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Delahoyde & Hughes
Orpheus
AESOP
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Over the centuries since Aesop, animals have come to be seen as belonging
to the realm of children. But Classical Greek fables are typically
subversive political critiques from the lower classes.
It is not certain if Aesop really existed. Greeks in the fifth century
b.c.e. thought of him as a sixth-century fabulist. The historian
Herodotus claimed Aesop was from Phrygia or Lydia and served as a slave
in Samos, and legend had it that he was ugly and had a speech impediment,
that he was freed by his master Iadmon due to his wit. Legend also says
that he was condemned to death for sacrilege, or that a crowd of angry
Delphians framed him for theft by planting a gold bowl on him and killed
him by throwing him off a cliff into the sea.
Nor is it known to what extent the fables that survive represent his
original work, which would have been passed down orally. Latin and Greek
collections in the first centuries a.d. are the first surviving texts,
although it seems that some bits were written down around 300 b.c.e. The
often cheesy morals tacked on were added in the Middle Ages.
For all their entertainment value, the world characterized in the fables
is pretty nasty. The powerful are predatory. And "Though Aesop clearly
sided with the oppressed creatures (i.e., the slaves and the common
people), he often showed how the victims victimized themselves through
stupidity" (Zipes 281).
Among the most famous of the fables are "The Fox and the Grapes," "The
Hare and the Tortoise," and "The Country
Mouse and the City Mouse." Lions, wolves, foxes, and jackasses appear
frequently.
Most will remember Aesop's story of "The Ants and the Grasshopper" as a moral tale of an
idle grasshopper playing and being generally worthless while the ants toil doggedly,
until a season when food is scarce and the grasshopper realizes that the prepared ants had
the right attitude about life all along. Take another look at this story. Unlike the cartoony
kiddie books that start with the backstory, Aesop confronts us immediately with "a cold,
frosty day" and "A grasshopper, half-dead with hunger" who "asked the ants for a morsel to
save his life." I know what you did last summer, remark the ants, somewhat sanctimoniously:
"as they laughed and shut their storehouse, 'since you kept yourself busy by singing all
summer, you can do the same by dancing all winter.'" Forget the puritanical cartoon moral;
consider this story as a slave parable concerning the workers vs. the privileged! And what
are the consequences? Not simply a bitter lesson learned, but apparently starvation!
Aesop. Fables. Trans. George Fyler Townsend. http://www.literat ure.org/authors/aesop/fables/
Aesop's Fables. Ed. Jack Zipes. NY: Penguin Books, 1992.
Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt, eds. Literature of the Western World, Volume 1. 5th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001. 595-611.