The Fabian name is met with as late as the 2nd century A.D. A complete list of the Fabii will be found in de Vit’s Onomasticon; see also W. N. du Rieu, Disputatio de Gente Fabia (1856), containing an account of 57 members of the family.
FABIUS PICTOR, QUINTUS, the father of Roman history,
was born about 254 B.C. He was the grandson of Gaius Fabius,
who received the surname Pictor for his painting of the temple
of Salus (302). He took an active part in the subjugation of the
Gauls in the north of Italy (225), and after the battle of Cannae
(216) was employed by the Romans to proceed to Delphi in order
to consult the oracle of Apollo. He was the earliest prose writer
of Roman history. His materials consisted of the Annales
Maximi, Commentarii Consulares, and similar records; the
chronicles of the great Roman families; and his own experiences
in the Second Punic War. He is also said to have made much use
of the Greek historian Diocles of Peparethus. His work, which
was written in Greek, began with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy,
and ended with the Hannibalic war. Although Polybius and
Dionysius of Halicarnassus frequently find fault with him, the
first uses him as his chief authority for the Second Punic War.
A Latin version of the work was in existence in the time of Cicero,
but it is doubtful whether it was by Fabius Pictor or by a later
writer with whom he was confused—Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus
(consul 142); or there may have been two annalists of
the name of Fabius Pictor.
Fragments in H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Fragmenta (1883); see also Annalists and Livy, and Teuffel-Schwabe, History of Roman Literature, § 116.
FABLE (Fr. fable, Lat. fabula). With certain restrictions,
the necessity of which will be shown in the course of the article,
we may accept the definition of “fable” which Dr Johnson proposes
in his Life of Gay: “A fable or apologue seems to be, in its
genuine state, a narrative in which beings irrational, and sometimes
inanimate (arbores loquuntur, non tantum ferae), are, for the
purpose of moral instruction, feigned to act and speak with human
interests and passions.” The description of La Fontaine, the
greatest of fabulists, is a poetic rendering of Johnson’s definition:
| “Fables in sooth are not what they appear; Our moralists are mice, and such small deer. We yawn at sermons, but we gladly turn To moral tales, and so amused we learn.” |
The fable is distinguished from the myth, which grows and is not made, the spontaneous and unconscious product of primitive fancy as it plays round some phenomenon of natural or historical fact. The literary myth, such as, for instance, the legend of Pandora in Hesiod or the tale of Er in the Republic of Plato, is really an allegory, and differs from the fable in so far as it is self-interpreting; the story and the moral are intermingled throughout. Between the parable and the fable there is no clear line of demarcation, and theologians like Trench have unwarrantably narrowed their definition of a parable to fit those of the New Testament. The soundest distinction is drawn by Neander. In the fable human passions and actions are attributed to beasts; in the parable the lower creation is employed only to illustrate the higher life and never transgresses the laws of its kind. But whether Jotham’s apologue of the trees choosing a king, perhaps the first recorded in literature, should be classed as a fable or a parable is hardly worth disputing. Lastly, we may point out the close affinity between the fable and the proverb. A proverb is often a condensed or fossilized fable, and not a few fables are amplified or elaborated proverbs.
The history of the fable goes back to the remotest antiquity, and Aesop has even less claim to be reckoned the father of the fable than has Homer to be entitled the father of poetry. The fable has its origin in the universal impulse of men to express their thoughts in concrete images, and is strictly parallel to the use of metaphor in language. It is the most widely diffused if not the most primitive form of literature. Though it has fallen from its high place it still survives, as in J. Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. The Arab of to-day will invent a fable at every turn of the conversation as the readiest form of argument, and in the Life of Coventry Patmore it is told how an impromptu fable of his about the pious dormouse found its way into Catholic books of devotion.
With the fable, as we know it, the moral is indispensable. As La Fontaine puts it, an apologue is composed of two parts, body and soul. The body is the story, the soul the morality. But if we revert to the earliest type we shall find that this is no longer the case. In the primitive beast-fable, which is the direct progenitor of the Aesopian fable, the story is told simply for its own sake, and is as innocent of any moral as the fairy tales of Little Red Riding-Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. Thus, in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf found in cloud-land his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and this is why she lives and dives alone to this very day. Such animal myths are as common in the New World as in the Old, and abound from Finland and Kamtchatka to the Hottentots and Australasians. From the story invented, as the one above quoted, to account for some peculiarity of the animal world, or told as a pure exercise of the imagination, just as a sailor spins a yarn about the sea-serpent, to the moral apologue the transition is easy; and that it has been effected by savages unaided by the example of higher races seems sufficiently proved by the tales quoted by E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 411). From the beast-fables of savages we come next to the Oriental apologues, which we still possess in their original form. The East, the land of myth and legend, is the natural home of the fable, and Hindustan was the birthplace, if not of the original of these tales, at least of the oldest shape in which they still exist. The Pancha Tantra (2nd century B.C.), or fables of the Brahma Vishnu Sarman, have been translated from Sanskrit into almost every language and adapted by most modern fabulists. The Kalilah and Dimna (names of two jackals), or fables of Bidpai (or Pilpai), passed from India to western Europe through the successive stages of Pahlavi (ancient Persian), Arabic, Greek, Latin. By the end of the 16th century there were Italian, French and English versions. There is an excellent Arabic edition (Paris, 1816) with an introduction by Sylvestre de Sacy. The Hitopadesa, or “friendly instruction,” is a modernized form of the same work, and of it there are three translations into English by Dr Charles Wilkins, Sir William Jones and Professor F. Johnson. The Hitopadesa is a complete chaplet of fables loosely strung together, but connected so as to form something of a continuous story, with moral reflections freely interspersed, purporting to be written for the instruction of some dissolute young princes. Thus, in the first fable a flock of pigeons see the grains of rice which a fowler has scattered, and are about to descend on them, when the king of the pigeons warns them by telling the fable of a traveller who being greedy of a bracelet was devoured by a tiger. They neglect his warning and are caught in the net, but are afterwards delivered by the king of the mice, who tells the story of the Deer, the Jackal and the Crow, to show that no real friendship can exist between the strong and the weak, the beast of prey and his quarry, and so on to the end of the volume. Another book of Eastern fables is well worthy of notice, Buddhaghosha’s Parables, a commentary on the Dhammapada or Buddha’s Paths of Virtue. The original is in Pali, but an English translation of the Burmese version was made by Captain T. Rogers, R.E.
From Hindustan the Sanskrit fables passed to China, Tibet and Persia; and they must have reached Greece at an early age, for many of the fables which passed under the name of Aesop are identical with those of the East. Aesop to us is little more than a name, though, if we may trust a passing notice in Herodotus (ii. 134), he must have lived in the 6th century B.C. Probably his fables were never written down, though several are ascribed to him by Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch and other Greek writers, and Plato represents Socrates as beguiling his last days by versifying such as he remembered. Aristophanes alludes to them as merry tales, and Plato, while excluding the poets from his ideal republic, admits Aesop as a moral teacher. Of the various versions of Aesop’s Fables, by far the most trustworthy is that of Babrius or Babrias, a Greek probably of the 3rd century A.D., who rendered them in choliambic verse. These,
