Pack Carnes †

How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’:

Notes on Aesop in a Contextual Model

Abstract
A fable communicates its meaning through the text of its story-line, through the texture
of its style and use of language, and finally through its particular context. This article
studies the contextual implications upon the constraints of meaning in fables, and –
taking the Phaedrine fable as example – investigates the complex use of context in both
the macro-structure and the micro-structure.

There are, perhaps surprisingly, a number of ways with which a fable, or

any narrative, communicates its meaning to us. This ‘meaning’ is a mani-
fold idea; I intend to investigate this multitude of various ‘meanings’ using
the scheme devised by Alan Dundes,1 essentially a folklore division, but
applicable to virtually any sort of criticism. In any case, as the fable form
is both literary and folkloric, there is no problem in using this scheme in
outline. I shall survey Aesop’s obvious meanings, and then study in detail
the less obvious, determined by context. First of all, there is the text, or
the story-line: for all fables are stories.2 This has to have meaning, or else
it is not much of a story; but that is not to say that even this is a single
meaning.3 We must allow for various meanings as perceived by the listeners
1 A. Dundes, ‘Texture, text and context’, Southern Folklore Quarterly 28 (1964),
pp. 251–65.
2 See B.E. Perry’s definition of the Aesopic fable, in: Aesopica: a series of texts relating

to Aesop or ascribed to him or closely connected with the literary tradition that bears his
name. Volume One: Greek and Latin Texts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952),
p. ix. For further refinements, see also G.-J. Van Dijk Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi: Fables in
Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 2–37.
3 W.T.K. Spence, ‘Causal Cohesion and Narrative Processing: The Role of Causal Re-

lationships in Narrative Comprehension’, dissertation: The University of Texas (Dallas,

1995), discusses fable meaning and tests for that meaning. Causal cohesion has tradition-
ally been investigated via experimental paradigms involving narrative recall. Spence offers
two evaluation experiments that do not involve recall, using fables to express interest-
ing ideas (although these are notoriously polyvalent and polysemous, and not restricted
to the one meaning assumed in this dissertation). A.C. Henderson, ‘Medieval beasts
and modern cages, the making of meaning in Fables and Bestiaries’, PMLA 97 (1982),
pp. 40–49, suggests that fables might be considered templates for ‘unobstructed views
of authentically medieval moralising’. D. Peil, ‘Beziehungen zwischen Fabel und Sprich-
wort’, Germanica Wratislaviensia 85 (1989), pp. 74–87, discusses a number of points
50 Pack Carnes

or readers: perhaps quite different from the speaker’s or writer’s meaning.4

This meaning is one of the primary features of narrative, but the fable also
has another set of meanings beyond the narrative.5 A well-crafted fable has
a paraenetic meaning as well: a ‘moral’ or a teaching, found not necessarily
in the moral or epimythium (or promythium) but often in the narrative,
and yet generally only recognised after the narrative is done.6
This ‘super-segmental meaning’, very much like that of an idiom, is very
important, and central to the fable’s essential meaning. Thus the textual
meaning of the first fable in Phaedrus: ‘Lupus et agnus’7 [P155 ‘Wolf and
Lamb’ (A-T 111A; TMI U31)8 ], concerns the wolf’s silly insults, all part
of his justification for attacking the lamb. The lamb’s answers are truthful,
but useless, as the wolf wants to eat the lamb, and finally does. This textual

of contact between fable and proverb, arguing that both genres have a dual essence in
that they have meanings as texts and also as didactic statements. On La Fontaine: F.F.
Boillot, ‘La Fontaine coloriste’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de France 28 (1921), pp. 346–
60, compares the fabulist with the artists of his time (bright primaries are rare, as are
words for various colours – and even then they do not always mean precisely what they
seem); and J.L. Logan, ‘La Fontaine, Plato and ‘La Cigale et la fourmi’ ’, Philosophical
Quarterly 65 (1986), pp. 197–209, builds on a reference to Plato in the fable’s prefatory
material, suggesting that ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, P373 ‘Cicada and Ant’ (A-T
280A; TMI J711.1) is built upon a Platonic fiction. [Cf. note 8.] Here the meaning of the
fable is something quite different from the general moral found in more straightforward
telling: there is more to life than getting and storing things, and a life without music is
not worth living.
4 E.V. Paducheva, ‘O sematicheskikh sviaziakh mezhdu basnei i ee moral’iu (na materi-

ale basen ezopa)’, Parmiologicheskie issledovaniia, ed. G.L. Permiakov (Moscow: Nauka,
1984), pp. 223–51, demonstrates that Aesopic fables lead to morals that do not actually
fit with the narrative because of the particular point of view of the reader/listener.
5 Actually, a number of them: see P. Jedrzejko, ‘The deep structure of narrative element

in Neoclassical Fable’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensis: An International Review of English

Studies [Poznan, Poland] 30 (1996), pp. 169–82.
6 See A. Skillen, ‘Aesop’s lessons in literary realism’, Philosophy: The Journal of the

Royal Institute of Philosophy 67 (April, 1992), pp. 169–82; or, from a different angle,
G.J. Van Dijk, ‘The function of Fables in Graeco-Roman Romance’, Mnemosyne 49
(1996), pp. 513–41. Fables, whether told at length or alluded to, have not only an in-
tertextual function in ancient Greek and Roman romances: the same fable would have
different meanings in different romances (or in the same romance or collection), for the
listener/reader.
7 All Phaedrus’s fables are cited from B.E. Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, Loeb Classical

Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

8 Fables are identified, wherever possible, by ‘Perry number’, the number assigned

to the fable in B.E. Perry’s monumental Aesopica and in the appendix to his Babrius
and Phaedrus (see above). The fable is further identified by ‘A-T’ numbers: the folktale
type number in A. Aarne and S. Thompson, Types of the Folktale; and finally, where
applicable, by ‘TMI’ numbers, or Thompson, Motif Index numbers, referring to the motifs
in S. Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1955). From these numbers, and allied indices, virtually all other indices can be accessed.
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 51

meaning is of little value, and does not make much of a story. The extended
meaning afforded us by the ‘moral’ gives us a bit more: Haec propter illos
scripta est homines fabula qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt, although
(knowing all about wolves and lambs) we can see that the wolf’s comments
are of no consequence either.
In the manner of the joke, a well-crafted fable tells a story, and all the
while a parallel universe of the real world is being created; and slowly the
application of the fable to one’s own life (or to the point the narrator wants
to make) becomes ‘clear’. The parallel universe (not fully understood until
the end of the story-line) thus tells us that it makes no difference what the
weaker of the two wants to do, nor does the truth of his argument have any
effect, if the stronger has already made up his mind to take over.
M.O. Albert sees a contradiction in these ‘logical processes’ of the fable:
its logical structure leads us consciously to believe that the moral is not
founded in truth; yet in fact the fable just as consciously convinces us of its
general application. He argues, from Lessing, that the fable convinces be-
cause its ‘moral content’ (here identified with the body of the fable) is felt
by the reader, and recognised as more or less identical to societal demands.
Since the fable does not, however, actually provide a suitable basis for the
application, the reader/listener has to supply one, by testing the implicit
‘moral’ and its validity upon his own experience and ‘confirming’ it as con-
sonant with his concept of society’s laws or his own day-to-day living.9 This
implies that the particular meaning of any fable (or of nearly anything, of
course) is never the same from one person to another. It may be similar,
but in each case it is going to be different.
The true meaning of the fable and the parallel world often come together
in the pro- or epimythium: another aspect of the text. The promythium or
epimythium more or less explains the fable, offering the ‘secondary’ meaning
intended by the author, and often considered the ‘real’ or ‘true’ meaning.
That this may arise from a false meaning (foxes and wolves do not talk),
leads us to an understanding of Luther’s famous ‘betriegen zur wahrheit’.
This is one of the fundamental features concerning a fable’s meaning, and
much ink has been spilled in discussing it.10 It is clear that the fable writer
9 M.O. Albert, ‘Fabel vom logischen Standpunkt aus’, Der praktische Schulmann 56

(1907), pp. 78–82.

10 U. Bamborschke, ‘I.A. Krylovs “Orel i pichela” ’, Russische Lyrik: Eine Einführung

in die Literaturwissenschaftliche Textanalyse, ed. Kl.-D. Seemann (Munich: Fink, 1982),

pp. 191–212, analyses the ‘Eagle and Bee’ fable: rhythm, vocabulary, word patterns and
the effect of diction, with a detailed study of the promythium. (The characters are not
only analogues to their human counterparts, but function allegorically.)
C.D. Benson, ‘O Moral Henryson’, Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. R.
Yeager (Hamden, CT.: Archon, 1983), pp. 215–35, focuses upon the apparent disunity be-
52 Pack Carnes

expresses his programme in the pro- or epimythium. Yet a well-crafted nar-

rative does not need an epimythium; in fact an epimythium to the metaphor
(a fable-narrative) often adds yet another metaphor to explicate the narra-
tive’s meaning, or rather the author’s specific meaning, in that case, and at
that time. For fables are notoriously polysemous (yet another problem with
meaning).11
For example, the famous fable of P226 ‘Tortoise and Hare’ (A-T 275A;
TMI K11.3; cf. La Fontaine VI, 10 ‘Le Lièvre et la Tortue’), the story
of the improbable race won by the tortoise because the hare fell asleep,
usually (but not always) has a ‘moral’ affixed, that the race is won by the
one who is ‘slow but sure’. This is an interpretation of an affixed moral
(which is also a proverb, and therefore also a metaphor, which itself needs
interpreting); but it is only the applicable ‘moral’ if the story-teller intends
us to understand that ‘the tortoise is slow, but sure, and that is a good
thing. . . ’ The same story could quite easily mean: ‘Do not fall asleep, or you
might lose the race’: a perfectly viable – and far more likely – result for the
fable. Again, with a slight change in the narrative, and previous knowledge
of the ‘original’ story, the ending could be a simple statement of fact: when
tween Henryson’s narration and epimythia (“Moralitates”); what others take as a blemish,
Benson considers an essential key to understanding the Fables: the gaps are intentional
and serve to make the reader aware of other tensions and conflicts in the work. Henryson
offers no simple answers, but ones that are at once more difficult and more exhilarating
(all showing that real moral teaching is not as simple as it might seem).
A. Bisanti, ‘Fortuna di un epimythion Fedriano nella favolistica mediolatina’, Pan:
Studi dell’Instituto di Filologia latina dell’Università di Palermo 8 (1987), pp. 105–19,
contrasts Phaedrus III, 12 ‘Cockerel and Pearl’, and its epimythium Hoc illis narro qui
me non intelligunt with the Adémar de Chabannes (988–1034) prose epimythium Qui
ad honorem pertingere valuissent, si ingenium habuissent, with the Romulus I, 1 Haec
Aesopus narrat, qui ipsum legunt et non intelligunt, and with some seven other variations,
including one of the prose traditions in the codex Wissemburgensis, Haec tibi Aesopus
narrat qui me non intelligis, the ‘Walter of England’ version, and other examples from
the medieval forms.
P. Grzybek, ‘Invariant meaning structures in text: Proverb and Fable’, in: Issues in
Slavic Literature and Cultural Theory, ed. K. Eimermacher, P. Grzybek and G. Witte
(Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1989), pp. 349–89, discusses the paradigmatics and syntagmatics
of the proverb and the fable in detail, with attention paid to the situational and thematic
characteristics of the fable. See for many others: P. Carnes, Fable Scholarship (New
York: Garland, 1985), passim, and Fable Scholarship II, forthcoming, with some 6,500
new entries.
11 Witness the ‘morals’ given to the same fable over a period of years. See also

