Fables of Aesop [antikvár]

5 Introduction I. the fable in greece before aesop Popular stories of one sort and another have existed in every place and age; and since primitive man has usually lived in close contact with wild and domesuc animals, it was natural for him to invent stories describing imaginary adventures of animals and to make them aa and speak with motives and emodons proper to human beings. The special charaaeristic of the fable is that it is designed, or can easily be adapted, to teach a lesson in morality or prudence. In a good fable the lesson is implicit in the narranve itself, so that he who runs may read it; but in course of time most fables were provided with a 'moral' - an explicit statement of the teaching which they were intended to convey. This method of impaning simple instruaion for the wise conduct of life is ingenious, striking, and effective. It has so caught men's fancy that many peoples have a corpus of fables either adapted firom or modelled on some of those which have been in existence for centuries. There are no fables in the Homeric poems, but a few occur in Greek poetry as early as the eighth or seventh century b.c. The Boeouan poet Hesiod* narrates a story of a hawk and a m'ght^ ingale (compare No. 73 in this selection). The fragments of Archilochus.f a poet of the island of Paros, contain parts of at least two fables - that of the eagle and the vixen (No. 67 below), and one about a fox and a monkey (perhaps siinilar to No. 5). These poems are several centuries earlier than the earliest known fables of any other country. A collection of Indian fables, which was formerly supposed to have been a model for Greek fables, is now known to contain nothing earlier than the fourth century, and most of it is probably of much later origin. Moreover, the parallelism between the * Works and Days, 202-12. f Frag. 89 if., 81 fK (Diehl). xiii