The Dhammapada is almost never read bare in Theravada practice. The verses come attached to the Dhammapada-atthakatha, the commentary traditionally ascribed to Buddhaghosa, the fifth-century scholar-monk who worked at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka. It supplies around 305 narratives explaining the occasion of each verse, who the Buddha was addressing, what they had done, how it ended. The story of Kisa Gotami, sent to beg mustard seed from a house untouched by death and finding none, comes from here rather than from the verse it accompanies.
The commentarial stories are best understood as a later interpretative layer, not as historical reporting; they are how the tradition taught the verses, and in Burmese and Sri Lankan monastic education they are learnt together. That relationship also explains the collection's role in practice: it is memorisation material for novices, and its verses are quoted in sermons the way proverbs are quoted in ordinary speech.
The European reception began with Viggo Fausboll, whose Latin translation with the Pali text appeared in 1855. Friedrich Max Muller published an English rendering in 1870 as the introduction to T. Rogers's translation of Buddhaghosa's parables, then revised it as volume ten of the Sacred Books of the East in 1881, paired with the Sutta Nipata. That volume put the Dhammapada in front of a general Victorian readership and set the pattern that has held since: it is the Buddhist text most likely to be issued as a standalone paperback, and it has been translated into English scores of times, from close scholarly versions to free renderings that owe more to the translator's idiom than to the Pali.