D. Peil, Der Streit der Glieder mit dem Magen: Studien zur Überlieferung und Deu-
tungsgeschichte der Fabel des Menius Agrippa von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert
(Frankfurt–Bern: Lang, 1985), p. 130. ‘Stomach and Feet’ (A-T 293; TMI J461.1) is traced
from Livy to modern times, with special attention given to the history of the shifts of
the fable’s meaning in certain contexts (the fable is known in the Romulus paraphrase of
Phaedrus).
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 53

the hare reached the finishing-line, the tortoise had traveled exactly eight
and three-quarter inches.12 As it stands, however, we do not have an Anti-
Fable ending;13 the textual meaning is implied, given the ‘moral’ provided.
Thus the epimythium has meaning, usually distinct from the narrative, and
often at odds with it.14
There are other ways whereby a fable meaning is conveyed. Another
aspect is Texture, involving the way the text is handled, and consisting
of language, style, vocabulary, and a host of minor details. These features
obviously affect how a fable ‘means’. If one does not understand the language
well, it is clear that one’s understanding of the fable will be impaired; indeed
the so-called ‘new critics’ (of the 40s) were obviously correct in assuming
that one cannot understand anything that is not contemporary or in your
native language, and even then, much meaning is lost. When we read fables
such as Phaedrus III, 1: ‘Anus ad amphoram’ (TMI J34), we may well miss
a number of allusions to contemporary events, to personal reactions, to a
host of other things. We may understand the overt text perfectly well,15
but we have no idea of the sub-text, the ‘moral’, or in fact, the particular
12 J. Thurber, Fables for our time (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 84. See P.

Carnes, ‘The American face of Aesop: Thurber’s Fables and tradition’, Moderna Språk
80.1 (1986), pp. 3–17; repr. in Idem, Proverbia in Fabula: Essays on the Relationship of
the Proverb and the Fable (Bern: Lang, 1988), pp. 311–31. S. Black, ‘Fable and Fairy
Tale’, in: James Thurber: His Masquerades: A Critical Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1970),
pp. 93–115, also deals with some of these topics.
13 Compare Hoshi Shin’ichi, the late Japanese Science Fiction giant, who has his rabbit

arrested by the police for speeding. See P. Carnes, ‘The Japanese Face of Aesop: Hoshi
Shin’ichi and Modern Fable Tradition’, Journal of Folklore Research 29.1 (1991), pp. 1–
22. On the concept of the anti-fable, see Idem, ‘The Fable and the Anti-Fable: the modern
faces of Aesop,’ Bestia: Yearbook of the International Beast Fable Society 4 (1992), pp. 5–
33.
14 An allegorical interpretation, more elaborate, requires perception of the fables with

a spiritual dimension. See E. Wheatley, ‘Scholastic commentary and Robert Henryson’s

Morall Fabillis: the Aesopic Fables’, Studies in Philology 91 (1994), pp. 70–99, who sees
the social interpretation of Aesopic fables requiring universalised social identities, with
animals symbolising noble or ignoble persons and strong or helpless individuals. Scholastic
narratives on ‘Walter of England’ ’s fables influenced Henryson’s selection of roles in his
Morall Fabillis. W. Freytag, ‘Die Fabel als Allegorie. Zur Poetologischen Begriffssprache
der Fabeltheorie von der Spätantike bis ins 18. Jahrhundert. I, II’, Mittellateinisches
Jahrbuch: Internationale Zeitschrift für Mediavistik / International Journal for Medieval
Studies 20 (1985), pp. 66–102, and 21 (1986), pp. 3–33, suggests that the concept of
allegory helps inform the meaning of the Aesopic fable by studying the fable and its uses
in rhetoric and in poetics theory.
15 As well as our knowledge of Latin allows us. . . Not only is our knowledge of Latin

‘datable’ to a certain time frame (changes of word meanings are notoriously dated to a
very specific time: witness the words ‘gay’, or ‘humanism’ over the past twenty years),
but there is the distinct chance that some other meaning, perhaps even a new meaning,
might have been implied.
54 Pack Carnes

relevance this fable had to the teller, when we try to understand Phaedrus’s
enigmatic epimythium: Hoc quo pertineat dicet qui me noverit.16 Here we
are left with the text meaning, and (our own) extended paraenetic meaning,
but have no real idea of what sort of directed meaning Phaedrus may have
had, or wanted to project.
Texture implies even more than that. Do we tend to understand texts
better in prose, rather than poetry? What about the differences between
reading a fable and hearing one? How about slang or ‘dialect’ forms17 as
opposed to ‘standard’ language media? How about the differences in brevity
between, say, Erasmus Alberus and Phaedrus? Between Phaedrus and La
Fontaine? How about retelling the fable as a joke? Texture is a wide-ranging
concept, and one that could well occupy scholars for a long time; but I should
like to turn to the third item of the Dundes triad (text – texture – context),
and discuss the implications of context upon the constraints of meaning in
the fable. As this is an enormous task, changing with each reading by each
reader, I restrict myself to those fables which use the character of Aesop, or
an allusion to Aesop. I will use Phaedrus as the primary source, but select
examples from other sources as well.
First of all, contextualisation is a manifold proposition. There is imme-
diate contextualisation, found in the environment in which the fable is told.
Whether or not this is intentional, the context is obviously very important.
When the fable is told after introducing a particular situation, the context
is critical; indeed the fable is often told precisely for the purpose of eluci-
dating the context itself. The very earliest fables in the Greek world are
found only within the framework of some context, not specifically as a fable
(or a fabular motif) written as an independent piece of literature. We find
Greek fables in context as early as the works of Hesiod, and they are com-
mon throughout Greek literature and in Latin works as well.18 The early
fable found in Hesiod is perhaps the easiest case: P4 ‘Hawk and Nightingale’
(TMI J321.1), from Erga, 202–12, is seen to explicate a particular situation
in Hesiod’s work.19 The context informs the fable at every turn, guiding its
16 A number of possible meanings have been suggested, but none so far have been

overwhelmingly convincing.
17 See F. Doret, Pour amuser nos tout petits: initiation aux fables de La Fontaine avec

une introduction sur la prononciation créole, Bibliothèque du petit Haı̈tien, 1 (Port-au-

Prince, Haı̈ti: Imprimerie des Orphelins-Apprentis d’Auteuil, 1924): compare this and a
reading in Standard French; or, for that matter, a reading of La Fontaine in ‘standard’
17th-c. French, and a doctored version into the French of today.
18 See H.Th. Archibald, ‘The Fables in Archilochus, Herodotus, Livy and Horace’,

