AESOPUS VIVIT! Laura Gibbs' recent book, Aesop's Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom is a truly inspiring labor of love. Most of us were introduced as little children to these stories, especially the animal tales, in colorful, illustrated editions with simple language, complete with a moral lesson attached. It is likely that most of us have not picked up a copy of Aesop's Fables to read for enjoyment in years, except perhaps to our own children or grandchildren. But like the stories themselves, there is much more to this book than initially meets the eye! When you buy a copy of Aesop's Fables in Latin, you get much more than the 80 tales contained within. Gibbs' book is an open door to a rich, unbroken tradition of literature that spans the centuries, from ancient times to the middle ages and the Renaissance and on into the modern world, as well as to the incredible collection of ancillary resources that Gibbs' has created online.

Aesop's Fables in Latin is beautifully organized. Be sure to read the author's introduction, which provides a guide to all the features included in the book as well as some of the best study tips and reading strategies for reading Latin that I have ever seen in a transitional reader. While Gibbs' provides a thorough grammatical overview to the fables, she encourages nascent readers to go beyond mere translation, suggesting innovative ways to experience the fables beyond simply rendering them into English. She furnishes ideas for oral and dramatic interpretations of the stories as well as suggestions for incorporating composition and creative writing. The fables themselves are presented in a graduated order of difficulty, accompanied by their own individual introductions, grammatical overview, facing vocabulary, and helpful notes. Although no morals are provided in the Latin text, relevant and pithy Latin proverbs (another passion of the author) are interspersed throughout the book, providing inspiration for students to draw their own conclusions, consider different perspectives, and, hopefully, write their own morals in Latin. Other helpful features include lists of dramatis personae, a vocabulary frequency list, and a full Latin-English glossary. Forty original black-and-white illustrations by the 17th century painter and engraver Francis Barlow are included, providing additional context to many of the stories. --Sharon Kazmierski, Latin Teach

Aesop's Fables in Latin is a wonderful new resource for second-year Latin courses and for independent learners who have completed an elementary program. Gibbs'...has taken a collection of Latin fables from the seventeenth century and repackaged it as a serious and smart intermediate reader. Aesop's Fables in Latin is made up of 80 of the original 110 Latin fables composed by the writer and translator Robert Codrington(1602-1665) for a trilingual fable book (Latin, French, and English) that became famous primarily because of its illustrations (of which Gibbs has included 40) by the English artist Francis Barlow (d.1704). All of the fables are presented with extensive notes and instructive commentary, and more than half of them are also adorned with one or more apposite proverbs in large shadowed textboxes. There is something refreshingly unfashionable about an intermediate reader that features the work of an author who is emphatically neither canonical nor ancient, and, moreover, one who is linked rather tenuously to an essentially anonymous ancient fable tradition. But Aesop's Fables in Latin is anything but a radical break with tradition....fables have held a prominent place in Latin(and Greek curricula for more than two millennia. As one reads through Gibbs' meticulous and thoughtful presentation of these fables it is easy to see why they have endured for so long in the classroom.

...Gibbs' has stripped all of the fables in Aesop's Fables in Latin of their original morals, reformatted them, and reorganized them according to the difficulty of the Latin. While the simplest fables are not easy to incorporate into a first-year course, anyone who has completed such a course ought to be able to handle even the most difficult ones. For example, the very first fable in the book uses indirect statement as well as subjunctives introduced by both cum and quod, while the last two fables have the gerund, deponent verbs, indirect questions introduced by uter and quomodo, and a causal subjunctive. The most distinctive feature of Aesop's Fables in Latin is the way in which Gibbs' has constructed a total of 80 discussions of Latin grammar and style adapted to the 80 fables, so that each fable is also devoted to a particular mini-lesson.

Each Latin fable is preceded by a brief Introduction and a Grammar Overview. The Introductions provide some background information, including references to one or two extant Greek, Roman, or English versions of the same fable. Gibbs' then discusses one item of Latin grammar or style before each fable in the Grammar Overviews, including topics such as unusual verb forms, points of syntax, 'little' words (postpositive particles, correlatives, and relative pronouns), word formation, and stylistic matters. The issues covered range from the very specific ('huc and illuc'; 'cum + subjunctive'; 'Frequentative Verbs') to the more general ('Adjectives and Adverbs,' on the ways in which Latin often uses an adjective where English would use an adverb; and 'Ambiguous Parts of Speech,')... Each fable nicely demonstrates the lesson of its Grammar Overview, but, because the fables were not originally composed for this purpose, many of the grammatical features best exemplified in one fable in fact surface in comparable ways throughout the other fables, and a few of the fables do not have particularly distinctive grammatical features best exemplified in one fable in fact surface in comparable ways throughout the other fables, and a few of the fables do not have particularly distinctive grammatical features. Thus, one may have encountered a certain phenomenon a few times by the time it receives its own Grammar Overview; this is not, however, a major problem because the goal of Aesop's Fables in Latin is to improve reading skills, not to introduce grammatical concepts. --Jeremy Lefkowitz, Swarthmore College

I purchased this when it was first available, and I love it! Thank you so much for making such a great text available to people. My students love it, too! It's great to read some of these fables and then apply them to current events.--Kristen Kanipe
Aesop's Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom, by Laura Gibbs (366 pages, February 2009), includes 80 Latin fables from the 1687 edition of British illustrator Francis Barlow's Aesop's Fables. Designed for beginning students of Latin, the text is a fun lesson supplement that includes an introduction to each fable, a grammar overview, vocabulary, and grammar notes, Gibbs' scatters relevant Latin proverbs throughout the book, along with forty 17th-century etchings by Francis Barlow. --George M. Eberhart, Senior Editor, American Libraries