Aesop (620-564BC) was supposed to have been a native of Phrygia. At one point he was a slave but because of his cleverness he was able to gain his freedom and travelled to Greece.
The fables attributed to him are anecdotes which use animals to illustrate a point or teach a moral lesson. Many of the stories predate him and are found on Egyptian papyri dating almost 1000 years earlier. However, such was Aesop's reputation that most of the fables in ancient times were ascribed to him.
The fables attributed to him are anecdotes which use animals to illustrate a point or teach a moral lesson. Many of the stories predate him and are found on Egyptian papyri dating almost 1000 years earlier. However, such was Aesop's reputation that most of the fables in ancient times were ascribed to him.
Among well-known stories attributed to him are The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, The Fox and the Grapes and The Hare and the Tortoise.
The phrase "lion's share" comes from one of Aesop’s stories. In Aesop's fable The Lion's Share, several beasts join the lion in a hunt. When the spoil was divided, the lion claimed one quarter for himself, the second quarter for his courage, the third for his dam and cubs, "and as for the fourth, let who will dispute it with me." Awed by the lion’s frown, the other beasts yielded and silently withdrew.
The phrase "Sour Grapes", meaning to pretend to not want something because you can't have it, comes from an Aesop's Fable. in The Fox and the Grapes, a fox tries very hard to reach some grapes but, when he is unable to do so, says they looked sour anyway. The moral that accompanies the story is that "any fool can despise what he can not get".
The origin of the phrase ‘a taste of your own medicine’ comes from Aesop’s fable about a swindler who sells fake medicine, claiming that it can cure anything. When he falls ill, people give him his own medicine, which he knows will not work.
According to a 13th century biography of Aesop by Maximus Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople, Aesop was an ugly, deformed dwarf. The famous marble statue at the Villa Albani in Rome (see below) depicts Aesop as a bearded hunchback with an intellectual appearance.
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| By user:shakko - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, $3 |
Aesop's stories were popularized by the Roman poet Phaedrus in the 1st-cAD.
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| The fable of the farmer and his sons from Caxton's edition |
A later tradition (dating from the Middle Ages) depicts Aesop as a black Ethiopian. The idea that Aesop was Ethiopian is encouraged by the presence of camels, elephants, and apes in his fables.
The Pixar computer animated movie A Bug's Life was inspired by the Aesop fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. Aesop's fable tells the story of a grasshopper who spends all summer singing and an ant who spends all summer storing food. When winter arrives the grasshopper begs the ant for food, but he is refused.
In one of Aesop's stories a thirsty crow can’t drink from a pitcher with a low level of water. By dropping in stones, the bird raises the water level and is able to drink. In 2017 raccoons and chimps were put through the Aesop's Fable test, to see if they could learn to displace water to get food from a container. Many succeeded: the raccoons used their hands to manipulate the container in creative ways, and one chimp simply urinated into the container (which worked).
Source Daily Mail
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