Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/167

145 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 145 according to /Eschylus*, the beautiful fable of the wounded eagle, who, looking- at the feathering of the arrow with which he was pierced, exclaimed, " I perish by feathers drawn from my own wing." From this example we see that the Libyan fable belonged to the class of fables of animals. So also did the sorts to which later teachers of rhetoric t give the names of the Cyprian and the Cilician ; these writers also men- tion the names of some fabulists among the barbarians, as Cybissus the Libyan and Connis the Cilician. The contest between the olive and the laurel on mount Tmolus, is cited as a fable of the ancient Lydians. The Carian stories or fables, however, were taken from human life, as, for instance, that quoted by the Greek lyric poets, Timocreon and Simonides. A Carian fisherman, in the winter, sees a sea polypus, and he says to himself, " If I dive to catch it, I shall be frozen to death ; if I don't catch it, my children must starve §." The Sybaritic fables men- tioned by Aristophanes have a similar character. Some pointed »aying of a man or woman of Sybaris, with the particular circumstances which called it forth, is related ||. The large population of the wealthy Ionian Sybaris appears to have been much given to such repartees, and to have caught them up and preserved them with great eager- ness. Doubtless, therefore, the Sicilian poet Epicharmus means, by Sybaritic apophthegms^", what others call Sybaritic fables. The Sybaritic fables, nevertheless, occasionally invested not only the lower animals, but even inanimate objects, with life and speech, as in the one quoted by Aristophanes. A woman in Sybaris broke an earthen pot ; the pot screamed out, and called witnesses to see how ill she had been treated. Then the woman said, " By Cora, if you were to leave off calling out for witnesses, and were to make haste and buy a copper ring to bind yourself together, you would show more wisdom." This fable is used by a saucy merry old man, in ridicule of one whom he has ill treated, and who threatens to lay a complaint against him. Both the Sybaritic and iEsopian fables are represented by Aristophanes as jests, or ludicrous stories (ysXota). § 16. To return to yEsop : Bentley has shown that he was very far from being regarded by the Greeks as one of their poets, and still less as a writer. They considered him merely as an ingenious fabulist, under whose name a number of fables, often applicable to human affairs, were current, and to whom, at a later period, nearly all that were either t Theon. and in part also Aphthonius. A fragment of a Cyprian fable, about the doves of Aphrodite, is published in the excerpts from the Codex Angelicus in Walz Rhetor. Grec. vol. ii. p. 12. J Callim. fr. 93. Bentl. § From the Codex Angelicus in Walz Rhet. Gr. vol. ii. p. 11., and the Proverbs of Macarius in Walz Arsemi Violetum, p. 318. L
 * Fragment of the Myrmidons,
 * Aristoph. Vesp. 1259, 1427, 1437. % Suidas in v.