Note 34 — Chapter VIII · THE ÆSOPIAN FABLES.
Reading edition
'Being exhorted by a dream, I composed some verses in honour of the god to whom the present festival [of the sacred embassy to Delos] belongs; but after the god, considering it necessary that he who designs to be a poet should make fables and not discourses, and knowing that I myself was not a mythologist, on these accounts I versified the fables of Æsop, which were at hand, and were known to me.'—Socrates in Plato's 'Phædo.'