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?
According to our ancient sources, the fable’s use of animals primarily serves to underscore the fictionality and lightness of the stories. The risibility of the humanized animal allows the fable to make its point without boring or insulting an addressee. So, it follows, while calling someone an “ass” might reasonably cause offense, fable-tellers can be more effective and more politic by offering advice or criticism with a made-up story. Take, for example, this excerpt from “The Ass in the Lion’s Skin” (Perry, 188):
An ass put on a lion’s skin and went around frightening the other animals (ta aloga zoa). He saw a fox and tried to terrify her, too. But she happened to have heard his voice and said to him, “I can assure you I would have been afraid of you, too, if I hadn’t heard your braying.” So it is that some ignorant men who create an impression of being someone by their outward elegance expose themselves by their own talkativeness (glōssalgias).
By bringing to the fore the fictitious nature of the story, animal fables entertain and establish that the only possibility of serious meaning is the interpretation; the auditor must listen to the moral and decide if the fable applies.
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"By toying with the conventional role played by logos in separating human from animal, fable implies that there are some humans who, left to their own devices, would prefer to live like animals."
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3rd July 2018
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