With the invention of printing the European book of Æsop was compiled about 1480 by Heinrich Stainhöwel, who put together the Romulus with selections from Avian, some of the Greek prose versions of Babrius from Ranuzio's translation, and a few from Alfred's Æsop. To these he added the legendary life of Æsop and a selection of somewhat loose tales from Petrus Alphonsi and Poggio Bracciolini, corresponding to the Milesian and Sybaritic tales which were associated with the Fable in antiquity. Stainhöwel translated all this into German, and within twenty years his collection had been turned into French, English (by Caxton, in 1484), Italian, Dutch, and Spanish. Additions were made to it by Brandt and Waldis in Germany, by L'Estrange in England, and by La Fontaine in France; these were chiefly from the larger Greek collections published after Stainhöwel's day, and, in the case of La Fontaine, from Bidpai and other Oriental sources. But these additions have rarely taken hold, and the Æsop of modern Europe is in large measure Stainhöwel's, even to the present day. The first three quarters of the present collection are Stainhöwel mainly in Stainhöwel's order. Selections from it passed into spelling and reading books, and made the Fables part of modern European folk-lore.[1]
We may conclude this history of Æsop with a similar
- ↑ An episode in the history of the modern Æsop deserves record, if only to illustrate the law that Æsop always begins his career as a political weapon in a new home. When a selection of the Fables were translated into Chinese in 1840 they became favourite reading with the officials, till a high dignitary said, "This is clearly directed against us," and ordered Æsop to be included in the Chinese Index Expurgatorius (R. Morris, Cont. Rev. xxxix. p. 731).
