But
when such Greek writers as Xenophon and Aristotle refer to old
folk-tales and legends, it is always in their own words. His fables are
written in choliambic verse; that is, imperfect iambic which has a
spondee in the last foot and is fitted for the satire for which it was
originally used.
The fables of Babrius have been edited, with an interesting and valuable
introduction, by W.G. Rutherford (1883), and by F.G. Schneidewin (1880).
They have been turned into English metre by James Davies, M.A. (1860).
The reader is also referred to the article 'Aesop' in the present work.