The poems of Phaedrus began to be translated into English during the 18th century. He himself had been reticent about the story's application, simply stating "People who know me will be able to say what this fable is about". In Thomas Bewick's Fables of Aesop and Others (1818), the commentary takes this to mean that the effect of education shows in this production of his old age.[4] At the end of his own version, George Fyler Townsend gives it the moral, “the memory of a good deed lives”.[5]