Page:Three hundred Aesop's fables (Townshend).djvu/17

Rh about the commencement of the Christian era. Aphthonius, a rhetorician of Antioch, A.C. 315, wrote a treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some of these fables. This translation is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates a custom of common use, both in these and in later times. The rhetoricians and philosophers were accustomed to give the Fables of Æsop as an exercise to their scholars, not only inviting them to discuss the moral of the tale, but also to practise and to perfect themselves thereby in style and rules of grammar, by making for themselves new and various versions of the fables. Ausonius, 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 Phædrus.

Seven centuries elapsed before the next notice is found of the Fables of Æsop. During this long period these