Who does not know the fable of the wolf who invents reasons to devour the lamb and, after it has been able to reject all accusations, eats it anyway? The oldest versions come from antiquity. Fables can be found embedded in a wide variety of texts since the beginning of European literature. Aesop was considered the inventor of the genre already in antiquity. However, collections exclusively of fables emerged only later under the name of Aesop, and in prose. They probably served as a source of material for orators, who could use them to illustrate their arguments. Collections of fable poems in artfully composed books date from later times. Among these are Phaedrus (1st century AD), who wrote Latin fables in iambic senares, Babrius (2nd century AD), who wrote Greek fables in choliambs, and Avianus (c. 400 AD), who wrote Latin fables in elegiac distichs. Their works are the focus of the project. In research, these texts have been neglected for a long time or studied one-sidedly under aspects of motif history or used as a source for social-historical questions. Our aim is to show that these texts must be read as idiosyncratic literary works of art, which not only vary and complement well-known fable motifs, but also show manifold references to a wide variety of literary genres and texts. They thus also inscribe themselves in the critical literary discourse of their own time, since they reflect not only on general questions of life, but also on literature and its function. They thus become fables about literature.

The project of the Graz research group is to present basic research on these authors for the first time, in the form of interpretative commentaries which, in addition to explanations of text, language, style, realia, etc., focus on an interpretative analysis of the texts. In a close reading, the intertextual references as well as the narratological peculiarities (situation, narrator, addressee, focalization, communication, plot, characters, space, time, emotion, etc.) are examined, whereby the instances of author and reader are also taken into account. Corresponding commentaries are already available on Phaedrus (B. 1; B. 2&3; U. Gärtner) and on Babrios (Babr. prol. 1; 1-17; prol. 2; L. Spielhofer). The volumes on Phaedrus B. 4&5 (U. Gärtner) and on Avianus (Chr. Poms) are now to be produced in the funding phase. These commentaries will be complemented by comparative studies on the narrative strategies of the three fable collections as well as a comprehensive bibliography.