Aesop

Aesop was a fabulist and storyteller of ancient Greece, credited with a large body of short tales that were later gathered under the name Aesop's Fables. He is usually placed in the Archaic period, around the early sixth century BCE, and his stories, often built around talking animals who behave like people, have been retold for more than two thousand years in many languages.

Very little about his life can be established with confidence. Some scholars doubt he ever existed, while others defend his historical reality. The earliest scattered details come from authors such as Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato and Aristophanes, and the oldest surviving image of him is a red-figure cup from about 470 BCE, showing him talking with a fox. Sources disagree about where he was born; Thrace, Phrygia, Sardis and Samos have all been proposed. According to tradition he was a slave, first to a man named Xanthus and later to Iadmon, who freed him, and he shared his servitude with the courtesan Rhodopis. Once free, he is said to have served King Croesus of Lydia. The best-known story has him carry offerings to Delphi for Apollo, fall out with the Delphians and be put to death on a charge of sacrilege. That account is largely legendary.

Much of the popular picture of Aesop comes not from history but from The Aesop Romance, an anonymous and highly fictional life, probably composed in the Roman imperial period, in which he appears as a grotesquely ugly slave who wins his freedom through wit. Its episodes, along with a medieval version by Planudes full of folk elements, shaped the fabulist's image far more than documented facts did.

The fables grew out of oral storytelling and were written down later. Demetrius of Phalerum is said to have made one of the first collections, now lost. The most important surviving one is the anonymous Augustana, joined by the Vindobonensis and Accursiana. Modern scholars distinguish three kinds of fable: agonal fables, where two characters are in conflict; situation fables, where the difficulty is a predicament rather than an antagonism; and aetiological fables, which explain how something came to be. In agonal fables the story usually moves through three stages: a conflicted starting point, the free choice the characters make, and an evaluation of that choice through its outcome, sometimes with an outside figure who clarifies the lesson.

His influence has been immense. Phaedrus and Babrius adapted the fables in Roman times, and Jean de La Fontaine and Félix María Samaniego carried them into modern literature. In the Middle Ages they mingled with other folk traditions, and during the Renaissance they became standard reading in universities. Spanish translations appeared as early as 1489.