Oxford appears in the book’s account of how scholars investigated the authorship and textual history of Aesopian fables. Its role is both institutional and scholarly: the Bodleian Library held a manuscript of Babrius’s fables, while Thomas Tyrwhitt published a dissertation and collection based on a manuscript found there, helping to develop the case for Babrius as a collector of these stories.

Tyrwhitt’s work on Babrius

At the close of the seventeenth century, Richard Bentley argued that many existing versions of Aesop’s fables could be reconstructed, with slight verbal changes, as the choliambic iambics associated with Babrius. Bentley went further than the evidence then warranted by claiming exclusive authorship for Babrius, prompting opposition and a learned dispute with Charles Boyle, later Earl of Orrery.

Thomas Tyrwhitt subsequently defended Bentley’s argument. In 1776, he published a dissertation on Babrius and a collection of the poet’s fables in choliambic meter, drawing on a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His work brought together scholarly argument and manuscript material, strengthening the investigation of Babrius’s place in the history of the fables.

The manuscript and the later discovery

The book also places Oxford within a wider sequence of evidence gathered by scholars. Francesco de Furia printed previously unpublished fables from a manuscript in the Vatican Library, adding testimony that Babrius had made a genuine collection. In 1844, Menoides found a manuscript at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. Divided into two books, it contained 125 fables in the first and 95 in the second, and proved to be the long-sought choliambic version of Babrius.

The newly recovered fables were published with George Cornewall Lewis as editor and James Davies as translator. The book describes the discovery as confirming, in striking fashion, conjectures made by generations of critics and as bringing to light important evidence for the antiquity and authenticity of much Aesopian fable. Oxford’s earlier manuscript-based scholarship thus belongs to a continuing inquiry that the Mount Athos discovery substantially advanced.

Place in the history of the fables

Oxford’s significance here is specific rather than general: it is the location of the Bodleian manuscript used by Tyrwhitt in his 1776 publication. That work belongs to a larger history of transmission in which stories first narrated orally were collected, versified, translated, and assembled in manuscripts and printed editions. The preface ultimately calls Babrius the earliest and most reliable collector of veritable Aesopian fables, a conclusion supported in its account by the later discovery and publication of the Mount Athos manuscript.