Aesop

Nothing Aesop wrote survives, for the good reason that he probably wrote nothing. He is described by Herodotus as a slave on Samos in the sixth century BC, and by later writers as Phrygian, Ethiopian, hunchbacked, mute until granted speech by a goddess, and finally thrown off a cliff by the people of Delphi. The Life of Aesop, which supplies most of these details, is itself a folk tale: a collection of jokes and escapes attached to a name, written down some eight hundred years after the man it describes.

What we call his fables were written down by other people. Demetrius of Phalerum made a collection around 300 BC that is lost. Phaedrus put them into Latin verse in the first century AD, Babrius into Greek verse in the second, and Renaissance printers took them up from there. Every version reshaped them. The morals printed at the end of each fable are largely an editorial habit rather than part of the story, and different editors have drawn opposite lessons from the same animals.

None of this makes them less useful, and it explains why they read the way they do. A fable that has passed through a thousand tellers has had every unnecessary word worn off it. Two characters, one situation, one turn, and it stops. That is why a hundred and fifty words of Aesop can carry a whole idea, and why a reader with two hundred words of English can finish one and understand all of it.

The readings here use the V. S. Vernon Jones translation of 1912 for the plan and simplified retellings on the fables shelf. If you want the fuller versions, the Gutenberg edition below is free.