Aesop's Fables: Encyclopedia II - Aesop's Fables - Origins

Aesop's Fables - Origins

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the fables were invented by a slave named Aesop who lived in Ancient Greece during the 6th century BC. While some suggested that Aesop did not actually exist, and that the fables attributed to him are folktales of unknown origins, Aesop was indeed mentioned in several other Ancient Greek works – Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses; and Demetrius of Phalerum compiled the fables into a set of ten books (Lopson Aisopeion sunagogai) for the use of orators, which had been lost. There was also an edition in elegiac verse by an anonymous author, which was often cited in the Suda.

The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin was done by Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus in this first century AD, although at least one fable had already been translated by the poet Ennius. Avianus also translated forty two of the fables into Latin elegiacs, probably in the 4th century AD.

The collection under the name of Aesop's Fables evolved from the late Greek version of Babrius, who turned them into choliambic verses, at an uncertain time between 3rd century BC and 3rd century AD. In about 100 BC, Indian philosopher Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, from where Andreopulos translated back to Greek, since original Greek scripts had all been lost. In the 9th century, Ignatius Diaconus, created a version of fifty-five fables in choliambic tetrameters, into which stories from Oriental sources were added. From these collections the 14th-century monk Maximus Planudes compiled the collection which has come down under the name of Aesop.

In 1484, William Caxton, the first printer of books in English, printed a version of Aesop's Fables, which was brought up to date by Sir Roger L'Estrange in 1692. An example of the fables in Caxton's collection follows:

The most reproduced modern English translations were made by Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814 – 1900). Ben E. Perry, the editor of Aesopic fables of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library, compiled a numbered index by type. The edition by Olivia Temple and Robert Temple, titled The Complete Fables by Aesop, is presented as the most complete, unexpurgated version, though more fables are available in the Loeb Classical Library volumes. More recently, A translation by Laura Gibbs was published by Oxford world's classics. It includes 600 fables and has selections from all the major Greek and Latin sources.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Origins", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki