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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Will you be honest and faithful if I buy you?" "I shall be that whether you buy me or not." "Will you promise not to run away?" "Did you ever hear," answered Aesop, "of a bird in a cage that promised to stay in it?" Xanthus was so much pleased with the answers that he bought Aesop.
Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus, of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus, and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims, parodies and epigrammatic trifles small matters, but indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.
The careful way in which he defines at what point his obligations to Aesop cease and his own invention begins, shows him to have had something of the trifler and a great deal of the egotist. His love of condensation is natural, for a fabulist should be short, trenchant, and almost proverbial in his style; but Phaedrus carries these to the point of obscurity and enigma.
If we were poets or fabulists, and could invest inanimate objects with all the qualities and feelings of animate ones; if, with all the magic of old AEsop, we could make pots and kettles talk, and endue barn-door fowls with the spirit of philosophy, we should be tempted to say that the great gates of Beaufort House, together with the stone Cupids on the tops of the piers, ay, and the vases of carved flowers which stood between those Cupids, turned up the nose as the antiquated, ungilt, dusty, and somewhat tattered vehicle containing the Lady Laura Gaveston and Wilton Brown rolled up.
Had he not called him Aesop, when it was plain to all the world that he represented Apollo? And now this night, again, he had taken the opportunity of turning him into ridicule in the presence of La Bianca; and he and she had spoken of the possibility of their being troubled with his company as of a nightmare.
Pittacus laughed at this reply, and Aesop told them this fable: The wolf seeing a parcel of shepherds in their booth feeding upon a lamb, approaching near them, What a bustle and noise and uproar would there have been, saith he, if I had but done what you do!
In Phaedrus we have human sentiments translated into the language of beasts, while in Aesop we have beasts giving utterance to such sentiments as would be naturally theirs if they were placed in the position of men. SATIRE AND EPIGRAM. Roman satire, subsequently to Horace, is represented by Persius and Juvenal. He was pure in mind, and free from the corrupt taint of an immoral age.
The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word ingentem, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided, Aesop the slave and the Athenians, must be read as an appoggiatura, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line "Servumque collocarunt ETERNA IN BASI." This passage from Phaedrus, which might be briefly designated The Apotheosis of the Slave, gave to me my first grand and jubilant sense of the moral sublime.
"Ah, Miss Wolston," said Fritz, "you forget I only did my duty; you must not allow your gratitude to over-estimate the service I rendered you." "Well, I declare," cried Mrs. Wolston, laughing "here is another animal that speaks." "The age of Aesop revived," suggested Mrs. Becker. "What do you say, Master Jack?" inquired Mrs. Wolston.
I know I'm emissary of Providence, but not that kind! You get out of it yourself, like Aesop and the other fellow. Must be dreadful muddle for young orphan o' forty; leather business and all! 'I am sure I don't know what you mean, said Morris. 'Not sure I know myself, said Michael. 'This is exc'lent vintage, sir exc'lent vintage. Nothing against the tipple.
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