17th century

The seventeenth century was a decisive period in the revival and reassessment of the fables associated with Aesop. Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica brought together material from multiple authors and manuscripts, while its preface helped spur a long-running inquiry into Babrias and the origins of the surviving collection. The period thus joined editorial recovery to a question of authorship that subsequent manuscript discoveries would sharpen.

Earlier transmission and the gap

The seventeenth-century revival followed a history of transmission marked by both adaptation and interruption. The preface says that the fables were first narrated by Aesop and passed down orally; Socrates was said to have versified some from memory while awaiting his death in prison. Demetrius Phalereus was credited with making the first collection, around 300 B.C., and later writers, including Phaedrus, Aphthonius, Ausonius, and Avienus, retold or recast material in verse and prose. Rhetoricians also used fables as exercises in moral interpretation, style, and grammar, producing further versions.

After these earlier stages, the preface describes a gap of seven centuries before renewed attention to the fables in the early fourteenth century. Maximus Planudes collected about 150 stories, and his collection became the foundation of early printed editions. Its relationship to the older tradition was disputed: some accused Planudes of turning Babrias’s verse into prose, while others claimed he had invented the fables himself. The preface rejects both extremes, arguing that he knew genuine Aesopian material, though it may have reached him in corrupt versions.

Nevelet’s 1610 collection

In 1610, the Swiss scholar Isaac Nicholas Nevelet published Mythologia Aesopica, described in the preface as the most complete collection yet issued. Alongside the fables associated with Planudes, it included 136 previously unpublished fables from manuscripts in the Vatican Library, 40 attributed to Aphthonius, and 43 from Babrias. It also brought together Latin versions by Phaedrus, Avienus, and other authors. This range made the book a composite record of the tradition rather than a collection limited to a single author or textual line.

The preface presents Nevelet’s volume as a culmination in the restoration of Aesop’s literary reputation. It says the collection helped return the fables to wide favor and describes their subsequent circulation across European and Eastern languages and communities. Its importance lay not only in the number of stories gathered, but also in making the accumulated, varied history of the fables available as a substantial corpus.

The question of Babrias

Nevelet’s preface also advanced the suggestion that Babrias might be the true author of the existing form of the Aesopian fables. The argument rested partly on features thought to be later than Aesop’s time: references to holy monks and to the Epistle of St. James, as well as the use of the name Piraeus for Athens’s harbor. Such details challenged the idea that every surviving story could have been composed in Aesop’s lifetime, while leaving open whether Babrias was author, collector, or both.

At the close of the seventeenth century, Dr. Richard Bentley examined the existing versions and argued that many could, with slight verbal changes, be reconstructed as the scazonic iambics in which Babrias was known to write. Bentley went further than the evidence then warranted, according to the preface, by claiming Babrias as the exclusive author. The theory provoked opposition, especially from Charles Boyle of the University of Oxford; their learned and witty exchanges became a notable episode in seventeenth-century literary history.

Later confirmation and significance

The controversy continued beyond the century. Thomas Tyrwhitt defended Bentley’s argument in a 1776 dissertation and published Babrias’s fables in choliambic meter from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library. Further evidence came from manuscripts in the Vatican Library. In 1844, Menoides, searching for ancient manuscripts on a commission, found a copy of Babrias at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. Its two books contained 125 and 95 fables respectively, giving material form to a tradition that earlier scholars had reconstructed through textual clues.

The manuscript discovery confirmed the importance of the question Nevelet had raised, but it does not make the seventeenth-century collection a simple endpoint. Nevelet’s work gathered versions and sources into a widely influential corpus; Bentley’s claim exposed the difficulty of assigning a single author to a tradition transmitted orally, recopied, translated, and reshaped over centuries. The period’s lasting significance lies in both achievements: renewed circulation of the fables and a more searching inquiry into how they came to bear Aesop’s name.