Aesop's Fables the fables arrived in and travelled from ancient Greece remains uncertain. Some cannot be dated any earlier than Babrius and Phaedrus, several centuries after Aesop, and yet others even later. The earliest mentioned collection was by Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian orator and statesman of the 4th century BCE, who compiled the fables into a set of ten books for the use of orators. A follower of Aristotle, he simply catalogued all the fables that earlier Greek writers had used in isolation as exempla, putting them into prose. At least it was evidence of what was attributed to Aesop by
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