The Complete Fables Read online

  We probably owe the preservation of the fables to their utilitarian use by orators and rhetoricians, so we must not begrudge them their morals. In fact, as long as one realizes the nature and origin of the morals, they develop a kind of kitsch fascination in themselves, like taking an interest in ornamental teapots.

  The fables themselves are far from the sugary children’s stories that many might imagine them to be. Most of those children’s editions of Aesop are carefully selected and so heavily rewritten and artificially expanded that they have only a tenuous connection with Aesop. At least one hundred of the most interesting fables, namely the weirder mythological ones, appear never to have been translated into English at all, so that the fables as a whole have thus been ‘purged’ or ‘whitewashed’ and given a false image until now of a ‘classic’. But perhaps that is the reason: a classic is something which is arrived at by consensus, and the weirder of the Aesop fables might have destroyed that consensus pretty quickly if anybody but a Greek scholar had ever been able to read them. For the fables are not the pretty purveyors of Victorian morals that we have been led to believe. They are instead savage, coarse, brutal, lacking in all mercy or compassion, and lacking also in any political system other than absolute monarchy. With one exception the kings are tyrants, and the women who appear include a young wife who scratches and claws at her (evidently brutal) husband’s face, and one who is really an animal disguised as a human who pounces on a mouse to eat it.

  This is largely a world of brutal, heartless men – and of cunning, of wickedness, of murder, of treachery and deceit, of laughter at the misfortune of others, of mockery and contempt. It is also a world of savage humour, of deft wit, of clever wordplay, of one-upmanship, of ‘I told you so!’ So stark is the world of Aesop that it calls to mind two reflections: first, women were relegated to such obscurity and powerlessness that they were unable to influence the actions of men or ameliorate them, and were essentially slaves. (We know from an analysis of surviving legal speeches that in classical Athens a woman who was an heiress could be seized from her husband and children, forcibly divorced and married to a distant male relative whom she didn’t even know simply because she was the legal conduit through which property flowed within her father’s family, and a family property owner must be male.) Second, there seems to have been no general public consensus that compassion towards one’s fellow human beings had anything particularly to recommend it.

  The latter observation is an important one, for we probably tend to underestimate the ethical transformation of Western culture which came about as a result of Christianity. In the West today there is also much brutality, violence and corruption, but among all of that there is also a widespread public consensus that it is a good thing to be kind to children, to care about the unfortunate, to help one’s neighbour, to assist the elderly across busy streets and to come to the assistance of someone in distress who may be drowning or being murdered in the street. But these attitudes seem to have been absent in ancient Greece except in the case of occasional individuals. The underlying ethos of the world of Aesop is ‘you’re on your own, and if you meet people who are unfortunate, kick them while they are down’. The law of the jungle seemed to prevail in the world of men as well as of animals for Aesop. Perhaps that is why animal stories were so appropriate.

  The Aesop fables provide fascinating glimpses of ordinary life in ancient Greece. Details emerge of objects of daily use, such as wigs and dog collars, which are occasionally surprising. Through the fables one gets inside people’s homes, learns what mice liked to eat – and hence what was in the larder – how pets were treated, how sons were spoilt, how superstitious everyone was, how merchants and tradesmen thought and acted, how a farmer could take it into his head to set up as a merchant trader and set out to sea with a small cargo of goods, how frequent disastrous shipwrecks were, how mistreated the donkeys were, how a miser would bury his gold, how a master would buy a new slave, how one staved off mockery by quick repartee. Such insights enable us to have the kind of understanding of ancient Greek life which does not come from reading Plato or Thucydides. Here we are face to face with peasants, tradesmen and ordinary folk, not mixing with the educated classes. Coarse peasant humour is found throughout the Aesop material, and some of the jokes would not be out of place in rough country localities round the globe at the present day.

  The fables are essentially a joke collection. They are an ancient joke book in the same sense that Artemidorus’s Oneirokritika (late second century AD) is an ancient dream book. These collections were meant to be thumbed through and consulted for relevant items as occasion demanded. They were reference books of material intended for use.

  The combination of humour and barbarism so characteristic of the Aesop fables may have alienated many classical scholars. Certainly there are any number of scholars of a snobbish disposition who would think it beneath them to concern themselves with coarse peasant jokes and the doings of the man-about-the-market-place. Such factors must be involved in the strange lack of attention given to the Aesop fables by classical scholars, and the lack of a previous English translation of the entire corpus. Nor is any Greek text of them in print to my knowledge. Instead of issuing a volume or even part of a volume of Aesop, the Loeb Library published in 1965 a volume entitled Babrius and Phaedrus by B. E. Perry, the Aesop scholar. Babrius and Phaedrus are literati who took the Aesop fables and expanded and adapted them in verse in the first century AD. Why should they be given such attention, with carefully edited text and translation, when the originals are largely ignored? Babrius and Phaedrus are second- or third-rate adapters and of little appeal or interest in themselves. At the end of the Babrius and Phaedrus volume is a very lengthy appendix by Perry entitled ‘An Analytical Survey of Greek and Latin Fables in the Aesopic Tradition’. This section does not include mention of all the fables to be found in Chambry, nor is its information always reliable.

