AUTHOR: AESOP (ATTRIBUTED TO)
DATE: C. SEVENTH/SIXTH CENTURIES BC
Generations of children – and adults – have grown up on a diet of ancient fables that impart wisdom in short, memorable and often highly entertaining illustrative tales. Now well over two thousand years old, these fables have proven they have staying power even if their origins are shrouded in mystery. Whatever the circumstances of their creation, their almost universal appeal over such a long period suggests that while much divides us as a species, there is also a seam of commonality – a shared well of ethics and ideas – that ultimately helps to unite us. So it is that stories like ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ and ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’ have secured a global audience.
We can be sure that Aesop’s fables originated in Greece around the sixth or seventh century BC, but beyond that there is little certainty. We do not even know if there was such a figure as Aesop or, if there was, whether he was responsible for the composition of the fables. It is possible he merely served as a figurehead, the purported author of what were in fact the fruits of many storytellers’ labours. There are even doubts as to whether anyone could be said to have ‘created’ the stories, or whether it was instead a case of gathering together a collection of tales passed from generation to generation orally, which were constantly changing and evolving.
Whatever the truth, a figure called Aesop and described as a writer of fables was mentioned by Herodotus as early as the fifth century BC. He is there too in the works of Aristophanes at about the same time, while Plato reckoned that Socrates reworked some of the fables into verse while he was imprisoned for offending the Athenian authorities. Several hundred years later, an anonymous author composed an apparent biography of Aesop, which claimed he had been a slave from the Aegean island of Samos.
Born mute and cursed with ugliness, the story says, Aesop was very smart and full of wisdom, so that he grew to become celebrated across Greece, earning a small fortune in the process. However, when he visited Delphi and the locals declined to pay him for his displays of sageness, he insulted the city’s people. They took revenge by accusing him of being a thief and, having planted the necessary evidence on him, sentenced him to death. The biography culminates with Aesop meeting his end in a fall from a cliff top, either at the hands of his accusers or in a bid to escape them. It all makes for a terrifically exciting story, but its veracity is highly uncertain. Today, most academics favour the notion that Aesop is something of a symbolic author, who became credited with any story that fitted into the general fable format.
ANCIENT HISTORY
Aesop had literary precursors in the Ancient Sumerian civilization. The Sumerians, often considered the first urban civilization and based in a region between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, were composing their own fable-style stories as early as 1500 BC. These tales shared common features with Aesop’s tales, such as the use of anthropomorphized animal characters to communicate a basic moral or piece of worldly advice, like the sage observation which echoes that in ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’: ‘Tell a lie and then tell the truth: it will be considered a lie.’
Notably, in their earliest iterations, the fables were regarded as serving an adult audience, reflecting social, political and religious considerations of their time. Although not philosophical works in the mould of a Plato or Aristotle, these sometimes-whimsical narratives – often featuring animals imbued with human characteristics – were regarded as vehicles for grand themes. A famed Athenian statesman, Demetrius of Phalerum, brought together the first known collection of Aesop’s Fables in the fourth century BC with a view that aspiring orators should study them. Once they were translated into Latin around the first century AD, they became essential study materials for the educated classes of the Roman world too.
For centuries to come, the fables were delivered to a primarily adult audience, not least by preachers looking to impart parables rich in moral wisdom. It was the philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century who seems to have been the first to spot their cross-generational potential. The Fables are, he said, ‘apt to delight and entertain a child … yet afford useful reflection to a grown man. And if his memory retain them all his life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly thoughts and serious business.’ Louis XIV of France in due course incorporated a series of statues based on several of the fables into the design of his palace at Versailles, where he hoped they would contribute to the education of his young son.
It is their adaptability that has contributed to the longevity of the stories. By dealing in simplicity – of story and of message – they allow for the widest reception. They have served audiences across borders and of various religious faiths at vastly different historical moments. The Ancient Greek philosopher, the medieval Islamic scholar, the Reformation monk, the Enlightenment thinker, the Victorian moralist and the twenty-first-century educator have all been able to utilize the fables for their own purposes.
It is only in more recent centuries that the ‘moral’ of each story has tended to be included as part of the text. Yet many of those simple messages, even as they evolve and adapt to their audience, are as potent now as they were thousands of years ago. To this day, we sometimes need to be reminded of such simple truths as it pays to think before we act, that slow and steady wins the race, and that things are not always what they seem.
Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century-ad philosopher from Anatolia, sums up the simple magnificence of those stories (numbering over seven hundred) commonly attributed to 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.