The legendary Aesop, whom Herodotus places on Samos in the 6th century BCE (Histories, 2.134), did not write a single fable with his own hand. The fables that have survived under his name were written in the centuries after his death, composed by a diverse set of writers who labeled their stories “Aesop’s” with little concern for historical accuracy. We are left with hundreds of tales and anecdotes scattered across the remains of Classical literature, in both Greek and Latin, in prose and in verse, each one with murky origins and dubious links to the life of Aesop. While this state of affairs poses significant challenges for the philologist and textual critic, the openness of the fable tradition, along with its simple style and moralizing tone, make Aesop a useful point of reference for investigations of early Greek thought.
The philosophical content of Aesop’s fables is perhaps best described as “popular” or “applied” ethics. Like other ancient satirical genres (e.g., iambography, Greek comedy, Roman satire), fables describe and condemn common varieties of misbehavior, especially greed, hypocrisy, vanity, and deceit. But two salient features set the fable apart from other forms of moralizing literature: (1) the drawing out of an explicit message in the form of a moral; and (2) the use of talking animals as protagonists. The aim of this brief reflection is to explore the relationship between these two aspects of the fable by looking at the role played by animals in the genre’s moralizing program. Why do animals feature so prominently in Aesop’s fables? And why do they talk?
Listening to Aesop’s Animals
Blurring the lines between human and animal, Aesop's Fables challenge our understanding of human behaviour
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