the father of Roman history, was descended from M. Fabius Ambustus the consul. In the interval between the first and second Punic wars we find him taking an active part in the subjugation of the Gauls in the north of Italy (225 B.C.); and after the battle of Cannae (216 B.C.), he was employed by the Romans to proceed to Delphi, in order to consult the oracle of Apollo. In his capacity of historian he is worthy of note as the first of the Roman annalists who set the example of writing the history of his country in prose. The rude muse of Naevius had already celebrated in verse the glory acquired by the Roman arms in the first Punic war, and Ennius had clothed the annals of his adopted country in the language of poetry. But till the time of Fabius Pictor, no one had appeared to chronicle in simple prose the res gestae of Rome and the Romans. The sources from which he derived the materials for his history were the oral traditions current among the people, and the annals of the priests; and though his style seems to have partaken much of the dry and jejune character of these chronicles, it is highly praised by Livy (who borrowed very largely from Fabius), as well as by Cicero, Pliny, and many other writers. Polybius has expressed a doubt respecting their credibility, but apparently without sufficient reason. That he should have copied from a Greek writer, Diocles of Alexandria, as Dionysius hints, carries with it its own refutation; but it is a curious fact that he wrote his annals in the Greek as well as Latin language. To what period he brought down his history we are unable to determine. Livy speaks of his death 169 B.C. (Mollier Diss. de Q. Fabio Pictore, Altorf. 1689; Lachman, De Fontib. Livii; Fabric. Bibl. Lat.)

Q. FABIVS MAXIMVS VERRUCOSVS, one of the most distinguished Romans of the republic. He first makes his appearance in history as the conqueror of the Ligurians, who had long braved the power of Rome; and though we have no account of his proceedings from this period down to the beginning of the second Punic war, he must have no doubt taken a prominent part in public affairs, as he was then appointed to head the embassy (219 B.C.) sent to Carthage to inquire whether that state approved of Hannibal's conduct in attacking Saguntum. The answer proved unsatisfactory; when Fabius, assuming the haughty dignity of a Roman senator, and folding up his cloak so as to form a cavity, thus addressed the nobles of Carthage: "Hic vobis bellum et pacem portamus; urrum placet sumite." Being answered that he might give which he pleased, he indignantly exclaimed, "Then I give you war;" and the deputies returned to Rome to state the result of their mission. The disastrous campaign on the Trebia, and the defeat on the banks of the Thrasymene Lake, warned the Romans that their successful resistance to Hannibal, and even their existence, depended on the wisdom of the general to whom they entrusted their troops. Everything pointed out Fabius as the person on whom the fate of Rome ought to be allowed to depend. The senate appointed him dictator; and the fearless character of Minucius probably induced Fabius to make him master of the horse, or second in command; and his conduct in that office did not eventually disappoint the expectations of his countrymen. The grand object of his policy was to weary out and exhaust the army of Hannibal, without the risk of a general engagement; and so closely did he adhere to the plan which he had laid down for himself, that he received from this circumstance the name of Cunctator. His slow and cautious policy by no means suited the ardent spirit of the Romans, and more particularly that of Minucius, his master of the horse, who began to ridicule the proceedings of Fabius, and, when he was absent at Rome, took the opportunity of attacking the enemy, and came off victorious in a small skirmish. This tended only more strongly to confirm the opponents of Fabius in their opinion; and Varro was bold enough to propose that Minucius should be made equal in command with Fabius. The result was exactly such as might have been anticipated. Minucius engaged in battle with Hannibal, and his army was on the verge of ruin when the opportune arrival of Fabius changed the aspect of affairs. Minucius seems to have had the moral courage to confess his folly, and cheerfully to submit to the orders of Fabius. At the end of six months he resigned his dictatorship.

But it was not long before Rome was again obliged to have recourse to the experience of Fabius. After the defeat at Cannae (216 B.C.), he was appointed, along with Marcellus, to the command of the armies; Fabius being called the shield, and Marcellus the sword, of the republic. He laid siege to the important city of Capua; and when Hannibal marched towards Rome, threatening the city itself, Fabius remained firmly at his post, trusting in the known bravery of his fellow-citizens. Again, in his fifth consulship, we find him taking the city of Tarentum; and when it was proposed, towards the conclusion of the war, that Scipio should pass into Africa, Fabius was decidedly opposed to the scheme. But he did not live to witness the final success of Scipio, having died at an advanced age, 203 B.C.

