The Legend of Aesop (in a nutshell)
Aesop was an enslaved man born mute and severely disfigured in 620 BCE (over 2,600 years ago) on the Greek island of Samos. One day he was nice to a priestess of the goddess Isis, which made Isis happy. As a reward, she and the Muses gifted him with speech and clever storytelling. He eventually leveraged these skills to gain his freedom and got all rich and famous as “the guy who tells those stories.” In 564 BCE, when he was 56, Aesop traveled to Delphi and told some fables that the people of Delphi did not like. He then insulted their heritage and intelligence, which pissed them off so much that they threw him off of a cliff. He did not survive. Fin.
So, was Aesop real?
Personally I want to say yes, but I recognize that’s a bit of wishful thinking. Our earliest surviving reference to Aesop comes nearly 140 years after he died, in Herodotus’s The Histories [1]. All Herodotus really has to say about Aesop is that he was a slave, he was a known storyteller, and he was killed by Delphians [2]. I really really really think 99% of the stories attributed to Aesop weren’t his invention, and that 99% of the lore around his life is fabricated. I mean, he fully could have been a made-up person. But I want to believe! And I think that’s just fine.
Where did these stories come from?
Regardless of whether or not he was real, the lore surrounding Aesop tells us a lot about the ancient tradition of fable-telling. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), attributing these stories to an enslaved man suggests that they were either intended for the enslaved, invented by the enslaved, or both. The IEP further explains their analysis below.
Why would slaves be thought to be particularly appropriate as the creators and audience for animal fables? [...] First, many authors have noted that fables allow for the possibility of hidden messages. They allow slaves to tell stories to one another about the cruelty of slavery and how its effects can be mitigated or evaded, without communicating in a way that will get them caught and punished by their masters. The fables can also provide messages about how to successfully survive in a world in which the odds are stacked against you. […] Second, it is important to recall that as an ugly slave, unable to speak, Aesop himself is on the boundary between human and animal at the beginning of his life. His slave status would by itself mark him as being on this boundary. […] It is only once he reaches the pinnacle of fame, wealth, and influence—when he has left his beginnings as almost more animal than human behind and moved from the low end of the human hierarchy to the high end—that he makes the errors in judgment that lead to his death in Delphi. [3]
The IEP also argues that the story surrounding Aesop’s life takes on a fabulist message much like the tales attributed to him. Perhaps arrogance leads to demise would be the attached moral??
Still, my all-time favorite thing about fables is that this tradition of storytelling has been shared across many cultures for thousands of years, always adjusting to reflect the people who share them wherever and whenever they are. The fables that come down to us today are highly refined artifacts, linking us to a chain of ancestors that stretches farther into the past than we even know. They are so much more than stories by some dead Greek guy—who maybe didn’t exist anyway! They belong to all of us.
Epilogue
I hope you enjoyed this context corner for Aesop’s fables! I’ll be back next time with our regularly scheduled programming, but I hope this background brings you a whole new appreciation for these stories. It certainly did for me!
TTYL,
-Liz
Further Reading & Works Cited
If you’re interested in reading more about Aesop and the tradition of telling fables, I recommend this article by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/herodotus
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D134
https://iep.utm.edu/aesop/