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 Æsopian 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
Æsop. 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 Æschylus;[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
Æsop, 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 Æsop, 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. Phædrus, a slave by birth or by
subsequent misfortunes, and admitted by Augustus to the honours 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, both in these and in later
times. The rhetoricians and philosophers were accustomed to give the
Fables of Æsop as an exercise to their scholars, not only inviting them
to discuss the moral of the tale, but also to practice and to perfect
themselves thereby in style and rules of grammar, by making for
themselves new and various versions of the fables. Ausonius,[9] the
friend of the Emperor Valentinian, and the latest poet of eminence in
the Western Empire, has handed down some of these fables in verse,
which Julianus Titianus, a contemporary writer of no great name,
translated into prose. Avienus, also a contemporary of Ausonius, put
some of these fables into Latin elegiacs, which are given by Nevelet
(in a book we shall refer to hereafter), and are occasionally
incorporated with the editions of Phædrus.

Seven centuries elapsed before the next notice is found of the Fables
of Æsop. During this long period these fables seem to have suffered an
eclipse, to have disappeared and to have been forgotten; and it is at
the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the Byzantine emperors
were the great patrons of learning, and amidst the splendors of an
Asiatic court, that we next find honours paid to the name and memory of
Æsop. Maximus Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople, made a
collection of about a hundred and fifty of these fables. Little is
known of his history. Planudes, however, was no mere recluse, shut up
in his monastery. He took an active part in public affairs. In 1327
A.D. he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Venice by the Emperor
Andronicus the Elder. This brought him into immediate contact with the
Western Patriarch, whose interests he henceforth advocated with so much
zeal as to bring on him suspicion and persecution from the rulers of
the Eastern Church. Planudes has been exposed to a two-fold accusation.
He is charged on the one hand with having had before him a copy of
Babrias (to whom we shall have occasion to refer at greater length in
the end of this Preface), and to have had the bad taste “to transpose,”
or to turn his poetical version into prose: and he is asserted, on the
other hand, never to have seen the Fables of Æsop at all, but to have
himself invented and made the fables which he palmed off under the name
of the famous Greek fabulist. The truth lies between these two
extremes. Planudes may have invented some few fables, or have inserted
some that were current in his day; but there is an abundance of
unanswerable internal evidence to prove that he had an acquaintance
with the veritable fables of Æsop, although the versions he had access
to were probably corrupt, as contained in the various translations and
disquisitional exercises of the rhetoricians and philosophers. His
collection is interesting and important, not only as the parent source
or foundation of the earlier printed versions of Æsop, but as the
direct channel of attracting to these fables the attention of the
learned.