Transactions of the American Philological Association 33 (1902), pp. 80–90; and Van
Dijk, Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi, pp. 138–68, 270–86 et passim, for other materials in the
Greek context.
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 55

ultimate paraenetic ‘meaning’ toward that end, and probably quite different
from the meaning one would imagine when reading the fable in its own. The
frame of the Panchatantra fables is another prime example:20 note that the
context here can either precede a particular fable, come after it, or surround
it. In the first and longest book, ‘The Loss of Friends’, the frame story will
colour all the fables told within that particular context, unless one reads the
fable by itself. By losing the context, one loses the point that the particular
teller was trying to make. In ‘The Blue Jackal’ (Bødker 830;21 TMI B240,
J512.13; J2131.5.6; Panchatantra, Ryder, pp. 122–29, Rajan 108–1422); or
in ‘Iron-Eating Mice’; Panchatantra (Ryder, pp. 192–97; Rajan, pp. 172–
77; cf. La Fontaine, IX, 1 ‘Le Dépositaire infidèle’),23 the reader would have
little idea of the overall meaning directed to these fables if he does not in
the frame, with all its twists and proverbs and other stories.
In the matter of text and texture, structure helps bring us to the meaning
of the fable, vectoring a specific interpretation among the myriad possibili-
ties of these polyvalent texts. The importance of context and the guidance
19 See, for example, A.N. Athanassakis, Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days. Shield. In-

troduction, Translation, and Notes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1983), who suggests
that the fable is to be read as an allegory, in which the rapacious hawk stands for the
kings and for Hesiod’s brother Perses, with the Poet as the nightingale. What is missing
in the fable is the hawk’s punishment for his hybris. See also M.L. West, ‘The ascription
of fables to Aesop in Archaic and Classical Greece’, in: La Fable: Huit exposées suives
de discussions, ed. Franscico R. Adrados (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1984), pp. 105–36
(discussion: pp. 129–36). Among much else, West begins with the knowledge that fables
begin with Sumer, and questions the existence of an Aesop in 6th-c. B.C. The early Greek
poets used aÚnoc to fables and the like, because they contain parai ÊesÐn tina, a measure
of advice. Hesiod tells ‘Hawk and Nightingale’, Erga ll. 202–12, to the unjust kings, as
an aÚnoc which will not be lost on them. See Van Dijk, Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi, pp. 79–87,
for a number of others, see Carnes, Fable Scholarship and Fable Scholarship II.
20 L. Alsdorf, ‘Pañcatantra-Miszellen’, Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen

Gesellschaft 100 (1950), pp. 356–61, offers a cursory discussion of the frame; also G.T.
Artola, ‘Ten Tales from the Tantropâkhyâna’, Adyar Library Bulletin 29 (1965), pp. 30–
73, an edition of tales from an unusual southern version of the Panchatantra, with a
critical introduction and English versions of the tales. The tales are edited from the
Trivandrum manuscript of the Tantropâkhyâna, which is incomplete, but which contains
at least fifteen new tales embedded into the frame.
21 L. Bødker, Indian Animal Tales: A Preliminary Survey FFC, 170 (Helsinki:

Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1957). See also G.U. Thite, ‘Indian Fable’, in La Fable,
ed. Adrados, pp. 33–60 (discussion: pp. 54–60). For further materials, P. Carnes, Bibli-
ography of the Pañcatantra and Allied Literature (Vadodara, India: Oriental Institute,
M.S. University of Baroda, 1966 [1997]).
22 A.W. Ryder, The Panchatantra (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Visnu

Sarma, The Pancatantra, translated by Ch. Rajan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1995).
23 See J.-Th. Papademetriou, ‘The mutation of an Ancient Greek proverb’, Revue des

Études Grecques 83 (1970), pp. 94–105; reprinted in Carnes, Proverbia in Fabula, pp. 195–
208.
56 Pack Carnes

of the reader’s reception are to be found not purely in terms of the micro-
structure of the individual fables, but also in the macro-structure of the
collection as a whole, if there is one.
There is the context of the collection as a whole, or of the single books,
since that is how they were almost certainly published. Although we are pri-
marily concerned here with the meaning of the individual fables, it is of value
to look first at the structure of the collection as a whole, with its prologues
and other connective materials. Phaedrus’s five books of fables each have a
prologue and some (II, III, and IV) are equipped with epilogues as well (that
epilogues should be missing from books I and V is naturally just as likely
an artifact of survival as is the fragmentary condition of the fable corpus).
Within these books, there are non-fabular pieces: the author’s intrusions
into the text and so forth, a few non-fabular anecdotes masquerading as
fables, and other added materials. All these elements provide a certain con-
text for the fable-telling, often referring to Aesop. This call upon Aesop for
authority in the fables, and for the legitimacy of the collection as a whole, is
clearly at odds with the attempt to justify the fables as Phaedrus’s own con-
structions. The tension between the two opposed forces create a special sort
of irony as well as providing a set of individualised situations or contexts for
each fable. There appears to have been an attempt – at least in the early
stages – to ascribe the fables to Aesop, given the name’s sheer value when
attached to a written piece. The use of the name Aesop conveys to us (and
presumably also conveyed to Phaedrus) the very notion of ‘fable’, providing
significant context in and for itself. In much the same way as ‘Once upon
a time’, ‘Il était une fois’, ‘Auf Einmal’, or ‘mukashi mukashi’ signals the
opening formula of a Märchen or ‘fairy-tale’, and sets our minds to accept
the story as such; or as ‘A Rabbi, a Priest and a Minister walked into a
bar’ prepares us for a joke, so too does the mention of Aesop in a collection
prepare us for a fable.
Yet Phaedrus draws back from casting over his stories the cloak of the
most famous teller of fables; increasingly, his desire to claim individual au-
thorship takes over, and the framing technique falls apart to a certain ex-
tent. The frames, such as they are, as culled from Phaedrus’s personal life,
are usually lost in any attempt to reconstruct those incidents; time has de-
constructed the frame. Compare, on the other hand, the Panchantantric
frame,24 and the other clear possibility of the absence of any contextualisa-
24 See J.-M. Schaeffer, ‘Aesopus auctor inventus: Naissance d’un genre. La fable

