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, as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel . Here he is shown wearing 15th Century German clothing]] Aesop's Fables or '''Aesopica''' refers to a collection of Fable s credited to Aesop ( 620 – 560 BC ), a Slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece . Aesop's Fables have become a Blanket Term for collections of brief fables, usually involving Personified animals. The fables remain a popular choice for Moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as '' The Fox And The Grapes '' (from which the Idiom "sour grapes" was derived), '' The Tortoise And The Hare '', '' The North Wind And The Sun '' and '' The Boy Who Cried Wolf '', are well-known throughout the world. Apollonius Of Tyana , the 1st Century AD Philosopher , is recorded as having said about Aesop: :"...like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. ( Philostratus , '' Life Of Apollonius Of Tyana '', Book V:14) AESOP See Also: Aesop Aesop (from the Greek '''' — '''''Aisopos'''''), famous for his Fable s, was a slave who lived mid-sixth century BC, in Ancient Greece. The place of Aesop's birth is uncertain. All — Thrace , Phrygia , Ethiopia , Egypt , Samos , Athens and Sardis — claim the honor. Little is known about him from credible records, except that he was at one point freed from slavery and that he eventually died in Delphi . In fact, the obscurity shrouding his life has led some scholars to deny his existence altogether. ORIGINS According to the Greek Historian Herodotus , the fables were invented by a slave named Aesop, who lived in Ancient Greece during the 6th Century BC . While some suggested that Aesop did not actually exist, and that the fables attributed to him are Folktale s of unknown origins, Aesop was indeed mentioned in several other Ancient Greek works – Aristophanes , in his comedy '' The Wasps '', represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in '' Phaedo '' that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses; and Demetrius Of Phalerum compiled the fables into a set of ten books (''Lopson Aisopeion sunagogai'') for the use of orators, which had been lost. There was also an edition in Elegiac verse by an anonymous author, which was often cited in the '' Suda ''. The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin was done by Phaedrus , a Freedman of Augustus in this 1st century AD, although at least one fable had already been translated by the poet Ennius . Avianus also translated forty two of the fables into Latin elegiacs, probably in the 4th Century AD . The collection under the name of Aesop's Fables evolved from the late Greek version of and other Indian story-books, including the Buddhist Jatakas ."''Ben E. Perry, "Introduction", p. xix, in ''Babrius and Phaedrus'' (1965) In the 9th Century , Ignatius Diaconus , created a version of fifty-five fables in choliambic Tetrameter s, into which stories from Oriental sources were added, ultimately mutated from the Sanskrit '' Panchatantra ''. From these collections the 14th-century monk Maximus Planudes compiled the collection which has come down under the name of Aesop.D.L. Ashliman, "Introduction", p. xxii, in ''Aesop's Fables'' (2003) On March 26 1484 , William Caxton , the first Printer of books in English , printed a version of Aesop's Fables. {Link without Title} . An example of the fables in Caxton's collection follows: Caxton's version was brought up to date by Sir Roger L'Estrange in 1692 . However, the most reproduced modern English translations were made by Rev. George Fyler Townsend ( 1814 – 1900 ). Ben E. Perry , the editor of Aesopic fables of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library , compiled a numbered index by type. The edition by Olivia Temple and Robert Temple , titled ''The Complete Fables by Aesop'', although the fables are not complete here since fables from Babrius, Phaedrus and other major ancient sources have been omitted. More recently, in 2002 a translation by Laura Gibbs was published by Oxford World's Classics, entitled ''Aesop's Fables''. This book includes 359 fables and has selections from all the major Greek and Latin sources. AESOP'S FABLES IN OTHER LANGUAGES
ADAPTATIONS
LIST OF SOME FABLES BY AESOP Aesop's most famous fables include:
A famous fable commonly mis-attributed to Aesop is '' The Scorpion And The Frog ''. SEE ALSO NOTES SOURCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
;Full Librivox Audio Book Catalog of Downloadable .iso CDs - some have Aesop's Fables |
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