under the name of the famous Greek fabulist. The truth lies
between these two extremes. Planudes may have invented some few
fables, or have inserted some that were current in his day; but
there is an abundance of unanswerable internal evidence to prove
that he had an acquaintance with the veritable fables of Aesop,
although the versions he had access to were probably corrupt, as
contained in the various translations and disquisitional
exercises of the rhetoricians and philosophers. His collection
is interesting and important, not only as the parent source or
foundation of the earlier printed versions of Aesop, but as the
direct channel of attracting to these fables the attention of the
learned.

The eventual re-introduction, however, of these Fables of Aesop
to their high place in the general literature of Christendom, is
to be looked for in the West rather than in the East. The
calamities gradually thickening round the Eastern Empire, and the
fall of Constantinople, 1453 A.D. combined with other events to
promote the rapid restoration of learning in Italy; and with that
recovery of learning the revival of an interest in the Fables of
Aesop is closely identified. These fables, indeed, were among
the first writings of an earlier antiquity that attracted
attention. They took their place beside the Holy Scriptures and
the ancient classic authors, in the minds of the great students
of that day. Lorenzo Valla, one of the most famous promoters of
Italian learning, not only translated into Latin the Iliad of
Homer and the Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, but also the
Fables of Aesop.

These fables, again, were among the books brought into an