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No Perry Numbers

Fables listed here without Perry numbers fall into two categories:

  • Ancient fables. There are a very few ancient fables which Perry did not included in his inventory of the Aesopica.
  • Medieval fables. For the most part, fables here without Perry numbers belong to the medieval Aesopic output. Given that there are serious problems with Perry's medieval catalog, I have not attempted to be systematic in identifying the Perry number for medieval sources. So, if you see a medieval fable that is cited without a Perry number, this could simply mean that the fable does not have an extant ancient prototype. It may in fact have a Perry number in the range 584-725.
  • Renaissance fables. In addition, Perry's index does not include the fables of Abstemius, a collection of 100 fables which enjoyed considerable popularity and which are found repeated in many later Renaissance and early modern collections of fables, both Latin and English.

 


You can find a compilation of Perry's index to the Aesopica in the gigantic appendix to his edition of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1965). This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the Aesopic fable tradition. Invaluable.