Vatican Apostolic Library

The Vatican Apostolic Library enters the book’s history of Aesopian fables as a source of manuscripts that enlarged the surviving corpus. Its holdings supplied materials for Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s influential 1610 collection and for Francesco de Furia’s later publication of further fables, linking the library to the recovery and transmission of texts attributed to Aesop and Babrias.

Manuscripts in Nevelet’s Collection

Nevelet’s Mythologia Aesopica, published in 1610, was described as the most complete collection of Aesopian fables then issued. Alongside the collection associated with Maximus Planudes and material printed in earlier editions, it included 136 previously unpublished fables drawn from manuscripts in the Vatican Library, as the book calls the institution in this account. Nevelet also incorporated 40 fables attributed to Aphthonius, 43 from Babrias, and Latin versions by Phaedrus, Avienus, and other writers. The Vatican manuscripts thus contributed a substantial, specifically counted group to an edition that gathered texts from several strands of transmission.

The book presents Nevelet’s volume as a turning point in the reception of the fables. It calls the work a complete corpus and credits Nevelet’s labors with restoring Aesop’s reputation as a moral teacher. It further reports that the fables circulated widely over the following centuries, were translated into many languages, and became familiar in everyday speech. The library’s manuscripts are part of the material basis for that expanded collection, although the account does not identify the individual manuscripts or describe their contents one by one.

De Furia and Babrias

The library appears again in the account of efforts to establish Babrias’s place in the history of Aesopian fable. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Tyrwhitt published a dissertation on Babrias and fables in choliambic meter found in a manuscript at the Bodleian Library. Francesco de Furia later added evidence by printing several fables, not previously published, from a manuscript held in the Vatican Library. These publications supported the proposition that Babrias had collected fables, but the book distinguishes this evidence from the later discovery of a more extensive manuscript.

In 1844, Menoides, acting on a commission to search for ancient manuscripts, found a copy of Babrias at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. That manuscript contained two books, one with 125 fables and the other with 95. The account treats its recovery as confirmation of conjectures developed by earlier critics and as an important addition to the literary record. The Vatican manuscript used by de Furia and the Mount Athos manuscript are separate parts of this history: the former yielded previously unpublished fables, while the latter supplied the substantial choliambic text that brought Babrias into clearer view.

Role in the Transmission of the Fables

The library’s significance in this account is archival and textual rather than institutional: the book provides no description of its administration, founding, or wider operations. It records the specific scholarly use of manuscripts associated with its collections, first in Nevelet’s broad compilation and later in de Furia’s publication of additional material. These references show how manuscript holdings could supplement printed editions and help researchers recover texts obscured by a long and uneven history of oral transmission, copying, translation, and compilation.

The book also cautions that the fables bearing Aesop’s name do not all come directly from Aesop. Some predate him, others arose later, and the received versions passed through oral tradition, collections, translations, and scholarly exercises. Against that complicated background, the Vatican manuscripts matter as witnesses used in assembling and testing the corpus—not as proof that every fable in the collection was authored by Aesop. Their contribution lies in preserving material that editors could bring into print and relate to the broader history of Aesopian and Babrian fables.