ésopique’, Poétique 16 [no. 63] (1985), pp. 345–64; and Fr. Rodriguez Adrados, ‘The
earliest influences of Indian Fable upon Medieval Latin Writing’, Classica et Mediaevalia
35 (1984), pp. 243–63, who discusses the frame story, contrasting it with the classical
fable; see also the contrast between the implied function of the frame stories, in F. Gha-
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 57

tion.
Contextualisation begins with the first word of the collection. In the line
Aesopus auctor quam materiam repperit / hanc ego polivi versibus senariis,
Phaedrus brings us into a known area, a place wherein we are comfortable,
because we all know Aesop. If we have no particular contextualizing element
for each fable, then the macro-frame will help. These, then, are Aesop’s
fables, though now dressed in Latin senarii. This framing technique also
breaks down relatively quickly.
There is another structural frame to be discussed. On a microstructural
level, each fable displays a fairly constant construction, facilitating its mean-
ing. Just as the structure of a joke, with a narrative and punch-line both
conveying the surface meaning of the joke and simultaneously signaling the
‘borrowed’ Gestalt and its incongruous environment, so too does the fable
often begin to describe a set environment, only to bring in an ending from
another, parallel or obliquely allied field, to finish the miniature narration.
In the case of the fable, the now stereotypical opposition is generally re-
duced to ‘single combat’, between two opposites.25 Here, of course, these
need be ‘opposites’ in only one single feature. The opposition of the wolf
and lamb in Phaedrus’s first fable is a case in point: they are introduced in
Phaedrus’s fable form with a place- or time-setting, and with the immediate
cause mentioned as well (‘compelled by thirst’). Like all fabulists, Phaedrus
depends upon stereotypical characterisation, and uses the natural relation-
ship of the wolf and the lamb to motivate the action. The ‘plot’ of the fable is
triggered by this relationship, and not by the words used to describe the pri-
mary action: siti compulsi does nothing to bring about the result, but only
functions as an introductory explanation, bringing the two actors together.
The pseudo-debate between wolf and lamb does not lead to the conclusion
either; but in this case, that is of course the whole point. The debate, with
its charge and rebuttal, shows only the futility of such activity: the outcome
is decided the moment the actors appear, with Ad rivum eandum lupus et
agnus venerant, siti compulsi. . . The epimythium, Haec propter illos scripta
est homines fabula qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt, adds nothing to
the fable, and is in fact simply a further generalisation from the last line of
the narratio: [atque] ita correptum lacerat iniusta nece. This last line gives
the narrator’s point of view (in the natural world, there is of course perfect
justification for the killing of the lamb: wolves have to eat).
The narration, then, contains within its structure the essence of the
zoul, ‘Poetic logic in the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights’, Arab Studies Quarterly
5 (1983), pp. 13–21.
25 See K. Doderer’s treatment of this fabular feature in: Fabeln: Formen, Figuren,

Lehren (Freiburg-in-Br.: Atlantis, 1970), especially pp. 60–89.

58 Pack Carnes

fable, which is therefore complete in the narrated portion, with no need of

epimythium. Phaedrus does not add a promythium to this fable, and clearly
that would have taken much away from it. The point of this fable, that once
the powerful have decided what they are going to do, no amount of logical
discussion will help, is made in the narration alone, with an introductory
line to ‘set the stage’, and the ‘debate’. The point that the lamb’s answers
are futile is made even stronger as we read that the wolf does not even wait
for a reply to his third charge that the lamb’s father had cursed him. . .
The fable’s outcome is from another direction than that indicated by its
action. The structure of a dual, parallel field not only helps us to understand
the process of narration, but suggests a purpose for the epimythium and
other parts of the fable. As we will see below, Phaedrus I, 6 ‘Ranae ad
solem’, P314 ‘Sun and Frogs’ (TMI J613.1), ends with: Quidnam futurum
est si crearit liberos?, a clearly comic punch-line.
After a story about the dictator Pisistratus in Athens, Phaedrus has
Aesop tell them the fable of the frogs asking for a king: Ph I, 2 ‘Ranae
regem petierunt’, P44 ‘Frogs Ask for a King’ (A-T 277; TMI J643.1). The
Aesop frame is recalled by actually inserting Aesop into the literary version
of the fable, as its teller.26 The Athenians were bewailing their lot under
the tyrant Pisistratus, and Aesop then told them the fable of the frogs and
their ‘king’. This is considerably more than a promythic statement of the
intended moral, but in fact, Phaedrus here gives us the same sort of context
that had been the norm in previous Greek fable usage. He ‘sets up’ the fable
by telling the story of Athens as a Democracy when the tyrant Pisistratus
took power. The Athenians then bewailed their fate, and their heavy burden.
As he heard that, Aesop told them the ‘Ranae regem petierunt’ fable. It
should be noted that Hesiod told his fable in order to illustrate a specific
point in his narration (the fable being an added feature). Phaedrus’s point
is not to illustrate the narrative, but in fact the reverse of that: he uses a
bit of narrative background to give him a reason to tell the fable, and also
to guide the resolution of the fable along quite specific lines.
By way of initial plot-characterisation (about borrowed clothes), ‘Aesop
tells’ (I, 3, Aesopus nobis hoc exemplum prodidit) the fable about the ‘Grac-
ulus superbus et Pavo’, P472 ‘The Vainglorious Jackdaw and the Peacock’
(TMI J242.5). Here we have an attempt to contextualise the narrative by
26 K.H. Powell, ‘La Fontaine’s “The Frogs who Asked for a King”: reptiles and rev-

olutions in French Fable illustration and caricature’, Bestia 2 (1990), pp. 63–80, refers
directly to La Fontaine III, 4 ‘Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi’. Powell makes the
point that the illustration of a fable functions as a visual gloss which allows a yet an-
other, further, context, perhaps even beyond that which the teller has provided. This
often makes its meaning specifically linked to a particular historical moment.
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 59

