Aesop, as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel. Here he is shown wearing 15th century German clothing

Apollonius of Tyana, the 1st century AD philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:

...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. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.
And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Book V:14)

1867 translation by George Fyler Townsend.

Aesop

Aesop (from the Greek — Aisopos), famous for his fables, was a slave who lived mid-sixth century BC, in Ancient Greece. The place of Aesop's birth was and still is disputed: Thrace, Phrygia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Samos, Athens, Sardis and Amorium all claimed the honor. Little is known about him from credible records, except that he was at one point freed from slavery and that he eventually died in Delphi. In fact, the obscurity shrouding his life has led some scholars to deny his existence altogether.

Origins

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the fables were invented by a slave named Aesop, who lived in Ancient Greece during the 6th century BC. While some suggested that Aesop did not actually exist, and that the fables attributed to him are folktales of unknown origins, Aesop was indeed mentioned in several other Ancient Greek works – Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses; and Demetrius of Phalerum compiled the fables into a set of ten books (Lopson Aisopeion sunagogai) for the use of orators, which had been lost. There was also an edition in elegiac verse by an anonymous author, which was often cited in the Suda.

Translation and transmission

The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin was done by Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus in this 1st century AD, although at least one fable had already been translated by the poet Ennius. Avianus also translated forty two of the fables into Latin elegiacs, probably in the 4th century AD.

The collection under the name of Aesop's Fables evolved from the late Greek version of Babrius, who turned them into choliambic verses, at an uncertain time between 3rd century BC and 3rd century AD. In about 100 BC, Indian philosopher Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, from where Andreopulos translated back to Greek, since original Greek scripts had all been lost. Aesop's fables and the Panchatantra share about a dozen tales, leading to discussions whether the Greeks learned these fables from Indian storytellers or the other way, or if the influences were mutual. Ben E. Perry, one of the foremost authorities on Aesopic fable, argued for the second possibility in his book Babrius and Phaedrus. In his introduction he wrote:

In the 9th century, Ignatius Diaconus created a version of fifty-five fables in choliambic tetrameters, into which stories from Oriental sources were added, ultimately mutated from the Sanskrit Panchatantra. From these collections the 14th-century monk Maximus Planudes compiled the collection which has come down under the name of Aesop.^[1]

Picture from Caxton's edition

On March 26 1484, William Caxton, the first printer of books in English, printed a version of Aesop's Fables.http://www.bartleby.com/39/7.html. An example of the fables in Caxton's collection follows:

Caxton's version was brought up to date by Sir Roger L'Estrange in 1692. However, the most reproduced modern English translations were made by Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814 – 1900). Ben E. Perry, the editor of Aesopic fables of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library, compiled a numbered index by type. The edition by Olivia Temple and Robert Temple is entitled The Complete Fables by Aesop; the fables are not complete here since fables from Babrius, Phaedrus and other major ancient sources have been omitted. More recently, in 2002 a translation by Laura Gibbs was published by Oxford World's Classics, entitled Aesop's Fables. This book includes 359 fables and has selections from all the major Greek and Latin sources.

Aesop's Fables in other languages

• The French fables of Jean de la Fontaine were inspired by the brevity and simplicity of Aesop's Fables.^[2]
• Around 1800, the fables were adapted and translated into Russian by the Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov.
• The first translation of Aesop's Fables into Chinese was made in 1625. It included thirty-one fables conveyed orally by a Belgian Jesuit missionary to China named Nicolas Trigault and written down by a Chinese academic named Zhang Geng (??). There have been various modern-day translations by Zhou Zuoren and others.
• Portuguese missionaries arriving in Japan at the end of the 16th century introduced Japan to this story. A Latin edition was translated into romanized Japanese. The title was Esopo no Fabvlas and dates to 1593. This was soon followed by a fuller translation into a three-volume kanaz?shi entitled sometime between 1596 and 1624.

