Aesop - The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics)

Aesops Fables what a ring it has to it! Of all the names of authors from Greek antiquity, Aesop is probably the best known, more so even than Homer. But it is ironical that Aesops reputation should be so high when so little is accurately known about him or his work and when no complete translation of his fables has ever existed in English. He is rather like a movie star everyone thinks they know him but in fact they only know him from certain roles he has played. The roles Aesop has played have been as a childrens storyteller and as a clothes-horse for Victorian morals such as haste makes waste and pride comes before a fall no such morals actually occur in Aesop at all. The animal stories which parents still buy in quantities for their childrens birthdays bear little resemblance to the real Aesop fables. I hesitate to say the real Aesop, because so little is known about the historical Aesop that some have maintained that he never actually existed.

It seems, however, that he did exist. Although the ancient Life of Aesop, which existed before the time of Plato, consists largely of fantasy episodes of an already legendary figure, serious scholars like Aristotle and his school made attempts to sort out the fact from fiction and came up with the conclusion that Aesop was not a Phrygian (from Asia Minor), as commonly believed in their day, but was actually a native of the town of Mesembria, in Thrace on the Greek mainland, and that he lived for some time on the Island of Samos. (This information survives in fragments of Aristotles lost Constitution of Samos.)

Aesop seems to have been a slave as a result of captivity. In Greek there were two different words for slaves, denoting whether a person had been born a slave (doulos) or had been captured in war and sold into slavery (andrapodon). Aesop was apparently in the latter category. But, despite this status, which rendered him liable to sale and deprived of all rights, Aesop appears to have lived the life largely of a personal clerk/secretary and even what we could call a confidential agent for his owners. He seems to have been a great wit, whose reputation for telling little animal tales in discussion and negotiation and scoring devastatingly clever points with them astonished and impressed his contemporaries. He thus became a legendary name around which all such witty animal tales clustered in later centuries, most of the surviving ones probably not actually written by him.

Aesop lived in the early sixth century BC, and one suggestion of his date of death is 564 BC, which may well be correct. One of the most famous courtesans of Greek antiquity was a woman named Doricha, better known by her nickname of Rhodopis, a Thracian who seems to have been seized in war at the same time as Aesop, since they became fellow-slaves. She (and possibly Aesop as well) was taken to Egypt, where she achieved fame all over the Mediterranean world for her irresistible beauty and charm. Charaxus of Mytilene in Lesbos, brother of the poetess Sappho, became infatuated with Rhodopis and bought her freedom at an enormous price. Charaxus was, at the time, engaged in a trading trip to Egypt, selling Lesbian wine. Sappho was furious with her brother because of this wild financial extravagance, and she wrote a poem ridiculing him. These historical facts help to anchor the dates of Aesop in some kind of chronological reality. The legends of Aesops association with King Croesus, on the other hand, appear to be pure fiction, as does a false story that Aesop went to Delphi and was thrown from a cliff while he was telling the fable of The Eagle and the Scarab Beetle, in this volume. (So widespread was the popular belief in this last episode that it is referred to by Aristophanes in The Wasps (1446) so briefly in passing that he clearly knows that his audience will be familiar with all the details of the story; that was in 422 BC.)

Since the best of the Aesop fables are full of wit and jest, it is not surprising that they were great favourites of the comic playwright Aristophanes. He refers to Aesop and some of his fables many times in his surviving plays. Some references are intriguing in the clues they give us as to the state of the Aesopic material in his time. In The Birds (470), written in 414 BC, one of his characters complains to another that he has not heard of the ancient lineage of the birds because youve a blind uninquisitive mind, unaccustomed to poring over Aesop. Thus we are led to presume that early collections of Aesop fables existed in book form. And two references in