Aesop

Almost everything about Aesop's life comes from stories told long after his death. The earliest mention is in Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC: he says Aesop was a slave on the island of Samos, owned by a man called Iadmon, and that he was killed by the people of Delphi, who later paid compensation for his death. Later writers add that he came from Thrace or Phrygia, that he was freed because of his cleverness, and that he travelled to the courts of kings, settling quarrels with a well-chosen story. The traditional dates, around 620 to 564 BC, are no more than a best guess.

In the first centuries AD an anonymous Greek text, the Βίος Αισώπου (Life of Aesop), turned him into a folk hero: ugly, hunch-backed and at first unable to speak, until a goddess gave him the gift of language, after which he outwitted his philosopher master at every turn. The Delphi episode became a tragic ending: accused of stealing a sacred cup, he was thrown from a cliff.

Historians treat all of this with caution. What is certain is that by the fifth century BC the Athenians already spoke of Aesop's stories as something familiar: Aristophanes jokes about them in his comedies, and Plato records that Socrates, waiting in prison for his execution, passed the time turning Aesop's fables into verse.

A fable (μύθος, mythos) is a very short story, usually with animals as characters, that ends in a moral, and Aesop's are the model for the whole genre. In Η αλεπού και τα σταφύλια (The Fox and the Grapes) a fox cannot reach a bunch of grapes and walks away saying they were sour anyway. In Ο λαγός και η χελώνα (The Hare and the Tortoise) the slow, steady tortoise wins the race. In Ο τζίτζικας και ο μέρμηγκας (The Cicada and the Ant) the cicada who sang all summer begs the hard-working ant for food when winter comes. Others everyone knows: the shepherd boy who cried wolf, the lion and the mouse, the town mouse and the country mouse, the wolf and the lamb.

Aesop wrote nothing down. The fables circulated by word of mouth for centuries before Demetrius of Phalerum collected them around 300 BC; that collection is lost, and the versions we read come from later authors, Phaedrus in Latin verse in the first century AD, Babrius in Greek verse around the second century, and anonymous Greek prose collections. The ancient prose is plain and quick: a situation, a twist, and the closing formula ὁ μῦθος δηλοῖ (the fable shows that…), followed by the lesson. That lean structure is exactly why the fables have survived every change of language and taste, and why they are among the easiest ancient Greek texts to read.

In Greece the fables are the first literature a child meets: they appear in primary-school readers and in countless picture books, and Αισώπειος μύθος (an Aesopian fable) is the standard term for any story with a moral. Several fables live on as everyday expressions. When someone pretends not to want what they cannot have, Greeks say «ξινά τα σταφύλια» (sour grapes), straight from the fox. The ancient closing formula «ο μύθος δηλοί» is used with a smile to announce the moral of any story, and someone who gives false alarms «φωνάζει λύκος» (cries wolf). A learner can start with the Greek versions of The Fox and the Grapes or The Hare and the Tortoise: short, present-tense, full of animal words, and already familiar from childhood in almost any language.

• Herodotus names Aesop as a fellow slave of Rhodopis, a famous courtesan, in the household of Iadmon on Samos, which is the oldest surviving reference to him.
• According to Plato's Phaedo, Socrates spent his last days in prison putting Aesop's fables into verse.
• Not a single line survives from Aesop's own time; the oldest complete collections are Phaedrus in Latin and Babrius in Greek, written five to seven centuries after he supposedly lived.
• The English expression «sour grapes» and the Greek «ξινά τα σταφύλια» come from the same fable about a fox.