Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Fables of Phaedrus: An Inaugural Lecture
So far however as research has yet been carried, it is through the prose paraphrases mainly, if not alone, that Phaedrus was known throughout the Middle Age. The investigations of Hervieux, who has made this part of the question the special object of a minute and prolonged study, have so widely extended our knowledge of this prose fable literature, as to require a separate treatment, which cannot be included in the present lecture. It is enough to say here, that no one who thinks to restore the text of Phaedrus often very much corrupted, can dispense with Hervieux elaborate and unique volume, which forms the second part of his work P/zea're et ses anciens imitateurs.
The fact, if it is one, that the name of our fabulist was as unknown as were his verses from the time of Avianus to the fifteenth century, is the more remarkable because among the five mss. Which have been discovered of the fables, two, the Pit/toeamcs and Remensis, were written in the ninth or at latest tenth century, one, the Codex of Daniel, containing only a few fables, in the eleventh; the other-two, the Perottine codex and its duplicate the Vati camis, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is quite as remarkable that though Perotti, Archbishop of Siponto, not only knew of the existence of Phaedrus, but transcribed many of his fables with his own hand in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first printed edition was not given to the world till the very end of the sixteenth, in September of the year 1596.
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