in Pieria, a mountainous area sacred to the Muses in northern Greece, then part of the Roman province of Macedonia (
Prof. 3.17-23). His strong desire for recognition and the talent about which he was boastfully confident are made clear at several places in his fables. He declares with pride, for example, in the prologue to the third book, that he "has made a road in place of [Aesop's] footpath, and has invented more topics than he [Aesop] left behind" (
Prol. 3.38-39). Clear, too, is that he seemed to have been a virtual outcast in Rome, but where he was educated and how he came to Italy is not known. It is possible, as F. Della Corte posits, that the consul L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi brought Phaedrus back from his assignment in Thrace in 11
B.C. to serve as a slave in the household of Augustus. There, as de Lorenzo conjectures, Phaedrus may have attended Lucius Caesar, Augustus's grandson, and studied with him in the school of Verrius Flaccus on the Palatine Hill.
According to Phaedrus himself, at some point before A.D. 31 he was prosecuted by Sejanus, the notorious commander of the praetorian guard under the emperor Tiberius, for something he wrote.
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