30 - Minor poetry

Summary

PHAEDRUS

Phaedrus holds no exalted rank amongst Latin poets, but he claims serious attention by his choice of subject matter and his individualistic treatment of it. He was, as far as we know, the first poet, Greek or Roman, to put together a collection of fables and present them as literature in their own right, not merely as material on which others might draw. And on this collection he firmly imprinted his own personality, complacent, querulous, cantankerous. In prologues, epilogues, and occasionally elsewhere he reveals his grievances and aspirations. His fables contain elements of satire and ‘social comment’, not at all gentle: if he had chosen to write satire proper, he might have vied with Juvenal in trenchancy and bitterness.

Animal fables, usually purveying a simple moral, have a long prehistory in folklore. Thereafter they provided speakers and writers with a ready store of homely illustrations and precepts. The Greeks of the fourth century B.C. ascribed a mass of these fables to the wise and witty slave Aesop: how many of those which survive in fact go back to this shadowy figure we do not know, but we approach firmer ground with the collection of fables, attributed to Aesop or in the Aesopian tradition, compiled in prose by Demetrius of Phalerum (c. 300 B.C.). This book itself is lost (unless some parts have come to light on a papyrus), but very probably it was Phaedrus' main source, perhaps his only source. We know of no other collections available to him. Certain recurrent features in Phaedrus may well derive from Demetrius, in particular promythia, initial statements of theme or moral, intended originally for the convenience of orators or others in search of illustrations.