Types of Women women to different animals in the poem is not an invention of Semonides, but seems to have been based on a pre-existing folk tale. Aesop's fables were attributed in ancient Greece to the sixth-century BCE slave of that name, but many of them are likely to be much older than that; one of these fables, that of Zeus and Prometheus, has a similar premise to Semonides' poem, and may have been known to him. Later poets tell similar stories, probably also inspired by these folktales. An elegiac fragment by Phocylides describes women as having originated from one of four different
La Fontaine's Fables 1666 with the Latin title "Specimen sapientiae Indorum veterum" ("A sample of ancient Indian wisdom"). With a genealogy going back to the Indian Panchatantra, they were then attributed to Bidpai (Pilpay), who is given more than his fair due by La Fontaine in the preface to his second collection of "Fables": "I must acknowledge that I owe the greatest part to Pilpay, the Indian sage." () His sources are in fact much more diverse and by no means mainly oriental; of 89 fables, no more than twenty are found in Bidpai's collection. Avienus and Horace are also drawn upon in