| Aesopancient greek
writer of fables, who is supposed to have been a freed slave from Thrace.
His name became attached to a collection of beast fables long transmitted
through oral tradition. The beast fables are part of the common culture
of the Indo-European peoples and constitute perhaps the most widely read
collection of fables in world literature. Many of Aesop's fables were rewritten
in Greek verse by the poet Babrius, probably a Hellenized Roman of the 1st
or 2nd century AD, and in Latin verse by the Roman poet Phaedrus in the
1st century AD. The collection that now bears Aesop's name consists for
the most part of later prose paraphrases of the fables of Babrius.
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