A similar fate is in store for creatures who aspire to be something more than they are, or who pretend to be something they are not, as in the story of the wolf and his shadow (Fable 265):
There was once a wolf who went wandering in the desert as the sun was sinking and about to set. Seeing his long shadow, the wolf exclaimed, ‘Should someone as great as myself be afraid of a lion? I’m a hundred feet tall! Clearly I should be the king of all the animals in the world!’ As the wolf was boasting, a mighty lion seized and devoured him. Realizing his mistake after the fact, the wolf exclaimed, ‘My self-conceit has been my undoing!’
In these two fables, the moral is expressed in the dying words of the principal characters, as the deer and the wolf confess the error of their ways with their last breath. Other fables end with castigation rather than confession, as in the famous story of the ant and the cricket (Fable 126):
During the wintertime, an ant was living off the grain that he had stored up for himself during the summer. The cricket came to the ant and asked him to share some of his grain. The ant said to the cricket, ‘And what were you doing all summer long, since you weren’t gathering grain to eat?’ The cricket replied, ‘Because I was busy singing I didn’t have time for the harvest.’ The ant laughed at the cricket’s reply, and hid his heaps of grain deeper in the ground. ‘Since you sang like a fool in the summer,’ said the ant, ‘you had better be prepared to dance the winter away!’
This fable depicts lazy, careless people who indulge in foolish pastimes, and therefore lose out.
In this case, the ant both refuses to take pity on the cricket and makes fun of him as well, using the last words of the fable to viciously correct the cricket’s mistake. The reader will of course notice that in addition to the last words of the fable spoken by the ant, there is an additional sentence, represented here in italics. In technical terms, this italicized sentence is an epimythium, something that comes after the story (Greek epi-mythos, ‘after-story’). The epimythium is added by the teller of the fable to make sure that the point is absolutely clear: lazy people will turn out to be losers, just like the cricket. In other fables, there may be instead a promythium, a moral that actually comes before the fable (Greek pro-mythos, ‘before-story’). Unlike the moral which is fully immersed inside the fable (i.e., the witty and vicious words spoken by the ant), the promythium or epimythium draws an explicit link between the world of the fable and the world in which all of us lazy people live. This link between the fable world and our own world is a key element in the fable’s didactic function, and a promythium or epimythium explicitly promotes this process of identification.
When fables are performed for an actual audience, the epimythium is sometimes needed to decode the meaning of the story so that the audience can understand how to apply it to their lives. Consider, for example, the account of Aesop defending a hated politician on the island of Samos (Fable 29):
Aesop was defending a demagogue at Samos who was on trial for his life, when he told this story: ‘A fox was crossing a river but she got swept by the current into a gully. A long time passed and she couldn’t get out. Meanwhile, there were ticks swarming all over the fox’s body, making her quite miserable. A hedgehog wandered by and happened to see the fox. He took pity on her and asked if he should remove the ticks, but the fox refused. The hedgehog asked the reason why, and the fox replied, “These ticks have taken their fill of me and are barely sucking my blood at this point, but if you take these ticks away, others will come and those hungry new ticks will drink up all the blood I have left!” And the same is true for you, people of Samos: this man will do you no harm since he is already wealthy, but if you condemn him to death, others will come who do not have any money, and they will rob you blind!’
In this account, Aesop tells a fable about a fox and a hedgehog, and the fox pronounces the moral of the story, correcting the hedgehog’s mistaken judgement: the hedgehog thinks it would be a good idea to get rid of those ticks, but the fox knows better. In the epimythium added by Aesop, who is shown here as a fable performer, there is an explicit link between the timeless, fictional world of the fox and the actual trial which is taking placing right now at Samos: the man on trial is a tick swollen fat with blood (wealthy man), but if the people of Samos remove (execute) him, then other ticks will come and drink their blood (rob them blind). This depiction of a fable in performance shows what might be called the fullest form of the Aesopic fable, in which the fox’s moral inside the fable and Aesop’s moral outside the fable combine to promote the fable’s entertaining and educational functions.
