Chapter 6

The history of Babrias is so strange and interesting, that it might not unfitly be enumerated among the curiosities of literature. He is generally supposed to have been a Greek of Asia Minor, of one of the Ionic Colonies, but the exact period in which he lived and wrote is yet unsettled. He is placed, by one critic,[14] as far back as the institution of the Achaian League, B.C. 250; by another as late as the Emperor Severus, who died A.D. 235; while others make him a contemporary with Phædrus in the time of Augustu…