BABRIUS, author of a collection of fables written in Greek. He is supposed to have been a Roman, living in the East, probably in Syria, where the fables seem first to have gained popularity. The address to "a son of King Alexander" has caused much speculation. The Alexander referred to may have been Alexander Severus (A.D. 222-235). There is no mention of Babrius in ancient writers before the beginning of the 3rd century A.D., and his language and style seem to show that lie belonged to that period. The first critic who made Babrius more than a mere name was Richard Bentley, in his Dissertation on the Fables of Aesop. In an examination of these prose fables, which had been handed down from the time of Maximus Planudes, Bentley discovered traces of versification, and was able to extract a number of verses which he assigned to Babrius. Tyrwhitt (De Babrio, 1776) and other scholars followed up these researches. In 1842 M. Minas, a Greek, the discoverer of the Philosophoumena of Hippolytus, came upon a ms. of Babrius, now in the British Museum, in the convent of St. Laura on Mt. Athos. This ms. contained 123 fables, arranged alphabetically, but breaking off at the letter 0. The fables are written in choliambic, i.e., limping iambic verse, having a spondee as the last foot. The style is extremely good. Their genuineness was generally admitted by scholars. In 1857 Minas professed to have discovered at Mt. Athos another ms. containing 94 fables and a preface. but this was soon proved to be a forgery. Six more fables were brought to light by P. Knoll from a Vatican ms. (ed. by A. Eberhard, Analecta Babriana, 1879).