APOLOGUE, a short fable or allegorical story, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for some moral doctrine or to convey some useful lesson. One of the best known is that of Jotham in the Book of Judges (ix. 7-15) ; others are "The City Rat and Field Rat," by Horace, "The Belly and its Members," by the patrician Menenius Agrippa in the second book of Livy, and per haps most famous of all those of Aesop. The term is applied more particularly to a story in which the actors or speakers are taken from the brute creation or inanimate nature. But an apologue is distinguished from a fable in that there is always some moral sense present, which there need not be in a fable. It is generally dramatic, and has been defined as "a satire in action." Martin Luther thought so highly of apologues as counsellors of virtue that he edited and revised Aesop and wrote a characteristic pref ace to the volume. The origin of the apologue is extremely ancient and comes from the East. Veiled truth was often neces sary in the East, particularly with the slaves, who dared not re veal their minds too openly. It is noteworthy that the two fathers of apologue in the West were slaves, namely Aesop and Phaedrus. La Fontaine in France, Gay and Dodsley in England, Gellert, Lessing, and Hagedorn in Germany; Tomas de Iriarte in Spain, and Krilov in Russia are leading modern writers of apologues. Length is not an essential matter in the definition of an apologue. Those of La Fontaine are often very short, as for example, "Le Coq at la Perle." On the other hand, in the romances of Rey nard the Fox we have mediaeval apologues arranged in cycles and attaining epical dimensions.
A work by P. Soulle, La Fontaine et ses devanciers (i866), is a history of the apologue from the earliest times until its final triumph in France.