When Aesop’s fables were later recorded in writing, however, the role of the fable’s author began to hold greater and greater sway, so that the moral inside the story (pronounced by one of the story’s characters) began to give way to an increasing emphasis on the moral appended by the fable’s author in the form of a promythium or epimythium. In fact, what might be called the endomythium, the moral inside the story (Greek endo-mythos, ‘inside-story’), was sometimes omitted entirely, as can already be seen in the first extant collection of fables, the poems of the Roman freedman Phaedrus. Consider, for example, Phaedrus’ version of the story of the fox and the goat at the well (Fable 113):
As soon as someone clever gets into trouble, he tries to find a way out at someone else’s expense.
A fox had unwittingly fallen in a well and found herself trapped inside its high walls. Meanwhile, a thirsty goat had made his way to that same place and asked the fox whether the water was fresh and plentiful. The fox set about laying her trap. ‘Come down, my friend,’ said the fox. ‘The water is so good that I cannot get enough of it myself!’ The bearded billy-goat lowered himself into the well whereupon that little vixen leaped up onto his lofty horns and came up out of the hole, leaving the goat stuck inside the watery prison.
In his version of the story, Phaedrus provides a promythium in which he introduces in advance what will be the moral action of the fable. Having promised a story about a clever character and a foolish victim, he then tells how the clever fox tricked the foolish goat. But what about the endomythium, in which the goat would admit his foolish mistake or the fox would make fun of him? Phaedrus does not feel a need to supply us with this type of moral inside the story. Throughout his fables, Phaedrus consistently includes either a promythium (as here) or an epimythium, while he often omits the endomythium, the moral pronounced inside the story.
There are, however, other versions of this fable about the fox and the goat which do include an endomythium, in addition to the promythium or epimythium. Caxton’s fifteenth-century English version of the fables follows this tradition, reporting the vicious and witty words with which the fox mocks the goat, adding insult to injury:
And thenne the foxe beganne to lawhe and to scorne hym | and sayd to hym | O mayster goote | yf thow haddest be wel wyse with thy fayre berde | or euer thow haddest entryd in to the welle | thow sholdest fyrst haue taken hede | how thow sholdest haue comen oute of hit ageyne.
Phaedrus and Caxton, separated from one another by more than a millennium of time and an even greater cultural gap, are both telling the ‘same’ fable, but they do so according to different styles of storytelling.
Sometimes there is more at stake than style, and the contents of the moral become a matter of disputed interpretation. The moral inside the story may provide one lesson, with the moral outside the story reaching an entirely different conclusion. The story of the fox and the eagle provides an example of this kind of discrepancy (Fable 83): An eagle was once caught by a man who immediately clipped his wings and turned him loose in the house with the chickens. The eagle was utterly dejected and grief-stricken. Another man bought the eagle and restored the eagle’s feathers. The eagle then soared on his outspread wings and seized a hare, which he promptly brought back as a gift for the man who had rescued him. A fox saw what the eagle was doing and shouted, ‘He’s not the one who needs your attention! You should give the hare to the first man,
so that if he ever catches you again, he won’t deprive you of your wing feathers like the first time.’
The fable shows that we should give appropriate thanks to our benefactors, while avoiding evil-doers.
The endomythium pronounced by the fox is perfectly suited to the fable in which one character corrects the mistake made by another: the naive eagle thinks that he should reward the man who already regards him as a friend, but the clever fox knows better. The fox offers the eagle a quite practical piece of advice, but the point of the fox’s speech seems to have been lost on at least some of the later authors who collected and transmitted this fable. The epimythium takes a completely different approach, as if the eagle would do better to avoid the man who clipped his wings and devote himself to his benefactor. The author of this epimythium is thus hoping to make the Aesop’s fable into an illustration of gratitude, while the fox is advocating a strategy worthy of Machiavelli. This blatant contradiction between the moral inside the story and the moral outside the story has often aroused the contempt of modern editors and translators of the fables. Lloyd Daly went so far as to consign all the epimythia to an appendix in the back of his translation of the fables, which was defiantly entitled Aesop without Morals (1961). Yet surely this conflict between the endomythia and the epimythia is worthy of our attention, allowing us to glimpse what are in effect two different moral codes confronting one another in a sustained moment of unresolved tension.
