Background

Aesop was born around 620 BCE. He seems to have been born in Thrace, the region of southeastern Europe now divided between Greece and Turkey. The name Aesop is a variant of Acthiop, which is a reference to Ethiopia in ancient Greek. This and the trickster nature of some of his stories, where humans are regularly outwitted by a cleverer animal figure, has led some scholars to speculate that Aesop may have been from Africa.

Career

The first recorded mention of his life came about a hundred years after he died, in a work by the eminent Greek historian Herodotus, who noted that he was a slave of one Iadmon of Samos and died at Delphi. Aesop was described by Herodotus, in his works, as a slave of a citizen of Samos called Xanthus. Xanto decided to grant him freedom, convinced that his ability to write fables was enormous. Usually, he amused Xanto and his family with attractive and thoughtful fables, which he could create in just a moment. As a freedman, he supposedly became involved in public affairs and traveled a lot telling his fables along the way. King Croesus of Lydia was so impressed with Aesop that he offered him residency and a job at his court.

While on a mission for King Croesus to distribute a certain amount of gold to the people of Delphi in Greece, there was a misunderstanding about how much gold each person was supposed to receive. Aesop became discouraged because the Delphians did not seem appreciative enough of the gift from the King so Aesop decided to take it all back to King Croesus. On his journey back the people of Delhi, who thought he was actively cheating them and giving them a bad reputation, tracked him down. Lloyd W. Daly writes, that apprehensive of his spreading this low opinion of them on his travels, the Delphians lay a trap for Aesop. By stealth they stashed a golden bowl from their temple in his baggage, then as he starts off through Phocis, they overtake him, search his baggage, and find the bowl. Haled back to Delhi, Aesop is found guilty of sacrilege against Apollo for the theft of the bowl and is condemned to death by being hurled off a cliff.

Aesop never wrote down any of the tales himself, he merely recited them orally. Aesop is credited with more than six hundred fables. Some of the more well-known morals credited to Aesop are, The Ant and the Grasshopper, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Frog and the Ox, The Fox and the Goat, The Fox and the Grapes, The Lion and the Mouse, The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.

Achievements

• Aesop is a fascinating historical figure from Ancient Greece. He is considered the father of the fable. Aesop’s Fables were very popular in classical Greece. His fables at the beginning were divulged orally to the whole community, his fame was such that apart from being orally disclosed, his fables were translated into texts used for teaching in schools. The rhetorician Demetrio de Falero made a compilation of the fables of Aesop in the fourth century B.C. The compilation contained about five hundred fables, which even today are read especially by children.
  
  Aesop is responsible for penning many phrases that are still in our pop culture and are regularly repeated today. Many of us don’t even know they came from him, such as the phrase sour grapes, which came from The Fox and the Grapes.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Aesop's Fables

    (Aesop’s Fables is a collection of stories attributed to A...)

  • The Fox and the Grapes

    (In this retelling of the classic Aesop's fable, the fox t...)

  • The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

    (In this retelling of Aesop's fable, a smart wolf is too c...)

  • The Mice and the Cat

    (Many mice live in a house. There is lots of food in the h...)

  • The Ant and the Grasshopper

    (Winter is coming. Ant works. She looks for food to save f...)

  • The Bear and the Travellers and The Ducks and the Tortoise
  • What The Fox Learnt
  • Aesop: The Complete Fables
  • The Eagle and the Cocks
  • The Lion and the Mouse
  • The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
  • The Mischievous Dog
  • The Mice in Council
  • The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs
  • The Fox and the Goat
  • Aesop's The Fox and the Crow
  • The Ox and the Frog
  • The Dog in The Manger

Views

Anthropomorphism, or animals with human capabilities, is the common thread throughout Aesop's fables. The main theme of the Aesopic fable is the social relations of humans, usually described from an ironic view of the world and power structures. The animals embody certain qualities these can be negative or positive, and in relation to it will be punished or rewarded in the denouement of the story, after the story is recorded an explicit moral by means of a forceful phrase.

The fables of Aesop have a simple and clear style since it handles everyday expressions. The message or messages of a particular fable depend on where it is found. If it is located within a particular story, it will derive its message from the story in which it is found, although even then it may have more than one meaning. If it stands on its own or is found in a collection of fables, its meaning becomes even more fluid.

Aesop created some typologies, which remained static among the fabulists, the fox is the embodiment of cunning; the wolf, of evil, the ant, of foresight, the lion, of majesty. It is necessary to notice that, in some of the fables of Aesop, human beings or divinities also intervene.

Quotations: "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."

"Betray a friend, and you'll often find you have ruined yourself."

"A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him."

"Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency."

"Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties."

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

"Fine clothes may disguise, but silly words will disclose a fool."

"If you choose bad companions, no one will believe that you are anything but bad yourself."

"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."

"No one believes a liar even when he tells the truth."

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

"United we stand, divided we fall."

"The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit."

"Please all, and you will please none."

"It is easy to be brave at a safe distance."

"Those who cry the loudest are not always the ones who are hurt the most".

"A liar will not be believed even when he speaks the truth."

"The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale."

"Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear."

"It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds."

"Adversity tests the sincerity of friends."

"He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own."

"Little by little does the trick."

"Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth."

"In trying to please all, he had pleased none."

"Once a wolf, always a wolf."

"We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction."

"Those who suffer most cry out the least."

"Give assistance, not advice, in a crisis."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Aesop is depicted in many historical sources as being ugly, grotesquely figured, with an oversized head. He is also described with a speech impediment that was healed by a deity.

Quotes from others about the person

• "They were among the first printed works in the vernacular European languages, and writers and thinkers throughout history have perpetuated them to such an extent that they are embraced as among the essential truths about human beings and their ways". - D.L. Ashliman
  
  "Aesop was such a strong personality that his contemporaries credited him with every fable ever before heard, and his successors with every fable ever told since". - Willis L. Parker
  
  "The popularity of Aesop is also shown by the fact that Plato records that Socrates decided to versify some of his fables while he was in jail awaiting execution". - Robert Temple

References

• Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter.
  2008
• The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature A comprehensive survey of children's literature features almost two thousand entries encompassing biographical sketches of authors, illustrators, printers, and publishers, as well as essays on the different genres, fictional characters, and printing processes.
  1999
• Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world.
  2010
• Ethics in Aesop's Fables: The Augustana Collection Ethics in Aesop's Fables: the Augustana Collection offers an original and innovative analysis of the Greek fable in the framework of Greek ethical thinking. The book starts with a brief account of the history and genre of the Greek fable. It then focuses on the Augustana collection of prose fables and analyses its ethical content in the larger context of Greek thought.
  2001
• Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop
  1936
• Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently.
  1991