SOURCE: "The Homing Instinct: A Folklore Theme in Phaedrus," in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Vol. 23, 1977, pp. 17-31.

In the following essay, Henderson examines the possible historical conduits by which Phaedrus's literary work might have been dispersed, and suggests that the parallelism of Phaedrus's narratives and modern "analogues " may be based in archetypal structures.

This paper examines a diffusionist view shared by several classical scholars and folklorists. The 'popular theme' cast into Latin senarii by the fabulist Phaedrus in the early 1st century A.D. which appears in modern editions has, it is as 'Appendix been Perottina' 16 Perry / 14 Poatgage¹ has, it is supposed, been transmitted to modern West Europe, where it is to be identified in a set of subliterary 'versions'. The counter-suggestion made here is that (1) this supposition is methodologically dubious and (2) that a close understanding of the nature and history of Phaedrus' collection of fabulae...