The Complete Fables
THE COMPLETE FABLES
AESOP probably lived in the middle part of the sixth century B.C. A statement in Herodotus gives ground for thinking that he was a slave belonging to a citizen of Samos called Iadmon. Legend says that he was ugly and misshapen. There are many references to Aesop found in the Athenian writers: Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle and others. It is not known whether he wrote down his fables himself, nor indeed how many of them are correctly attributed to his invention.
OLIVIA TEMPLE was born in London and educated at a convent grammar school in Hertfordshire. She has published extracts from her diary and written articles and reviews for a variety of magazines. She is a figurative painter, with works in private collections in Europe, America, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
ROBERT TEMPLE has a degree in Sanskrit and is the author of eight books, including a history of Chinese science. He translated the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, and has published several articles about the scientific works of Aristotle. His book Conversations with Eternity includes studies of ancient Greek oracles and divination techniques. He is also a television drama producer.
The Complete Fables
AESOP
Translated by OLIVIA and ROBERT TEMPLE
With an Introduction by ROBERT TEMPLE
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1998
9
Copyright © Translation and Annotation, 1998 Robert and Olivia Temple
Copyright © Introduction, 1998 Robert Temple
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translators has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
9780141915784
For our godchildren
Camilla, Edward, Antony,
Niralie, Alice, Laurie,
Joshua and Benjamin
and also for Emma
Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Text
THE COMPLETE FABLES
Introduction
Aesop’s Fables – what a ring it has to it! Of all the names of authors from Greek antiquity, Aesop is probably the best known, more so even than Homer. But it is ironical that Aesop’s reputation should be so high when so little is accurately known about him or his work and when no complete translation of his fables has ever existed in English. He is rather like a movie star – everyone thinks they know him but in fact they only know him from certain roles he has played. The roles Aesop has played have been as a children’s storyteller and as a clothes-horse for Victorian morals such as ‘haste makes waste’ and ‘pride comes before a fall’ – no such morals actually occur in Aesop at all. The animal stories which parents still buy in quantities for their children’s birthdays bear little resemblance to the real Aesop fables. I hesitate to say ‘the real Aesop’, because so little is known about the historical Aesop that some have maintained that he never actually existed.
It seems, however, that he did exist. Although the ancient Life of Aesop, which existed before the time of Plato, consists largely of fantasy episodes of an already legendary figure, serious scholars like Aristotle and his school made attempts to sort out the fact from fiction and came up with the conclusion that Aesop was not a Phrygian (from Asia Minor), as commonly believed in their day, but was actually a native of the town of Mesembria, in Thrace on the Greek mainland, and that he lived for some time on the Island of Samos. (This information survives in fragments of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Samos.)
Aesop seems to have been a slave as a result of captivity. In Greek there were two different words for slaves, denoting whether a person had been born a slave (doulos) or had been captured in war and sold into slavery (andrapodon). Aesop was apparently in the latter category. But, despite this status, which rendered him liable to sale and deprived of all rights, Aesop appears to have lived the life largely of a personal clerk/secretary and even what we could call a confidential agent for his owners. He seems to have been a great wit, whose reputation for telling little animal tales in discussion and negotiation and scoring devastatingly clever points with them astonished and impressed his contemporaries. He thus became a legendary name around which all such witty animal tales clustered in later centuries, most of the surviving ones probably not actually written by him.
Aesop lived in the early sixth century BC, and one suggestion of his date of death is 564 BC, which may well be correct. One of the most famous courtesans of Greek antiquity was a woman named Doricha, better known by her nickname of Rhodopis, a Thracian who seems to have been seized in war at the same time as Aesop, since they became fellow-slaves. She (and possibly Aesop as well) was taken to Egypt, where she achieved fame all over the Mediterranean world for her irresistible beauty and charm. Charaxus of Mytilene in Lesbos, brother of the poetess Sappho, became infatuated with Rhodopis and bought her freedom at an enormous price. Charaxus was, at the time, engaged in a trading trip to Egypt, selling Lesbian wine. Sappho was furious with her brother because of this wild financial extravagance, and she wrote a poem ridiculing him. These historical facts help to anchor the dates of Aesop in some kind of chronological reality. The legends of Aesop’s association with King Croesus, on the other hand, appear to be pure fiction, as does a false story that Aesop went to Delphi and was thrown from a cliff while he was telling the fable of ‘The Eagle and the Scarab Beetle’, Fable 4 in this volume. (So widespread was the popular belief in this last episode that it is referred to by Aristophanes in The Wasps (1446) so briefly in passing that he clearly knows that his audience will be familiar with all the details of the story; that was in 422 BC.)
