Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of
Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book;
but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the
province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned
by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated
works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest
circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the
first ten years of this century the _Original Poems_ of Jane and Ann
Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature;
but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary
verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and
pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to
another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind
us of the _Fables_ of Phaedrus.

The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred
pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much
translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional
stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the
Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not
strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also
stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the
history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor
Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the
talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the
prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which
Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against
detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The
body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most
recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though