Adaptations

• The Scottish poet Robert Henryson made a sophisticated interconnected sequence of northern renaissance fable adaptations in which Aesop himself appears in unusual guise, entitled The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (c.1480s).
• Jean de la Fontaine, the French poet, took his inspiration from the Aesop's Fables to write his Fables Choisies (1668).
• American cartoonist, Paul Terry began his own series of cartoons called Aesop's Film Fables in 1921. In 1928, the Van Beuren Studio took hold of the series. It ended in 1933.
• Brazilian dramatist Guilherme Figueiredo wrote a play The Fox and the Grapes (A raposa e as uvas) (1953) about Aesop's life. It was staged many times in the world's best theaters.
• American animator Jay Ward created a seies of short cartoons called Aesop & Son, which first aired as part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in the early 1960s.
• The Smothers Brothers, an American musical-comedy team, released a comedy album titled Aesop's Fables The Smothers Brothers Way in 1965. Seven of Aesop's more famous fables and morals are related in the album.
• Bill Cosby portrayed the story-teller in a 1971 children's program titled Aesop's Fables.
• The famed American artist Jacob Lawrence (b.1917) illustrated 'Aesop's Fables' for the Univ of Washington Press in 1997.

List of some fables by Aesop

Detail of the Fontana Maggiore (Main Fountain) in Perugia, sculpted after 1275 by Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano, showing tales The Crane and the Wolf and The Wolf and the Lamb.

Russian sculpture of the crow in "The Fox and the Crow" fable

• Lion's Share
• The Ant and the Grasshopper
• The Bear and the Travelers
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf
• The Boy Who Was Vain
• The Cat and the Mice
• The Crow and the Pitcher
• The Deer without a Heart
• The Dog and the Bone
• The Dog and the Wolf
• The Dog in the Manger
• The Farmer and the Stork
• The Farmer and the Viper
• The Frog and the Ox
• The Frogs Who Desired a King
• The Fox and the Crow
• The Fox and the Goat
• The Fox and the Grapes
• The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs
• The Lion and the Mouse
• The Mice in Council
• The Mischievous Dog
• The North Wind and the Sun
• The Tortoise and the Hare
• The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
• The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

• A famous fable commonly mis-attributed to Aesop is The Scorpion and the Frog.
• It is alleged the story "The Fox and the Cat" is an Aesop Fable.

See also

• Ancient Greek literature
• Panchatantra
• Uncle Remus

Notes

Sources

• Anthony, Mayvis, 2006. "The Legendary Life and Fables of Aesop". Toronto: Mayant Press.
• Bentley, Richard, 1697. Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris... and the Fables of Æsop. London.
• Caxton, William, 1484. The history and fables of Aesop, Westminster. Modern reprint edited by Robert T. Lenaghan (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1967).
  • Caxton's famous Epilogue to the Fables, dated March 26, 1484
• Handford, S. A., 1954. Fables of Aesop. New York: Penguin.
• Jacobs, Joseph, 1889. The Fables of Aesop: Selected, Told Anew, and Their History Traced, as first printed by William Caxton, 1484, from his French translation
  • i. ''A short history of the Aesopic fable''
  • ii. The Fables of Aesop
• Lewis William Brüggemann, A View of the English Editions, Translations, and Illustrations of the Ancient Greek and Latin Authors, 1797. Burt Franklin. Provides a long list of translations with notes about each.
• Perry, Ben E. (editor), 1965. Babrius and Phaedrus, (Loeb Classical Library) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. English translations of 143 Greek verse fables by Babrius, 126 Latin verse fables by Phaedrus, 328 Greek fables not extant in Babrius, and 128 Latin fables not extant in Phaedrus (including some medieval materials) for a total of 725 fables.
• Rev. Thomas James M.A., (Ill. John Tenniel), Aesop's Fables: A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources, 1848. John Murray. (includes many pictures)
• Temple, Olivia and Robert (translators), 1998. Aesop, The Complete Fables, New York: Penguin Classics. (ISBN 0-14-044649-4)
  • Bryn Mawr Classical Review, with Aesop bibliography

External links

• 1947 Hare and Tortoise film at Internet Archive (public domain).
• Aesop: a comparison with [[Panchatantra]]
• Aesopic fables and other stories - an online collection for children, some (links to Aesop's Fables). See also Preface to Aesop's Fables
• Aesopica: Over 600 English fables, plus Caxton's Aesop, Latin and Greek texts, Content Index, and Site Search.
• Aesop's Fables, Librivox Audio CDs
• Free audiobook of Aesop's Fables from LibriVox
• Images of Aesopus moralitus - Vita, Fabulae

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