Since the best of the Aesop fables are full of wit and jest, it is not surprising that they were great favourites of the comic playwright Aristophanes. He refers to Aesop and some of his fables many times in his surviving plays. Some references are intriguing in the clues they give us as to the state of the Aesopic material in his time. In The Birds (470), written in 414 BC, one of his characters complains to another that he has not heard of the ancient lineage of the birds ‘because you’ve a blind uninquisitive mind, unaccustomed to poring over Aesop’. Thus we are led to presume that early collections of Aesop fables existed in book form. And two references in The Wasps are interesting: at 565 Aristophanes gives some indication of how the Aesop material was conceived, when he says: ‘Some tell us a legend of days gone by, or a joke from Aesop, witty and sage…’ And at 1255, two characters are speaking of drinking parties, one of them complaining about the violent behaviour and hangovers which they normally entail, but the other clai
ms: ‘Not if you drink with gentlemen, you know. They’ll…tell some merry tale, a jest from Sybaris, or one of Aesop’s, learned at the feast. And so the matter turns into a joke…’ The other character replies: ‘Oh, I’ll learn plenty of those tales…’
These references show that the more refined drinking parties, or symposia, at Athens in the fifth century BC featured repartee and witty stories, and that people attending them who wanted to make a good impression as wags and wits studied their Aesop, and made a note of remembering the tales which they heard (‘learned at the feast’), in case they didn’t have an Aesop collection ‘to pore over’ at home. A large proportion of the surviving fables are not only jokes, but are even what we call today ‘one-liners’. Aristophanes clearly thought of Aesop as primarily a humorist.
The popularity of Aesop is also shown by the fact that Plato records that Socrates decided to versify some of his fables while he was in jail awaiting execution (Phaedo 60b). The Platonic dialogues mention Aesop several times. Fable 196 is referred to in the dialogue The First Alcibiades (123a) in a very clever way. (This dialogue is one of the disputed dialogues of Plato, so that its authorship is not certain.)
But the deepest appreciation of Aesop in Greek times was shown by Aristotle and his school. Aristotle was a systematic collector of riddles, proverbs and folklore. He made a special study of riddles promulgated by the Delphic oracle, whose history he was keen to record. He probably collected Aesop fables in the way that he collected everything else, and farmed out their systemization to his pupils. Doubtless through the agency of his nephew Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander on his military expeditions, Aristotle seems to have acquired the Assyrian Book of Ahiqar, which contained fables, some of which were related to ‘Aesop’ fables. Aristotle’s colleague, Theophrastus, published a book of this title (in Greek Akicharos), apparently a translation into Greek with his commentary (now completely lost). Theophrastus’s pupil, Demetrius of Phalerum, then made a collection of Aesop fables – approximately a hundred of them – which became the standard collection for several centuries to come. If it were not for the efforts of Demetrius, most of the Aesop fables known to us today would certainly have been lost. He may well have compiled his edition of Aesop as well as his book, Sayings of the Seven Wise Men, from collected material in the library of Aristotle’s Lyceum at Athens, which would have been his ‘local university library’, as he was a student there for a considerable time.
Aristotle’s pupil, Chamaileon, also well known to Demetrius, made a study of the so-called ‘Libyan Stories’, which Aristotle says in his Rhetoric (II, 20, 1392b) was another collection of fables, since he there speaks of such material useful in making speeches as ‘the fables of Aesop, or those from Libya’. Several of these ‘Libyan Stories’ appear to survive in our present Aesop collection, as we shall note in a moment. Chamaileon, in a lost work (the fragments of which were not collected by Wehrli but only by Alberta Lorenzoni in Museum Criticum (13/14 (1978-9) 321 ff.)), identified the author of the ‘Libyan Stories’ as Kybissos or Kybisses. Chamaileon seems to have continued his discussion of fables from various lands by identifying a man named Thouris as the author of certain ‘Sybaritic tales’, which were also fables (these are the ‘jests from Sybaris’ mentioned by Aristophanes in The Wasps), and another man named Konnis as the author of some Cilician fables from Asia Minor. The author Theon, who appears to have drawn from Chamaileon, goes on to speak of fables coming also from Phrygia and Egypt. We must bear in mind that some or all of these fable collections may be represented in our present ‘Aesop’ collection.
Aristotle actually records earlier variants of two Aesop fables, Fable 19 in his Meteorology and Fable 124 in The Parts of Animals (see notes to these fables). And, in his Rhetoric (II, 20, I393b24), he tells an interesting story of how Aesop, then living on the island of Samos, defended a popular leader being tried for his life before the Assembly by telling a fable about a fox crossing a river who was swept away by the current. The fox became stuck in a hole in the rocks, where, being afflicted by swarms of fleas, she asked a passing hedgehog who had expressed sympathy not to relieve her of them because ‘These fleas are by this time full of me and not sucking much blood; if you take them away, others will come with fresh appetites and drink up all the blood I have left.’ Aesop used this fable to say that his client was wealthy already and, if put to death, others would come along who would rob the treasury, whereas he didn’t need to. Aristotle had spent a great deal of time studying the history of Samos, and it is highly likely that this story is accurate; it indicates that Aesop was a lawyer who pleaded before the Samian Assembly and, in doing so, used his own fables in the way orators would do for centuries to come. This particular fable is most probably genuine, but was later lost (and so is not in this collection).
