The fables of Phaedrus /

This unpretentious volume is little more than what its title proclaims it to be: a new translation of the "Aesopic" fables of Phaedrus (freedman of the Emperor Augustus) from the original Latin iambic senarii. Widdows (emeritus Concordia University, Montreal) has used the unrhymed but rhythmic English verse form of lines of four stressed beats (but no fixed number of syllables) that goes back to Anglo-Saxon times (e.g., Fable I. 1. 1: "To the ^Us'elf^Usame ^Ustr'eam, to ^Usl'ake ^Utheir ^Uth'irst. . ."). The translation (which includes the so-called "Perotti's Appendix" of fables copied in the 15th century by the Italian scholar of that name from a codex no longer extant) is preceded by a brief introduction discussing Phaedrus's life, work, and reputation, and the origin of the prose animal fables (most attributed to the semi-mythical Aesop, though some are clearly Roman) that he versified. There is a short bibliography, but no index. Each fable has its own page (Phaedrus prided himself on his brevity), and some are illustrated by appropriate woodcuts reproduced from a 1477 German edition of Aesop. The translation itself is generally fine, though the desire for alliteration has occasionally triumphed over accuracy. Useful for undergraduate, community college, and general readership libraries. Those with Latin would do better with the critical editions of L. Havet (1895) or Postgate (1919), or Perry's scholarly Loeb edition (1955, with facing-page English prose translation). C. J. Zabrowski; Gettysburg College