Aesop's Fables

• 1. Introduction

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  Aesop's Fables have been told for more than two and a half millennia, yet many of the stories in that famous collection were never actually his. Aesop himself was a slave who lived in ancient Greece somewhere between 620 and 564 BCE. He left no written words. The fables now attached to his name were not collected until roughly three centuries after his death, by which time a sprawling body of stories, jokes, and proverbs from entirely different traditions had accumulated under his reputation. What makes a story "Aesop's"? Who was adding to that collection, and when did they stop? The answers point to one of the most restless, shape-shifting bodies of literature ever assembled.

• 2. Who Was Aesop?

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  The Greek historian Herodotus referred to "Aesop the fable writer" in passing, describing him as a slave who lived during the 5th century BCE. That casual mention is one of the oldest written records of his existence. Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, showed the character Philocleon learning the "absurdities" of Aesop from dinner-party conversations. Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates spent his final days in prison turning some fables "which he knew" into verse.

  The philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, writing in the 1st century CE, described Aesop's method with precision: "like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story, he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it."

  Yet the modern scholarly view holds that Aesop did not originate all the fables attributed to him. Two problems are particularly stubborn: the morals within his attributed fables frequently contradict one another, and the ancient accounts of his biography contradict one another just as badly. Scholars now treat "Aesop" less as a specific author and more as a magnetic name that drew anonymous fables toward it whenever no other source could be identified.

• 3. Fable as a Form

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  Classical theorists insisted that proper fables had to be short, unaffected, fictitious, useful to life, and true to nature. Talking animals and plants were standard inhabitants, though some fables placed humans in scenes with no animals at all. A typical fable opened with a brief scene-setting passage, moved through the story, and underlined the moral at the close.

  Some titles eventually passed into everyday language. The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs and The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse are now phrases as much as stories. Fables such as The Young Man and the Swallow appear to have been invented specifically to illustrate proverbs that already existed. One ancient theorist pushed this logic all the way, defining fables as nothing more than extended proverbs.

  The genre also carried an aetiological function, explaining why things are as they are: why the ant is a mean, thieving creature, or how the tortoise came to have a shell. Other entries crossed into outright jokes; The Old Woman and the Doctor, for instance, was aimed squarely at greedy medical practitioners. The genre's flexibility meant it could absorb nearly anything, a quality that proved both its strength and the source of centuries of confusion about what actually belonged in the collection.

• 4. Origins Beyond Greece

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  Modern scholarship has found fables and proverbs of Aesopic form in ancient Sumer and Akkad dating as far back as the third millennium BCE, long before any Greek writer set a word down. The Buddhist Jataka tales and the Hindu Panchatantra share roughly a dozen stories with the Aesopic corpus, though the details often diverge considerably. Scholars continue to debate whether Greeks learned these tales from Indian storytellers, the reverse, or whether the influences traveled in both directions.

  Loeb editor Ben E. Perry, writing in Babrius and Phaedrus in 1965, took the hardest line available: in his reading, not a single fable in the entire Greek tradition derived from an Indian source, while many Greek and Near Eastern fables appeared later in Indian collections. Few scholars today would accept so absolute a position given the conflicting and still-emerging evidence.

  The entry of Oriental material into the Aesopic canon can also be traced through Jewish sources. A comparative list on the Jewish Encyclopedia website shows twelve fables that resemble stories common to both Greek and Indian sources, six parallel only to Indian sources, and six parallel only to Greek sources. When the rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah told the fable of The Wolf and the Crane to a Jewish audience to dissuade them from rebelling against Rome, the version he used was closer to an Indian variant in which the story features a lion and a different bird.

• 5. How the Collection Traveled

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  The earliest known attempt to compile the fables into a single body came from Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian orator and statesman of the 4th century BCE, who gathered them into ten books for the use of public speakers. He simply catalogued what earlier Greek writers had already used as illustrative examples, placing them in prose. The work was cited frequently for the next twelve centuries and was considered the official Aesop. No copy now survives.

  What did survive came largely through Babrius, thought to have lived in the 1st century CE, whose incomplete manuscript preserves around 160 fables in choliambic verse. In Latin, the freedman Phaedrus, a contemporary of Augustus, produced the first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin iambic trimeters. The rhetorician Aphthonius of Antioch converted some forty fables into Latin prose in 315, and Avianus put 42 into Latin elegiacs in the early 5th century.

  The most influential single prose text in the medieval tradition was a collection bearing the name of an otherwise unknown figure called Romulus. Containing 83 fables and dating from the 10th century, it seems to draw on an even earlier prose version possibly written during the Carolingian period. A verse adaptation of the first three books of Romulus, made around the 12th century and attributed to one Gualterus Anglicus, became one of the most widely used teaching texts in medieval Europe and remained popular well into the Renaissance.