Finally, a number of modern editors have also been disconcerted by the quantity of material in the ancient collections which does not seem to teach any kind of moral lesson whatsoever. There are numerous jokes in these ancient collections, as well as aetiological stories and allegories, myths and legends, and even contemporary gossip about the rich and the famous. For each of these related genres, it is easy to see what might have prompted their inclusion together with the fables in a collection. For example, given that the endomythium of a fable is so much like the punch-line of a joke, it only makes sense that other jokes and witticisms would be included in the fable collections. Moreover, Aesop himself was the subject of many jokes and anecdotes, and these naturally made their way into the ancient fable collections. Aesop was also a teller of riddles and an interpreter of enigmas, so these forms of folklore and popular wisdom can likewise be found in the ancient collections. In addition to Aesop, there are other famous figures of popular wisdom who appear in the fables, such as Thales, one of the legendary ‘seven sages’ of ancient Greece, as well as other legendary wise men such as Simonides and Socrates.
Animal Lore and Legend in the Fables
More than the human characters, however, it is the animal characters—the talking animals—who catch our attention in the fables. Modern readers are often surprised, in fact, to discover that Aesop’s fables are not strictly limited to animal stories. Yet at the same time that the fables so often involve animal characters, there was no special relationship between the legendary Aesop and the world of animals; Aesop was by no means an ancient Doctor Dolittle who could ‘talk to the animals’. Instead, Aesop talked about animals (but not exclusively about them), using jokes and stories about talking animals in order to make a sharp critique of human foolishness. We already saw how Aesop used the fable of the fox and the hedgehog when defending a politician on trial at Samos (Fable 29). Likewise, when Aesop saw some people celebrating the wedding of a thief who lived next door, he told a story about some foolish frogs in order to chastise the people’s foolish behaviour (Fable 436). Aesop was also famous for his aetiological stories, much like Kipling’s ‘just-so’ stories, explaining how the tortoise got its shell (Fable 508), how the crested lark got its crest (Fable 499), and so on. Given the presence of animals in so many of Aesop’s fables, it is therefore not surprising that over time some anecdotes and legends from the natural-history writers were also adopted as Aesop’s fables. There were many strange and fascinating legends about animals in the ancient world—stories about hermaphrodite hyenas, self-castrating beavers, swans who sing their ‘swan-song’ at the moment of their death, among others—all of which found their way into the fables. Likewise, there are also some animal stereotypes that come into play: the fox is often sly (but not always), the lion is typically brave (but not always), the rabbit is generally a coward, the peacock proud, and so on. Yet precisely because Aesop’s fables revel in surprise and paradox, things often turn out other than expected: the lion may be big and brave, but he can become indebted to a mouse; the wolf may be a crafty predator, but he can be outwitted by a goat, and so on. The encounters between the animals are not determined by any kind of rigid formula in Aesop: you can never be sure of what is going to happen when the wolf encounters a sheep, or when the donkey challenges the lion.
The animal characters of Aesop’s fables bear a sometimes uncanny resemblance to those in the ancient folktales of India collected both in the Hindu storybook called the Panchatantra (which later gave rise to the collection entitled Kalila wa Dimnah, a book which served as a source for many of the didactic animal stories in the Islamic mystical poet Rumi) and also in the tales of the Buddha’s former births, called jatakas. Like Aesop’s fables, the stories in the Panchatantra and in the jatakas are didactic tales that illustrate a specific point or moral, generally with talking animals as their principal characters. Yet unlike the disjointed Aesop’s fables, both the jatakas and the Panchatantra stories are narrated within the overarching structure of a frame tale: there is an external narrative, the frame, which includes as part of its plot the telling of a story, while the moral of this inner story conveys a message to the characters in the framing narrative. The jatakas, for example, consist of two parts: a story of the present, in which the Buddha is often mediating a dispute among the monks of his monastery, and a story of the past, in which the Buddha was incarnated as a person, or animal, or even a plant in a past life. These stories of the past, like Aesop’s fables, convey a pointed message meant to educate the audience listening to Buddha’s recitation in the world of the present. Similarly, the Panchatantra features elaborate framing narratives, as when the animals in the court of the lion king plot and scheme against one another, telling each other stories in order to defend their goals and strategies. In the written tradition of Aesop’s fables, however, we very rarely find such elaborate framing narratives. In a few cases, Aesop is depicted as telling a story in order to instruct his contemporaries, as in the story of the frogs told at the thief’s wedding or the various moments in the Life of Aesop when Aesop tells an illustrative story. For the most part, however, Aesop’s fables stand alone: they were not transmitted as stories embedded in framing narratives.
