315 AD

A.D. 315 is the date the preface assigns to Aphthonius of Antioch’s treatise on Aesopian fables and his Latin prose versions of some of them. The date situates his work in a transmission history in which fables moved between oral narration, literary collections, verse, and prose, while serving both as moral instruction and as material for language study.

Aphthonius and the Date

The preface identifies Aphthonius as a rhetorician from Antioch and dates his work to A.D. 315. It says that he wrote a treatise on the fables and converted some into Latin prose. The account does not name the particular fables he treated, so the date is significant chiefly as a chronological marker in the record of their adaptation and study.

Fables as a Language Exercise

Aphthonius’s Latin versions illustrate a teaching practice the preface describes as common in his time and later: rhetoricians and philosophers assigned Aesopian fables to students. The exercise joined interpretation to composition. Students were invited to discuss each tale’s moral and to practice style and grammatical rules by producing new versions of the stories. In this setting, a fable was both a compact narrative with an instructive purpose and a flexible text through which learners could refine their command of language.

A Stage in a Longer Transmission

The account places Aphthonius after several earlier forms of transmission. The fables had first been narrated by Aesop and passed down orally; Socrates was said to have versified some that he remembered, while Demetrius Phalereus was credited with making an early collection. Around the beginning of the Christian era, Phaedrus adapted many into Latin iambics. Aphthonius’s prose versions therefore represent another mode of recasting the material, rather than the beginning of its written history.

The preface also names later Latin adaptations: Ausonius preserved some fables in verse, Julianus Titianus rendered them into prose, and Avienus put some into Latin elegiacs. Against this sequence, A.D. 315 records a particular point at which the fables served rhetorical teaching through prose translation. Their continuing adaptation reflects the preface’s broader account of the genre: stories designed to convey moral instruction could retain their force even as their language and form changed.