Phaedrus

Greek fabulist

• Born: c. 15 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Pieria, Thessaly, Macedonia (now in Greece)
• Died: c. 55 c.e.
• Place of death: Unknown

As a prolific writer of fables and reputed translator of Aesop, Phaedrus elevated the fable from a rhetorical device, used incidentally in writing and speaking, to a completely independent genre with a recognizable place in literature.

Early Life

The little that is known about Roman fabulist Phaedrus (FEE-druhs) is derived either directly or by deduction from his own writings. He was born Gaius Iulius Phaeder in Pieria, Thessaly, which was at the time part of a Roman province. He was presumably the son of a schoolteacher and was instructed by a highly educated poet and teacher of Greek. He spent part of his early youth in Italy, where he received the customary education in Latin and Greek. He studied, among others, Vergil, Euripides, Simonides, and particularly Quintus Ennius, who, together with Lucilius and Horace, had previously employed the fable in Roman literature.

During some portion of his youth, Phaedrus was attached to the retinue of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi, who spent about three years settling disturbances in Thrace. After Piso’s return to Rome, Phaedrus was brought, as a personal servant and tutor, to the house of Augustus, where he taught Greek to the emperor’s grandson and heir, Lucius, while he himself attended the school of the famous scholar and philologist Marcus Verrius Flaccus. Years later, Phaedrus was granted his freedom by the emperor; however, his manumission did not confer upon him complete civil rights. As a freedman under Augustus, Phaedrus continued to live under the repressive tutelage and influence of the Imperial rules.

Phaedrus’s writing was strongly influenced by folklore, especially the fables collected in the writings of Aesop (c. 600 b.c.e.). The fable, which originally came from the “wisdom literature” of numerous civilizations, migrated, in oral or written form, to Europe. There, Aesop, considered to be one of the wisest men of Greece, developed it and came to be known as the father of the fable. Aesop had also been a freed slave and, through his fables, he became, in scholar H. J. Blackham’s words, “idealized as spokesman of the wisdom of the common man.” Aesop himself explained that, in giving the use of speech to animals (actually the poet Hesiod’s invention), he “laid the plan of teaching the most beautiful and useful maxims of philosophy under the veil of fables.”

Aesop’s influence on Phaedrus cannot be underestimated. “Where Aesop made a footpath, I have built a highway,” wrote Phaedrus. He not only adopted the fable as a form of writing that he would later elevate to an independent genre but also, as a slave and later a freedman under Augustus and Tiberius, became increasingly preoccupied with the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the common people and used the fable to give a voice to those who were not allowed to speak openly. In the prologue to book 3 of his fables, he wrote:

The slave, being liable to punishment for any offence, since he dared not say outright what he wished to say, projected his personal sentiments into fables and eluded censure under the guise of jesting with made-up stories.

On more than one occasion, his allusions to the atmosphere of unfairness and injustice in which he lived got him into trouble. His audacity even brought him to the point of persecution at the hands of Sejanus, the most powerful minister of Tiberius’s reign. However, it is not known which poem or poems in books 1 and 2 offended Sejanus or what form of punishment Phaedrus received.

Life’s Work

Much of Phaedrus’s work is lost. His only surviving work, Phaedri augusti Liberti Fabularum Aesopiarum (The Fables of Phaedrus, 1646), is a collection based on Aesop’s fables that had been gathered in prose by Demetrius of Phalerum in about 300 b.c.e. Using Demetrius as his only source, Phaedrus translated Aesop’s fables into Latin, cast them into verse form, and compiled them in the first collection of fables ever published as poetry and thus as literature. The five-book collection contains a total of ninety-three fables, but it is thought to be incomplete, because the length of each volume varies considerably. In particular, volumes 2 and 5 are thought to have originally contained much greater numbers of fables. Later editions include some thirty additional fables compiled by Niccolò Perotti (Archbishop of Manfredonia, 1430-1480 c.e.) in the Appendix Perottina (1470; Perotti’s Appendix, 1826). Except for Perotti’s Appendix, each volume begins with a prologue in which Phaedrus stresses his independence from his source and defends his poetry from the attack of what he calls “malign critics.”

The fables were written during a span of twenty years. Books 1 and 2 were published during the last years of Tiberius’s reign and contain some of Phaedrus’s most famous animal fables, such as “The Wolf and the Lamb,” “The Wolf and the Crane,” and “The Frogs Complain Against the Sun.” Book 3 appeared under the reign of Caligula somewhere between 37 and 41 c.e. Book 4 differs from the previous volumes in that it includes a large number of fables composed by Phaedrus himself. This volume marked Phaedrus’s return to writing after he had determined to put an end to his work. Book 5 was written without much enthusiasm under the reign of Claudius I (41-54 c.e.) or during that of Nero (54-68 c.e.), when Phaedrus was at a very advanced age and probably close to death.

