Aesop's Fables Robert Temple's Penguin edition is titled "The Complete Fables by Aesop" (1998) but in fact many from Babrius, Phaedrus and other major ancient sources have been omitted. More recently, in 2002 a translation by Laura Gibbs titled "Aesop's Fables" was published by Oxford World's Classics. This book includes 359 and has selections from all the major Greek and Latin sources. Until the 18th century the fables were largely put to adult use by teachers, preachers, speech-makers and moralists. It was the philosopher John Locke who first seems to have advocated targeting children as a special audience in "Some Thoughts Concerning
There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip his comment on the Latin phrase "inter os atque offam" (between the mouth and the morsel) used by Marcus Cato. The Greek verse is attributed to Palladas in "The Greek Anthology" (X, 32), but that is manifestly erroneous, since Palladas lived two centuries "after" Aulus Gellius. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Anthology says that the verse is "a very ancient proverb, by some attributed to Homer". There is a reference to the many things that can intervene between cup and lip already in an iambic verse by Lycophron (3rd century B.C.) quoted by Erasmus. According to a story