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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  Aesop’s Fables

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  LAURA GIBBS

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  AESOP’S FABLES

  AESOP was a legendary storyteller of ancient Greece and Rome and ‘Aesop’s fables’ have become one of the most enduring traditions of European culture. There are Aesop’s fables scattered throughout Greek and Roman literature, along with extensive collections of the fables compiled in both Latin and Greek. As Aesop’s fables circulated throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, so did legends about Aesop himself, who was supposed to have been a notoriously ugly and tongue-tied slave who miraculously received the power of speech with which he won his freedom, only to be treacherously executed by the citizens of Delphi. The historical authenticity of these legends is dubious, but the popularity of Aesop’s fables is undeniable. Long after Greece and Rome were in ruins, the fables continued to be copied in both the Latin West and the Greek East until they were reunited once again in the modern printed editions of Aesop first published in the fifteenth century. This English translation of Aesop’s fables continues that long history, providing a newly assembled collection that represents all the fables attested in the ancient Greek and Latin traditions, arranged for the first time according to the fables’ contents and themes.

  LAURA GIBBS completed her M.Phil. in European Literature at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She has also studied and taught at the Centre for the Study of Anthropology and the Ancient World at the University of Siena in Italy. She is currently employed as a specialist in academic computing at the University of Oklahoma where she is developing Latin and Greek teaching tools for use on the Internet.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text and Translation

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology of the Fables

  AESOP’S FABLES

  Aesop, the Popular Favourite

  I. The Fables

  II. Aetiologies, Paradoxes, Insults, and Jokes

  Index of Perry Numbers

  Index of Sources

  General Index

  PREFACE

  There have been many excellent English translations of Aesop’s fables over the centuries, beginning with Caxton’s remarkable first edition of the fables in 1484. His lively English translation still conveys a powerful sense of the breadth of the Aesopic tradition, drawing as it does on all the Greek and Latin sources that were known in western Europe at that time. More recent English translations, however, have failed to be as comprehensive as Caxton’s great edition of over 500 years ago. On the one hand, there are modern English translations which provide complete versions of a single author or source (a translation of the anonymous Greek fables, for example, or the complete poems of Phaedrus), but by themselves these translations cannot convey a complete picture of the larger tradition. Then there are the English translations which provide only a sampling of fables from the various ancient sources, preferring the most familiar items while omitting the many weird or obscure (and even obscene) stories which were an integral part of the Aesopic tradition. In this new translation for Oxford World’s Classics, the ancient Greek and Latin collections are fully represented and arranged for the first time in an order that reflects the fables’ dominant preoccupations and themes. Notes are provided for variant versions and comprehensive indexes link each fable to its original source.

  In preparing these translations, I have relied greatly on the generosity of Professor Donald Russell, who has provided invaluable comments and suggestions at every stage of this project. Judith Luna has been an ideal editor, and I appreciate her willingness to include Aesop, an admittedly unusual author, in the Oxford World’s Classics series. This book has benefited from the ongoing assistance of two outstanding students at the University of Oklahoma, Randy Hoyt and Rebecca Belanus. I also owe very special thanks to Naomi Teplow and all the members of the Excelsior Avenue Poetry Club in Oakland California: I hope that this book can convey to its readers the same joy of discovery that the members of the Poetry Club have shared together over the years.

  INTRODUCTION

  Aesop and his Fables

  Aesop in the Ancient World

  The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, considered Aesop to be a historical figure who lived on the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, near the coast of modern Turkey. According to Herodotus, Aesop originally came from Thrace (modern Balkans), while other ancient sources maintained that he came from Phrygia (modern Turkey or A
rmenia). The Life of Aesop, an ancient Greek novel of uncertain provenance (perhaps dating to the first century CE, but almost certainly relying on earlier prototypes), provides us with an elaborate and extremely humorous account of Aesop’s adventures both as a slave and later as a freedman. In its opening lines, we learn about the many disadvantages that Aesop had to overcome:

  Aesop, our great benefactor, the storyteller, chanced to be a slave, and by birth he was a Phrygian from Phrygia. He was extremely ugly to look at, filthy, with a big fat belly and a big fat head, snub-nosed, misshapen, dark-skinned, dwarfish, flat-footed, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, and fat-lipped, in short, a freak of nature. What’s more, there was something even worse than this physical deformity: Aesop was mute and unable to speak.

  The story then tells how the mute Aesop treated a priestess of the goddess Isis with such great kindness that he was rewarded with the gift of speech. As soon as he could talk, Aesop proceeded to denounce the overseer of the slaves for his inordinate cruelty. As a result, Aesop was put up for sale and was eventually purchased by a philosopher from the island of Samos named Xanthus. The bulk of the Life of Aesop describes the many occasions on which Aesop was able to outwit his master and humiliate his master’s wife. Aesop eventually won his freedom and became an advisor to the king of Babylon. He then helped the king of Babylon to win a battle of wits with the king of Egypt, for which he was handsomely rewarded. By that point, Aesop had become famous throughout all the world, but when he went to the Greek city of Delphi, he insulted and provoked the citizens of Delphi to such a degree that they decided to kill him. Without Aesop’s knowledge, the Delphians planted a golden cup from the temple of Apollo in his baggage and then arrested him for theft. Although he pleaded for his life by telling a series of stories, the Delphians finally executed Aesop by hurling him from a cliff. Aesop’s unhappy fate might suggest that the fables were not an especially effective genre of persuasive speech, but the history of the fables themselves proves otherwise. Even if the fables in the Life of Aesop were not able to rescue Aesop from the Delphians, ‘Aesop’s fables’ are one of the longest-lived and most widely diffused genres of ancient Greek and Roman culture. The tradition flourished for more than a thousand years in Greece and Rome, and then sprang back to life in the later Middle Ages, enjoying another millennium of popularity lasting from the tenth century until the present day.

  As shown by the testimony in Herodotus, the legend of Aesop and his fables was already widespread and well-attested in classical Greece. That is why the comic playwright Aristophanes (late fifth century BCE) could safely assume that everyone in his audience was well acquainted with Aesop and his fables, as we can see in this exchange from The Birds, which concludes with the fable of the lark and her crest (Fable 499):

  PISTHETAERUS. I feel so badly for all of you, who used to be kings.

  CHORUS-LEADER. We were kings? Over whom?

  PISTHETAERUS. You were kings of everything in existence, of me, and of this man, and even of Zeus himself. You are older than Cronus and the Titans; you were born even before Gaia, the Earth herself.

  CHORUS-LEADER. Older than the Earth?!

  PISTHETAERUS. I swear it by Apollo.

  CHORUS-LEADER. By Zeus, I never heard that before!

  PISTHETAERUS. That’s because you are ignorant and lacking in curiosity, and have failed to go over your Aesop, who says that the crested lark was the first bird to be created, even before Gaia, the Earth. As a result, when the lark’s father became sick and died, there was no earth to bury him in. On the fifth day that his body had been lying there, the frustrated lark, not knowing what else to do, buried her father in her own head.

  What exactly does Aristophanes mean by someone ‘going over’ their Aesop? The Greek verb he uses is pepatekas, which literally means to ‘have walked through’ or ‘gone over’ Aesop. Citing precisely this passage in Aristophanes, the Liddell–Scott dictionary of Greek suggests that the verb should also mean ‘to thumb through’, or ‘to be always thumbing Aesop’. Such a translation, however, misses the mark. To ‘thumb through’ Aesop implies that there was a text of Aesop to read, like the book you are holding in your hands right now and which you can certainly ‘thumb through’ at your leisure. In fifth-century Athens, however, there were no books of Aesop to be thumbed through, since the first written collections of Aesop did not yet exist. It is very hard for us as modern readers to appreciate the fact that Aesop could still be an authority whom you had to consult, even if he were not an author of books to be kept on the shelf. To ‘go over’ or ‘run through’ Aesop meant to bring to mind all the many occasions on which you had heard the stories of Aesop told at public assemblies, at dinner parties, and in private conversation. Aesop’s fables and the anecdotes about Aesop’s famous exploits were clearly a familiar way of speaking in classical Greece, a body of popular knowledge that was meant to be regularly ‘gone over’ and brought to mind as needed.

