Aesop's Fables: Who Aesop Was, Where the Stories Came From, and the Morals Still in Our Language

Aesop's Fables are a collection of short stories, mostly about animals that talk and act like people, each ending with a lesson; they are credited to Aesop, a Greek storyteller traditionally said to have lived from about 620 to 564 BC, but they were passed on by word of mouth and not collected until about three centuries after his death. Many of the stories, such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, are still told to children around the world, and their morals have become everyday sayings.

Did Aesop really exist?

Nobody is completely sure. Ancient writers including Herodotus, Aristotle and Plutarch mention Aesop, and Herodotus calls him "Aesop the fable writer" and says he was a slave. Yet one modern scholar wrote that it is "far from certain whether a historical Aesop ever existed". Much of what people "know" about him comes from The Aesop Romance, an ancient, probably highly fictional life story. In it, Aesop is an extremely ugly slave on the island of Samos who at first cannot speak, is given the gift of speech and storytelling by a goddess, and uses his wit to outsmart his master and powerful people.

From spoken stories to books

The fables began as oral tradition. By the time they were collected, many other stories, jokes and proverbs had been attached to Aesop's name, some older than him and some from outside Greece. The earliest collection we know of was made by Demetrius of Phalerum in the fourth century BC. In the first century AD, Phaedrus, a freed slave of the Roman emperor Augustus, turned the fables into Latin verse, and the Greek poet Babrius made his own versions. Through the Middle Ages, Latin manuscripts kept the stories alive across Europe.

Printing and the world

When printing arrived, collections of Aesop were among the earliest books in many languages. William Caxton printed the first English edition on 26 March 1484. Portuguese missionaries brought the fables to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century, printing a Japanese version in Latin letters in 1593. In China, the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault passed on 38 fables orally, which the scholar Zhang Geng wrote down in 1625. Today the fables exist in almost every language, and many children meet them before they can read.

What makes a fable

Ancient writers said a good fable should be short and simple, clearly invented, useful for life and true to human nature. Animals stand in for human types: the fox is clever, the lion is powerful, the ant is hard-working. Because the characters are simple, the lesson is easy to see and easy to remember. Sometimes the title of a fable itself became a proverb, as with The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs or The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

Five famous fables and their morals

• The Tortoise and the Hare: the fast but overconfident hare naps during a race and loses to the slow, steady tortoise. Moral: slow and steady wins the race.
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf: a shepherd boy who keeps raising false alarms is not believed when a wolf really comes. Moral: liars are not believed even when they tell the truth.
• The Fox and the Grapes: a fox who cannot reach some grapes decides they must be sour anyway. This gave English the phrase "sour grapes".
• The Ant and the Grasshopper: the ant works all summer while the grasshopper sings, and in winter the grasshopper has nothing to eat. Moral: prepare for hard times.
• The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs: a greedy owner kills the goose to get all the gold at once and ends up with nothing. Moral: greed destroys the source of good things.

Learn with Aesop: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
sour grapes	pretending not to want what you can't have	Saying the job was boring is just sour grapes.
to cry wolf	to give false alarms	If you cry wolf too often, nobody will help.
slow and steady wins the race	patience beats speed	Study a little every day: slow and steady wins the race.
to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs	to destroy a source of profit through greed	Raising prices too much will kill the goose.
the lion's share	the biggest part	He took the lion's share of the cake.

Try this: Write three English sentences about your own habits, using "slow and steady wins the race" and "sour grapes".