Aesop (c. 620 BCE - c. 564 BCE) was a storyteller of ancient Greece credited with the collection of brief moral tales known as Aesop's Fables. [1] Ancient authors describe him as a slave who won fame and freedom through his wit, but no writing survives in his own hand, and modern scholarship treats him as a semi-legendary figure to whom a much larger and older stock of fables was gradually attached. [2]
Life and tradition
Almost nothing about Aesop can be established with certainty. The earliest surviving reference comes from Herodotus, writing roughly a century after the traditional dates of Aesop's life, who describes him as a fable-writer and a slave in the household of a Samian master named Iadmon. [1] Later authorities, including Plutarch and Aristophanes, treat him as a real and well-known figure of the sixth century BCE.
Ancient sources disagree about his origins, variously placing his birth in Thrace, Phrygia, Samos and Mesembria. A widely repeated tradition holds that he died at Delphi, thrown from a cliff by the inhabitants after a quarrel, a story that later authors linked to a divine punishment visited on the city. [2]
A late antique prose romance, the Life of Aesop, added the enduring portrait of an ugly, mute slave granted speech by a goddess, who repeatedly outwits his masters and his social superiors. The work is fiction rather than biography, but it fixed the popular image of Aesop as the underdog whose only weapon is intelligence. [1]
The fables
The fables associated with Aesop are short prose narratives, usually featuring talking animals, that end in a practical or ethical lesson. Among the most familiar are the tortoise and the hare, the fox and the grapes, the ant and the grasshopper, the boy who cried wolf, and the lion and the mouse. [3]
Aesop wrote nothing down. The stories circulated orally and were first gathered into a written collection by Demetrius of Phalerum around 300 BCE, a compilation now lost. Surviving versions descend chiefly from the Latin verse of Phaedrus in the first century CE and the Greek verse of Babrius somewhat later, along with medieval Byzantine prose collections. [2]
Transmission and influence
The fables passed into medieval Europe through Latin schoolbooks and were among the earliest texts printed in the vernacular: William Caxton issued an English translation in 1484. Successive translators and adapters, from Jean de La Fontaine in seventeenth-century France to nineteenth-century children's illustrators, reshaped the material for their own audiences. [3]
Because the corpus grew by accretion, many tales conventionally called Aesop's are demonstrably older or younger than his traditional lifetime, with parallels in Near Eastern, Indian and Egyptian literature. Scholars therefore speak of the Aesopica, a tradition rather than an authored book. [2]
Legacy
Aesop's fables remain a staple of primary education and a permanent presence in everyday speech, supplying phrases such as sour grapes and crying wolf. [3] Their compact form — a single incident, a fixed cast of animal types, an explicit moral — established a literary genre that continues to be imitated, and made the name Aesop a shorthand for the moral tale itself. [1]