  Over time, as writing penetrated more and more deeply into the ancient Greek and then the Roman world, the fables of Aesop became known as both a written and as an oral tradition. The oldest extant collection of written fables is the work of Phaedrus, a freedman poet of ancient Rome who composed his fables in verse sometime in the early first century CE. Not long afterwards, an otherwise unknown poet named Babrius set about composing fables in Greek verse. By writing their fables in verse, both Phaedrus and Babrius openly declared their literary aspirations and paved the way for later experiments in versifying the fables, such as the medieval fables of the poetess Marie de France or her later compatriot Jean de La Fontaine, whose verse fables are one of the masterpieces of French literature. In addition to attracting the interest of the poets, Aesopic fables were also put into collections that were used for teaching purposes by the grammarians and rhetoricians (the fables of Aphthonius, dating to the fourth century CE, belong in this category). Yet while some of the fables were recorded in the handbooks of the grammarians and rhetoricians, Aesop’s fables were not considered ‘children’s literature’ in the ancient world. In fact, this notion of a children’s Aesop begins only with early modern collections of fables such as Roger L’Estrange’s English translation of 1692, which aimed to ‘initiate the Children into some sort of Sense and Understanding of their Duty’. The Aesop’s fables of ancient Greece and Rome were told by and for adults, not children. This does not mean, however, that the ancient fables did not serve a didactic purpose. Quite the opposite, in fact: the didactic morals of the fables are one of the most characteristic elements of the genre.

  The Moral of the Story

  While there is no hard and fast definition of an Aesopic fable, it is the moral of the story that most clearly distinguishes the fables from other kinds of humorous anecdotes or jokes: jokes have punch-lines but fables have morals. Typically, the moral of the story is expressed by one of the characters in the story’s very last words, the same position occupied by the punch-line of a joke. Unlike a punch-line, however, a moral conveys a message or lesson. The character who pronounces the moral verbally corrects a mistaken judgement, which might be his own mistaken judgement or that of another character in the story. Consider, for example, the story of the wild ass, or onager, and the domesticated donkey (Fable 4):

  An onager saw a donkey standing in the sunshine. The onager approached the donkey and congratulated him on his good physical condition and excellent diet. Later on, the onager saw that same donkey bearing a load on his back and being harried by a driver who was beating the donkey from behind with a club. The onager then declared, ‘Well, I am certainly not going to admire your good fortune any longer, seeing as you pay such a high price for your prosperity!’

  In this case, the story is based on a single character: the onager. The story opens as the onager makes a mistaken judgement: he thinks that the fat donkey standing in the sunshine is leading an enviable life. Later on, when the onager sees the hard labour and abuse that afflict the donkey, he realizes that he was mistaken and
he voices his new understanding in the fable’s final words. Although the onager nominally directs his words at the donkey (‘I am certainly not going to admire your good fortune any longer’), the fable is oriented around a single character whose conscious thoughts are revealed in the fable and expressed in speech: the wise onager says aloud the lesson he has learned.

  Other fables are based on a dramatic interaction between two characters, as in the famous story of the fox and the lion in the cave (Fable 18):

  A lion had grown old and weak. He pretended to be sick, which was just a ruse to make the other animals come and pay their respects so that he could eat them all up, one by one. The fox also came to see the lion, but she greeted him from outside the cave. The lion asked the fox why she didn’t come in. The fox replied, ‘Because I see the tracks of those going in, but none coming out.’

  In this story, the lion is trying to lead the fox into making a potentially fatal mistake, walking into his cave as all the other foolish animals did before her. The fox, however, is not fooled, and she explains her wise reasoning in the fable’s final words. The dramatic tension between the fox and the lion is resolved in the fox’s favour, and the lion has to go hungry. Both of these fables are positive exempla in which the onager and the fox provide examples worthy of imitation: ‘be like the onager: don’t envy the fat donkeys!’ or ‘be like the fox: watch out for those lions!’

  In many cases, however, the Aesopic fable provides a negative exemplum, an example of some foolish behaviour or mistaken judgement which we would do well to avoid. Greedy creatures, for example, regularly come to a bad end in Aesop, as in the story of the deer and the vine (Fable 80):

  A deer who was being pursued by hunters hid under a grapevine. When the hunters had passed by, she turned her head and began to eat the leaves of the vine. One of the hunters came back, and when he saw the deer he hurled his javelin and struck her. As she was dying, the deer groaned to herself, ‘It serves me right, since I injured the vine that saved me!’