Aesop's Fables

This collection gathers three hundred fables under Aesop's name, in George Fyler Townsend's English translation from the Greek. Each is a compact story, usually less than a page, in which animals, gods, and ordinary people act on familiar motives and collect the results. A lion spares a mouse and is later gnawed free from the hunters' ropes; a wolf accuses a lamb of offenses it could not have committed and eats it anyway. Many fables close by stating their lesson in a single sentence.

The edition's preface and prefixed life supply the frame. Aesop is presented as a Greek slave born about 620 B.C., freed for his learning and wit, who told fables at the court of Croesus and in the cities of Greece and was put to death at Delphi. The fables themselves accumulated for centuries before and after him, passed on orally, first collected around 300 B.C., and retold by Roman and medieval hands; the collection bears his name because he fixed the form. Townsend defines that form precisely: one simple action, a hidden meaning carried by fictitious characters, and a moral so interwoven with the story that every reader draws the same conclusion.

A large family of the fables trains self-command. Hercules refuses to help the praying carter until he puts his own shoulder to the wheel. The thirsty crow raises the water in the pitcher stone by stone. The tortoise beats the hare because it never stops while its rival sleeps, and the ants tell the begging grasshopper that whoever sings all summer must dance supperless to bed in winter. Effort, patience, foresight, and invention are the recurring virtues; wishing and boasting are the recurring targets.

Another family teaches clear sight about oneself and others. The crow opens her beak to prove she can sing and drops her meat to the flattering fox. The dog grasping at his own reflection loses the meal he carries. The fox who cannot reach the grapes pronounces them sour, and the shepherd boy who cries wolf for sport finds no one listening when the wolf truly comes. Vanity, greed, and self-excuse appear here not as private weaknesses but as openings the world will use.

The collection is equally frank about power. The wolf needs only a pretext, not a reason; the tyrant's charges do not have to be true. Against this the fables set the defenses of the weak: the bundle of sticks that cannot be broken while bound together, the three bulls that fall only after the lion separates them, the mouse whose small teeth free a lion, and the sun that wins by warmth where the wind fails by force. The morals endure because nothing in them rests on authority. The stories let conduct meet its consequences, and the reader's own judgment does the rest.