  We have taken great pains to get the identities of the animals and plants right because important points are involved. We are not merely being pedantic by insisting on calling a chough a chough. Choughs (sea-crows), now nearly extinct in Britain, were so common in ancient Greece that beggars took them around with them as many in London take mongrel dogs today, and ‘to chough’ in Greek meant ‘to beg’.

  Precision in the terminology also reveals facts such as that household pets in ancient Greece were not cats but domesticated polecats, or house-ferrets (galē); see Fables 76, 77 and 251. Only Fables 12, 13 and 14 of our collection actually mention cats (ailouros); in the case of Fable 14, about the cat doctor, the identity of the animal was probably changed when the fable was added to a collection. Cats came to Greece from Egypt, but until the Hellenistic period after Alexander the Great, they were rare or absent from Greek households. The famous fable (Fable 76) of the cat who was changed into a girl by Aphrodite is thus not about a cat at all.

  Translating the fables was full of perils, and there were a few words which were not in Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon. And with unusual words like diarragentos (Fable 193, ‘ruptured’, for a seagull’s gullet), the Aesop reference is not given by them while a Babrius reference (his Fable 38, ‘burst’, for woodmen bursting a pine trunk with an axe) was (although it has disappeared from the 1996 edition), thus perhaps one more indication of the disregard shown to Aesop by most classical scholars over the years.

  By virtue of our enforced familiarity with the Aesop fables, a number of ideas and theories about them forced themselves upon us. We began to notice certain patterns and clusterings, which I should take a moment to mention. These are related to certain strange anomalies. To start with one of the latter first, we thought it bizarre to say the least that the wild ass was several times represented as going hunting with the lion for game, which they were then to divide between them. Certainly the obvious fact that wild asses do not eat meat had somehow been overlooked here. Then it began to impress itself upon us that the lion fables were very similar, somehow more satiri
cal and political, than most of the other fables, and the fox tended to be a crafty courtier or vizier to the absolute monarch, the lion. And we began to suspect that there was in these particular fables an underlying intention to parody courts and monarchs. We had here a cluster of fables which really represented political satire of a wholly non-Greek kind, with a cast of characters alien to Greece, and where the fox was a substitute for the jackal. Few ancient Greeks had ever set eyes on a lion, unless they had seen the odd stone carvings of Naxian lions on the sacred island of Delos – which archaeologists like to point out are imagined, rather than observed, lions, inaccurately proportioned and looking like hungry hounds. If the Greeks couldn’t even carve a lion statue properly for a sacred site, why were they so keen to have lions as characters in such a large number of their fables? What was really going on here?

  The situation seemed even stranger in that the camel appeared more frequently in the fables, despite its non-existence in Greece, than the pig, which at least did live there. So why all these foreign elements? It became obvious that substantial numbers of the Aesop fables as we now have them are non-Greek in origin. And thus it was of particular interest to discover that Aristotle (as mentioned earlier) spoke in the same breath of Aesop fables and ‘Libyan Stories’. For the ‘Libyan Stories’ would necessarily have included Libyan animals, and Libya was notoriously infested with lions and jackals, and had many camels. A significant number of the lion fables are probably therefore some of those very ‘Libyan Stories’ which have otherwise disappeared and left no trace. They certainly do not appear to be ‘Greek Stories’.

  Fable 145 has a camel, an elephant and an ape – but none of these were Greek animals. This fable thus has to be of foreign origin. It also includes the detail that elephants are frightened of piglets. No Greek could be expected to know that. It would be something familiar only to people who had elephants. But who had elephants? The Carthaginians were later to use elephants to cross the Alps so, once again, the finger points at Libya. Fable 147 features a dancing camel. Who in Greece had sufficient knowledge of camels to be able to write a humorous fable as a joke about how a camel walks? This again points at Libya.

  On the other hand, a few of the fables seem to have Egyptian, as opposed to Libyan, elements. A clear example is Fable 4, which is actually a jumbled mixture of sacred Egyptian traditions (see its footnote). Another obvious Egyptian element in a fable occurs in Fable 137, where a bird-catcher is bitten by an asp (Egyptian cobra), which does not exist in Greece. (Of course, this might be Libyan.) What is not so certain is whether the Egyptians or the Libyans had bird-catchers who used birdlime. Such a bird-catcher is really a stock character for a Greek fable. But if a Greek had written this, surely he would have had the bird-catcher tread on an adder, since adders occur in various fables and are the poisonous snake of Greece. Again, some of the monkey fables are clearly non-Greek. Fable 304 describes a monkey sitting in a high tree observing some fishermen casting their net into a river. But this is most unlikely to have happened in Greece. And Fable 306, which concerns a monkey and a camel, is another unlikely story to emerge from the Greeks, who, in many cases, had seen neither animal (despite the urban Greeks sometimes keeping monkeys as pets).

