Listed 4 sub titles with search on: Biographies for wider area of: "PIERIA Prefecture GREECE" .
PIERIA (Ancient area) MAKEDONIA CENTRAL
A Roman writer of poetical fables. By birth a Macedonian of
the district of Pieria, he came early to Rome as a slave, and acquired a knowledge
of Roman literature while still a boy. If the traditional title of his five books
of fables after Aesop is to be trusted (Phaedri, Augusti liberti, fabulae Aesopiae),
he was set free by Augustus. To Phaedrus belongs the credit of introducing fable-writing
into Latin poetical literature--a fact of which he was fully conscious, but which
secured him neither relief from his miserable position, nor recognition on the
part of the educated public; his patrons seem to have been only freedmen like
himself. In fact, he even drew upon himself, by his two first published books,
the illwill and persecution of the all-powerful favourite of Tiberius, Seianus,
who suspected in them malicious reference to contemporary events. In consequence,
he did not publish the remaining books till after the fall of Seianus in A.D.
31 and the death of Tiberius in 37.
The five books are preserved, though not in a complete form.
Whether the further collection of thirty-two fables, transcribed from a MS. in
the fifteenth century by Archbishop Nicolo Perotti (Fabulae Perottianae)--and
published at Naples in 1809--are a genuine work of Phaedrus, is doubtful. The
matter of the fables is only to a small extent borrowed from Aesop. Some include
stories from history, partly referring to the present or immediate past. In relation
to the Greek originals, the material is not always skilfully used, especially
in the "morals." The drawing of the characters is at first very cramped,
but is afterwards more broadly treated; the language fluent and, in general, correct;
the metre, too (iambic senarius), used with strictness, though wanting the purity
which, in this kind of verse, became general from the time of Catullus. About
the tenth century an author, calling himself Romulus, drew up a prose version
of Phaedrus, which served as a model for the mediaeval collections of fables.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Oct 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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