In India the great ethical reformer, Sakyamuni, the Buddha, initiated (or adopted from the Brahmins) the habit of using the Beast-Tale for moral purposes, or, in other words, transformed it into the Fable proper. A collection of these seems to have existed previously and independently, in which the Fables were associated with the name of a mythical sage, Kasyâpa. These were appropriated by the early Buddhists by the simple expedient of making Kasyâpa the immediately preceding incarnation of the Buddha. A number of his _itihâsas_ or Tales were included in the sacred Buddhistic work containing the _Jātakas_ or previous-births of the Buddha, in some of which the Bodisat (or future Buddha) appears as one of the Dramatis Personæ of the Fables; the Crane, _e.g._, in our _Wolf and Crane_ being one of the incarnations of the Buddha. So, too, the Lamb of our _Wolf and Lamb_ was once Buddha; it was therefore easy for him—so the Buddhists thought—to remember and tell these Fables as incidents of his former careers. It is obvious that the whole idea of a Fable as an anecdote about a man masquerading in the form of a beast could most easily arise and gain currency where the theory of transmigration was vividly credited. The Fables of Kasyâpa, or rather the moral verses (_gathas_) which served as a _memoria technica_ to them, were probably carried over to Ceylon in 241 B.C. along with the Jātakas. About 300 years later (say 50 A.D.) some 100 of these were brought by a Cingalese embassy to Alexandria, where they were translated under the title of “Libyan Fables” (Λόγοι Λυβικοί), which had been earlier applied to similar stories that had percolated to Hellas from India; they were attributed to “Kybises.” This collection seems to have introduced the habit of summing up the teaching of a Fable in the Moral, corresponding to the _gatha_ of the Jātakas. About the end of the first century A.D. the Libyan Fables of “Kybises” became known to the Rabbinic school at Jabne, founded by R. Jochanan ben Saccai, and a number of the Fables translated into Aramaic which are still extant in the Talmud and Midrash. In the Roman world the two collections of Demetrius and “Kybises” were brought together by Nicostratus, a rhetor attached to the court of Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier part of the next century (c. 230 A.D.) this _corpus_ of the ancient fable, Æsopic and Libyan, amounting in all to some 300 members, was done into Greek verse with Latin accentuation (choliambics) by Valerius Babrius, tutor to the young son of Alexander Severus. Still later, towards the end of the fourth century, forty-two of these, mainly of the Libyan section, were translated into Latin verse by one Avian, with whom the ancient history of the Fable ends.