Babrius.

Babrius. a Greek fabulist, who lived most probably shortly before the age of Augustus, but of whom nothing whatever is known, his very date being put variously from the Alexandrian age to the middle of the third century of our era. He made a considerable collection of Æsopic fables (see ÆSOP), which he turned into choliambic verse, in a natural and popular style. Several prose versions and transformations of these were made during the middle ages, and have come down to us under the name of Æsop's Fables. Bentley was the first to recognise in these so-called prose fables of Æsop traces of versification showing the original work of Babrius. A few fables were added from manuscripts by Furia, Korais, and Schneider, and all that was known at the time was collected by Knoche (Halle, 1835). At last, in 1842, a Greek of the name of Minoides Minas, employed by the French government to explore the convents of the East, discovered at Mount Athos a manuscript with 123 hitherto unknown fables of Babrius, a copy of which he made and brought to Paris, where they were published in 1844. In 1857 he found 95 fables more, the authenticity of which, however, was denied by Conington, Cobet, and other scholars. These were edited by Lewis in 1859, were included by Bergk in his Anthologia Lyrica (4th ed. 1883), and were edited, with additions from manuscripts in the Bodleian and Vatican libraries, by Gitlbauer (Vienna, 1882). See Lachmann's edition (Berl. 1845), and Rutherford's Babrius (1883).