  When printing arrived, collections of Aesop's fables were among the very first books produced in multiple languages. Heinrich Steinhöwel's Esopus, published around 1476, included both Latin texts and German translations alongside 205 woodcuts. Translations based on it appeared in Italian in 1479, French in 1480, and English in the Caxton edition of 1484. The first printed English edition of Aesop's Fables was published on the 26th of March 1484 by William Caxton.

• 6. Across Languages and Continents

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  Portuguese missionaries arriving in Japan at the end of the 16th century introduced the fables by translating the Latin into Japanese and printing it in Latin letters under the title Esopo no Fabulas in 1593. That translation was so thoroughly absorbed into Japanese culture that after Westerners were expelled from Japan, the figure of Aesop had been acculturated and presented as if he were Japanese. Colored woodblock editions of individual fables were later produced by Kawanabe Kyosai in the 19th century.

  In China, the first substantial collection came in 1625 when 38 fables were conveyed orally by the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault and written down by the Chinese academic Zhang Geng. A later Chinese translation, Yishi Yuyan in 1840, was initially very popular until readers recognized the fables as anti-authoritarian, and the book was banned for a time.

  Further east still, 47 fables were translated into Nahuatl in the late 16th century under the title In zazanilli in Esopo. Working in the Mexican environment, the native translator adapted the stories to incorporate Aztec concepts and rituals and made them rhetorically more complex than their Latin source. In South Africa, the writer Sibusiso Nyembezi translated a selection of the fables into Zulu in books prepared for school students in the 1960s, substituting in some fables animals more familiar in his region.

  Translations into the languages of South Asia began in the early 19th century. The Oriental Fabulist of 1803 included roman-script versions in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. Complete collections followed in Hindi by 1837, Kannada by 1840, Urdu by 1850, Tamil by 1853, and Sindhi by 1854.

• 7. Children, Sermons, and Satire

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  For most of their history the fables were addressed to adults, covering religious, social, and political themes. The philosopher John Locke was the first to formally advocate directing them at children, writing in Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693 that fables were "apt to delight and entertain a child" while still offering "useful reflection to a grown man."

  The idea had already been tried. Gabriele Faerno's Centum Fabulae of 1564 had been commissioned by Pope Pius IV specifically so that children could learn moral and linguistic purity from the same book. King Louis XIV of France, wanting to educate his six-year-old son, incorporated a series of hydraulic statues representing 38 chosen fables into the labyrinth at Versailles in the 1670s, following the advice of Charles Perrault.

  In Great Britain the Reverend Samuel Croxall published Fables of Aesop and Others in 1722, illustrated with engravings by Elisha Kirkall, and it was reprinted continuously into the second half of the 19th century. John Newbery's Fables in Verse first published in 1757 ran to ten editions. Richard Scrafton Sharpe, whose Old Friends in a New Dress appeared in 1807, argued that separating the moral from the story was a mistake: children would skip the "Application" section and miss the lesson entirely. His proposed fix was to weave the moral into the story itself.

  Religious communities found uses of their own. Odo of Cheriton collected fables for use in sermons around 1200, giving the stories a strong medieval and clerical character. Martin Luther drew on that tradition at the start of the Reformation in the work now known as the Coburg Fables. In the Jewish fox-fable tradition, Berechiah ha-Nakdan's 13th-century Hebrew collection Mishlei Shualim retold familiar animal tales with a layer of Biblical quotations, using them to teach Jewish ethics. The first printed edition appeared in Mantua in 1557.

• 8. Theater, Music, and Animation

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  La Fontaine's celebrated French verse adaptations of the late 17th century set off a wave of theatrical interest. Edmé Boursault wrote a five-act verse drama, Les Fables d'Esope, in 1690, depicting a physically ugly Aesop serving as adviser to the governor of Cyzicus under King Croesus and using fables to comment satirically on those seeking his favor. The play was so successful that a rival theater immediately produced a competing version, Arlaquin-Esope, the following year. Boursault's sequel, Esope à la cour, was held up by censors and not produced until after his death in 1701. In England, John Vanbrugh adapted the play as Aesop, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London in 1697, where it remained popular for two decades.

  In music, Charles Valentin Alkan composed Le festin d'Ésope in 1857, a set of piano variations each said to depict a different animal or scene from the fables. Vincent Persichetti set six for narrator and orchestra in his Fables in 1943, following Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf approach. The American William Russo took a more radical route in 1971 with a rock opera that incorporated nine fables, each introduced by the narrator before music and characters took over. In "The Crow and the Fox", the bird introduces himself in vernacular speech without any editorial framing.

  Cartoonist Paul Terry launched a series called Aesop's Film Fables in 1921, though by the time Van Beuren Studios took it over in 1928, the story lines had largely departed from any recognizable Aesopic source. Jay Ward created a television series of short cartoons, Aesop and Son, in the early 1960s, first aired as part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, in which actual fables were spoofed to end on a pun based on the original moral. Between 1989 and 1991, fifty Aesop-based fables were reinterpreted on French television as Les Fables géométriques, featuring characters built from animated geometric shapes and accompanied by Pierre Perret's slang verse renditions of La Fontaine.