It is only in medieval Europe that a more elaborate narrative form begins to emerge with the medieval ‘beast epic’ stories of Reynard the fox, inveterate rival of Ysengrimus, the wolf. In the beast epics, the animals become self-aware individuals, endowed with memory, motivation and—perhaps most importantly—personal names. It is but a slight jump from this tradition to the horse named Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the famous pigs named Wilbur or Babe or Porky, not to mention Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and innumerable other cartoon animals, along with the extraordinary comic-book animals in Spiegelman’s Maus. The characters in Aesop’s fables, on the other hand, are still basically generic representatives of their species; they have not yet become specific individuals.
Sources of the Fables
Anonymous Collections
Approximately one-third of the fables in this book are taken from the anonymous Greek collections of fables attributed to Aesop, which consist almost entirely of prose versions of the fables. The dating of these anonymous collections is a subject of much scholarly disagreement. It is generally agreed that the first collection was the work of Demetrius of Phalerum (d. 280 BCE), who is supposed to have written a book of fables called Aisopeia, ‘the things of Aesop’. Except for (perhaps) a single fragment of papyrus, Demetrius’ book has disappeared completely and the relationship between this lost text a
nd the later collections of the fables is a subject of considerable study, based largely on conjecture as well as wishful thinking. While it is quite likely that Demetrius did compose this first written collection of Aesopic fables, there is no reason to doubt that he later had many imitators, and the anonymous Aesopic collections that have survived might have been assembled almost anywhere in the ancient Greek or Roman worlds with or without access to Demetrius’ Aisopeia. The Collectio Augustana (so named because its principal manuscript was at one point housed in Augsburg) is probably the oldest of these collections, dating to the second or third century CE (although some scholars date it later, to the fourth or fifth century). The Augustana contains approximately 230 fables arranged in alphabetical order based on the first word of each fable. It gave rise to two other major collections, the so-called Collectio Vindobonesis (which takes its name from a manuscript housed in Vienna) and the Collectio Accursiana (named after the editor of the first printed edition, Bonus Accursius, who published this collection of Greek fables in the late fifteenth century). These various collections continued to grow over time, as the authors of the different manuscript traditions incorporated the Aesopic fables that they heard or read elsewhere, until eventually there were over 350 fables circulating in the anonymous Greek collections, copied and recopied over the centuries by Byzantine scholars and scribes.
Phaedrus
The Roman poet Phaedrus was a freedman of the emperor Augustus who certainly lived during the reign of the emperor Tiberius and perhaps as late as the reign of Nero. This allows us to date his fables to the early first century CE, making the poems of Phaedrus the earliest extant collection of fables. There are approximately 120 verse fables of Phaedrus that have survived (written in a Latin metre called iambic senarii), of which slightly over 100 are translated in this book. Aside from the historical period in which he lived and his status as a freedman (former slave), very little is known about Phaedrus. Despite his great ambitions, about which he is very explicit in his poems, he seems to have made little or no impression on later generations of Roman writers. His poems are addressed to patrons named Eutychus and Particulo, but these persons are also otherwise unknown. Poems from five different books of fables by Phaedrus have been preserved in a ninth-century manuscript, the so-called Codex Pithoeanus, but not all of the books are complete. There are medieval prose paraphrases of Phaedrus that reflect a more complete collection of poems than what has come down to us directly (see below), and there is also a separate collection of fables copied from a manuscript of Phaedrus discovered by the humanist scholar Niccolo Perotti in the fifteenth century. This manuscript has since been lost, but Perotti’s copy was preserved and is commonly referred to as ‘Perotti’s Appendix’. The fables transmitted by Perotti do not, however, contain the promythia and epimythia (regular features of Phaedrus’ fables) and instead Perotti substituted his own editorial morals in prose, which are included here in the notes to the fables. It is not known what sources Phaedrus used to craft his poems. Presumably some of these were Greek, although there are many fables in his collection which are not found in any extant Greek source.
Aesop's Fables Page 2