Aesop’s fables in Greek

Aesop, Αἴσωπος in ancient Greek, is the most famous teller of fables. But we know very little about him. An early report comes from the historian Herodotus, in the 5th century BC. Herodotus places Aesop in the 6th century BC. He says that Aesop was a slave of Iadmon, a man from the island of Samos. He calls him a λογοποιός, a story-maker. He also tells us that Aesop was killed, and that the people of Delphi, after an oracle, later offered payment for his death.

Later writers added many more tales. In a comedy by Aristophanes, Aesop is accused of stealing a sacred cup at Delphi. Other stories make him an adviser to King Croesus. Today many researchers think that there was probably no real Aesop. For them, his name is a label for a group of old stories. We cannot be sure.

A fable is a very short story with a lesson. The animals talk and act like people. In Greek, a story like this is a μῦθος. A sentence at the end often explains the lesson. This is the ἐπιμύθιον, a word made from ἐπί and μῦθος.

• The fox and the grapes (Ἀλώπηξ καὶ βότρυς). A hungry fox sees grapes hanging from a vine. She cannot reach them. As she walks away, she says: «Ὄμφακές εἰσιν», “They are unripe.” The lesson: some people fail because they are weak, and then they blame the circumstances.
• The cicada and the ants (Τέττιξ καὶ μύρμηκες). It is winter. A hungry cicada asks the ants for food. Why did you not collect food in summer, they ask. “I was singing,” it says. The ants laugh: then dance in winter! Some books say “grasshopper”, but the Greek says τέττιξ, a cicada.
• The tortoise and the hare (Χελώνη καὶ λαγωός). The hare laughs at the tortoise’s feet, so they have a race. In one Greek version, a fox is the judge. The hare trusts his legs and goes to sleep. The tortoise does not stop, and she wins.

At first, people passed on the fables by word of mouth. This kind of story is older than the dates given for Aesop. Around 700 BC, the poet Hesiod already told a short tale in which a hawk speaks to a nightingale. In 399 BC, Socrates was in prison and waiting to die. Plato says that he took “the μύθους of Aesop” that he knew and turned them into verse.

In the 4th century BC, the Athenian Demetrius of Phalerum made a collection of the fables. It is now lost. In the 1st century AD, Phaedrus wrote fables in Latin verse. Babrius wrote them in Greek verse, perhaps in the late 1st or in the 2nd century AD. Modern editions print Greek prose fables from later collections, such as the edition by Émile Chambry. In the 17th century the French poet La Fontaine retold them, and many versions we know today come from his.

Read a fable aloud in Greek, and you hear today’s words. The tortoise, χελώνη, is now χελώνα. The hare, λαγώς, is now λαγός. The fox has had a longer journey: a related ancient form, ἀλωπά, changed slowly in the Middle Ages until it became αλεπού. The ant, μύρμηξ, became μυρμήγκι through a small form, μυρμήκιον. The cicada, τέττιξ, became τζίτζικας, and the insect’s own sound, τζι τζι, helped to change it.

Some words did not stay in everyday speech. The fable’s βότρυς, a bunch of grapes, is now only a learned word in botany. Greeks say σταφύλι, which comes from another ancient word, σταφυλή. The unripe grape, ὄμφαξ, is now usually αγουρίδα, a later word. But μύθος is still here. A Greek dictionary gives «οι μύθοι του Αισώπου» as its example, and επιμύθιο is still the word for the moral of a story.