Gaius Julius Phaedrus (; ; Phaîdros) or Phaeder (c. 15 BC – c. 50 AD) was a 1st-century AD Roman fabulist and the first versifier of a collection of Aesop's fables into Latin. Nothing is recorded of his life except for what can be inferred from his poems, and there was little mention of his work during late antiquity. It was not until the discovery of a few imperfect manuscripts during and following the Renaissance that his importance emerged, both as an author and in the transmission of the fables.
Biography The poet describes himself as born in the Pierian Mountains,III prol. 17 perhaps in Pydna, and names the Thracian musicians Linus and Orpheus as his countrymen.III prol. 56 sqq. The inscriptions and subscriptions in the manuscript tradition identify him as a freedman of Augustus. Some have inferred from these data that Phaedrus was brought to Rome in his childhood as a slave following the Thracian campaign of L. Calpurnius Piso.
Whether in Rome or elsewhere, Phaedrus studied Latin literature in his youth, as he quotes a line from Ennius saying that he read it when he was a boy.III epil. 33 sqq. When he had published his first two books of fables, he was subjected to a trial in which he says Sejanus was accuser, witness, and judge.III prol. 38 sqq. Although it is not clear what punishment the poet suffered, the poet pleads with a certain Eutychus to intercede on his behalf in the prologue to his third book. In the epilogue of the third book, the poet describes himself as in advanced middle age,III epil. 15 and the final poem of Phaedrus's fifth book implies that he had reached old age.V.30 (); otherwise numbered V.10 (, , , ) or 103 ()
There is no external evidence by which to judge whether the poet spoke truthfully of himself, and scholars have assigned different degrees of significance to the biographical hints contained in the poems. Attilio de Lorenzi's biography Fedro is reviewed by Perry as a "consistent and convincing all-round picture of the man" with "nothing unreasonable or improbable in any of the author's conclusions," but derided by another reviewer as "a romance" born of "de Lorenzi's ingenious imagination" which is "entertaining to read, but not always easy to believe." likewise disparages elements of de Lorenzi's reconstruction as tenuously supported and "novelistic," and declares Fedro an original and useful work on the whole, but one which must be used with caution for biographical facts. Edward Champlin, while acknowledging that the traditional account of Phaedrus's life is "handed down through the scholarly literature," derides even the broad outlines of it that are most commonly accepted as "complete fantasy" and argues that what Phaedrus had to say about himself might as plausibly be reinterpreted to prove that he was born in Rome and spent the whole of his life there as a free citizen. On the basis of "an astonishingly sophisticated interest in Roman law" seen in the poems, however, Champlin asserts that "Phaedrus was a lawyer."
purported to find new biographical information in the fables in the form of acrostics, many of which could not be found in the text without novel editorial interventions. Herrmann also attributed the Apocolocyntosis, the Distichs of Cato, and most of the Culex to Phaedrus and sifted these texts for further biographical clues. The second part of Herrmann's book was an edition of the fables (in a novel order and divided into four books) and the other works he ascribed to Phaedrus. C. J. Fordyce described Herrmann's book simply as "full of surprises", of which the greatest was that Herrmann was "an editor of Phaedrus, and a professor of Latin, to whom quantity appears to mean nothing at all and who by his own conjectures turns metrical lines into unmetrical on every other page." Frank Goodyear mocked a later editor for citing Herrmann, referring to him sarcastically as "that noted metrician". Alfred Ernout remarked that while he would leave Herrmann's biographical theories to be discussed by historians of literature, he could only regret the abundance of errors of every kind to be found in Herrmann's edition.
Name Phaedrus's name appears in his own textIII prol. 1 and in MartialEpigrammata 3, 20, 5 in the genitive case as Phaedri. It is found in the nominative case, as Phaedrus, in Avianus's letter to Theodosius, and in the titles of three of the fables,III prol.; V.7; V.21 possibly added by scribes on the authority of Avianus. Some critics have argued the poet's name would more correctly be written Phaeder in the nominative, by analogy to Latin names like Alexander, Menander, and Anaximander which reflect Greek originals that end in -δρος, supported by evidence from ancient inscriptions of the use of the form Phaeder.
Roman slaves were known by a single name, in contrast with the tria nomina borne by citizens. Manumitted slaves in the early empire usually took the praenomen and nomen of their former master, keeping their slave name as a cognomen.Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2012), s.v. "names, personal, Roman" (9) Some sources therefore give the poet's full name as Gaius Julius Phaedrus (or Phaeder), with the praenomen and nomen of Augustus.
Dates Because Sejanus died in AD 31, Phaedrus's statement that his poems had offended Sejanus is usually taken to establish that the first two books were written before that date. That the first two books were published (whether together or separately) in the reign of Tiberius is supported by II.5.7, where Tiberius appears to be referred to as alive. Most scholars infer from the hostile manner in which Phaedrus writes of Sejanus, as if he had nothing further to fear from him, that the third book was written after Sejanus' death, but not long after, since Phaedrus was still suffering the effects of persecution by Sejanus. Phaedrus's statement in the third book that he was in advanced middle age would therefore support an approximate birth date of 15 BC or 18 BC. Based on the poet's insinuation in the fifth book that he was worn out by old age like the dog in the fable, scholars conclude that he died an old man in the reign of Claudius (41–54) or Nero (54–68); Giuseppe Zago believes Phaedrus to have revised his first book after having read Seneca the Younger's Moral Epistles and books De beneficiis, in which case Phaedrus died in the reign of Nero or Vespasian (69–79).
