Aesop was born in Phrygia, an ancient country in
the center of what is now Turkey. He may have
been taken prisoner by one of his homeland’s
many conquering invaders; it is known he was enslaved
and eventually sold to a man called Iadmon.
On Samos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea where
the prosperous landowner took him, Aesop established
a reputation as a masterful storyteller and
fabulist (maker of fables).Aesop so impressed Iadmon
with his gifts that his master freed him so he
might tell his humorous animal tales throughout
Greece. Aesop was later retained by King Croesus
of Lydia as a diplomat and ambassador.
Aesop successfully represented his various employers
in legal matters and other negotiations by
telling instructive, lively stories featuring animals
with very human traits. The great Greek philosopher
ARISTOTLE tells the following story of Aesop
in Rhetoric, a treatise on the art of persuasion:
While defending a popular political leader of
Samos who had swindled the public, Aesop recounted
“The Vixen and the Hedgehog.” In this
story, Aristotle explains, a fox who becomes
trapped in a gully and tormented by fleas is offered
help by a passing hedgehog. The fox declines the
offer, explaining that the fleas clinging to her skin
had had their fill of her, but if the fleas were taken
away they would be replaced by another set of parasites
that would drain the rest of her blood.
“So, men of Samos,” Aesop concluded, according
to Aristotle, “my client will do you no further
harm; he is wealthy already. But if you put him to
death,” he explained, other ambitious politicians
will assume the position the man has vacated,“and
their peculations will empty your treasury completely.”
Aesop died while on a diplomatic mission to
the sacred site of Delphi, where he found the residents
to be not holy, but arrogant and greedy. Fearful
that Aesop would use his powers of oratory to
discredit them, the Delphians enacted a conspiracy
to frame him with theft. In his defense, the already
legendary fabulist told of “The Rat and the Frog”
and “The Eagle and the Beetle,” tales cautioning
that oppressors of the innocent will be subjected to
divine vengeance. Notwithstanding his warnings,
Aesop was found guilty and executed by being
flung from the cliffs at Delphi.
There are hundreds of fables attributed to
Aesop, but it is uncertain how many he actually
composed, if any.He did not write any down, and
some of the stories in the body of work known as
“Aesop’s Fables” are known to have originated
well before his birth or after his death. He may
merely have been a brilliant raconteur of oft-told
tales that were then recited in the “Aesopic” manner.
They were written down for the first time
around 300 B.C., probably by storytellers and
other fabulists.
Critical Analysis
In Aesop’s Fables, talking moles, swallows, monkeys,
and a host of other animals demonstrate alltoo-
human flaws, virtues, and desires.Accordingly,
they are taught lessons that humans might do well
to mind. Like all fables, those attributed to Aesop
are both brief—sometimes as short as two sentences—
and fanciful, and are designed to teach a
lesson about such themes as modesty, honesty, and
industriousness.
Perhaps the best-known tale is “The Hare and
the Tortoise,” in which the speedy hare challenges
the sluggish tortoise to a race. The confident hare,
thinking he has all the time in the world, takes a nap,
while the tortoise trudges laboriously to the finish
line, teaching that slow and steady wins the race.
In “The Fox and the Grapes,” another popular
favorite, a ravenous fox spies a bunch of the fruit
hanging from a trellis. Unable to reach them, he
tells himself they weren’t ripe, anyway, giving rise
to the term sour grapes.
Aesop also relates the story of a shepherd boy
who falsely “cries wolf ” so often that when a real
wolf appears and threatens the herd, nobody heeds
his pleas for help; and of a mule who boasts of his
racehorse mother but is compelled to acknowledge
that his father is a jackass (“There are two sides to
every story”). Another narrative tells of a fox happening
upon a lion for the very first time and
nearly dying of fright. The fox becomes bolder
upon each encounter until one day he strolls up to
the lion with a cheeky greeting, because “familiarity
breeds contempt.”
In “The Dairy Maid and Her Milk Can,” a milkmaid
is carrying a pail of milk on her head daydreaming
about what she will do with the money
she will earn from selling it. She imagines increasing
her stock of eggs, which will produce a certain
number of chicks that she will sell at a certain
price. She’ll have enough money for a new gown,
and her beauty will attract many suitors, but she
will just toss her head at the lot of them. At that,
she tosses her head and the pail of milk crashes to
the ground—along with her fantasy. The moral:
Do not count your chickens before they hatch.
The greedy owner of “The Goose with the
Golden Eggs” squanders an even greater windfall
than that of the milkmaid. He cuts the goose open,
hoping to find a large gold nugget inside.Thus, when
referring to people whose impatience for great riches
causes them to lose what little they do have, we may
say they “killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Another familiar expression comes from “The
Fishes and the Frying Pan.” Some live fish are placed
in a skillet over a flame to cook. As the pan heats
up, the fish find the high temperature intolerable, so
they leap from the pan, landing in the flames.Today,
we use the expression “out of the frying pan and
into the fire” to mean a choice that exchanges one
unpleasant situation for one that is worse.
Our very language owes a debt to Aesop’s fantastical
universe, insofar as everyday speech is populated
with animals who have the human traits
Aesop ascribed to them.We speak of wily foxes,
wolves in sheep’s clothing, vain peacocks, rapacious
vultures, and hardworking ants.
The lessons Aesop’s fables teach are very much in
evidence in contemporary expressions, too, and in
the way civic and ethical matters are framed and
judged in modern society.“The Country Mouse and
the City Mouse” is an exceptionally popular fable
that is no less relevant today than in ancient times,
and it aptly illustrates the benefits and drawbacks
of rural and urban living. As the Country Mouse
sums up: “You can dine in this way and grow fat, if
you like; jolly good luck to you if you can enjoy
feasting sumptuously in the midst of danger. For my
part, I shall not abandon my frugal home under
ground, where I can eat coarse food in safety.”
Aesop is generally credited with introducing the
fantastical animals who made the tales and their
characters so beloved, keeping the tales simple and
providing a “moral of the story” tagline that made
them so unforgettable. The fables have been translated
and augmented many times over, perhaps
most famously by the 17th century French poet
Jean de La Fontaine, and they have retained their
straightforward appeal for more than 2,000 years.
In many ways, it is irrelevant whether Aesop
was, in fact, the author of the fables. He was the
storyteller who brought them to vivid life and
made them, and himself, universal and timeless.
See also PHAEDRUS.
English Versions of Works by Aesop
Aesop: The Complete Fables. Translated by Olivia and
Robert Temple. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Aesop’s Fables: With a Life of Aesop. Edited by John
Esten Keller. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1993.
Works about Aesop
Bader, Barbara. Aesop and Company: With Scenes from
His Legendary Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin/
Walter Lorraine Books, 1999.
Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. English Fable: Aesop and Literary
Culture, 1651–1740. Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Wheatley, Edward.Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education,
Chaucer, and His Followers. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2000.