For the details of his public life see art. ROMAN HISTORY.

FABLE is a word used in several senses, all arising out of that primitive meaning in which it denotes an invented or fictitious story. Its applications to literature are, especially in modern speech, much narrower than those of its root, the Latin Fabula; and the only one of these requiring notice is that in which it is the name of a particular kind of literary composition. A fable is a fictitious story, designed, characteristically and mainly, for illustrating a general or universal truth; and it may thus be said to be an allegory and something more, or an adaptation of the allegory to a special purpose. This description, however, would fairly include the Parable also, between which indeed, and the Fable or Apologue, the line of distinction is not very clear. It is, as commonly taken, no broader than this; that the invention of the latter is carried, while that of the former is not carried, beyond the bounds, not of the probable only, but even of the possible. Jotham's story to the men of Shechem is strictly an apologue, while Nathan's allegorical reproof to David is as strictly a parable; but many other tales would be referred to the one class or to the other, according to the diverse experience of different readers.

The apologue, however, has been worked out in one direction, as to the character of which there can be no dispute. This development constitutes what has been called the Æsopian Fable, in which the imagined actors, or the chief of them, instead of being men, are the lower animals, and sometimes plants or other things really inanimate. This shape of the fable arose in very early times, probably among the Eastern nations; and, passing thence to Greece and Rome, it flourished also profusely in the middle ages. We read of its having become, more than once, an instrument of persuasion in the hands of public men, who aimed at fitting their oratory to the grasp of a semi-civilized people: one instance, probably the oldest of which any record exists, is that which was above referred to, from the Book of Judges; another occurred when the Roman Menenius Agrippa told his tale of the members of the body to the plebeians on the Sacred Mount. In regions widely distant from each other, and in very remote ages, the fable took also a literary shape. It was used for many centuries as a favourite vehicle for the inculcation of rules of practical action, as well as for the venting of satire political and social; and even in modern times it has not altogether lost its ground, having been employed, not unfrequently, and oftenest in the form of verse, for insinuating the minor morals, or for giving point to epigrammatic and stinging jests. It should be noted, indeed, that the nature of the apologue proper unfitts it for effectively symbolizing high ethical doctrines: to positions giving occasion for such teaching, its animal or inanimate actors cannot well be made to rise, unless by a looseness of invention that would degenerate into extravagance and absurdity. Accordingly, the framers of apologies have at all times been tempted to wander beyond their own field. In many of the most striking and celebrated fables, the introduction of the animal personages is merely ornamental, the action and its lesson turning really on the thoughts and conduct of human beings who appear along with them; nor is there, perhaps, any extensive collection of fables, whether ancient or modern, invented or compiled, in which an attempt is not made to relieve the monotony by the interspersion of stories having men only as their actors.

It is not probable that we possess any Oriental Apologies, in the state in which they were received by the Greeks. But there are many extant specimens which are very ancient, and which likewise have reached us without any loss of the native Eastern colouring. The most famous of these are contained in the various shapes and versions of a collection, which was long known as the Fables of Pilpay. Hindustan was the birth-place, if not of the originals of these tales, yet certainly, at least, of the oldest shape in which they still exist. The source of all of them is the Sanscrit book called the Pancha Tantra, or Five Sections. It has been analysed by Professor H. H. Wilson in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society; and the Hitopadesha, an alteration of it in the same language, was translated into English by Wilkins. The stories of both works are told in prose, but reflections in verse, chiefly quotations, are interspersed freely. The fables which they contain reached Europe in the middle ages, through translations from an Arabic version (long lost), usually called the "Kalila Damana," from the names of two jackals who figure prominently in it; and the name Bidpai, there given to the wise man who is the story teller, has been changed into Pilpay. There exists in Arabic, also, a much more meagre collection of fables, attributed traditionally to Lokman, who is said to have lived in the time of King David.