Textual sources The following sources are of significance for establishing the text of Phaedrus:
Codex Pithoeanus (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 906, ff. 33–87), so called because of its previous ownership by Pierre Pithou who used it to edit the editio princeps, was copied by several hands in the late 9th Century and contains 94 fables of Phaedrus divided into four books, bound together with the Liber Monstrorum. It was rebound in the 16th Century, now with a copy of Phaedrus on paper in Pithou's hand in the front. It was inherited by Pithou's great-grandson, , whose family was granted the title of Marquis of Rosanbo by Louis XIV, and so has also been known as the Rosanbo manuscript. A paleographic edition was published in 1893 with the permission of the Marquis of Rosanbo,Ulysse Robert, ed., Les Fables de Phèdre: Édition paléographique publiée d'après le manuscrit Rosanbo (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893) but the family afterwards denied scholars access to the manuscript, prompting Perry to remark that the codex was in "very private possession" and Postgate to compare the present owner to the dragon from one of Phaedrus's fables. It became more accessible after the Pierpont Morgan Library purchased it in 1961.Marshall, Peter K. "Phaedrus," in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 300–3 Codex Remensis, formerly held at the Abbey of Saint-Remi, was copied ca. 830–850 and destroyed in a fire on January 16, 1774. The readings of this lost witness must be determined by the reports of printed editions and manuscript collations or tracings made by those who were able to have direct knowledge of the manuscript. It contained the same poems as the Codex Pithoeanus in the same order, bound together with the Querolus. Codex Reginensis Latinus 1616, preserved in the Vatican Library, contains the inscription of the first book immediately followed by eight fables from it (11–13 and 17–21) copied in the mid-9th Century at ff. 17r–18r. Despite the fragment's brevity, E. K. Rand declares it the best source for the fables which it contains. This fragment is also called the "vetus Danielis chartula" or "scheda Danielis" because of its previous ownership by , who acquired many of the books of Fleury Abbey after the monastery was plundered by Huguenots in 1562. Daniel's books were sold after his death to Jacques Bongars and Paul Pétau, and Pétau's share was largely acquired in 1650 by Isaac Vossius as the agent of Christina, Queen of Sweden, who took her library to Rome after abdicating the throne. Her books passed into the Vatican Library, and in her honor are catalogued as the reginenses, or "queenly" books. Codex Neapolitanus or Perottinus (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, IV F 58) is the sole independent witness of an Epitome fabellarum Aesopi Auieni et Phaedri composed by Niccolò Perotti, consisting of poems composed by Phaedrus, Avianus, and Perotti himself, in Perotti's hand and seemingly written after 1474. The waterlogged manuscript was discovered in the library of the Duke of Parma in early 1727 by . About a decade after d'Orville's discovery, the codex was transferred from Parma to Naples following Charles III of Spain's inheritance of the Farneses' books and conquest of the Kingdom of Naples. The manuscript contains 66 poems by Phaedrus, or rather 63, as Perotti copied one fable twice, and two fables are each divided into two. 30 of these 63 poems were not in the Pithoeanus or Remensis. This manuscript's condition has so deteriorated over time due to water damage that in many places it can no longer be read, and recourse must be had to older copies and collations to determine its readings. Nearly all the lacunae can be filled by reference to two codices in the Vatican Library. Codex Urbinas Latinus 368, ff. 100–146, containing the entire Epitome, was made from the Neapolitanus around 1482 by Federico Veterano. The manuscript was brought to light by Angelo Mai around 1830. Codex Urbinas Latinus 301, the sole witness of a work by Perotti titled Cornucopiae, includes two fables of Phaedrus (III.17 at f. 644r and app. 4 at f. 126r–v). The so-called schedae d'Orvillianae (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. d'Orville 524) are a copy of the Neapolitanus made by d'Orville in 1727. D'Orville's manuscripts were sold by his grandson to J. Cleaver Banks, who sold them to the Bodleian Library in 1804.Bodleian Library, D'Orville Collection Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5190, ff. 111r–125r, contains 22 fables of Phaedrus copied by two hands in the late 15th Century mixed with fables of Avianus, including 8 poems otherwise known only through the Neapolitanus, although it is evidently independent of Perotti.
Prose paraphrases Several medieval fable collections made extensive use of Phaedrus "in solution," i.e., with the metrical verses adapted into prose. The following collections contain 54 fables that are preserved in the direct tradition, 28 that have been lost from it, and 16 from non-Phaedrian sources. Each of them is printed in , and the fables they contain which have no equivalent in the extant metrical text of Phaedrus are translated or summarized in .
Codex Leidensis Vossianus Latinus O. 15 (Leiden University Library), copied in the early 11th Century by Adémar de Chabannes, contains 67 fables at ff. 195r–203v, all but a few of which are paraphrases of Phaedrus.