Fables and Fabulists: Ancient and Modern

'Pairing Time Anticipated.'

19

Suidas.

20

The mina was twelve ounces, or a sum estimated as equal to £3 15s. English.

21

See post, p. 76 (#Page_76).

22

Spelt variously Locman, Lôqman, Lokman.

23

This woman is notorious in history as a courtesan who essayed to compound for her sins by votive offerings to the temple at Delphi. She is also said to have built the Lesser Pyramid out of her accumulated riches, but this is denied by Herodotus, who claims for the structure a more ancient and less discreditable foundation, being the work, as he asserts, of Mycerinus, King of Egypt (Herod., ii. 134).

24

Phædrus, Epilogue, book ii.

25

Boothby, Preface, p. xxxiv.

26

Solon.

27

Crœsus.

28

Quoted from the 'Life of Æsop' in the introduction to Dodsley's 'Select Fables.'

29

Antiquary in 'The Club.'

30

'Conviv. Sapient.'

31

Boothby's translation.

32

Priscian.

33

Ante, p. 54 (#Page_54).

34

'Being exhorted by a dream, I composed some verses in honour of the god to whom the present festival [of the sacred embassy to Delos] belongs; but after the god, considering it necessary that he who designs to be a poet should make fables and not discourses, and knowing that I myself was not a mythologist, on these accounts I versified the fables of Æsop, which were at hand, and were known to me.' – Socrates in Plato's 'Phædo.'

35

Suidas.

36

Sir William Temple.

37

Goldsmith, in his 'Account of the Augustine Age of England,' remarks: 'That L'Estrange was a standard writer cannot be disowned, because a great many very eminent authors formed their style by his. But his standard was far from being a just one; though, when party considerations are set aside, he certainly was possessed of elegance, ease, and perspicuity.' Notwithstanding this considerable estimate of L'Estrange, it may be said that he is now remembered chiefly by his association with the Æsopian fables.

38

'The Charioteer of Caligula,' Bücheler.

39

From the translation of the fables of Phædrus into English verse by Christopher Smart, A.M.

40

Sometimes spelt 'Gabrias.'

41

Jacobs: 'History of the Æsopic Fable,' p. 22.

42

'Rhetoric,' book ii., chap. xx.

43