B. E. Perry is one of the leading Aesop scholars, having published as much on the subject as anyone in the twentieth century, and it was his view that true Aesop fables were likely to be the ones with mythological elements. An example would be Fable 120, ‘Zeus and the Men’. Such fables tend to combine strange myths of how or why something came to be as it is, together with an amusing twist. Others would be Fable 73, ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, Fable 121, ‘Zeus and Apollo’, Fable 123, ‘Zeus and the Jar of Good Things’ (which is related to the story of Pandora’s Box), Fable 126, ‘Zeus the Judge’, Fable 210, ‘The Lion, Prometheus and the Elephant’, Fable 234, ‘The Bees and Zeus’, Fable 291, ‘The Trodden-on Snake and Zeus’, Fable 298, ‘The Receiver of a Deposit of Money, and the God Horkos’, Fable 319, ‘Polemos and Hybris’, Fable 322, ‘Prometheus and Men’. Fable 124, ‘Zeus, Prometheus, Athena and Momos’ sometimes changed its cast of characters; it is also known as ‘Poseidon, Zeus, Athena and Momos’ in another version, and yet another version was recorded by Aristotle in The Parts of Animals, mentioned above.
Not only did the mythological identities of the gods shift and change, but Perry accurately detected a tendency for the fables to become ‘de-mythologized’ as time went on. A perfect example of what he means is Fable 19, which features ‘the earth’ swallowing the sea, but we know from Aristotle’s Meteorology (III, 356b11) that in the original version it was Charybdis, not ‘the earth’, who swallowed the sea. As Greek culture evolved people became less devout and the old myths ceased to have any particular mystique. The fables thus tended to have their original mythological elements dropped, and neutral forces of nature substituted in their stead. In short, the fables became increasingly mundane and everyday, and lost much of their archaic quality. To detect these developments helps give us a feel for, among other things, how antique a particular fable might be, whether it might really be by Aesop or not and how debased a version we have in front of us.
Another aspect of the fables which Perry believed could help date them was a change in the usage of a word: logos. In the old days – prior to the Hellenistic period which dates from the reign of Alexander the Great – a fable tended to be called a logos. After that, the use of the word logos in that sense dropped out of fashion altogether. The word mythos was used instead. The ‘morals’ appearing at the end of many of the fables are of three types: some begin ‘This logos shows that…’ others ‘This mythos shows that…’ and a third type that begin in a different way, such as ‘Thus…’ Perry believed that the ones in the first category were all older than the ones in the second category, the former dating roughly prior to Alexander the Great, and the latter later in date in accordance with the change in the usage of the two words. This makes a great deal of sense and is probably correct.
In this translation we did not differentiate between the two, however, as we thought it would become tedious to have to have literally hundreds of occurrences of the Greek words. We simply say ‘This fable shows that…’ Anyone who is sufficiently interested in the relative dates of the fables to want to differentiate between the two categories can consult the Greek text of Chambry’s edition (see ‘A Note on the Text’). But we never trans
late ‘This fable shows that…’ unless it is either a logos or a mythos, and the fables without either can always be distinguished. As regards those, the thinking seems to be that most of them are later still, but, on the other hand, a few of them which are of an archaic nature may be the oldest of all. For the morals seem to have been added later than the fables to which they are attached, and the relative dates indicated by the morals are not the relative dates of the composition of the fables but of their collection.
Some remarks need to be made about the morals. It will readily appear to most readers that the morals are often silly and inferior in wit and interest to the fables themselves. Some of them are truly appalling, even idiotic. Because they were added later by collectors of the fables, we have separated them from the fables and print them in italics. Not all the fables have morals, but most do. (When there is none in our translation, they are missing in the text.) Occasionally one comes across a really literate and worthy moral, such as that appended to Fable 22: ‘Thus it is that what skill denies us, chance often gives us freely.’ Such morals were added in a more philosophical spirit. But the ones that commence ‘This fable shows that…’ can be taken as having been written by orators and rhetoricians who collected the fables for use in speeches and oratory. The morals were intended as guides to someone thumbing through the collection looking for an apt story for a particular use. For instance, Fable 77 ‘is aimed at people who pick arguments’ and, regarding Fable 74, ‘One could apply this fable to those who are exposed to disgrace As for Fable 120, ‘This fable applies to a man of great stature but of small spirit.’ Fable 185 ‘applies to the covetous’, Fable 234 ‘is applicable to those who suffer as a result of their own envy’.
Sometimes the morals even refer to specific situations in assemblies or courts: for Fable 289 we are told ‘…in the city-states, people who interfere in the quarrels of the demagogues become, without suspecting it, the victims of both sides’, and again for Fable 304 we are reminded that ‘This fable shows that by meddling in affairs which one doesn’t understand, not only does one gain nothing, but one also does oneself harm’ – a suitable rebuke to a citizen who dares to speak against a policy when he has not taken part in public affairs. And Fable 301 is directed against ‘men carried away by the strength of their passions [who] thoughtlessly undertake ventures…’, to be used against the demagogues who, in a passion, urge a heedless policy. And someone speaking in the assembly who wanted to urge the appeasement of a threatening but dominant power could use Fable 121, the moral to which identifies it as expressing the sentiment: ‘…by struggling with rivals stronger than ourselves whom we cannot possibly overtake, we expose ourselves to mockery’.