a promythic situation that is generalised, and then in a sort of argumen-

tum ad auctorem attaches the name of Aesop to the story. Of course the
fable may well have been in the Aesopic canon as known to Phaedrus’s
contemporaries, but Phaedrus is our earliest known version.27
This sort of micro-frame occurs again in Ph I, 6 ‘Ranae ad solem’, P314
‘Sun and Frogs’ (TMI J613.1), and the single line Vicini furis celebres vidit
nuptias, is cause for concern, as the fable is about the possibility of the sun
taking a wife. The frogs complain to Jupiter that it is already often too hot
for them, and that it would become so much worse if the sun procreates.
The fable is presented without promythium or epimythium in the sense
of a specifically-directed resolution of the metaphor of the fable, and the
copulative line does not therefore give us the usual ‘this fable teaches us’,
or ‘this fable is for those who. . . ’; rather it connects the fable to a specific
context, in effect equating the two ideas, and the resolution is directed
firmly toward that situation. The situational preamble is there to explain
the reason for the fable and to elucidate the narration. The context given is
very clear, although the exact application is still opaque. What is important
here is that Phaedrus does not give us a general application field (as, say,
in the case of his promythic proverbs), but on the contrary, offers us as a
locative introduction a very limited circumstance, a specific event, with the
articulating line making the action of the individual specific to Aesop. Here,
however, the promythic contextualisation simply states the circumstances
from which the fable stems, but nothing about any external context: about
the audience, implied or real.28
By I, 10 ‘Lupus et vulpis, iudice simio’, P474 ‘Wolf and Fox before
Judge Ape’ (TMI B270, B274), the Aesop frame has been reduced to the
near-cliché Aesopus narrat. . . (here: hoc adtestatur brevis Aesopi fabula).
Again this fable is known to us first from the Phaedrus form, and may very
well have not been an Aesopic fable at all (i.e., a fable previously associated
27 This somewhat misleading. P472 is part of a fable complex which has a series of

fables all related, but with uncertain genealogies. The group contains a number of fa-
bles: P101 ‘Borrowed Plumage’ (A-T 244; TMI J951.2). Part of complex: P2 ‘Eagle,
Jackdaw and Shepherd’ (TMI H2413.3); P123 ‘Jackdaw and Crows’ (TMI J951.2); P126
‘Jackdaw and Fox’ (TMI J2066.2); P129 ‘Jackdaw and Pigeons’ (TMI J951.2); P131
‘Runaway Jackdaws’ (TMI U255.2); P219 ‘Peacock and Jackdaw’ (TMI J242.4); P294
‘Crane and Peacock’ (TMI J242.5); and P472 ‘Vainglorious Jackdaw and Peacock’ (TMI
J512, J951.2). The Phaedrus form has motifs not found in any of the others, but the fable
is clearly related to the complex.
28 For interesting ‘meanings’ associated with this and other fables, see C. Janson, ‘The

Animal Fable: prints and popular culture in the Dutch Revolt’, in: From Revolts to
Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries 1500–1700. International and Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Th. Hermans and R. Salverda (London: Centre for Low
Countries Studies, 1993), pp. 93–108.
60 Pack Carnes

with Aesop, rather than the generic use of the name). Since we do not
know Phaedrus’s source29 and can not tell whether or not this fable was
in it, there is no way to tell. There are no more fables in the first book
that attempt this micro-framing; Phaedrus seems to have given it up, or,
perhaps thinking that it had done its work, passively implies that the rest of
the fables are his own. But he returns to the macro-frame of Aesop and the
general concept of his fables in the prologue to Book II., Exemplis continetur
Aesopi genus. . . The frame then shifts, slowly and slightly, when Phaedrus
begins a few lines later to transfer the true value of these stories to himself:

Quicumque fuerit ergo narrandi iocus,

dum capiat aurem et servet propositum suum,
re commendatur, non auctores nomine. (II, prol. 5–7)

Phaedrus mentions Aesop in the next line: equidam omni cura morem ser-
vabo senis, but adds, bringing the focus sharply back to himself:

sed si libuerit aliquid interponere,

dictorum sensus ut delectet varietas,
bonas in partes, lector, accepias velim,
ita, si respendet illi brevitas gratiam. (II, prol. 9–12)

Aesop appears in the third fable of Book II, ‘Aesopus ad Quendam de

successu inproborum’, P64 ‘Wrong Remedy for Dog Bite’ (TMI J2108).
Aesop is present as an actor within the fable, commenting upon the actions
of a man who, bitten by a dog, dips some bread in his wound, and offers it
to the dog to eat. Aesop’s comment is directed toward the man (not to the
people, nor to us):

Tunc sic Aesopus ‘Noli coram pluribus

hoc facere canibus, ne nos vivos devorent,
cum scierint esse tale culpae praemium’.
29 Probably some version of the Demetrius of Phalerum collection, the Lìgwn AÈswpeÐwn

SunagwgaÐ of Demetrius Phalereus (see Diogenes Laertius 5:80), now lost. See B.E. Perry,
‘Demetrius of Phalerum and the Aesopic Fables’, Transactions of the American Philo-
logical Association 93 (1962), pp. 287–346, who believed that this book was apparently
extant as late as the 10th c. It was apparently contained in one book roll, and was com-
piled no earlier than 300 B.C., almost certainly in Alexandria. This collection, more a
checklist of fables than a literary work, must have been at least one of Phaedrus’ sources
and is most likely to be identified with the ‘Aesop’ to which he often refers. The Demetrius
collection was made to serve as a sort of source-book for rhetoricians. The fables were
apparently indexed by application or topic, and were introduced by some sort of formula
describing that application. This introductory tag gave rise to the promythium, originally
more or less a one-line summary of possible applications of the fable in question.
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 61

