Author: PHAEDRUS
Biography:
PHAEDRUS (fl 1st century)
Gaius Julius Phaedrus, born in Thrace but educated in Italy, was a slave in the household of Augustus (d 14 CE) until he was freed by his master. His five books of fables, based closely on those of Aesop (q.v.) but incorporating anecdotes and details of daily life in his own time, circulated in manuscript but were not widely known until they were published from a manuscript source in Troyes, France, in 1596. The only source of information about the life of the author is the fables themselves, and neither his exact birthdate nor the date and circumstances of his death are known. Boothby speculates that he composed the fables at “an advanced age” and died in poverty and neglect. Coincidentally, a further manuscript collection of fables believed to be by Phaedrus was published in 1808 with 32 more poems. A recent translator judges Boothby’s versions to be “often neat and trenchant in expression” but so committed to brevity and rhyme as to be “closer to a paraphrase than a translation” (Widdows, xxiii). (Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911] 21: 341-2; Harvey; P. F. Widdows, trans. The Fables of Phaedrus [1992]; Brooke Boothby, Preface to Fables and Satires [1809]) HJ