Aesop ( ; , ; – 564 BCE; formerly rendered as Æsop) was a Greek fabulist and storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Although his existence remains unclear and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. Many of the tales associated with him are characterized by anthropomorphic animal characters.
Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch. An ancient literary work called The Aesop Romance tells an episodic, probably highly fictional version of his life, including the traditional description of him as a strikingly ugly slave () who by his cleverness acquires freedom and becomes an adviser to kings and city-states. Older spellings of his name have included Esop(e) and Isope. Depictions of Aesop in popular culture over the last 2,500 years have included many works of art and his appearance as a character in numerous books, films, plays, and television programs.
Life
The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, indicate that Aesop was born around 620 BCE in the Greek colony of Mesembria. A number of later writers from the Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin) say that he was born in Phrygia.Brill's New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World (hereafter BNP) 1:256. The 3rd-century poet Callimachus called him "Aesop of Sardis,"Callimachus. Iambus 2 (Loeb fragment 192) and the later writer Maximus of Tyre called him "the sage of Lydia."Maximus of Tyre, Oration 36.1
By AristotleAristotle. Rhetoric 2.20 . and HerodotusHerodotus. Histories 2.134 . we are told that Aesop was a slave in Samos; that his slave masters were first a man named Xanthus, and then a man named Iadmon; that he must eventually have been freed, since he argued as an advocate for a wealthy Samian; and that he met his end in the city of Delphi. PlutarchPlutarch. On the Delays of Divine Vengeance; Banquet of the Seven Sages; Life of Solon. tells us that Aesop came to Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus of Lydia, that he insulted the Delphians, that he was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, and that he was thrown from a cliff (after which the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine). Before this fatal episode, Aesop met with Periander of Corinth, where Plutarch has him dining with the Seven Sages of Greece and sitting beside his friend Solon, whom he had met in Sardis. (Leslie Kurke suggests that Aesop was himself "a popular contender for inclusion" in the list of Seven Sages.)Kurke 2010, p. 135.
In 1965, Ben Edwin Perry, an Aesop scholar and compiler of the Perry Index, concluded that, due to problems of chronological reconciliation dating the death of Aesop and the reign of Croesus, "everything in the ancient testimony about Aesop that pertains to his associations with either Croesus or with any of the so-called Seven Wise Men of Greece must be reckoned as literary fiction." Perry likewise dismissed accounts of Aesop's death in Delphi as mere fictional legends.Perry, Ben Edwin. Introduction to Babrius and Phaedrus, pp. xxxviii–xlv. However, later research has established that a possible diplomatic mission for Croesus and a visit to Periander "are consistent with the year of Aesop's death."BNP 1:256. Still problematic is the story by Phaedrus, which has Aesop, in Athens, relating the fable of the frogs who asked for a king, because Phaedrus has this happening during the reign of Peisistratos, which occurred decades after the presumed date of Aesop's death.Phaedrus 1.2
The Aesop Romance Along with the scattered references in the ancient sources regarding the life and death of Aesop, there is a highly fictional biography now commonly called The Aesop Romance (also known as the Vita or The Life of Aesop or The Book of Xanthus the Philosopher and Aesop His Slave), "an anonymous work of Greek popular literature composed around the second century of our era ... Like The Alexander Romance, The Aesop Romance became a folkbook, a work that belonged to no one, and the occasional writer felt free to modify as it might suit him."William Hansen, review of Vita Aesopi: Ueberlieferung, Sprach und Edition einer fruehbyzantinischen Fassung des Aesopromans by Grammatiki A. Karla in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.39 . Multiple, sometimes contradictory, versions of this work exist. The earliest known version was probably composed in the 1st century CE, but the story may have circulated in different versions for centuries before it was committed to writing,Leslie Kurke, "Aesop and the Contestation of Delphic Authority", in The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration, ed. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke, p. 77. and certain elements can be shown to originate in the 4th century BCE.François Lissarrague, "Aesop, Between Man and Beast: Ancient Portraits and Illustrations", in Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, ed. Beth Cohen (hereafter, Lissarrague), p. 133. Scholars long dismissed any historical or biographical validity in The Aesop Romance; widespread study of the work began only toward the end of the 20th century.
In The Aesop Romance, Aesop is a slave of Phrygian origin on the island of Samos, and extremely ugly. At first he lacks the power of speech, but after showing kindness to a priestess of Isis, is granted by the goddess not only speech but a gift for clever storytelling, which he uses alternately to assist and confound his master, Xanthus, embarrassing the philosopher in front of his students and even sleeping with his wife. After interpreting a portent for the people of Samos, Aesop is given his freedom and acts as an emissary between the Samians and King Croesus. Later he travels to the courts of Lycurgus of Babylon and Nectanabo of Egypt – both imaginary rulers – in a section that appears to borrow heavily from the romance of Ahiqar.Lissarrague, p. 113. The story ends with Aesop's journey to Delphi, where he angers the citizens by telling insulting fables, is sentenced to death and, after cursing the people of Delphi, is forced to jump to his death.
Fabulist
Aesop may not have written his fables. The Aesop Romance claims that he wrote them down and deposited them in the library of Croesus; Herodotus calls Aesop a "writer of fables" and Aristophanes speaks of "reading" Aesop,BNP 1:257; West, p. 121; Hägg, p. 47. but that might simply have been a compilation of fables ascribed to him.Aesop's Fables, ed. D.L. Ashliman, New York 2005, pp. xiii–xv, xxv–xxvi Various Classical authors name Aesop as the originator of fables. Sophocles, in a poem addressed to Euripides, made reference to the North Wind and the Sun.Athenaeus 13.82 . Socrates, while in prison, turned some of the fables into verse,Plato, Phaedo 61b . of which Diogenes Laërtius records a small fragment.Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.5.42 : "He also composed a fable, in the style of Aesop, not very artistically, and it begins—Aesop one day did this sage counsel give / To the Corinthian magistrates: not to trust / The cause of virtue to the people's judgment." The early Roman playwright and poet Ennius also rendered at least one of Aesop's fables in Latin verse, of which the last two lines still exist.Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 2.29.
Collections of what are claimed to be Aesop's Fables were transmitted by a series of authors writing in both Greek and Latin. Demetrius of Phalerum made what may have been the earliest, probably in prose (), contained in ten books for the use of orators, although that has since been lost.Perry, Ben E. "Demetrius of Phalerum and the Aesopic Fables", Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 93, 1962, pp. 287–346. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, cited by the Suda, but the author's name is unknown. Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus, rendered the fables into Latin in the 1st century CE. At about the same time Babrius turned the fables into Greek choliambics. A 3rd-century author, Titianus, is said to have rendered the fables into prose in a work now lost.Ausonius, Epistles 12 . Avianus (of uncertain date, perhaps the 4th century) translated 42 of the fables into Latin elegiacs. The 4th-century grammarian Dositheus Magister also made a collection of Aesop's Fables, now lost.
Aesop's Fables continued to be revised and translated through the ensuing centuries, with the addition of material from other cultures, so that the body of fables known today bears little relation to those Aesop originally told. With a surge in scholarly interest beginning toward the end of the 20th century, some attempt has been made to determine the nature and content of the very earliest fables which may be most closely linked to the historic Aesop.BNP 1:258–9; West; Niklas Holzberg, The Ancient Fable: An Introduction, pp. 12–13; see also Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi: Fables in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek by Gert-Jan van Dijk and History of the Graeco-Latin Fable by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados.
Physical appearance and the question of African origin The anonymously authored Aesop Romance begins with a vivid description of Aesop's appearance, saying he was "of loathsome aspect ... potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity,"The Aesop Romance, translated by Lloyd W. Daly, in Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature, ed. William Hansen, p. 111. or as another translation has it, "a faulty creation of Prometheus when half-asleep."Papademetriou, pp. 14–15. The earliest text by a known author that refers to Aesop's appearance is Himerius in the 4th century, who says that Aesop "was laughed at and made fun of, not because of some of his tales but on account of his looks and the sound of his voice."Himerius, Orations 46.4, translated by Robert J. Penella in Man and the Word: The Orations of Himerius, p. 250. The evidence from both of these sources is dubious, since Himerius lived some 800 years after Aesop and his image of Aesop may have come from The Aesop Romance, which is essentially fiction; but whether based on fact or not, at some point the idea of an ugly, even deformed Aesop took hold in popular imagination. Scholars have begun to examine why and how this "physiognomic tradition" developed.See Lissarrage; Papademetriou; Compton, Victim of the Muses; Lefkowitz, "Ugliness and Value in the Life of Aesop" in Kakos: Badness and Anti-value in Classical Antiquity ed. Sluiter and Rosen.
A much later tradition depicts Aesop as a black African from Aethiopia. The first known promulgator of the idea was Planudes, a Byzantine scholar of the 13th century who made a recension of The Aesop Romance in which it is conjectured that Aesop might have been Ethiopian, given his name. But according to Gert-Jan van Dijk, "Planudes' derivation of 'Aesop' from 'Aethiopian' is ... etymologically incorrect,"Gert-Jan van Dijk, "Aesop" entry in The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, ed. Nigel Wilson, p. 18. and Frank Snowden says that Planudes' account is "worthless as to the reliability of Aesop as 'Ethiopian.Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (hereafter Snowden), p. 264.