The Complete Fables [antikvár]

Introduction Aesop's Fables - what a ring it has to it! Of all the names of authors from Greek antiquity, Aesop is probably the best known, more so even than Homer. But it is ironical that Aesop's reputation should be so high when so little is accurately known about him or his work and when no complete translation of his fables has ever existed in English. He is rather Hke a movie star - everyone thinks they know him but in fact they only know him from certain roles he has played. The roles Aesop has played have been as a children's storyteller and as a clothes-horse for Victorian morals such as 'haste makes waste' and 'pride comes before a fall' - no such morals actually occur in Aesop at all. The animal stories which parents stiU buy in quantities for their children's birthdays bear little resemblance to the real Aesop fables. I hesitate to say 'the real Aesop', because so htde is known about the historical Aesop that some have maintained that he never actually existed. It seems, however, that he did exist. Although the ancient Life of Aesop, which existed before the time of Plato, consists largely of fantasy episodes of an already legendary figure, serious scholars like Aristode and his school made attempts to sort out the fact from fiction and came up with the conclusion that Aesop was not a Phrygian (from Asia Minor), as commonly believed in their day, but was actually a native of the town of Mesembria, in Thrace on the Greek mainland, and that he lived for some time on the Island of Samos. (This information survives in fragments of Aristotle's lost Constitution of Samos.) Aesop seems to have been a slave as a result of captivity. In Greek there were two different words for slaves, denoting whether a person had been bom a slave (doulos) or had been captured in war and sold