University of Oxford

The University of Oxford enters the preface’s account of Aesopian literature not as the home of a single collection, but as a site of scholarly recovery and publication. Its Bodleian Library preserves a manuscript from which Thomas Tyrwhitt published Babrias’s fables in 1776; later, Oxford scholars George Cornewall Lewis and James Davies helped bring to print the fables recovered from a manuscript on Mount Athos.

Manuscripts and the Babrias Debate

The preface describes a long-running dispute over who composed or collected the fables attributed to Aesop. At the end of the seventeenth century, Dr. Bentley argued that many existing versions could be resolved, with slight verbal changes, into the choliambic meter associated with Babrias, and advanced the claim that Babrias was their exclusive author. His position provoked opposition, including from Charles Boyle, a member of the University of Oxford; their learned and witty exchanges became a notable episode in seventeenth-century literary history.

The debate continued through later scholarship. In 1776, Thomas Tyrwhitt published a dissertation on Babrias alongside a collection of his fables in choliambic meter, drawn from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This publication supplied further material for the argument that Babrias had assembled a genuine collection, although the preface presents the question of authorship as a contested inquiry rather than a settled fact at that point.

The Mount Athos Manuscript and Its Publication

In 1844, Menoides, acting on the suggestion of M. Villemain, searched for ancient manuscripts and found a copy of Babrias at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. The manuscript contained two books: one with 125 fables and the other with 95. Its discovery drew wide attention because it appeared to confirm earlier scholarly conjectures and brought a substantial body of fables into view.

The preface identifies Sir George Cornewall Lewis as the manuscript’s editor and the Reverend James Davies, a former scholar of Lincoln College, Oxford, as its translator. Their work carried the recovered collection into publication. The account concludes that this discovery established Babrias as the earliest and most reliable collector of authentic Aesopian fables, giving Oxford-connected scholarship a role in the chain from manuscript recovery to the printed text.

Oxford in the Collection’s Scholarly Record

The University of Oxford is also named among the institutional contexts surrounding the preface’s account of transmission. The collection’s stated sources include editions of Babrias published by George Cornewall Lewis in Oxford in 1846 and, in a separate edition of the manuscript’s second part, in London in 1857. The preface thus links Oxford both to Tyrwhitt’s use of the Bodleian manuscript and to the later editorial work that made recovered Babrias material available to readers.

These references give the University of Oxford a specific, bounded significance: its library supplied a manuscript used in the eighteenth-century Babrias debate, while scholars connected with Oxford participated in translating and editing material recovered in the nineteenth century. The preface places those contributions within a much broader history of fables transmitted through oral tradition, ancient collections, medieval compilations, and printed editions.