Among the many books destined for children, the one preferred in America during the colonial period was the Fables attributed to the Phrygian slave, Aesop. Translated into Spanish, it was found in the hands of travelers and colonists throughout the Spanish empire. The simplicity of the tales and the morals which they point out made them the delight not only of children but also of adults, who explained the precepts with purposeful wit.
Aesop was one of the authors most read in the New World, according to what we can deduce by consulting the numerous lists of books which were sent to various parts of the American continent. His fables were also circulated in Latin and Greek, surely for pedagogical purposes. In Spain there was no lack of poets who devoted part of their work to fables, such as the Archpriest of Hita with his Enxiemplos, up to the culmination in the eighteenth century with Félix María Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, whose works it is logical to suppose were brought to the New World with many others of various kinds. By that time the shores of America were being swept by other ideas, distinct from those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought unrest to the minds of the people, ideas foreign to the calm and well-being of the two previous centuries.