Fables

Overview

Several hundred short tales, most a paragraph or less, most involving talking animals, each ending in a stated or implied moral. Editions vary widely: the Perry Index, the modern scholarly catalogue of everything attributed to Aesop across the ancient sources, runs to 725 numbered fables, and any given translation selects and arranges a few hundred of them.

Aesop himself is a shadow. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, says he was a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century and was killed by the people of Delphi. Later biographical traditions, none of them reliable, make him deformed, witty, and eventually freed for his cleverness. No writing by him survives, and probably none ever existed: the fables were an oral tradition, attributed to his name the way jokes get attributed to a famous wit, long before anyone wrote them down.

The written record comes later and through several channels. Demetrius of Phalerum made a Greek prose collection around 300 BCE, now lost. Phaedrus, a freed slave in the household of Augustus, put a set into Latin verse in the first century CE. Babrius did the same in Greek verse around the second century CE. Medieval and Byzantine collections multiplied and reshuffled the material further, and by the time printed editions appeared in the Renaissance, the corpus had absorbed material from Indian, Near Eastern and other sources entirely unconnected to any historical Aesop. What we call Aesop’s Fables is really a genre and a tradition, not a fixed text by a single author.

What happens

The fables are almost always short enough to read in under a minute, and the form is fixed: a brief situation, usually involving animals but sometimes people or gods, a small event that reveals character or produces a consequence, and a moral, either stated outright at the end or obvious enough not to need stating.

A sample of the most famous:

The Tortoise and the Hare. The hare, confident of his speed, naps during the race and loses to the tortoise, who never stops moving. Slow, steady effort beats talent that does not apply itself.

The Fox and the Grapes. A fox cannot reach a bunch of grapes and declares, walking away, that they were probably sour anyway. The origin of sour grapes as a phrase, and a precise, unflattering portrait of rationalized failure.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf. A shepherd boy raises a false alarm for amusement, twice, and is not believed the third time, when the wolf is real. A fable about the cost of lying that punishes the liar rather than rewarding honesty, which is characteristic of the form’s harder edge.

The Ant and the Grasshopper. The ant works through summer storing food; the grasshopper sings and starves in winter. Simple on its face, and read very differently depending on whether the reader identifies with the provident ant or feels for the grasshopper who at least enjoyed himself.

The Lion and the Mouse. A lion spares a mouse who begs for its life, and the mouse later frees the lion from a hunter’s net by gnawing through the ropes. The fable that most directly contradicts the fables’ usual cynicism about the weak: here smallness matters and kindness pays.

The Wolf and the Lamb. A wolf, wanting an excuse to eat a lamb, accuses it of muddying his drinking water, though the wolf is upstream and the accusation is physically impossible. The lamb’s every logical objection is met with a new charge, and the wolf eats him regardless. One of the bleakest fables in the collection and often read as a fable about power needing no real justification at all.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. The town mouse visits his country cousin and finds the food plain; the country mouse visits the city and finds rich food but constant danger from cats and servants, and goes home content with less but safer.

The Dog and the Bone (or the Dog and Its Reflection). A dog carrying a bone sees its reflection in the water, mistakes it for another dog with a bigger bone, snaps at it, and loses its own bone in the process. Greed that costs what it already had.

The Crow and the Fox. A fox flatters a crow holding a piece of cheese into singing, so that the cheese falls from its open beak. Flattery as a tool of theft, and vanity as the thing that makes theft possible.

The North Wind and the Sun. The two compete to make a traveler remove his cloak. The wind blows harder and the traveler only wraps the cloak tighter; the sun simply shines warmly, and the traveler takes the cloak off himself. Gentle persuasion succeeds where force fails.

How to read it

Read them in bursts, not straight through. A few dozen at a sitting is plenty; the form does not sustain long continuous reading, and the pleasure is in the individual tale.

Notice how often the moral cuts against comfortable expectation. The wolf gets away with eating the lamb. The ant is not obviously the hero. The fables are not children’s morality tales with the edges filed off; that softening happened later, in retellings for young readers, and the originals are considerably tougher.

Read a few in more than one translation if you can. Because the tradition is oral and multi-lingual, the same fable often exists in several versions with different details and even different morals, and comparing two tellings of the Fox and the Grapes or the Ant and the Grasshopper shows how much the moral of a fable depends on who is doing the telling.

Watch the animals as fixed types rather than individuals. The fox is always clever and usually dishonest, the wolf is always predatory, the ass is always foolish or put upon, the lion is always powerful. The fables assume the reader already knows these types, and the meaning comes from watching the types collide, not from character development.

Read Phaedrus or La Fontaine afterward if you want to see the tradition at its most literary. Both took the bare tales and turned them into polished verse with real wit, and La Fontaine in particular used the form to say things about the court of Louis XIV that would have been dangerous to say directly.

And take the attribution to a single author as a convenient fiction. What you are reading is centuries of anonymous storytelling, filtered through Greek, Latin, Byzantine, Arabic and European hands, that settled, for reasons of legend rather than evidence, under one enslaved Greek’s name.

Questions it raises

• Why do the fables so often reward cunning over honesty, or power over justice, rather than the reverse?
• The wolf and the lamb offers no real moral victory for the innocent. What is a fable doing when it ends that way?
• Is the fox’s dismissal of the grapes a lie he tells himself, or an accurate description of a mind protecting itself from disappointment?
• What is lost, and what is gained, when a fable’s ambiguous ending is fitted with a single explicit moral?
• If the fables really are a folk tradition rather than one author’s work, does the name Aesop mean anything at all?
• Children are usually the first audience for these tales now. Were they originally meant for children, adults, or both?