For a long time, the simplicity of the Physio logus stories impeded any serious attempt to understand its function. They evoke the fables of Aesop and other “sto-ries with a moral” that are often read to children. Such stories seem to have didactic but otherwise no real intellectual value and little historical significance or influence. The editor of the facsimile of the Physio logus in Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 318, for example, was sure of the text’s “kunstlose Naivität” and “Volksbuchcharakter.” But this kind of assessment is unjust to the Physio logus and especially to fables. None of the variety of forms taken by fables is found in the Physio logus. The Greeks had used fables as useful material for the practice of rhetoric: that is, as elements of speech or thought. Writers such as Babrius, Aelian, and Phaedrus, active between the third cen-tury Bce and the third century ce, who took up and helped transmit Aesop’s material, aimed to entertain and engage audiences as well as to educate them.8 Priscian, the 160–220), Hippolytus of Rome (ca. 170–235), and Origen (184/5–253/4).12 Since it contains a quote from the apocryphal Gospel of James, which dates to ca. 150, the Greek Physio logus can be no older.13 Some scholars have argued that the text’s date of composition was ca. 254 or ca. 370, based on the use of the Physio logus by other authors, but these dates are much too late in light of the other evidence. Alexandria was almost certainly the place where the text was compiled, to judge from the Coptic names of the month and Egyptian animals present in the Greek text, as well as a pos-sible association with Pantaenus, the teacher of Clement of Alexandria.