The Sanscrit Fables bear the Hindu impress very strongly. The animals, the scenery, and the aspect of society, are all genuinely Indian; and not a few features image vividly the ancient state of Indian greatness and independence. One of the names of the older form of the collection signifies "The Book of Polity;" and the tales are feigned to have been told by a learned Brahmin to the sons of a great king or raja, the education of whom had been committed to him, and was to be effected chiefly through the weighty lessons of wisdom and morality thus communicated. Many stories which afterwards in European hands assumed a domestic and familiar cast, are here invested with royal and aristocratic pomp; the several kinds of animals have their several kingdoms, mixed up together by whimsical borrowings and dependences; and the picture is often embellished also with wild mythological groups. Among other tales found in the collection, which are not properly fables, are the originals of the Arabian Almaschar, of the story versified in Bethgeleert, and of several of the French fabliaux.

The Æsop of the Greeks, the hunchbacked slave and jester, is very like the Lokman of the Arabs; and of the fables which were current in Greece under his name not a few are identical with those of the East. As to all of them, it is quite uncertain who may have been the author or compiler; but Fables attributed to Æsop are quoted, in prose, by Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other Greek writers; and Plato represents Socrates as having versified some such in the time of his imprisonment. Babrius or Babrias, who appears to have lived not long before the Augustan age turned a large number of Æsopian Fables into Greek choliambic verse; and, after these had long been known in fragments only, most, if not all of them, were recovered in a manuscript found in a monastery of Mount Athos in 1844. The London edition of these, that of Sir G. C. Lewis, contains a hundred and twenty-nine fables. They are equal to those of Phædrus for brief expressiveness of phrase, and superior in the apposite pointedness with which, in most of them, the incidents are brought to bear on the moral. It may be worth noting that Babrias introduces the tiger, who, though very prominent in the Oriental apologues, had for a while lost his place among the Greeks. But he leaves the lion in possession of his sovereignty over the brutes; a feature, by the way, whose appearance in the more recent fables is one decisive symptom of their Oriental origin.

To this little corner of literature the Romans certainly supplied nothing better than the one fable, that of the Town Mouse and Country Mouse, told so tersely by Horace in one of his satires. But to the same age belong, not unworthily, the Fables of Phædrus, about ninety in number. They tell, in the easy iambic verse of comedy, and with a grace of style not surpassed by any other Augustan writer, stories, for the invention of which the fabulist professes himself to be indebted to Æsop, and most of which are generally of the Æsopian kind. There is, however, much originality in details. Even when his outline seems to be clearly traceable to some of the Greek stories still accessible, Phædrus often alters very skilfully, for the purpose either of giving a more natural or lively air to the picture, or of fitting the incidents more closely to the moral; and almost everything seems to be his own that strikes us most, in the light touches of characterization, and the occasional strokes of quiet humour. If the extreme brevity which he maintains throughout does sometimes give bareness and dryness to his scenes, it has opened to him the occasions which most of all bring out his mastery of language, while sometimes also it enables him to exhibit much force in concentrating both thought and imagery. A critic who deals very severely with Phædrus has been compelled to allow the excellence of the following fables, which indeed may be taken as fair specimens of his characteristic merits: the Ass and the Old Shepherd (i. 15); the Weasel and the Man (i. 22); the Mule and the Robbers (ii. 7); the Bees and the Drones (iii. 13); the Cicada and the Owl (iii. 16); the Huntsman and his Dog (v. 10).

The Fables of the rhetorician Aphilionius in Greek prose, and those in Latin elegiac verse, attributed to Avianus or Avienus, make, in the history of the apologue, a sort of link between the classical and the dark ages. In that overflowing chaos, which constitutes the literature of the middle ages, the fable reappears in several aspects. In a Latin dress, sometimes in prose, sometimes in regular verse, and sometimes in rhymed stanzas, it contributed, with other kinds of narratives, to make up the huge mass of stories which has been bequeathed to us by the monastic libraries. These served more uses than one. They were always easier reading, and were often held to be safer and more instructive reading also, than the difficult and slippery classics, for those monks who cared for reading at all, and were not learned enough for any pursuit deserving the name of study. For those who were a little more active-minded, they aided the Gesta Romanorum and other collections of fabliaux or short novels, in suggesting illustrations available for popular preaching. Among those medieval fables in Latin, very little of originality is to be detected. The writers contented themselves with working up the old fables into new shapes, with rendering from prose into verse, or from verse into prose; a kind of attempts which had its merit in such hands as those of Babrias or Phædrus, but from which no fruit could be expected to be gathered in the convents. The few monks who could have performed such a task well, aimed wisely at something higher. It might be enough to name, among the monkish fabulists, Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican of the twelfth century, in whose Speculum Doctrinale are a good many prose fables, more than half of them from Phædrus. About the end of the same century, too, a considerable number of fables, some of which have been printed, were compiled by an English Cistercian monk, Odo de Cerinton. Nor was this the only collection that arose in England.

