Four of the most widely read books in early America were the Bible, the Almanac, Plutarch's Lives and Aesop's Fables. Nearly twenty different editions of Aesop, in English translation, were printed in America in the second half of the eighteenth century alone.¹ These translations contained not only the fables of the sixth-century B.C. Greek slave, Aesop, but also many fables from Phaedrus, a first-century A.D. Roman freedman. Many of the eighteenth-century American editions of these authors also included several Latin fables of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and some fables composed by anonymous authors in the middle ages. All these fables, although composed by a variety of authors over the span of many centuries, frequently bore the collective title, "Aesop."

        The popularity of Aesop's fables often originated from the charming woodcuts, which accompanied an individual fable (see illustration), and the lengthy moralizing conclusions which authoritatively interpreted the fable for the young reader. The Latin fables of Phaedrus and the Latin versions of Aesop's fables, with their lessons of modesty, fidelity, honesty, generosity, kindness, and truthfulness, as well as the reverse of each of these virtues, were favorites of grammar school masters in early America who were intent on teaching their charges not only correct Latin, but also virtuous conduct.

        Selections A and B are taken from an anonymously authored collection of Aesop's Fables, Fabulae Aesopi Graece et Latine Nunc Denuo Selectae (Amsterdam, 1727). Selections C, D and E are from a 1745 schoolboy edition of The Fables of Phaedrus, published in London.

Selection A. Aesop: "The Wolf and the Crane"

                     L.1 quum = cum; temporal conjunction, introduces a circumstantial clause with the subjunctive, haberet.
                            Same use of quum in 1.2. Understand se, referring to the lupus, as the subject accusative of
                            praebiturum (esse). sibi, a dative of possession, is used instead of eius to distinguish the wolf's throat
                            from that of the crane.

                     L.2 sibi, a dative of possession, is used instead of eius to distinguish the wolf's throat from that of the
                            crane quod, antecedent is os. Illa refers to grus. longo collo, ablative of quality describing quae.

                     L.5  understand scripta est with fabula.

                     L1 ipsam refers to the gallinam; take auri with massam.

                     L.2 multum + divitiarum.

                     L.3 oportere, infinitive in indirect statement after significat.

                    L.8 ad meos haustos, as if ad me bibentem, "to me drinking."

                    L.9 repulsus, "refuted."

                    L.15 fictis causis, ablative absolute, translate, "under false pretences."
 

Selection D. Phaedrus: "The Frogs seeking a King"

                    L.3 licentia, subject of solvit.

                    L.4 factionum partibus, translate, "political parties."

                    L.5 Pisistratus, benevolent tyrant of Athens from 560-527 B.C.; he gained power and
                            political control, however, through the bodyguard which had been granted to him by
                            the Athenian people.

                    L.7 understand esset with ille crudelis and with grave onus.

                    L.10 liberis, "free," "independent," i.e., "ungoverned."

                    L.12 compesceret, subjunctive, purpose clause, as if qui was ut ille.
 
                    L.16 hoc, refers to tigillum, and subject of jaceret.

                    L17 subject of profert is una (ranarum).

                    L.21 inquinassent = inquinavissent

                    L.22 rogantes, modifies legatos understood. The usual construction is misere legatos
                            qui rogarent; misere = miserunt.

                    L.27 Mercury was the traditional messenger of the gods.

                    L.28 with contra Deus understand inquit.

                    L.30 Aesop is the subject of ait.

                    L.31 by hoc malum is meant the rule of Pisistratus.

                    L.6 asino, dative of person advised.

                    L.7 ille, the asinus.

                    L.9 mea has occasioned considerable grammatical discussion. Here it is taken as the accusative
                            plural neuter; some would read the line as re (ablative) fert mea.
  

