Sic saepe ingenia calamitate intercidunt. New approaches to Phaedrus. An essay in nine chapters and one preliminary remark

Resumen

The fables of Phaedrus have long been neglected or have received harsh criticism. If they have been focussed on at all, they were often regarded only as part of the history of motifs or were interpreted as statements of a freedman who uses the fable as a means of veiled accusation against the ruling class though not calling an uprising but preaching adaptation. In this paper, this biographical approach is questioned. The aim is to show that almost all of these «personal» statements are topoi shaped by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus and picked up in a great number by the poets of the late republic and Augustan age. Phaedrus seems to play a witty game by taking up these topoi, exaggerating them and applying them to an inappropriate genre the fable to turn them upside down.