both in these and in later times. The rhetoricians
and philosophers were accustomed to give the Fables of Aesop as an
exercise to their scholars, not only inviting them to discuss the moral
of the tale, but also to practice and to perfect themselves thereby in
style and rules of grammar, by making for themselves new and various
versions of the fables. Ausonius,[9] the friend of the Emperor
Valentinian, and the latest poet of eminence in the Western Empire, has
handed down some of these fables in verse, which Julianus Titianus, a
contemporary writer of no great name, translated into prose. Avienus,
also a contemporary of Ausonius, put some of these fables into Latin
elegiacs, which are given by Nevelet (in a book we shall refer to
hereafter), and are occasionally incorporated with the editions of
Phaedrus.

Seven centuries elapsed before the next notice is found of the Fables
of Aesop. During this long period these fables seem to have suffered an
eclipse, to have disappeared and to have been forgotten; and it is at
the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the Byzantine emperors
were the great patrons of learning, and amidst the splendors of an
Asiatic court, that we next find honors paid to the name and memory
of Aesop. Maximus Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople, made a
collection of about a hundred and fifty of these fables. Little is known
of his history. Planudes, however, was no mere recluse, shut up in his
monastery. He took an active part in public affairs. In 1327 A.D. he
was sent on a diplomatic mission to Venice by the Emperor Andronicus
the Elder. This brought him into immediate contact with the Western
Patriarch, whose interests he henceforth advocated with so much zeal as
to bring on him suspicion and persecution from the rulers of the Eastern
Church. Planudes has been exposed to a two-fold accusation. He is
charged on the one hand with having had before him a copy of Babrias
(to whom we shall have occasion to refer at greater length in the end of
this Preface), and to have had the bad taste "to transpose," or to turn
his poetical version into prose: and he is asserted, on the other hand,
never to have seen the Fables of Aesop at all, but to have himself
invented and made the fables which he palmed off under the name of
the famous Greek fabulist. The truth lies between these two extremes.
Planudes may have invented some few fables, or have inserted some that
were current in his day; but there