14th century

The fourteenth century was a turning point in the documented transmission of Aesop’s fables. After an interval of about seven centuries in which the fables seemed to have faded from view, Maximus Planudes assembled a collection of roughly 150, helping return them to learned attention and supplying the foundation for early printed editions.

The Collection and Its Compiler

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, during a period when the Byzantine emperors were patrons of learning, Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople, collected about 150 fables. The account presents this compilation as the first major renewed notice of the fables after their long eclipse. Planudes was not portrayed as a recluse: in 1327, Emperor Andronicus the Elder sent him on a diplomatic mission to Venice.

The collection’s relationship to earlier material is described as disputed. One accusation held that Planudes had a copy of Babrias and turned its verse into prose; another claimed that he had never seen Aesop’s fables and invented stories under Aesop’s name. The account rejects both extremes. It allows that Planudes may have invented a few fables or included stories circulating in his own time, while arguing that internal evidence shows he knew genuine Aesopian material, probably through versions already altered by translators and rhetorical exercises.

Influence and Controversy

Planudes’s compilation mattered not only as a collection but as a point of transmission. The account identifies it as the foundation of the earliest printed versions and as a direct means by which learned readers’ attention was drawn back to the fables. Its influence therefore rested on both the stories it gathered and its role in making them available to later editors and readers.

Planudes’s public activity also shaped his later reputation. After his mission to Venice, he came into contact with the Western Patriarch and thereafter advocated that figure’s interests with such zeal that the rulers of the Eastern Church suspected and persecuted him. The account records this political context alongside the scholarly disputes over his collection, distinguishing his documented diplomatic role from uncertain claims about how he assembled particular fables.

Reception of the Life of Aesop

A separate work by Planudes, a Life of Aesop, was prefixed to early editions of the fables and remained in circulation for centuries; Archdeacon Croxall republished it in 1727 as an introduction to his edition. The later account sharply rejects it as history, describing its portraits of Aesop’s grotesque deformity, apocryphal stories, legends, and anachronisms as unauthentic. Its prominence in printed editions thus contrasts with the collection’s acknowledged importance: Planudes helped transmit the fables, but his accompanying biography was later judged unreliable.

Place in the Transmission History

The collection’s afterlife extended beyond its initial compilation. Bonus Accursius printed the Planudes collection between 1475 and 1480, and William Caxton translated it into English and printed it at Westminster Abbey in 1485. These later milestones show how a fourteenth-century compilation became a conduit for the fables’ wider circulation, even as questions about its sources and the reliability of Planudes’s biography remained distinct matters.