Page:Fables of Aesop and other eminent mythologists.djvu/9

WE have had the History of Æsop so many times over and over, and drest-up so many several Ways; that it would be but Labour Lost to Multiply Unprofitable Conjectures upon a Tradition of Great Uncertainty. Writers are divided about him, almost to all manner of purposes: And particularly concerning the Authority, even of the greater part of Those Compositions that pass the World in his Name: For, the Story is come down to us so Dark and Doubtful, that it is Impossible to Distinguish the Original from the Copy: And to say, which of the fables are Æsops, and which not; which are Genuine, and which Spurious: Beside, that there are divers Inconsistencies upon the Point of Chronology, in the Account of his Life, (as Maximus Planudes, and others have Deliver’d it) which the noble Earth can never Reconcile. Vavasor the Jesuite, in a Tract of his, de Ludicra Dictione, takes Notice of some four of five Gross Mistakes of This Kind. [Planudes (says he) brings ÆSop to Babylon, in the Reign of Lyceus; where there was never such a Prince heard of, from Nabonassar (the first King of Babylon) to Alexander the Great. He tells also of his going into Ægypt in the Days of King Nectenabo; which Nectenabo came not into the World till well nigh Two Hundred Years after him. And so he makes him Greet his Mistress upon his first Entrance into his Master’s House, with a Bitter Sentence against Women out of Eruipides; (as he pretends) when yet Æsop had been Dead, a matter of Fourscore Years, before T’other was Born. And once again, He brings him in, Talking of the Pyrœan port, in his Fable of the Ape and the Dolphin: A Port, that the very Name on’t was never thought of, till about the Seventy Sixt Olypiad: And Æsop was Murder’d, in the Four and Fifti’th.] This is enough in All Conscience, to Excuse any Man from laying over-much Stress upon the Historical Credit of a Relation, that comes so Blindly, and so Variously Transmitted to us: Over and above, that is not one jot to our Bus’ness (further than to Gratify an Idle Curiosity) whether the Fact be True or False; whether the Man was Streight, or Crooked; and his Name, Æsop, or (as some will have it) Lochman: In All which Cases, the Reader is left at Liberty to Believe his Pleasure. We are not here upon the Name, the Person, or the Ad-