Phaedrus: Manumission and Fable in Latin

This graduate seminar in Latin literature will be a thorough study of the Latin
poet Phaedrus, an otherwise unknown freedman of the imperial household who wrote five
volumes of Aesopic fable in verse during the reigns of Tiberius and perhaps Claudius. We will
aim to read Phaedrus’s corpus in its entirety, with a focus on two major interpretive questions:
first, how Phaedrus’s fables relate to other fables from the Greek and Latin tradition, to the
tradition around fable (e.g. the Life of Aesop), and to the broader cultural context of fable that
includes parables in the Christian gospels; and second, how Phaedrus’s freedman status can be
productively brought to bear on the interpretation of his poetry, and how the historicity of that
status has been contested and challenged by modern scholars.