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AESOP is the reputed author of a collection of moral fables, which, in various forms, has had a wide vogue and great influence in Europe. About the man we know absolutely nothing. The fables were shown by Bentley to be probably of Indian or Persian origin. The form of imagination which gives speech and other human characteristics to the lower animals is common and congenial to the early stages of thought, but it appears very rarely in Greek literature. We have an instance in both Hesiod and Aeschylus, and in one or two other early Greek poets, but not elsewhere. In placing Aesop at the head of the series of writers of whom Aristophanes is chief, we may recognize the fact that this "beast epic" is the earliest form of that humorous description of the faults of human life which, in its fully developed shape, we call "comedy." The Fables of Aesop were versified in later years by Phaedrus in Latin, and by Babrius in Greek. But it was another writer, now almost forgotten, who kept these fables alive during the Middle Ages, enjoying for many centuries a celebrity second only to Virgil -- the half-barbarous elegiac fabulist, Avianus.
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| This biography is reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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