        Knowledge of Aesop's fables was widespread in early America. A Latin text of Aesop was a standard work in the personal library of every educated colonial gentleman. An Aesop in English translation was also a cherished possession even of those who were neither formally educated nor familiar with the Latin and Greek languages. Among the latter was George Washington, who inherited a copy of Aesop in 1759 when he married Martha Custis.² Certainly, some of the fables and morals from his copy of Aesop made a direct impression on Washington as a young adult since he recommended to Fielding Lewis and Betty Washington, the builders and owners of Kenmore house in Fredericksburg, that the bas-relief plaster scene of the drawing room overmantel, begun sometime after 1770, consist of Aesop's fable of the Fox, Crow and Cheese.³ Just as Washington desired the moral lesson of this fable to be constantly before the eyes of his nieces and nephews, so also did countless scores of other youngsters in early America have many moral lessons preached to them by their parents who, at the fireside on dark winter's evenings, read to them from one of the many editions of Samuel Croxall's Fables of Aesop, and Others, Translated into English (1722). In the dedication to his translation, Croxall claims that:

^{2. See Louis B. Wright, "The Classical Tradition in Colonial Virginia," Biblioqraphical Society of America 33 (1939), pp. 86-91, for Aesop among the library inventories of early Virginian gentlemen, and pp. 92-94 for Washington's inheritance. Even the woodcut illustrations of Aesop became popular, and reduplications of them became commonplace in early American art, including imported chinaware, as can still be seen in a collection of very attractive, early nineteenth-century china at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.}

^{3. For a detailed discussion of the Kenmore mansion, see Thomas T. Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia 1770-1776 (New York: Bonanza Books, 1945), pp. 313-324.}

^{4. Samuel Croxall, Fables of Aesop, and Others, Translated into English: With Instructive Applications (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1722), p. iii. The Fable of the Fox, Crow, and Cheese was printed as the ninth fable in Croxall's collection.}

5. Croxall, Fables of Aesop, pp. 25-26

^{6. See Introduction, pp. 8-10, for Nathaniel Williams' description of Aesop in the curriculum of the Boston Latin Grammar School. See also John Adams' letter of March 17th, 1780 to his son John Quincy Adams on the merit of studying Phaedrus, along with Cicero and Erasmus etc.: "Making Latin, construing Cicero, Erasmus, the Appendix de Diis et Heroibus ethnicis, and Phaedrus, are all Exercises proper for the Acquisition of the Latin Tongue; you are constantly employed in learning the Meaning of Latin Words, and the Grammar, the Rhetorick and Criticism of the Roman Authors: These Studies have therefore such a Relation to each other, that I think you would do well to pursue them all, under the Direction of your Master."--(L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence 3, April 1778-September 1780 [Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1,973], pp. 308-309). By May of 1781 young John Quincy writes to his father, "I have finish'd Phaedrus's fables".}

^{7. See Selection E. and Robert J. Taylor et al., editors, Papers of John Adams, 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977), p. 334.}

^{8. Jefferson's letter of May 29th, 1781, written at Charlottesville while he was a wartime governor, informs Lafayette of what measures the Virginia House of Delegates had taken to procure horses for his cavalry units; see Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 6 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 35.}

^{9. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 8 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 229.}

^{10. Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed., The Writinqs of Thomas Jefferson 6 (Washington, D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), p. 58. See also Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), pp. 25-26.}

^{11. See Jefferson to James Madison, January 30th, 1787, in Julian Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 11 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 93.}

^{12. Jefferson to John Jay, January llth, 1789; see Julian Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 14 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 429.}

^{13. See Joseph I. Gardner and Joan P. Kerr, The Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, A Biography in His Own Words, 1 (New York: Newsweek Books, 1974), pp. 188-189. Jefferson was not the only American to use Aesop's fables to illustrate a political point during the period of the Constitutional Debate. The author of the "Old Whig" anti-federalist essays which appeared in the Philadelphia "Independent Gazetter" from October 1787 through February 1788, cites in "Essay VIII" the following passage from Aesop's fable of the "Clown and the Word" to express his concern for vesting even potential, excessive political power in the hands of a public official: "A man, says Aesop, coming into a wood, begged the trees to grant him the favor of a handle to his axe. The whole forest consented; upon which he provided himself with a strong handle; which he had no sooner done, than he began to fell the trees without number, then the trees, though too late, repented of their weakness, and an universal groan was heard throughout the forest. At length, when the man came to cut down the tree which had furnished him with the handle, the trunk fell to the ground uttering these words: Fool that I was! I have been the cause of my own destruction." See Herbert E. Storing, The Complete Anti-Federalist 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 48, 52.}

^{14. Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 13 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 423-424.}

^{15. For an informative discussion of the pedagogical, social, philosophical, literary, and especially political uses of fables in early eighteenth-century England, see Stephen H. Daniels, "Political and Philosophical Uses of Fable in Eighteenth-Century England," The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 23 (1982), pp. 151-171.}