Aesop - Life, Aesop's Fables

Legendary Greek fabulist. He is supposed to have been a native of Phrygia and a slave who, after being set free, travelled to Greece. The fables attributed to him are anecdotes which use animals to make a moral point and are, in all probability, a compilation of tales from many sources. The stories were popularized by the Roman poet Phaedrus in the 1st-cAD, and rewritten in sophisticated verse by La Fontaine in 1668.

Aesop (also spelled Æsop, from the Greek Αἴσωπος — Aisōpos), known only for the genre of fables ascribed to him, was by tradition a slave (δούλος) who was a contemporary of Croesus and Peisistratus in the mid-sixth century BC in ancient Greece. The various collections that go under the rubric "Aesop's Fables" are still taught as moral lessons and used as subjects for various entertainments, especially children's plays and cartoons. According to tradition he was at one point freed from slavery and eventually died at the hands of Delphians, but nothing is known about Aesop from credible records.

Life

The place of Aesop's birth was disputed in Antiquity: Thrace, Phrygia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Samos, Athens, Sardis and Amorium all claimed the honour. According to the sparse information gathered about him from references to him in several Greek works (he was mentioned by Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle), Aesop was a slave for someone called Xanthus (Ιάδμων), who resided on the island of Samos. A contrary story, however, said that Aesop spoke up for the common people against tyranny through his fables, which incensed Peisistratus, who was against free speech.

According to the historian Herodotus, Aesop met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi, though the cause was not stated.

Popular stories surrounding Aesop were assembled in a vita prefixed to a collection of fables under his name, compiled by Maximus Planudes, a fourteenth century monk. However, according to another Greek historian Plutarch's account of the symposium of the Seven Sages, at which Aesop was a guest, there were many jests on his former servile status, but nothing derogatory was said about his personal appearance.

Aesop was also briefly mentioned in the classic Egyptian myth, "The Girl and the Rose-Red Slippers", considered by many to be history's first Cinderella story. In the myth, the freed slave Rhodophis mentions that a slave named Aesop told her many entracing stories and fables while they were slaves on the island of Samos.

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or the collection of fables assembled as Aesopica refers to various collections of moralized fables credited to Aesop. "Aesop's Fables" has also become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals. The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" is derived), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun and The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf (also known as The Boy Who Cried Wolf), are well-known throughout the world.

Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote free adaptations of some of his fables. The history and fables of Aesop, Westminster. Caxton's famous Epilogue to the Fables Bentley, Richard, 1697. and the Fables of Æsop. The Fables of Aesop: Selected, Told Anew, and Their History Traced, as first printed by William Caxton, 1484, from his French translation i. The Fables of Aesop Handford, S. 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.