Ninety-seven fables in Latin iambic verse (ed. Orelli), distributed in five books, are attributed to Phaedrus. The first writer who mentions Phaedrus is Avienus, unless one of Martial's epigrams (3.20) alludes to him, and there is no sufficient reason for doubting that the author of the fables is meant. The little that is known of Phaedrus is collected or inferred from the fables. he was originally a slave, and was brought from Thrace or Macedonia to Rome, where he learned the Latin language. As the title of his work is , we must conclude that he had belonged to Augustus, who manumitted him. Under Tiberius he appears to have undergone some persecution from Sejanus, but the allusion to Sejanus in the prologue to Eutychus (Lib. iii.) is very obscure, and has been variously understood. It may be inferred from this prologue that the third book of the fables was not published until after the death of Sejanus. A passage in the tenth fable of the third book shows that this fable was written after the death of Augustus.

The prologue to the first book states that the fables are Aesop's matter turned into iambic verse : -- Aesopus auctor quam materiam repperit,Hanc ego polivi versibus senariis.

This prologue also adds that the object was to amuse and to instruct. The prologue to the second book intimates a somewhat freer handling of the old fabulist's material. In the prologue to the third book he still refers to Aesop as his model :-- Librum exarabo tertium Aesopi stilo.

There is no prologue to the fourth book; and in the prologue to the fifth book he intimates that he had often used the name of Aesop only to recommend his verses. Accordingly, many of the fables of Phaedrus are not Aesopian, as the matter clearly shows, for they refer to historical events of a much later period (5.1, 8, 3.10). Many of the fables, however, are transfusions of the Aesopian fables, or those which pass as such, into Latin verse. The expression is generally clear and concise, and the language, with some few exceptions, as pure and correct as we should expect from a Roman writer of the Augustan age. But Phaedrus has not escaped censure, when he has deviated from his Greek model, and much of the censure is just. The best fables are those in which he has kept the closest to his original.

Another collection of thirty-two fables, attributed to Aesop, has been published from a MS. of the same N. Perotti, who was archbishop of Manfredonia in the middle part of the fifteenth century.