ures of craft or counsel, of cowardice or courage, of generosity or
rapacity.

These terms of praise, it must be confessed, cannot be bestowed on all
the fables in this collection. Many of them lack that unity of design,
that close connection of the moral with the narrative, that wise choice
in the introduction of the animals, which constitute the charm and
excellency of true Aesopian fable. This inferiority of some to others is
sufficiently accounted for in the history of the origin and descent
of these fables. The great bulk of them are not the immediate work of
Aesop. Many are obtained from ancient authors prior to the time in which
he lived. Thus, the fable of the "Hawk and the Nightingale" is related
by Hesiod;[4] the "Eagle wounded by an Arrow, winged with its own
Feathers," by Aeschylus;[5] the "Fox avenging his wrongs on the Eagle,"
by Archilochus.[6] Many of them again are of later origin, and are to be
traced to the monks of the middle ages: and yet this collection, though
thus made up of fables both earlier and later than the era of Aesop,
rightfully bears his name, because he composed so large a number (all
framed in the same mould, and conformed to the same fashion, and stamped
with the same lineaments, image, and superscription) as to secure to
himself the right to be considered the father of Greek fables, and the
founder of this class of writing, which has ever since borne his name,
and has secured for him, through all succeeding ages, the position of
the first of moralists.[7]

The fables were in the first instance only narrated by Aesop, and for a
long time were handed down by the uncertain channel of oral tradition.
Socrates is mentioned by Plato[8] as having employed his time while in
prison, awaiting the return of the sacred ship from Delphos which was to
be the signal of his death, in turning some of these fables into verse,
but he thus versified only such as he remembered. Demetrius Phalereus,
a philosopher at Athens about 300 B.C., is said to have made the first
collection of these fables. Phaedrus, a slave by birth or by subsequent
misfortunes, and admitted by Augustus to the honors of a freedman,
imitated many of these fables in Latin iambics about the commencement of
the Christian era. Aphthonius, a rhetorician of Antioch, A.D. 315, wrote
a treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some of these fables.
This translation is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates a
custom of common use,