improved by isolated suggestions from a host of scholars. The three first printed copies (Aldine, 1518; Turnebus and Robortello, 1552) give only those parts of Agamemnon found in M., from which MS. some leaves were lost; in 1557 the full text was restored by Vettori (Victorius) from later MSS. After these four, the chief editions of the seven plays were those of Schütz, Porson, Burler, Wellauer, Dindorf, Bothe, Ahrens, Paley, Hermann, Hartung, Weil, Merkel, Kirchhoff and Wecklein. Besides these, over a hundred scholars have thrown light on the corruptions or obscurities of the text, by editions of separate plays, by emendations, by special studies of the poet’s work, or in other ways. Among recent writers who have made such contributions may be mentioned Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Enger, Conington, Blaydes, Cobet, Meineke, Madvig, Ellis, W. Headlam, Davies, Tucker, Verrall and Haigh. The Fragments have been edited by Nauck and also by Wecklein. The Aeschylean staging is discussed in Albert Müller’s Lehrbuch der griechischen Bühnenalterhümer; in “Die Bühne des Aeschylos,” by Wilamowitz (Hermes, xxi.); in Smith’s Dict. of Antiquities, art. “Theatrum” (R. C. Jebb); in Dörpfeld and Reisch (Das griechische Theater), Haigh’s Attic Theatre, and Gardner and Jevons’ Manual of Greek Antiquities. English Verse Translations: Agamemnon, Milman and R. Browning; Oresteia, Suppliants, Persae, Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Vinctus, by E. D. A. Morshead; Prometheus, E. B. Browning; the whole seven plays, Lewis Campbell.
(A. Si.)
AESCULAPIUS (Gr. Ἀσκλήπιος), the legendary Greek god of medicine, the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis. Tricca in Thessaly and Epidaurus in Argolis disputed the honour of his birthplace, but an oracle declared in favour of Epidaurus. He was educated by the centaur Cheiron, who taught him the art of healing and hunting. His skill in curing disease and restoring the dead to life aroused the anger of Zeus, who, being afraid that he might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt (Apollodorus iii. 10; Pindar, Phthia, 3; Diod. Sic. iv. 71). Homer mentions him as a skilful physician, whose sons, Machaon and Podalirius, are the physicians in the Greek camp before Troy (Iliad, ii. 731). Temples were erected to Aesculapius in many parts of Greece, near healing springs or on high mountains. The practice of sleeping (incubatio) in these sanctuaries was very common, it being supposed that the god effected cures or prescribed remedies to the sick in dreams. All who were healed offered sacrifice—especially a cock—and hung up votive tablets, on which were recorded their names, their diseases and the manner in which they had been cured. Many of these votive tablets have been discovered in the course of excavations at Epidaurus. Here was the god’s most famous shrine, and games were celebrated in his honour every five years, accompanied by solemn processions. Herodas (Mimes, 4) gives a description of one of his temples, and of the offerings made to him. His worship was introduced into Rome by order of the Sibylline books (293 B.C.), to avert a pestilence. The god was fetched from Epidaurus in the form of a snake and a temple assigned him on the island in the Tiber (Livy x. 47; Ovid, Metam. xv. 622). Aesculapius was a favourite subject of ancient artists. He is commonly represented standing, dressed in a long cloak, with bare breast; his usual attribute is a club-like staff with a serpent (the symbol of renovation) coiled round it. He is often accompanied by Telesphorus, the boy genius of healing, and his daughter Hygieia, the goddess of health. Votive reliefs representing such groups have been found near the temple of Aesculapius at Athens. The British Museum possesses a beautiful head of Aesculapius (or possibly Zeus) from Melos, and the Louvre a magnificent statue.
Authorities.—L. Dyer, The Gods in Greece (1891); Jane E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903); R. Caton, Temples and Ritual of A. at Epidaurus and Athens (1900); articles in Pauly-Wissowa’s Real-Encyclopädie, Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie; T. Panofka, Asklepios und die Asklepiaden (1846); Alice Walton, “The Cult of Asklepios,” in Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, iii. (New York, 1894); W. H. D. Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings (1902).