As the modern languages became by degrees applicable to literary use, fables began to appear in them. There still exist, in Norman-French, a good many of which may be noted the fables called those of Ysopef, and those composed by Marie de France, the authoress of the well-known fabliaux. Later, also, they were not wanting, though not numerous, in our own tongue. Chaucer has given us one, in his story of Chaunteclere and Dame Partelet; another is Lidgate's tale of The Churl and the Bird. But the course of the short and isolated fables through the middle ages is not here worth prosecuting.

Several of Odo's tales, like Chaucer's Æsopian story, must have been derived from some shape or other of a work, or series of works, for the sake of which chiefly the medieval history of the apologue is interesting. This was the History of Reynard the Fox. Grimm has traced, to as early a date as the middle of the tenth century, the earliest of some extant stories in Latin verse, out of which arose the later poems on the theme, composed in the spoken tongues. The oldest of these was written in High German, probably in the twelfth century; not much later appeared a good many shorter poems in Norman-French; and a Low-German edition of the story "Reineke de Vos" (which has lately been shown to have been founded on an older Flemish original), exhibited the adventures in their fullest elaboration, and became, in its own shape and in translation, popular throughout all Europe. One of our venerable Caxton's labours was a version of a Dutch prose version of it, which he finished in 1481. By the German antiquaries and critics the "Reineke" has been treated with that somewhat overstrained enthusiasm which, since the beginning of the present century at least, they have bestowed so freely on the mediæval monuments of the father-land: a rendering of it into modern hexameters appears among the works of Goethe. It is really a very remarkable piece. In it the Æsopian fable received a development which was in several respects quite original. We have here no short and unconnected stories. Materials, partly borrowed from older apologies, but in a much greater proportion new, are worked up into one long and systematic tale, so as to form what has been quaintly called an animal-romance. The moral, so prominent in the fable proper, shrinks so far into the background, that the work might be considered as a mere allegory. Indeed, while the suspicion of its having contained personal satires has been convincingly set aside, some writers deny even the design to represent human conduct at all; and we can scarcely get nearer to its significance than by regarding it as being, in a general way, what Carlyle has called "a parody of human life." It represents a contest maintained successfully, by selfish craft and audacity, against enemies of all sorts, in a half-barbarous and ill-organized society. With his weakest foes, like Chaunteclere the Cock, Reynard uses brute force; over the weak who are protected, like Kiward the Hare and Belin the Ram, he is victorious by uniting violence with cunning; Bruin, the dull, strong, formidable Bear, is humbled by having greater power than his own enlisted against him; and the most dangerous of all the fox's enemies, Isengrim, the obstinate, greedy, and implacable Wolf, after being baffled by repeated strokes of malicious ingenuity, forces Reynard to a single combat, but even thus is not a match for his dexterous adversary. The knavish fox has allies worthy of him, in Grimbart the watchful badger, and in his own aunt Dame Rukenaue, the learned Fable. She-ape; and he plays at his pleasure on the simple credulity of the Lion-King, the image of an impotent feudal sovereign. The characters of these and other brutes are kept up with a rude kind of consistency, which gives them great liveliness; many of the incidents are devised with much force of humour; and the sly hits at the weak points of mediæval polity and manners and religion, are incessant and palpable.

It is needless, as has already been said, to attempt tracing the appearance which fables, or incidents borrowed from them, make so frequently as incidental ornaments in the older literature of our own country and others. Nor is there here fit occasion for dwelling minutely on the cultivation of the apologue in modern times, as a special form of poetical composition. It has appeared in every modern nation of Europe, but has nowhere become very important, and hardly ever exhibited much originality either of spirit or of manner. In our own language, Prior indicated the possession of much aptitude for it; but neither the fables of Moore, nor even the much more lively ones of Gay, possess any distinguished merit. To Dryden's spirited remodellings of old poems, romances, and fabliaux, the name of fables, which he was pleased to give them, is quite inapplicable. In German, Hagedorn and Gellert are quite forgotten; and Lessing's fables, both in prose and in verse, are chiefly notable for hard thinking and cool satire. The Italian fables of Pignottiere are much superior to all of those which have just been referred to.

