Telling Tales on Caesar

This book contains a dozen entertaining stories in Latin verse (with new translations and commentaries by John Henderson) written by a member of the palace staff of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. The stories included range from pointed contemporary anecdote, amusing cameos of the emperors, to legendary parables thus appealing to students, scholars, and the interested general reader.

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This book contains a dozen entertaining stories written in colloquial Latin verse newly translated and commented on by John Henderson. The author, Phaedrus, was a freeman of Augustus who put Aesop's Fables into five books of verse during the reign of Tiberius. He included a number of stories and anecdotes on everyday life situations as well as assorted satirical bits. Rarely read today, they take the reader to the heart of ancient Rome into everyday corners of classical life and culture, high and low, in the focal period of the first emperors, Augustus and Tiberius. Phaedrus was a member of the imperial staff and his themes include the emperor in private and in court; theatricity in public life; declamation as a site for mythologizing Rome; masculinity in ancient gender coding; patronage for poets under the Caesars; prejudice, wit, cynicism, and tyranny. The stories, combined with an introduction to the Fabulae of Aesop, show the ways Romans thought of, and protested at, Caesars.