Aesop Tells His Fables

Aesop's fables are short tales, usually featuring animals that speak and behave like people, each ending with a lesson about human conduct. Stories such as "The Tortoise and the Hare" and "The Fox and the Grapes" are among the most widely retold in the world, and they gave English phrases like "sour grapes" to everyday speech. The date of around 700 BCE is only a rough marker, and the storyteller behind them remains a shadowy figure.

Almost everything about Aesop comes from later writers, and historians disagree about how much of it is true. Ancient Greek authors, including Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century BCE, describe him as a slave on the Greek island of Samos who lived in the sixth century BCE and was eventually freed. Later traditions place his origins in Thrace, Phrygia, or elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, and a late biography adds colorful details that are almost certainly legendary. Some scholars even doubt that he existed as a single person. The traditional dates, therefore, are best treated as approximate.

The tradition of animal tales was older than any one Greek storyteller. Fables with talking beasts and pointed morals appear in Mesopotamian literature, including Sumerian and Akkadian collections, and in other ancient Near Eastern traditions. Greek audiences were probably drawing on this wider world of storytelling, and Aesop's name seems to have become attached to the genre as a whole, much as later jokes get credited to a famous wit.

The fables were told aloud, not written down at first. Speakers used them in conversation, in speeches, and at gatherings to make a point indirectly, which was especially useful for people with little power who wished to criticize the powerful without direct risk. Because the stories were so adaptable, they spread easily across languages and cultures. Greek writers such as Demetrius of Phalerum are said to have compiled collections, though those early books have not survived.

The fables lasted because they were portable and endlessly reusable. The Roman writer Phaedrus turned them into Latin verse, and Babrius did the same in Greek. Medieval teachers used them to train children in reading and morals, and printers produced many editions after the invention of the printing press. In the seventeenth century, Jean de La Fontaine reworked them in French verse, and translators carried them around the globe. Today's collections draw on hundreds of stories, many of which were added long after any real Aesop could have lived. What they share is a clear, memorable structure: a brief situation, a surprising turn, and a moral that people recognize at once.