– an invective which we reinterpret as we remind ourselves of the wit and

wisdom of Aesop.
Aesop does not return in this book until the epilogue, in which Phaedrus
draws the frame around the book by discussing Aesop’s statue in Athens,
laying emphasis upon the fact that the statue is of a slave, and making this
a metaphor for the idea that advancement in life is a matter of merit, and
not birth. Again Phaedrus uses this framework to redirect the reader to the
poet, suggesting that he is writing his fables so that Aesop, having been the
first to do these things (invent fables, rise from slavery, and be honored),
will not be alone. And if Latium will accept his work with favor, there will
be other poets who write thus. Phaedrus puts himself here in a position like
Aesop, his source and inspiration, and stands ready to serve himself in like
manner to others, and that situation will give a very specific context to all
the fables that follow, if we choose to hold it in our minds. Phaedrus found
no direct followers in fable collections among his contemporaries as far as
we can tell, but his statement that the Romans would have their own fable
writers to set against the Greek was to be proven true.
Aesop returns in the third book. The fable is described as his own fable,
‘fabella mea’, he says, but Aesop is in the fable and announces the gnomic
ending which serves as the moral. Ph III, 3 ‘Aesopus et Rusticus’, P495
‘Aesop and the Farmer’ (TMI T465.1):
Aesopus ibi stans, naris emunctae senex,
Natura numquam verba cui potuit dare,
‘Si procurare vis ostentum, rustice,
uxores’ inquit ‘da tuis pastoribus.’
This is far from a fable in the strictest sense: it is a joke, more or less a
part of what the fable might well have been in its widest sense. But its
meaning is clear, even though it does not have very much more meaning in
the paraenetic mode, save to call attention to what the shepherds are doing
(which is not mentioned in the narration). The mention of Aesop seems to
be the only reason why we should call this a fable today. The same applies
to Aesop as actor in Ph III, 5 ‘Aesop et Petulans’, P497 ‘Aesop and the
Saucy Fellow’ (TMI J1602), in which Aesop fools the man who has thrown
a rock at him into throwing another at a rich man: thus having him arrested
and put to death. There is virtually no paraenetic meaning here at all above
the story-line.
Aesop returns in III, 14 ‘De lusu et serveritate’, P505 ‘Concerning re-
laxation and tension’ (TMI J533.1), with little added. The fact that Aesop
is called ‘one who causes more to laugh at others than to be laughed at
himself’, is striking and makes us think about him for a moment. We might
62 Pack Carnes

even miss the rest of the fable, and have to read it again, before really
understanding the epimythium. This is far from a true fable; but because
it has Aesop in it, it appears to be one. Aesop’s value seems to lie in his
ability to make a true fable of a non-fable, or to have us take no account of
the matter.30 Phaedrus III, 19, ‘Aesopus respondet garrulo’, P510 ‘Aesop’s
reply to an Inquisitive Fellow’ (TMI J1303), uses the Diogenes motif in his
collection, once again in the manner of a joke, as far as the structure is con-
cerned. That it is Aesop who ‘searches’ for a man is very important here.
Anyone else would probably mean that it would have to derive its ‘fable
quality’ from the fact that it is found in a book of fables; but with Aesop
in it, one hardly needs to ask. Such is the power of context. It may well be
that Phaedrus has inserted the name for that reason.
The use of Aesop as a source decreases over time: in other words, there
are many more occasions in which Aesop is named as author of a fable in the
first book than in the later books. The first book of the collection consists of
a prologue and 31 fables. Fourteen of these fables are known in their earliest
known versions from Phaedrus’s collections (P472 to P486). The fact that
the earliest known version of a particular fable appears in Phaedrus does not
of course mean that Phaedrus invented the fable, although there is always
that possibility. It seems likely that a significant number of fables from
the Greek corpus have been lost, perhaps fables that were in Phaedrus’s
immediate source (probably some version of the Demetrius of Phalerum
collection). Yet Phaedrus does say that he added fables of his own to those
he found in Aesop, in the prologue to Book Four, when describing his fables:

Quas Aesopias, non Aesopi, nomino,

quia paucas ille ostendit, ego plures sero,
usus vetusto genere sed rebus novis,. . . (lines 12–14)

One of these is among the most common fables known today. Phaedrus I,
3 ‘Gracculus superbus et Pavo’, P472 ‘The Vainglorious Jackdaw and the
Peacock’ [compare P129] (A-T 244; TMI J512, J951.2), is part of the fable
complex known as ‘Borrowed feathers’.31
30 Or so it seems. . . When asked whether this was a fable, a whole class of 21 students

said that it was, yet fully 14 admitted that this was because of the mention of Aesop. It
makes no difference of course; but it is interesting because of the power of that person’s
name.
31 The complex consists of P101 (as in, e.g., Babrius 72), P123 and P129 (both from the

Greek Prose tradition), and P472. P472 is the Phaedrus addition, and is the first known
example of that version. Horace’s version is P101 (see H.Th. Archibald, ‘The Fable in Ho-
race’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 33 (1910), pp. 14–19, and R.
Galli, ‘Fedro e Orazio’, Paideia: Revista letteraria di internazione bibliografia 38 (1983),
pp. 195–99). The set is further identified as A-T 244; TMI J951.2, with folktale reflexes
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 63

It should not be surprising that Phaedrus made significant changes to

Aesop32 in the fables in his work. The writing-down of fables without a
specific context would in itself impose certain changes. First of all, there
is the framework, still felt necessary to give the fable at least some sort of
reason for being part of the collection. In this case, we have the prologues
and epilogues, as well as the narrator’s intrusions. Secondly, the fable tends
to expand when it becomes the subject of an individual poem, told for itself.
There are examples of how distorted this form can become, in the sixteenth-
century fables of the Scot Robert Henryson or of the Germans Hans Sachs
and (especially) Erasmus Alberus.33 Phaedrus seems to have sensed the
potential toward expansion, and has consciously tried to be brief. He does
mention, however, at the end of III, 10, that he had been criticised for
making the fables too short:

Haec exsecutus sum propterea pluribus,

brevitate nimia quoniam quosdam offendimus. (59–60)34
from all over. For a discussion of the entire range of the complex (though the Phaedrus
fable version is only discussed from the point of view of its medieval paraphrases), see M.
Fuchs’s dissertation, Die Fabel von der Krähe, der sich mit fremden Federn schmücht,
betrachtet in ihren verschiedenen Gestaltungen in der abendländischen Literatur (Berlin:
Schade, 1886). For the Greek forms, see H.D. Austin, ‘The origin and Greek versions of
the Strange Feathers fable’, in: Studies in Honor of A. Marshall Eliott, 2 vols (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins U.P., 1910 [1912]), I, pp. 305–27. P129 is discussed by B. Edwards, ‘The
Aesopic tradition in the Roman d’Alexandre’, in Studies in Honor of Frederick William
Shipley (St Louis: Washington University U.P., 1942), pp. 95–99, who discusses P129
and its relationship to P101. This fable complex is very important not only for the mo-
tifs and content of the several versions, but also because its presence in the late Middle
Ages shows that one version of the Greek prose tradition was known, perhaps in oral
circulation.
32 Again, probably from Demetrius; but we have no way of knowing the precise shape

