1857

1857 is the publication year of the second part of George Cornewall Lewis’s edition of the Babrian fables, issued in London from a manuscript. In the book’s account of the transmission of Aesopian fable, this volume extends the publication of the Mount Athos manuscript discovered in 1844 and belongs to the modern scholarly effort to establish and circulate Babrias’s collection.

Publication in the Babrian edition

The book lists the work as Babrii Fabulae Aesopeae. E codice manuscripto partem secundam edidit, published by Parker in London in 1857. The title identifies it as the second part, edited from a manuscript, rather than as a new general collection of fables. Its place in the bibliography makes the year a concrete milestone in the printed transmission of the Babrian text.

The manuscript behind the edition

The second-part publication followed the discovery, in 1844, of a manuscript at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. Found by Menoides during a search for ancient manuscripts, the codex contained a choliambic version of Babrias divided into two books: one of 125 fables and another of 95. The book presents that discovery as confirmation of earlier scholarly conjectures and as a source of valuable material for the history and authenticity of the wider Aesopian tradition.

Editorial work and scholarly significance

George Cornewall Lewis edited the recovered fables, with the book also naming the Reverend James Davies as their translator. It identifies Lewis’s 1857 volume specifically as an edition of the manuscript’s second part; the first listed edition had appeared in Oxford in 1846. The publication therefore represents a continuation of the editorial work on the recovered text, not the original discovery of the manuscript.

The preface places the edition within a long history of changing attributions and transmission. Aesop’s fables, it explains, first circulated orally and were later collected, versified, translated, and adapted; the medieval collection of Maximus Planudes became a foundation for early printed versions, while Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica assembled material from several traditions. The Mount Athos manuscript and its publication gave scholars a substantial Babrian witness against which to reconsider the origins and textual history of fables long transmitted under Aesop’s name.