FREE BOOK Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop's Fables in Latin

Latin Learning Latin
1

Salvete! I wanted to let the fans of Latin here at TextKit know about a book which I pulled together this summer, and which is available for FREE DOWNLOAD in PDF format here: http://pdf.bestlatin.net

The book contains Aesop’s fables in Latin from a wide variety of sources, all of which are online at GoogleBooks or at other digital libraries online. The fables are all in prose, they are all short (120 words of Latin or less), and they are arranged by characters. The book is good for reading through continuously, or just for browsing. The PDF version is very readable on the iPhone and iPad (the two devices I was able to test; I opened the document in Safari and also with GoodReader - it looked very nice either way), and I’ve been told it looks good on the Android also.

There’s a website that goes with the book where you can find illustrated versions of the fables, some audio, easy-to-read fables, etc. You can find that website here:
http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/

Aesop’s fables have been very important in my own Latin learning and of course they have also been a part of the traditional Latin curriculum for many centuries. I hope the book might be useful to some folks here, and I would encourage you to spread the word. The more Latin students and teachers who download a copy of the book, the happier I will be!

2

How is one supposed to use this? There are no grammatical annotations, no vocabulary section, etc. etc.?

3

Hello Hample, you use it the way you use any book: it is for reading. If you have completed a basic Latin language textbook (such as Wheelock), you will not find the fables too difficult to read on your own. I have published an intermediate Aesop book with notes and vocabulary - it is available from Bolchazy-Carducci, or at amazon - http://tinyurl.com/dbmbg3 - but I created this book for people who are interested in reading more Latin fables on their own. You can find the vocabulary in any Latin dictionary (the online Lewis and Short here is great: http://athirdway.com/glossa/ for example), and if you have grammar questions, please ask them! I will be glad to respond to any questions you have. We can use this forum at TextKit for that purpose if you want. The notes in the book (there are about 100 pages of notes) are about the sources that I used; I did not include grammar notes. The reading really is not so hard and my hope is that people will enjoy reading the fables for the MEANING of the fables, not just as an exercise for grammar analysis or translation. The reason I like the fables is that they offer some kind of lesson or idea you can maybe find useful in real life. There are some notes here about the morals of the fables and how they can be something to engage with when you are reading:
http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/2010/08/overview-moral-of-story.html

Also, I am creating very simple versions of the fables here, limited to present-stem verbs, very few subordinated constructions, etc. - if the fables in the book are too hard, you might like these better:
http://latinviafables.blogspot.com/

:slight_smile:

Laura

4

Ms. Gibbs has a fine book available on Amazon called “Aesop’s Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom”. I own a copy, and it has plenty of grammar notes and vocab. It’s a bit advanced for me at the moment, but I hope to grow into it.

5

It was actually when I was preparing that other book (which is based on one particular 17th-century edition of Aesop) that I started collecting the fables in this Mille Fabulae book: once I saw all the amazing 16th and 17th and 18th century Latin fable books available online at GoogleBooks and other digital libraries, I wanted to create an anthology to make them easily accessible. I didn’t think a publisher would be interested in this kind of book, which is why I self-published it, and that also means I can give it away in the PDF form for free (a regular publisher would not be very happy about that…).

Sometimes those old Latin books can be hard to read because of the old-fashioned typography and spelling conventions; plus, the use of quotation marks for direct speech is a comparatively modern invention. Aesop’s fables have a lot of direct speech (that is what makes them easier to read than many other types of Latin texts), and by marking all the direct speech with quotation marks, I hope to have made the fables easier to read and enjoy.

6

Ummmm… it’s free. Are you familiar with the English proverb involving a gift horse and its mouth?

7

Ha ha, it is a Latin proverb too:

Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.
or
Cum dabitur sonipes gratis, non inspice dentes.

I collect Latin proverbs about animals. But alas: I have no llamas!

:slight_smile:

8

I am not, so please explain what it means. I might have heard it before, but I’ve had a migraine attack today, so my head is not what it usually is.

9

I suppose it’s more of a saying than a proverb. At any rate, it goes “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”. (A horse’s age can be determined by opening its mouth and looking at its teeth, if you know what you’re looking for.) Essentially, it means, if you are given a gift, don’t try to determine its value in front of the giver, or criticize it for not being valuable enough.

Maybe I should assume that you were trying to be humorous, and I failed to pick up on it. Or maybe your migraine put you in a bad mood? Hope you feel better soon. I’ve never had migraines, but I know someone who did, and they must be living hell.

10

Salve Laura!

Congratulations (and thanks) for the Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop’s Fables in Latin. I think that it is a wonderful collection of bite-sized Latin passages for beginners (actually they would be ideal for a Latin-fable-of-the-day e-mail newsletter). It must have been quite a job tracking down all the sources, selecting appropriate versions, convert quite a few of these from verse to prose, abbreviate others. The links on the web site to the original texts are useful as well. Cool! Gratias tibi ago.

Only one minor criticism. Wouldn’t it add to the clearness of arrangement if the table of contents were put at the beginning of the PDF? Of course, the end of a book is always the next place to look for it. But should one really have to look? Converting the entries in the ToC to internal hyperlinks might be nice as well.

As for grammatical annotations, I do not think that these are really necessary for texts of this difficulty level. Anyway, I find it somewhat strange to criticize this “lack” when nobody complains about lack of annotations in Orberg’s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (and no, the sidebars contained for example in his Familia Romana of that series can hardly be called proper annotation).

And as for vocabulary, I bet that anyone reading a Latin text has a dictionary at hand (who doesn’t is either very “bold” or sufficiently proficient to do without).

Anyway, thanks a lot for your effort!!!

Vale,

Carolus Raeticus

11

I’m enjoying these fables a lot. Thank you for putting this together, Laura!

