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The Old Man And The Ass
The Old Man and the Ass began as a fable with a political theme. Appearing among Aesop's Fables, it is numbered 476 in the Perry Index. Variations and interpretations The fable as recorded by Phaedrus concerns an old man who tells his ass to fly with him on the approach of an army. The ass asks if they are liable to double his load and on being assured not, replies that, since his lot is to be a beast of burden, he is indifferent who is his owner. Phaedrus comments on the story that "When there is a change in government, nothing changes for the poor folk except their master's name." Much the same conclusion is drawn in Hieronymus Osius's Neo-Latin poem, ''Asinus et vitulus'' (the ass and the herdboy). The story later appeared in La Fontaine's Fables as ''Le vieillard et l'âne'' (VI.8). Here the ass has been turned into a meadow and prefers to continue grazing rather than flee. Its conclusion is that, whoever is owner, "Our master is our enemy" (''Notre ennemi, c’est notre maî ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perry Index
The Perry Index is a widely used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. The index was created by Ben Edwin Perry, a professor of classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Modern scholarship takes the view that Aesop probably did not compose all of the fables attributed to him;D. L. Ashliman, “Introduction,” in George Stade (Consulting Editorial Director), ''Aesop’s Fables.'' New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, (2005). Produced and published in conjunction with Fine Creative Media, Inc. (New York) Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher. See pp. xiii–xv and xxv–xxvi. indeed, a few are known to have first been used before Aesop lived, while the first record we have of many others is from well over a millennium after his time. Traditionally, Aesop's fables were arranged alphabetically, which is not helpful to the reader. Perry listed them by language (Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phaedrus (fabulist)
Gaius Julius Phaedrus (; grc-gre, Φαῖδρος; Phaîdros) was a 1st-century CE Roman Empire, Roman fabulist and the first versifier of a collection of Aesop's fables into Latin. Few facts are known about him for certain 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 A recent statement of the few facts that past scholars have tried to deduce from autobiographical hints given by Phaedrus in his poems has summarised them as follows: He was born in Macedonia, probably in Pydna, about 15 BCE, came to Rome as a slave and was freed by Augustus. He probably had some teaching function between then and the time of Tiberius, under whom the first book of his poems appeared. Envious competitors interpreted the morals of some fables as being critical of the regime and he was trie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hieronymus Osius
Hieronymus Osius was a German Neo-Latin poet and academic about whom there are few biographical details. He was born about 1530 in Schlotheim and murdered in 1575 in Graz. After studying first at the university of Erfurt, he gained his master's degree from Wittenberg university in 1552 and later lectured on Poetics in the Philosophical faculty there. In 1558 he was crowned poet laureate in Copenhagen by King Christian III of Denmark. Thereafter he held teaching positions in Jena, Regensburg and Graz, identifying with Protestantism in the religious conflicts of the time. Osius was known as a pre-eminent poet whose works were frequently reprinted. They included his "Song on Christ’s Birth" (''Carmen de natali Christi'', 1557); an adaptation into Latin of the Homeric comic epic, the Batrachomyomachia (''Pugna ranarum et murium'', the battle of the frogs and mice); an epic of the Dithmarschen Peasants’ War (''Historia belli Ditmarsici'', 1560), which had only recently concluded an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Fontaine's Fables
Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered classics of French literature. Humorous, nuanced and ironical, they were originally aimed at adults but then entered the educational system and were required learning for school children. Composition history Divided into 12 books, there are 239 of the ''Fables'', varying in length from a few lines to some hundred, those written later being as a rule longer than those written earlier. The first collection of ''Fables Choisies'' had appeared March 31, 1668, dividing 124 fables into six books over its two volumes. They were dedicated to ''"Monseigneur"'' Louis, ''le Grand Dauphin'', the six-year-old son of Louis XIV of France and his queen consort Maria Theresa of Spain. By this time, La Fontaine was 47 and known to readers chiefly as the aut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Matthews (physician)
John Matthews (1755–1826) was a versatile English physician and poet, also involved in local affairs and politics in Herefordshire. Life Baptised 30 October 1755, he was the only surviving child of William Matthews of Burton, in Linton, Herefordshire, who died 29 August 1799, by his wife Jane, daughter of Philip Hoskyns of Bernithen Court, Herefordshire, who died 20 May 1768. He matriculated from Merton College, Oxford, on 14 February 1772, and graduated B.A. 1778, M.A. 1779, M.B. 1781, and M.D. 1782. On 30 September 1782 he was a candidate for the Royal College of Physicians, and a year later he became a fellow. From 20 April 1781 to his resignation in 1783 he was physician to St. George's Hospital, London, and in 1784 he delivered the Gulstonian lectures. He moved back to acquire the estate of Clehonger, near Hereford, and built on it in 1788–90 the mansion of Belmont, situated on the banks of the River Wye with extensive lawns and plantations. For the rest of his life h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Poland
The history of Poland spans over a thousand years, from medieval tribes, Christianization and monarchy; through Poland's Golden Age, expansionism and becoming one of the largest European powers; to its collapse and partitions, two world wars, communism, and the restoration of democracy. The roots of Polish history can be traced to ancient times, when the territory of present-day Poland was settled by various tribes including Celts, Scythians, Germanic clans, Sarmatians, Slavs and Balts. However, it was the West Slavic Lechites, the closest ancestors of ethnic Poles, who established permanent settlements in the Polish lands during the Early Middle Ages.. The Lechitic Western Polans, a tribe whose name means "people living in open fields", dominated the region and gave Poland - which lies in the North-Central European Plain - its name. The first ruling dynasty, the Piasts, emerged in the 10th century AD. Duke Mieszko I is considered the ''de facto'' creator of the Polish sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius (c. 1440–1508) was an Italian writer and professor of philology, born at Macerata in Ancona. His learned name plays on his family name of Bevilaqua (Drinkwater), and he was also known by the Italian name Lorenzo Astemio. A Neo-Latin writer of considerable talents at the time of the Humanist revival of letters, his first published works appeared in the 1470s and were distinguished by minute scholarship. During that decade he moved to Urbino and became ducal librarian, although he was to move between there and other parts of Italy thereafter as a teacher. The work for which he is principally remembered now is ''Hecatomythium'' (1495), a collection of a hundred fables written in Latin and largely of his own invention. However, the inclusion together with this work of the thirty-three Aesopic fables translated from the Greek by Lorenzo Valla gave the impression that his own work was of the same kind. Several of the fables of Abstemius, it is true, relate to Ae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Ass And His Masters
The Ass (sometimes 'donkey') and his Masters is a fable that has also gone by the alternative titles The ass and the gardener and Jupiter and the ass. Included among Aesop's Fables, it is numbered 179 in the Perry Index. The fable The fable only appears in Greek sources in classical times. In it, an ass in the employ of a gardener complains to the king of the gods that he is not fed adequately and asks for a change of master. He is transferred to a potter and prays for another change because the loads are so heavy. Now he passes to a tanner and regrets leaving his first employer. At a time when slavery was common, the fable was applied to the dissatisfaction felt by slaves. In Renaissance times two Neo-Latin poets contributed to making the story better known. Gabriele Faerno as ''Asinus dominus mutans'', with the moral that a change of master only brings worse; and Hieronymus Osius as ''Asinus et olitor'' (The ass and the gardener), with the comment that habitual dissatisfaction a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fables By Laurentius Abstemius
Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying. A fable differs from a parable in that the latter ''excludes'' animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech or other powers of humankind. Conversely, an animal tale specifically includes talking animals as characters. Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the New Testament, "" ("''mythos''") was rendered by the translators as "fable" in the First Epistle to Timothy, the Second Epistle to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus and the First Epistle of Peter. A person who writes fables is a fabulist. History The fable is one of the most enduring forms of folk literature, sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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