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 Phaedrus.

Seven centuries elapsed before the next notice is found of the
Fables of Aesop. During this long period these fables seem to
have suffered an eclipse, to have disappeared and to have been
forgotten; and it is at the commencement of the fourteenth
century, when the Byzantine emperors were the great patrons of
learning, and amidst the splendors of an Asiatic court, that we
next find honors paid to the name and memory of Aesop. Maximus
Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople, made a collection of
about a hundred and fifty of these fables. Little is known of
his history. Planudes, however, was no mere recluse, shut up in
his monastery. He took an active part in public affairs. In
1327 A.D. he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Venice by the
Emperor Andronicus the Elder. This brought him into immediate
contact with the Western Patriarch, whose interests he henceforth
advocated with so much zeal as to bring on him suspicion and
persecution from the rulers of the Eastern Church. Planudes has
been exposed to a two-fold accusation. He is charged on the one
hand with having had before him a copy of Babrias (to whom we
shall have occasion to refer at greater length in the end of this
Preface), and to have had the bad taste "to transpose," or to
turn his poetical version into prose: and he is asserted, on the
other hand, never to have seen the Fables of Aesop at all, but to
have himself invented and made the fables which he palmed off