12

Thanks for your comments, Carolus! I debated about what to do with the Table of Contents, but since I knew I wanted to put the other commentary in the back, I figured I would just put everything in the back to lure people there where they would find the other notes, in addition to the Table of Contents. Plus, working with all those old European books over the past couple of years got me in the habit of looking for the table of contents in the back, since that is often where it was found - even though for American readers, that really will be a bit of a surprise I guess, since American books rarely have TOC in the back.

As for the lack of hyperlinks in the PDF, that’s just my own lack of time: I barely finished the book before school started, and didn’t have time to do anything with the PDF except to duplicate the book. Over the winter holidays, I’ll be doing a new PDF using some better PDF features (bookmarks, hyperlinks - I need to learn more about that, since I had never distributed something in PDF format before!) and also to fix the typos I discover in the next months. I’m keeping an errata list at the website here:
http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/2010/08/errata.html

And yes, the original texts online are amazing: you can find dozens and dozens of different versions of popular fables like Formica et Cicada or Ranae et Rex Earum because they are included in pretty much every single Aesop collection. So, there is lots to explore in those sources - literally thousands and thousands of Latin fables (I transcribed about 5000 fables to create the book). That is really my goal here: to get people excited about Aesop, and to open some doors. An author like Abstemius, for example, used to be incredibly famous, well-known by Latinists all over Europe, but now he is forgotten. If I can get people interested in reading him directly (and you can find him online), I will be so happy! The same goes for the poetry: I decided to put the poetry in prose form to make it easier to read, but the poetry itself is delightful. There is iambic verse (like the amazing Desbillons), and also wonderful elegiac verse (like Alexander Nequam, for example) - and it’s all available online if you know where to look. I’ve got links to the original texts online for each fable, plus links for the Bibliography too, which is easier if you are curious about a specific author rather than a specific fable:
http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/search/label/FableLinks

As for “fable of the day,” I have something sort of like that at Bestiaria Latina, which is my blog - proverbs, fables, that kind of stuff; during the school year, I don’t publish every day but more like every other day. Anyway, here it is:
http://bestlatin.blogspot.com/

Thanks again for your comments. This was a new experiment for me - I’ve published with traditional publishers, but this combination of self-publishing at Lulu.com and giving away the PDF is much more satisfying than any book I’ve done previously. For non-mainstream Latin, there is not any serious money to be made, but I really have enjoyed creating this new anthology of Aesop, very different from anything else out there, and putting it into as many hands as possible with this PDF. I am curious to know which fables people will connect with. Any comments are welcome here, or you can leave comments at the blog.

With all the amazing old Latin books available at GoogleBooks and other online digital libraries waiting to be re-discovered and re-used, I hope to do more projects like this in the future! :slight_smile:

13

Laura, I have just added something to both our happinesses. Gratias tibi ago, bene collatus et scriptum.

14

Hampie, a friend of mine just suggested a really nice solution for getting vocabulary help with the fables - I’ve put text files for all the fables online, and that means they can be cut and pasted into Lee Butterman’s very nice interactive vocabulary tool at NoDictionaries.com. Such automated vocabulary is not always perfect, but it can definitely be a big help. Here’s information about how to do that:
http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/2010/08/mille-fabulae-et-una-plus.html

Unlike a regular printed book, this digital book is available in text format - PDF of the whole book, and text files of the individual fables. I had not really imagined that the text files would be useful to others (I had put them online for my own reference), but now I see that it can be a big help for cutting-and-pasting into NoDictionaries. Kudos to Lee Butterman for making that great tool available for free online!

15

What an outstanding collection you have put together. Thank you for your hard work and for coming here to tell us about this. I’m definitely putting this on my Kindle and tackling fables whenever I have a touch of time and want a “bite-sized” bit of Latin.

16

What a lovely, neat working-collection you’ve made, Laura! I would have loved to see references to an historical source for each story but we all have our individual preferences,—or are all fables common to all “complete” editions? Nice job.

Quàm et bellam et mundam et utilem collectionem, Laura, à te factam! Equidem fontes cuiusque fabulae pristinas videri praetulerim at genii inter homines variant. Omnesne fabulae in quibusque editionibus plenis? Macte.

17

Thanks, Adrianus! I’ve provided detailed bibliographical information for each fable as to the Latin source I used (and all the sources are online, so they are easy for anyone to explore - and fascinating in their own right, esp. the Renaissance collectors like Steinhowel and Camerarius), but you’re right about the lack of historical references. Here’s the dilemma: for folklore materials such as Aesop, it’s not really feasible. Basically none of the sources for Aesop’s fables are forthcoming about what their own sources were: did they read the stories in an earlier book? did they hear the stories from another person? did they make up the story on their own? Such questions are not answered for our earliest Latin sources such as Phaedrus, and the same questions pertain even to the 19th-century anthologies of fables. Plus even when we feel confident that we know the answer about the source a given author used, the authors of the fables feel quite unconstrained about changing that source, improvising, even making radical changes: genii inter homines variant would be a great motto for the makers of fables in fact! For example, in the famous fable of the fox without a tail who wants the other foxes to cut off their tails, in some versions, the foolish foxes fall for this trick and cut off their own tails, and in other cases they see through the trick and rebuke the tail-less fox for trying to trick them. Do we call those two different fables? The same fable? (Sadly, I had room for just one version in the book, but both versions exist in Latin.) Just classifying the fables is an impossible task, much less assigning them historical dates. Of course, just because it is impossible doesn’t mean it is not fun, and I really hope that this collection which acknowledges the breadth of the Aesopic tradition (only about half the fables in this book are cataloged by Perry in his Aesopica) will inspire some students to take up the study of Aesop. I’ve been at it for over 20 years and still find it completely fascinating. :slight_smile: