Aesop, the Father of Fables

According to these sources, Aesop lived in Greece in the sixth century BCE and was from Thrace. He was reportedly very ugly but had charismatic skills to tell stories for didactic purposes or entertainment. Sold as a slave on the Greek island Samos, Aesop exhibited a cleverness greater than that of his master, probably the philosopher Xanthos, who later set him free because Aesop was able to interpret an important augury to Xanthos’s benefit. Aesop’s death, apparently by execution in Delphi, remains shrouded in myth. By the fifth century the talented and intelligent Aesop had apparently taken on legendary dimensions.

From antiquity Aesop’s name has been synonymous with fables. Based on oral tradition, Aesop’s fables were stories with mostly animals as main protagonists (the tricky fox, the powerful lion, etc.). There are also fables that describe relationships between humans and animals and fables that have protagonists who are humans or even plants. The fables have a simple structure: the description of the situation at the beginning is followed generally by a short dialogical part and then by the concluding statement containing the moral. The fables function metaphorically and have an ironic character similar to wellerisms. Although Aesop has been perceived since antiquity as the creator of the fable, many attempted to write fables before him, in particular Homer, Hesiod, Archilochos, Semonides, Stesichoros, Herodotus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Plato, among others. The first collection of Aesop’s fables in written form was made by the philosopher Demetrius of Phaleron in about 300 BCE. Since then-during the Roman period, through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day-Aesop’s fables have circulated widely as part of the fable tradition.

The fable was established as an autonomous literary genre in Roman poetry in 40 CE by Phaedrus, whose five-volume work with fables in Latin verse survives only in fragments. In the second century CE, the Roman Babrius distributed 143 of Aesop’s fables in verse, as they played an important role in Roman and Byzantine education. During the Middle Ages fables were integrated into Christian literature and sermons. Aesop’s influence continued in Renaissance and Baroque fable books, and in seventeenth-century France Aesop’s reception is especially evident in the stories of Jean de La Fontaine, who gave his fables a more humorous and satirical tone. Translated into almost all languages, Aesop’s fables are often encountered allusively in popular culture and over time have also become an indispensable part of children’s literature.