Whatever the truth of the legend may be, it is certain that there were in the Greek language early collections of fables called "Æsop." More than three hundred years before Christ, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle translated stories from "Æsop." Plutarch and Lucian, in the second century after Christ, remade them. In the thirteenth century Marie de France versified a hundred of them, using an old English source which we cannot now find. She called her collection Ysopet, or "Little Æsop." Finally in 1447, Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, put forth in prose a collection of about three hundred stories, which bears the name of "Æsop." [Hitopadesa and Panchatantra] The East never stopped to cavil about the source of fables. It has always loved the type. The Hindoos have two very ancient Sanscrit collections of fable-like discourses--the "Panchatantra" (Five Books), written in prose, and the "Hitopadesa" (Friendly Instruction), in verse. These differ from ordinary sets of fables in having the principle of connection throughout and in being, instead of mere brief tales, rather romantic and dramatic dialogues and expositions designed as text-books for the instruction of princes and those called to govern. Many selections, however, have been taken out, translated, modified, and used either as whole stories or as elements of larger ones. [Reynard the Fox and beastiaries] The very widely read and extensively translated eleventh century "Reynard the Fox" is a beast-epic, and not a fable in the technical sense of the term. As likewise the bestiaries are not fables. Those quaint medieval collections of false lore, modeled probably on some earlier Greek or Latin _physiologus_, were meant as doctrinal expository allegories rather than zoological treatises or than narratives which would fall within our present classification. Yet they are allied to this group in that they are symbolic and didactic and permit unnatural natural history. [Some more writers of fables]