Fabelsammlungen der Spätantike

In addition to the already published bilingual collections of fables by Aesop, Phaedrus and Babrios, there are two late antique collections whose versions of fables became better known in the Middle Ages and modern times than those of the other three because, unlike these, they were continuously handed down. Avian's 42 fables, in which he turns the otherwise rather short fable texts into elegiac tales in the style of Ovid, were copied over a hundred times between the 9th and 16th centuries. Romulus pretended to edit the "Aesopus Latinus" - in reality, his fables are largely prose adaptations of Phaedrus fables, which were lost for a long time - and were therefore considered so "authentic" that they had a particularly rich afterlife. Both collections appeared in Heinrich Steinhöwel's Latin-German Editio princeps of 1476/77, which, translated into 11 languages in the early modern period and a bestseller in print like the Bible, became known from Iceland to Italy and from Mexico to Japan. Both collections, on which the entire fable tradition of the early modern period primarily depended, were not yet available in Latin-German. They complement Aesop, Phaedrus and Babrios to form a complete edition of ancient fables.

Niklas Holzberg, Munich, Germany.