of these fables. We are forced to use the oldest forms we do have, which all have some
form of contextualisation already firmly in place.
33 See Henryson’s extended fables in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Erasmus Alberus: Die Fabeln: Die erweiterte Ausgabe von
1550 mit Kommentar sowie die Erstfassung von 1534, ed. W. Harms and H. Vögel
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997); and P. Carnes, ‘The fable in service to the Reformation’,
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 20.4 (1984), pp. 176–89.
34 There is one important note to all of this concern about the form of the Phaedrine

fable. It must be pointed out that Phaedrus helped establish the form of the fable to
which we all respond. It is essentially the Phaedrine form which we all commonly call
the ‘proper’ form of the fable, with a narrative and a ‘moral tag line’ or epimythium
providing the general application of the story. This came about over the 1500 or so years
of constant use as a medium for teaching Latin, which insured that virtually everyone
who studied during the Middle Ages through to at least the Second World War would
know Phaedrus’s fables, even if they did not know his name. It is perhaps more correct
to suggest that this particular form, or the convention of essentially using this form, is to
be attributed both to the Phaedrus and to the many other reworkings of the fables, and
64 Pack Carnes

Thus Phaedrus I, 4 ‘Canis per fluvium carnem ferens’, P123 ‘Dog With
Meat and his Shadow’ (A-T 34; TMI J1791.4) might be used as a rhetori-
cal device to drive home the point, in nearly any context, that ‘one ought
to be content with one’s lot’, or perhaps to describe the dangers of being
greedy (or other such semantic fields). But it might well be used in context
to illustrate a much wider range of ideas, such as the avoiding of tempta-
tion, or the idea of deceptive images, which would of course be far removed
from what is ‘obviously’ Phaedrus’s intent here. Phaedrus’s ‘directed’ ap-
plication in the promythium: Amittit merito proprium qui alienum adpetit
is perhaps narrower than that into which any given reader might have re-
solved the metaphor of the fable, but not by very much. The author’s use
of a proverb or proverbial phrase, as this obviously is, adds the value of
an already broadly accepted metaphoric field. The proverb is already a
metaphor for the general application, and its use effectively doubles the fa-
ble’s metaphoric mode, allowing two ‘chances’ as it were, for the reader to
apprehend the ‘intended’ content, or Phaedrus’s directed meaning. Phae-
drus’s introductory lines are the first move toward what would become
common practice in post-classical fable writing: the use of a proverb or a
proverbial phrase as a sort of resumé of the general moral. The fable affirms
the proverb, and is in turn affirmed by it. The use of a promythic prover-
bial phrase is found in Phaedrus with historical anecdotes or other didactic
materials, as well as with fables, thus evening out the differences between
these forms. For example, in IV, 23 ‘De Simonide’, P519 ‘About Simonides’
(TMI J222), we read of the distinguished poet Simonides who became rich
by singing the praises of victors in the games, and set sail for home. The ship
encountered a storm, and everyone except for Simonides rushed to gather
their belongings – which were then either lost as the overladen passengers
drowned, or lost later to thieves. Only Simonides, who answered “Mecum
[. . . ] mea sunt cuncta”, avoided disaster. This is a very specific example
(and not necessarily fictive as in the case of the fable) of the sententious
promythic proverb: Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet.
A ‘directed application’ by some sort of sententious statement, a proverb
or proverbial phrase, provides a vector for the general range of possible
meanings (extending from the limited through to the broad), by means of
what is often – compared to the specific example in the narration – an even
broader field, or, more usually, a simple re-definition of that field. There are
structural reasons for this state of affairs. The early classical fable, as we
have mentioned, is always found within a specific context, which to some

to other, later fable collections of the Middle Ages; but the form is there in Phaedrus,
even if not displayed in each instance.
How Phaedrus’s Fables ‘Mean’ 65

extent virtually always ‘directs’ the resolution of the metaphor, or channels

the application of the paraenetic content of the form.
Fables without a specific context – and, after all, that is precisely what
is ‘new’ in Phaedrus – usually do not have such ‘built-in’ limiting features;
and here the need for channeling ‘morals’, as promythia or epimythia, be-
comes more obvious. The author’s use of a promythic introductory line or
two directs the listener’s or reader’s reception into a specific area (though
still broader than a literary context) and the fable will, in theory, be read
with that application in mind. The advantage of the promythia over the
epimythia for the writer is the process of programming the reader/listener
for a specific application. The disadvantages are also found in that pro-
cess: the announcement of the resolution of the metaphor about to be heard
might work as something akin to prefacing a joke with its punch-line, and
that might well explain why the practice is rare in the modern fable.35
Context is a complex affair; it can arise from features totally alien to
the fable itself, indeed from the reader himself, or what he has seen or
heard. Context can arise from previous fables in which actors act or react in
contrasting ways, or indeed in the same fashion. Phaedrus has done much
to insure that his fables will tend to be understood in a particular manner.
But context will vary from case to case, from time to time, from situation
to situation, and from person to person, with Phaedrus not being able to
do anything about it.

Author’s address:
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Lake Forest College, 555 North Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, Ill. 60045-2399 — USA
e-mail: carnes@lfc.edu

35 Indeed, only one modern writer I know uses promythia exclusively: G. Branstner

in his Der Esel als Amtmann oder Das Tier ist auch nur ein Mensch: Fabeln (Berlin:
Buchverlag der Morgen, 1977). Branstner’s ‘morals’, which usually sound sententious,
if not always actually proverbial, work in fact because they are actually mini-fables in
rhymed couplets. For example, the two-liner ‘Wer schreit / bringt’s weit’, introduces a
fable that begins with the Chorus of the Animals and their problem: no-one knows how
to get rid of the raven, the most unmusical of all the animals. Because they do not know
what to do, they make him the director. Thus the proverbial promythium first of all sets
the context, limited though it is, and secondly, directs the reader toward ‘looking’ for the
moral in the fable narrative.