A very prolific department of literature, and one which has served as a rich source of inspiration, imitation, and allusion in all subsequent times, was that of the fable. In this domain the name of “Aesop” is supreme. Whether there was ever an historical person bearing precisely this name has been questioned. The tradition which places him in Rhodes as a slave in the middle of the sixth century B.C. cannot be implicitly trusted; but it is difficult to understand how the special name of “Aesopus” can have come to attach itself to a series of beast-stories, unless some individual who bore it, or of whom it was a sobriquet, had been distinguished for his invention, or at least for his promulgation, of such satirical narratives. It is indeed almost certain that a large number of “fables of Aesop” originally came from India and the East; yet it is in Greece that Europe first makes acquaintance with those fables which are still the best known, and which most constantly appear in the existing collections or selections. All educated or even sophisticated Greeks were supposed to know “Aesop.” At a later time (in the third century A.D.) the Graeco-Roman Babrius versified such fables as were known to him, and he again was copied into Latin verse by Avianus. The Indian fables of Pilpay were not circulated in Europe till five centuries later than Babrius, nor did they ever gain such wide currency. It was primarily along the Greek channel that there was derived, if not all the matter, at least the inspiration, for the fables in French by La Fontaine, and the English fables by Gay, together with all the collections which have been printed, or which were current before the days of printing, and which have become part of the _répertoire_ of childhood and a fund of reference for proverbs and for all classes of writers. * * * * * Of other kinds of writing which appear already in ancient Greece may be briefly mentioned: (1) Character-sketches, first produced by Theophrastus (about 320 B.C.), and imitated by La Bruyère (_Characters_) in France, and in England in such works as Hall’s _Characterismes of Virtues and Vices_, Overbury’s _Characters or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons_, and best in Earle’s _Microcosmography_.