Phaedrus’s collection of fables is far from being a mere compilation of Aesop’s work. Phaedrus went beyond his source, refining and rewriting the fables in iambic senarii (a simple meter composed of lines of six iambic feet with variations that provide varying rhythms), the standard meter used by Greek and Roman dramatists. He also included some of his own fables using “the old form but with modern content.” As a result, the collection includes a variety of stories, proverbs, sayings, and jests of varied length. Not all of them are animal fables. In fact, volumes 3, 4, and 5 include progressively fewer animal characters and more poets, priests, farmers, and shepherds, in conversation among themselves and sometimes even with Aesop himself (as in “The Poet,” “The Thief and His Lamp,” “Aesop and the Farmer,” and “Aesop and the Saucy Fellow”).

This difference in the form, however, does not affect their main purpose, which, following the example set by Aesop, was to convey a moral or useful truth beneath the shadow of an allegory. Thus, “The Sheep, the Dog, and the Wolf” teaches the reader that liars are liable to lose in the end, while “Aesop and the Imprudent Fellow” instructs the reader that success dooms people to their downfalls. To stress the didactic purpose of the fables, Phaedrus usually inserted a separate moral, either at the beginning (promythion) or at the end (epimythion) of each fable. It is believed that he may have derived this feature from Demetrius; it was definitely not from Aesop, who rejected such trite and wearisome additions that left little to the imagination.

Phaedrus wrote the fables in the language that characterized the early Augustan period: lucid, simple, and free from ornaments. At times, he uses a colloquial and coarse language, but it is always in agreement with his characterizations. His style, often satirical but at times serious, is defined by an extreme brevity that other fabulists both admired and envied but that most critics judged on account of the rather obscure effect some of his extremely brief sentences yielded. Only occasionally, such as in “The Poet, on Believing and Not Believing,” and “The King, the Flute Player,” is the language less concise, yielding a rather tedious effect. His tone has been defined sometimes as charming and humorous, other times as querulous and cantankerous, and, in one critic’s opinion, embittered, particularly when commenting on the “law of the stronger.”

Throughout his lifetime, Phaedrus suffered much stern criticism. Not only were his fables condemned by Sejanus, but he was also constantly ridiculed by jealous and hostile critics who underrated his writing and condemned it to a level below that of poetry. In books 3 and 4, he asked Eutychus and Particulo, two of his patrons, to vindicate him in the eyes of the public. Their defense must not have made much of an impact, for he was rarely mentioned in classical literature. Neither Seneca the Younger nor Quintilian, both of whom wrote in the first century c.e., mentioned him in their writings, and even Flavius Avianus, himself a fabulist writing in the fourth century c.e., claims to have been influenced by Babrius (who wrote in the second half of the first century c.e.) rather than Phaedrus.

If, however, Phaedrus’s contemporaries failed to recognize his literary merit, he regained the respect he had always sought after the fifteenth century, when his fables were rediscovered and were read by the public, paraphrased among respected fabulists, and even used for teaching Latin in school.

Significance

Phaedrus admitted that his ambition was to carry on, in Latin, the literary tradition of Greece, which he had inherited. He chose the fable because it combined the two traditional functions of poetry: entertainment and instruction. Some scholars suggest, however, that his main motive in adopting the fable as a literary form and Aesop as his subject was to fight against moral degradation during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Because slaves were not allowed to speak outright, he chose a genre in which he was able to elude censure and thus remain immune. This may well have been true. Behind the speech of his animals and his inanimate objects such as trees, there is the constant reminder of some of his prevalent themes: the advantage of the stronger over the weak (“The Wolf and the Lamb”), the futility of protest (“The Frogs Ask for a King”), the safety found in poverty (“The Dog Carrying a Piece of Meat Across the River”), the pervasiveness of power (“The Eagle and the Crow”), and the praise of freedom (“The Wolf and the Sleek Dog”). Phaedrus was not a highly inventive fabulist nor a poet of great achievement. However, no other fabulist did for the fable what Phaedrus did: By adapting the Greek genre of the fable to Latin, he made it a subject of poetic composition and gave it a recognizable voice in literature.

Bibliography

Blackham, H. J. The Fable as Literature. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1985. Chapter 1 gives a detailed account of the fable as early popular narrative, including its Indian and Aesopic origins. Phaedrus is mentioned tangentially throughout the discussion.

Conte, Gian Biagio. Latin Literature: A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. The section “Phaedrus: The Fable Tradition” includes a discussion of Phaedrus’s merit as a man of letters and a social commentator of his time.

Duff, J. Wight. A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age: From Tiberius to Hadrian. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Chapter 5, “Phaedrus and Fable: Poetry of the Time,” is a long discussion on Phaedrus’s life and work within the Roman context.

Perry, Ben Edwin. Babrius and Phaedrus. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. The lengthy introduction covers the Aesopic fable in antiquity, its origin, and the roles of Aesop, Babrius, and Phaedrus in its development.

Phaedrus. The Fables of Phaedrus. Translated by P. F. Widdows. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Translation includes a lengthy introduction discussing Phaedrus’s life and work, his fables, his reputation, his use of meter, and Christopher Smart’s 1764 translation of his work.