Aesop's Fables

Aesop’s Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620-564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.

   The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death. By that time a variety of stories, jokes, and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some material was from much earlier or came from elsewhere. That process has continued until the present with some of the fables unrecorded before the later-Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably of more recent authorship.

    Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop’s fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop’s reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world.

     Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social, and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onward were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting, and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time.