AESERNIA (mod. Isernia), a Samnite town on the road from Beneventum to Corfinium, 58 m. to the north-east of the former, at the junction of a road going past Venafrum to the Via Latina. These routes are all followed by modern railways—the lines to Campobasso, Sulmona and Caianello. A Roman colony was established there in 263 B.C. It became the headquarters of the Italian revolt after the loss of Corfinium, and was only recovered by Sulla at the end of the war, in 80 B.C. Remains of its fortifications are still preserved—massive cyclopean walls, which serve as foundation to the walls of the modern town and of a Roman bridge, and the subterranean channel of an aqueduct, cut in the rock, and dating from Roman times.
AESOP (Gr. Αἴσωπος), famous for his Fables, is supposed to have lived from about 620 to 560 B.C. The place of his birth is uncertain—Thrace, Phrygia, Aethiopia, Samos, Athens and Sardis all claiming the honour. We possess little trustworthy information concerning his life, except that he was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. A pestilence that ensued being attributed to this crime, the Delphians declared their willingness to make compensation, which, in default of a nearer connexion, was claimed and received by Iadmon, the grandson of his old master. Herodotus, who is our authority for this (ii. 134), does not state the cause of his death; various reasons are assigned by later writers—his insulting sarcasms, the embezzlement of money entrusted to him by Croesus for distribution at Delphi, the theft of a silver cup.
Aesop must have received his freedom from Iadmon, or he could not have conducted the public defence of a certain Samian demagogue (Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 20). According to the story, he subsequently lived at the court of Croesus, where he met Solon, and dined in the company of the Seven Sages of Greece with Periander at Corinth. During the reign of Peisistratus he is said to have visited Athens, on which occasion he related the fable of The Frogs asking for a King, to dissuade the citizens from attempting to exchange Peisistratus for another ruler. The popular stories current regarding him are derived from a life, or rather romance, prefixed to a book of fables, purporting to be his, collected by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century. In this he is described as a monster of ugliness and deformity, as he is also represented in a well-known marble figure in the Villa Albani at Rome. That this life, however, was in existence a century before Planudes, appears from a 13th-century MS. of it found at Florence. In Plutarch’s Symposium of the Seven Sages, at which Aesop is a guest, there are many jests on his original servile condition, but nothing derogatory is said about his personal appearance. We are further told that the Athenians erected in his honour a noble statue by the famous sculptor Lysippus, which furnishes a strong argument against the fiction of his deformity. Lastly, the obscurity in which the history of Aesop is involved has induced some scholars to deny his existence altogether.
It is probable that Aesop did not commit his fables to writing; Aristophanes (Wasps, 1259) represents Philocleon as having learnt the “absurdities” of Aesop from conversation at banquets) and Socrates whiles away his time in prison by turning some of Aesop’s fables “which he knew” into verse (Plato, Phaedo, 61 b). Demetrius of Phalerum (345–283 B.C.) made a collection in ten books, probably in prose (Λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαί) for the use of orators, which has been lost. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, often cited by Suidas, but the author'’s name is unknown. Babrius, according to Crusius, a Roman and tutor to the son of Alexander Severus, turned the fables into choliambics in the earlier part of the 3rd century A.D. The most celebrated of the Latin adapters is Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus. Avianus (of uncertain date, perhaps the 4th century) translated 42 of the fables into Latin elegiacs. The collections which we possess under the name of Aesop’s Fables are late renderings of Babrius’s version or Προγυμνάσματα, rhetorical exercises of varying age and merit. Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, and Andreopulos put the Syriac back again into Greek. Ignatius Diaconus, in the 9th century, made a version of 53 fables in choliambic tetrameters. Stories from Oriental sources were added, and from these collections Maximus Planudes made and edited the collection which has come down to us under the name of Aesop, and from which the popular fables of modern Europe have been derived.
For further information see the article Fable; Bentley, Dissertation on the Fables of Aesop; Du Méril, Poésies inédites du moyen âge (1854); J. Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop (1889): i. The history of