  There are thus many anomalies regarding the animals and even, sometimes, the plants, which only seem explicable on the basis of attributing foreign origins to a substantial number of the fables. And as we have seen earlier there were foreign fable collections circulating in ancient Greece, none of which appears to have survived. It makes sense that some of them were absorbed into the Aesop collections. We are encouraged in drawing this conclusion also by virtue of the fact that B. E. Perry, in his study of Demetrius of Phalerum’s role in preserving the fables, discovered that his Aesop collection seems to have included less than a hundred fables, and he also demonstrated that several of those later dropped out of the picture and are not included in the text of Chambry. So, according to that kind of reasoning, it may well be that in excess of 250 non-Aesopic fables were added to the collection. A few of these may be very short, not particularly inspired, rhetorical exercises. But, certainly, there is plenty of room in the existing collection to accommodate a batch of ‘Libyan Stories’ and maybe some Egyptian, Cilician and other foreign fables as well. Fable 29, for example, is actually set on the bank of the Maeander River in Asia Minor and presupposes familiarity with the fact that the river’s mouth is at Miletus.

  Political satire seems to be prominent in some of the lion fables, as well as the curious role of the wild ass as friend of the lion. Anyone who reads over the fables in which the lion appears as a character will see that, in most cases, the whole nature of the fable seems rather different from most of the collection. A one-liner such as Fable 194 could easily be Greek, because it uses the lion only as a representative of strength, almost in an abstract sense. But Fables 38, 39, 41, 195, 196, 198, 199, 205, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 269 and 270 all seem to come from the same source. These sixteen almost give the impression of being fragments or excerpts from some satirical book of non-Greek origin, a work of political satire of rather a high literary standard and biting wit. And the strange character of the wild ass may be a substitute for some other creature who was indeed carnivorous. One possibility is that the fox was originally a jackal and the wild ass was originally a hyena. Such transpositions of animals are known to have happened frequently with the fables. The lion, at least, was renowned in Greece and could be accepted as a character, but since neither jackal nor hyena exists in Greece, the jackal was changed into the familiar fox and the hyena became another wild creature which could run very fast – but with the disadvantage that it was vegetarian and would have no interest in going hunting with the lion and hoping for a share of the catch.

  So much, then, for the possible origins of the fables now collected under the name of Aesop. As for the connections between those few fables in common with ones found in India, it seems that we will never know for certain in which direction the transmission took place. (The notes to several of the fables in this collection give details of their similarities.)

  I am convinced that the fables gathered here are of great importance, both for a better understanding of our past and as studies of human nature. The idea of representing human types as animals has the advantage of a profound simplicity, but is not simplistic. Anyone reading through the whole collection should be inspired to form a resolution to show more mercy in the future! Too many of the beasts meet with violent ends. The pungent American description of life, ‘It’s a jungle out there!’ could be taken as the motto of Aesop. The fables are certainly a wonderful source of wry humour, of gnomic utterances, of witty asides, of barbed epigrams. They are a delight – a rather horrifying delight at times – but then we have always laughed at people slipping on banana skins, so why not laugh at Aesop’s fables?

  Robert Temple

  February 1997

  A Note on the Text

  The text used for this translation is that of Professor Émile Chambry, published in 1927: Ésope Fables, Texte Établi et Traduit par Émile Chambry, Collection des Universités de France, Paris, 1927. Chambry’s edition contains 358 fables numbered consecutively from their alphabetical arrangement by Greek title. We have taken Chambry’s text to represent the ‘complete’ fables of Aesop for the purposes of this volume, although every scholar would probably alter the text by taking away some and adding others according to his or her own personal choices. There are many fables, some ancient, some not so ancient, which are not included in Chambry’s edition, but since we have no knowledge whether any fables are by Aesop or not (or, if he did write them, whether any survive), the ‘complete fables of Aesop’ is whatever the editor of its Greek text chooses to say it is. We have not entered into such disputes, nor have we included discussions of the textual history of the countless manuscripts of fable collections which exist, since that has been treated at length by others, such as B. E. Perry and Chambry himself. We mention these issues in
the Introduction only in passing.

  A previous Penguin edition of Aesop, a translation by S. A. Handford, contained only 182 fables, slightly more than half of the number which we publish here. In that translation, new titles were fabricated by the translator and numbers assigned at random. Until now it has not been possible to identify the Aesop fables in English unambiguously, but the numbering system now makes that possible. We have also been conscientious in attempting to render the titles accurately in English.

  As for the various Victorian and Edwardian translations of Aesop, they were not only limited in their scope, inaccurate in their terminology and sentimental in their morals, but the famous ‘translation’ of Croxall was more than half written by the translator himself. In this volume, nothing has been added to the text and the only changes or liberties taken have been to render portions of narration in the form of dialogue, in a handful of instances, without distorting the meaning, and occasionally to render, say, Aphrodite as ‘Aphrodite, goddess of love’, to be helpful to readers.