Fables and Parables Fables and Parables Fables and Parables ("Bajki i przypowieści", 1779), by Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801), is a work in a long international tradition of fable-writing that reaches back to antiquity. They have been described as being, "[l]ike LaFontaine's [fables]... amongst the best ever written, while in colour they are distinctly original, because Polish." They are, according to Czesław Miłosz, "the most durable among Krasicki's poems." Emulating the fables of the ancient Greek Aesop, the Macedonian-Roman Phaedrus, the Polish Biernat of Lublin, and the Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine, and anticipating Russia's Ivan Krylov, the Pole Krasicki populates his fables with anthropomorphized
Aesop's Fables as in the case of The Hawk and the Nightingale (133-5). It also includes the earliest instance of The Lion, the Bear and the Fox (60) in a language other than Greek. Another voluminous collection of fables in Latin verse was Anthony Alsop's "Fabularum Aesopicarum Delectus" (Oxford 1698). The bulk of the 237 fables there are prefaced by the text in Greek, while there are also a handful in Hebrew and in Arabic; the final fables, only attested from Latin sources, are without other versions. For the most part the poems are confined to a lean telling of the fable