Note 478 — Chapter V · PHAEDRUS AND FABLE: POETRY OF THE TIME

The process of abridgement, mutilation and transformation of Phaedrus took place between the time when Avianus must have read the fables in verse-form (i.e. with intervals marked between lines), and the ninth or tenth century, when the Pithoeanus has them without any mark to distinguish them from prose. Ellis (op. cit., pp. 9-10) argues that the abridgement “may have been executed in the 5th or 6th cent., and that the gradually declining knowledge of ancient language and metre, which the unsettled state of Europe produced, caused the iambics of Phaedrus to be written in prose. As prose they were probably read by the Carlovingian scholars.”