It is only in France that the Fable has attained, in modern times, a literary position of real eminence; and it has owed this distinction to one writer, whose singular success has been sufficient alike to eclipse predecessors and to discourage all endeavours at imitation. La Fontaine, a man who, both in character and in intellect, was not unlike Goldsmith, was enabled by fortunate circumstances to concentrate his powers more vigorously; while the state of French society, and the turn of French opinions and feelings, brought out clearly some tendencies which in our own land of genius were but imperfectly developed. La Fontaine's fables are, beyond all doubt, incomparably superior to everything else of their class. Of his extraordinary mastery in style and versification we foreigners can be only so far sensible, as to share, partly on trust, in the admiration felt for those excellencies by his countrymen. We can appreciate fully, in many instances, the rare pointedness and aptness of brief expression, clothing shrewd and striking apophthegms, which have given to so many of his lines and phrases a place in the common speech of educated men, like that which has been gained in our tongue by many fragments of Pope and by some of Shakspeare. The "Aide-toi et Dieu t'aidera," is but one example of a thousand. We can understand thoroughly, too, his unique mixture of sly sagacity, fine humour, and quiet reflectiveness, with a simplicity, and good-heartedness, and tenderness, which are best describable by the words of his own language—"naiveté" and "bonhomie."

The outlines of his stories are chiefly borrowed from Phaedrus, Avienus, and the older French fabulists. But among his two hundred and fifty fables there are certainly some whose idea was his own: there has been cited, as one undoubted instance, the ingenious device which he uses in "L'Homme et son Image," for paying a delicate compliment to Rochefoucault. He has, likewise, inexhaustible variety of invention in the filling up of details by original touches, both of incident and of description. Sometimes these are applied merely for giving liveliness and reality to the picture; at other times they suggest humorous images of contrast, as when the lion is described as holding court in his "Louvre," and as issuing his proclamations, "De par le Rol." Often, again, the originality lies in the increase of pointedness and wit with which he throws out the epigrammatic lesson of the old story; a feature which may be exemplified in "L'Ours et les Deux Compagnons," "Le Renard, Le Singe, et Les Animaux," and the tale from Phaedrus of "Le Vieillard et L'Ane." He occasionally remodels fabliaux and similar anecdotes; being prompted by a desire both for diversity of incident and for opportunities of insinuating maxims not easily wrapt up in the apologue proper, either because they rise somewhat high in morals, or because they bear on complicated relations of modern society. Some such deviations from the path of the fable are apologized for in light and sparkling passages; as in the introductions to "Tyrcis et Amarante" and "Le Dépositaire." His personal feelings are often brought gracefully into play, and nowhere perhaps so beautifully as in the sentimental reflections which close "Les Deux Pigeons." His favourite manner of narration is broad, garrulous, and studded with particulars; and it thus escapes from the bareness which often chills us in Phaedrus. But this fulness is not always unattended by superfluity: "in many of his fables he beats round the subject, and misses often before he hits." This is a remark of Mr Hallam's; who observes, also, that the moral of the tale is kept more directly in view by La Fontaine than by Phaedrus. It must be said, however, that the abundance of features sometimes obscures the moral, or suggests, besides the moral which the poet chooses to draw, other inferences both more important and more obvious. The latter case is instanced in "Le Cochon, La Chèvre, et Le Mouton," and "L'Homme et La Couleuvre." Yet, even in such stories, there occurs often a silly good-humoured hint, which shows that the writer had his eyes open. Indeed there is hardly any piece of the collection, that fails to evince the loving zeal which the simple-hearted fabulist lavished on these his favourite works: the general equality of merit among them is very striking; and further, of those which are deformed by faults lying on the very surface, there is not perhaps one which, on narrower scrutiny, does not disclose some counterbalancing beauty of thought or of expression. Thus we have the rich Hermits-Rat ("Le Rat qui s'est retiré du Monde"), who, on an appeal from the starving community of his race, offers his prayers but refuses charity; an incident in the conception of which the idea of animal nature is quite lost sight of. But this very poem has been warmly admired; and the admiration is richly merited by the fine irony, for which the poet has carefully prepared himself in the opening of the story, and which he utters in its close with his most felicitous smile of gay and well-bred satire.