Kitap 5
11.19
Again those fables which, although they did not originate with Aesop (for Hesiod seems to have been the first to write them), are best known by Aesop's name, are specially attractive to rude and uneducated minds, which are less suspicious than others in their reception of fictions and, when pleased, readily agree with the arguments from which their pleasure is derived. Thus Menenius Agrippa See Liv. ii. 32. is said to have reconciled the plebs to the patricians by his fable of the limbs' quarrel with the belly. Horace Epis I. i. 73.
11.20
also did not regard the employment of fables as beneath the dignity even of poetry; witness his lines that narrate What the shrewd fox to the sick lion told. The Greeks call such fables αἶνοι (tales) and, as I have already In the preceding section. cp. Arist. Rhet. II. xx. 3 for Libyan stories. remarked, Aesopean or Libyan stories, while some Roman writers term them apologues, though the name has not found general acceptance.
11.21
Similar to these is that class of proverb which may be regarded as an abridged fable and is understood allegorically: The burden is not mine to carry, he said, the ox is carrying panniers.
