Ancient Greece: The Truth Behind Aesop’s Fables – Part 1/4 (ca. 620-560 BC)
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Aesop’s fables were composed by a slave who lived in ancient Greece sometime during the 6th century BC. Whether or not Aesop himself was the person who committed his fables to writing is another debate entirely, however there is no doubt that Aesop actually existed – many other famous Greek authors mention his name in their writings, such as Aristophanes in his play The Wasps, and Plato in the work Phaedo, where he reports that Socrates actually spent some of his time in jail turning Aesop’s writings into verse. Another ancient Greek by the name of Demetrius of Phalerum compiled Aesop’s fables into a set of ten books that orators could use for their speeches, however these have long since been lost.
A man by the name of Phaedrus was the first person to translate Aesop’s writings into Latin, during the 1st century AD. Sometime either before or after Phaedrus, another Greek writer by the name of Babrius compiled his own edition of the stories, which is thought to have been a major source of inspiration for many subsequent versions. Later during the 4th century, a Latin author by the name of Avianus translated 42 of the fables and turned them into a kind of Latin poetry called ‘elegiac’.
Intriguingly, a number of Eastern and Oriental sources picked up the fables and translated them for their own reading, helping to preserve the stories throughout the centuries. Thus, it was only in the 14th century when a monk by the name of Maximus Planudes re-translated and put together the collection of stories known to modern audiences as Aesop’s Fables.
In 1484, the first English version of the fables was printed by William Caxton, the man who introduced England to the printing press. It was subsequently updated in 1692 and then again in the mid-1800s, and many of the more recent publications of the fables now omit some of the stories from certain major ancient sources, including some from Babrius and Phaedrus.
Whether Aesop was the originator of all of the fables is debatable, as many of the stories seem to have been crafted out of the Eastern sources, possibly borrowing from their folk tales just as much as they originally borrowed from Aesop. Many tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra are morality-themed or didactic tales centered around animals.
But who, exactly, was Aesop himself?
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Tomorrow: The truth behind the myth
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