Aesopi Carmina: Desbillons Book 1

One of the projects I've decided to work on is an anthology of Aesop's fables in Latin verse, including classical, medieval and modern Latin poetry. Among the modern poets, François-Joseph Terrasse Desbillons is without doubt the most important. There are Wikipedia articles in French and German about Desbillons, so perhaps as part of this project I will try to write an English article about him! In the meantime, you can rely on Google Translate to render those Wikipedia articles in English. :-)

I'm relying on the nice edition of his Latin fables available at the Internet Archive, Fabulae Aesopiae, published in 1778, containing all 15 books of his Aesop's fables. I'll do a series of blog posts book by book with indexes to each of the individual fables. In addition, I'll pick out a very short poem to feature in the blog post. My goal is to focus on very short Latin poetry (everybody knows I like tiny things!) which is obviously a big plus for beginning Latin readers.

So, you'll find a poem-by-poem index to Book 1 below (linking to the pages at the Internet Archive), and here's the poem I selected from that book, just three lines long. It is the classical fable of the crab and its child:

I.19 Cancer et eius Filius

Ut prorsus iret, filium retrogradum

Cancer monebat; at filius, "I prae! Sequar."

Cuiquam ne objicias, quod tibi objici potest.

Here is the poem written out in English prose order to help in reading:

Cancer monebat

retrogradum filium

ut iret prorsus; 

at filius [dixit], 

"I prae! 

Sequar."

Ne objicias cuiquam, 

quod potest objici tibi.

The meter is iambic. Sadly, most Latin textbooks have nothing to say about iambic meter, and even school editions of Phaedrus sometimes just ignore the meter entirely. I suspect that is because of the range of substitutions which make iambics harder to scan than the much more regular dactylic hexameter and the closely related elegiac couplet.

Still, it's not impossible to get a feel for iambics, and the best way to explain how to read iambic verse is to think about the verse as it unfolds foot by foot and the decision points you reach:

* Is the first syllable of a foot long? Then it can be followed by a long (L-L) or by a short, in which case, expect another short (L-S-S); end of foot!

* Is the first syllable of a foot short? Then it can be followed by a long (S-L) or by a short, in which case, expect two more syllables (S-S-S or S-S-L); end of foot! 

* You might also find a S-S-S-S foot, but it's so rare as to not worry about it.

Once you spend some time reading iambic lines, these five most common feet — L-L, L-S-S, S-L, S-S-L, S-S-S — will become just as familiar as the dactylic hexameter lines with their L-L and L-S-S feet, and you'll be able to "feel" the feet taking shape as the verse line unfolds, syllable by syllable.

In addition, the two-syllable feet greatly outnumber the three-syllable feet (for various reasons having to do with iambic verse composition which I won't go into here), and in order to help those three-syllable feet stand out, I have underlined them below. The tilde marks elisions, and the raised dot appears between feet:

Ut pror · sus i · ret, fi · lium · retro · gradum

cancer · mone · bat; at · filius: · I prae, · sequar.

Cuiquam · n~ objici · as, quod · tib~ ob · jici · potest.

If you have only worked on dactylic or elegiac Latin poetry, don't worry if iambs feel strange at first. And when you learn to read them, then you can better appreciate the poetry of Phaedrus, and of Plautus and Terence too! 

You can find illustrations for the fable here. Here's one by Arthur Rackham, and I used imgflip to make it a graphic:

More poems in Desbillons, Book I: 

1. belluae pestilentia laborantes (lines: 20+)

2. formica et cicada (lines: 17)

3. aquila, corvus, et pastor (lines: 14)

4. lacerta et testudo (lines: 4)

5. ericius et talpa (lines: 14)

6. leo, lupus, et vulpis (lines: 20+)

7. pueruli fratres (lines: 18)

8. rosa et papilio (lines: 17)

9. columba plumipes, et columba saxatilis (lines: 19)

10. capo (lines: 14)

11. simius et hinnuleus (lines: 20+)

12. gruis et pavo (lines: 16)

13. mala aurea (lines: 20+)

14. cucurbita, glans, et rusticus (lines: 20+)

15. lupus poenitens (lines: 20+)

16. vulpis et canis (lines: 5)

17. mures duo (lines: 20+)

18. aries et taurus (lines: 13)

19. cancer et eius filius (lines: 3)

20. agricola et Mercurius (lines: 20+)

21. aquila et mus (lines: 11)

22. cycnus et anser (lines: 20+)

23. equus et asinus (lines: 11)

24. lupus ovilla pelle indutus, et pastor (lines: 11)

25. rusticus et silva (lines: 6)

26. canis et lepores duo (lines: 4)

27. leo, simius, et vulpis (lines: 11)

28. aquila et sol (lines: 11)

29. Liber et Prelus (lines: 20+)