SOURCE: Joseph Jacobs, in The Fables of Aesop: Edited, Told Anew and Their History, by Joseph Jacobs, University Microfilms, Inc. 1964, 222 p.

In the following excerpt, reprinted in 1964, Jacobs discusses how the text of Aesop's fables has been preserved and changed as it passed through successive translators and publishers from antiquity to his day.

It is difficult to say what are and what are not the Fables of Aesop. Almost all the fables that have appeared in the Western world have been sheltered at one time or another under the shadow of that name. I could at any rate enumerate at least seven hundred which have appeared in English in various books entitled Aesop's Fables. L'Estrange's collection alone contains over five hundred….

Aesop himself is so shadowy a figure that we might almost be forgiven if we held, with regard to him, the heresy of Mistress Elizabeth Prig. What...