Page:The Fables of Æsop (Jacobs).djvu/23

Rh standard Æsop of medieval Christendom. The same history applies in large measure to the Fables of Avian, which were done into prose, transferred back into Latin verse, and sent forth through Europe from England.

Meanwhile Babrius had been suffering the same fate as Phædrus. His scazons were turned into poor Greek prose, and selections of them pass to this day as the original Fables of Æsop. Some fifty of these were selected, and with the addition of a dozen Oriental fables, were attributed to an imaginary Persian sage, Syntipas; this collection was translated into Syriac, and thence into Arabic, where they passed under the name of the legendary Lôqman (probably a doublet of Balaam). A still larger collection of the Greek prose versions got into Arabic, where it was enriched by some 60 fables from the Arabic Bidpai and other sources, but still passed under the name of Æsop. This collection, containing 164 fables, was brought to England after the Third Crusade of Richard I., arid translated into Latin by an Englishman named Alfred, with the aid of an Oxford Jew named Berachyah ha-Nakdan ("Benedictus le Puncteur" in the English Records), who, on his own account, translated a number of the fables into Hebrew rhymed prose, under the Talmudic title Mishle Shu'alim (Fox Fables). Part of Alfred's Æsop was translated into English alliterative verse, and this again was translated about 1200 into French by Marie de France, who attributed the new fables to King Alfred. After her no important addition was made to the medieval Æsop.