Aesop's Fables

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This article is about the Greek tales. For the cartoon
series, see Aesop's Film
Fables.

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

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a slave and
story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's
Fables have become a blanket term for
collections of brief fables, usually involving anthropomorphic
animals. His fables are some of the most well known in the world. The fables
remain a popular choice for moral education of children today.
Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the
Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" was derived),
The Tortoise and
the Hare, The North Wind
and the Sun and The Boy Who Cried
Wolf, are well-known throughout the world.

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.

Contents

1 Aesop

2 Origins

3 Translation and
transmission

4 Aesop's Fables in other
languages

5 Adaptations

6 List of some fables by
Aesop

7 See also

8 Notes

9 Sources

10 External links

[edit]
Aesop

Main article: Aesop

Aesop (from the Greek Αἴσωπος — 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.

[edit]
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.

[edit]
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 entire Greek tradition there is not, so far as I can
see, a single fable that can be said to come either directly or indirectly
from an Indian source; but many fables or fable-motifs which make their
first appearance in Greek or Near Eastern literature are found later in
the Panchatantra and
other Indian story-books, including the Buddhist Jatakas."[1]

”

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.[2]

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.[1]. An example of the fables in Caxton's collection
follows:

Men ought not to leue that thynge whiche is sure & certayne / for hope
to haue the vncertayn / as to vs reherceth this fable of a fyssher whiche with
his lyne toke a lytyll fysshe whiche sayd to hym / My frend I pray the / doo
to me none euylle / ne putte me not to dethe / For now I am nought / for to be
eten / but whanne I shalle be grete / yf thow come ageyne hyther / of me shalt
thow mowe haue grete auaylle / For thenne I shalle goo with the a good whyle /
And the Fyssher sayd to the fysshe Syn I hold the now / thou shalt not scape
fro me / For grete foly hit were to me for to seke the here another
tyme.

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.

[edit]
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.[3]

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 (張賡). 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 kanazōshi entitled
Isoppu Monogatari (伊曾保物語, Isoppu
Monogatari?)
sometime between 1596 and 1624.

[edit]
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.

[edit]
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

Aesop's most famous fables include:

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.

[edit]
See also

Ancient Greek
literature

Panchatantra

Uncle Remus

[edit]
Notes

^ Ben E.
Perry, "Introduction", p. xix, in Babrius and Phaedrus (1965)

^ D .L.
Ashliman, "Introduction", p. xxii, in Aesop's Fables (2003)

^ Préface aux Fables de La Fontaine

[edit]
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

[edit]
External links

Wikisource has original text
related to this article:

Aesop's
Fables

Greek Wikisource has original text
related to this article:

Aesop's
Fables

Wikimedia Commons has
media related to:

Aesop's
Fables

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

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop%27s_Fables"

Categories: Aesop's
Fables | Ancient
Greek literature

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