Editing Fable (section)

===Aesopic or Aesop's fable===
The varying corpus denoted ''Aesopica'' or ''[[Aesop's Fables]]'' includes most of the best-known western fables, which are attributed to the [[legend]]ary [[Aesop]], supposed to have been a slave in [[ancient Greece]] around 550 BCE. When [[Babrius]] set down fables from the ''Aesopica'' in verse for a [[Hellenistic]] Prince "Alexander", he expressly stated at the head of Book II that this type of "myth" that Aesop had introduced to the "sons of the Hellenes" had been an invention of "Syrians" from the time of "[[Ninus|Ninos]]" (personifying [[Nineveh]] to Greeks) and [[Belus (Assyrian)|Belos]] ("ruler").<ref>Burkert 1992:121</ref> [[Epicharmus of Kos]] and Phormis are reported as having been among the first to invent comic fables.<ref>P. W. Buckham, p. 245</ref> Many familiar fables of Aesop include "[[The Crow and the Pitcher]]", "[[The Tortoise and the Hare]]" and "[[The Lion and the Mouse]]".

In the first century AD, [[Phaedrus (fabulist)|Phaedrus]] (died 50 AD) produced Latin translations in iambic verse of fables then circulating under the name of Aesop. While Phaedrus's Latinizations became classic (transmitted through the Middle Ages, though attributed to a certain [[Romulus (fabulist)|Romulus]], now considered legendary), the writing of fables in Greek did not stop; in the 2nd century AD, [[Babrius]] wrote beast fables in Greek in the manner of Aesop, which would also become influential in the Middle Ages (and sometimes transmitted as Aesop's work).{{citation needed|date=August 2024}}

In ancient Greek and Roman education, the fable was the first of the ''[[progymnasmata]]''—training exercises in prose composition and public speaking—wherein students would be asked to learn fables, expand upon them, invent their own, and finally use them as persuasive examples in longer forensic or deliberative speeches. The need of instructors to teach, and students to learn, a wide range of fables as material for their declamations resulted in their being gathered together in collections, like those of Aesop.{{citation needed|date=August 2024}}