Simple Yet Profound: On the Timelessness of Aesop’s Fables

Here’s a nice Aesopian fable, no. 61 in my recent translation of four hundred of the fables. It’s not one of the most famous and familiar, but it’s typical in certain respects, and so makes a good introduction to the fables.

A mouse bit a bull, and the bull set out after him, smarting from the pain. But the mouse escaped deep into a crack in a wall before the bull could catch him. The bull planted his feet and began to dig away at the wall with his horns, but eventually he grew tired, and he lay down and fell asleep by the hole. Presently, the mouse poked his head out, crept up to the bull, bit him once more, and retreated into the crack. The bull leaped to his feet but there was nothing he could do. And the mouse squeaked at him: “It’s not always the big one who has the power. Sometimes a small and lowly creature proves stronger.”

I call it (and all the others) “Aesopian” rather than “by Aesop,” because for lack of evidence it’s impossible to say anything for certain about Aesop, not even whether there ever was such a person. (I think there probably was, just as there probably was a Homer.)

The first thing to note about this fable—and it may surprise some readers—is that it is overtly political. This fable joins some others in proclaiming, hopefully, that the weak can sometimes get the better of the rich and powerful. Now, part of the Aesop legend is that he was born a slave and was given his freedom only when he was a young adult. So you might think it natural for the fables to take the part of the poor and downtrodden, but in fact more fables advise the poor not to try to rock the boat: the rich and powerful are simply so arrogant, brutal, and well-armed that ordinary folk stand no chance against them.

These warning fables resonate with a number of others that advise people to know their limits and not try to be other than they are; it is not just that a leopard does not change its spots, but that it should not try to do so. For the fable-makers prudence is the most important virtue—but by its very nature prudence does not make for extreme action.

So the fables—we know of over seven hundred—deliver inconsistent messages. They are a ragbag. From our childhoods, we’re most familiar with animal fables that have a moral attached. But in many fables animals don’t feature at all. We have talking inanimate objects such as walls and bushes, talking parts of the human body, talking humans and gods. And not all the fables are intended to deliver a moral. Some are jokes; some are aetiological (they explain the origin of something, like short versions of Kipling’s Just So Stories); some are just amusing stories.

But the fables do have one thing in common: they were definitely not originally written for children. The fable printed above is typical in this respect, because all the fables have the adult world as their background. At the most extreme, one fable tells of the incestuous rape of a daughter by her father. Quite a few others are sexual or scatological. Many are openly political. And the background world of the fables is not a very pleasant one: animals in the fables are usually brutal, cunning, predatory, treacherous, and ruthless; they mock the misfortunes of others, despise those weaker than themselves, and crow about others’ mistakes. These are surely not values that we want to teach our children!

Many of the animal fables, however, can be adapted for the edification of children. This has often been done in English over the decades since the political activist Roger L’Estrange and the philosopher John Locke called for the fables to be put to such use in the early 1690s. This phenomenon dates back to at least the early third century CE, when the writer Philostratus of Lemnos described the purpose of the fables as “teaching children about life” (Imagines 1.3). Nevertheless, they were not originally written or told as morality tales for children; they are not the ancient equivalent of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. And so none of the many little books containing fables for children is actually a translation of any ancient text; they are radical retellings.

As a result of these children’s versions, we are most familiar with fables that express the supposed moral of the story. Here’s a short one (no. 156 in my collection):

The Widow and the Hen

A widow woman had a hen that laid just one egg a day. It occurred to her that if she fed it more it would lay twice a day. But when she did this the hen became fat and stopped laying even once a day.

The point of this tale is that very many people lose what they already have by greedily wanting more.

Most of the fables have just such a moral. Sometimes the moral is given before the fable rather than after; some fables have both kinds, one before and one after. But in my opinion the earliest fables are those, like “The Bull and the Mouse,” where the moral is embedded within the story and expressed by one of the protagonists of the story. Or even if these aren’t the earliest fables, they retain the structure of the earliest fables.

The contexts in which the fables were originally told are significant. They were told by politicians (especially to put down rivals), writers of display speeches, philosophers, and cracker-barrel philosophers; they occur in poetry of all stripes, from the beautiful lyric poetry of the Archaic period (750–480 BCE) to the writers of coarse comedies in the Classical period (479–323); they were told in hearthside conversations, as jokes at symposia, and at other convivial gatherings. In all of these contexts, the fable had to be short, pointed, and pithy. As soon as we come across a long fable—and some of them straggle on for a few pages—we know that this is a later fable, or an elaboration of an earlier one. And another important reason for the fables to be short is that they were originally told not for a reading audience, but for pre- and even sub-literate audiences. A lot of the punch of a fable is also lost if the teller feels that they have to point out the moral of the story.

In order to retain this pithiness, these short fables have a clear, tripartite structure; quite often they consist of just three sentences. A typical fable starts by giving the bare minimum of information needed to enable the reader or listener to creatively imagine the scene. After this introduction of the scene and the protagonist of the fable comes the action of the story, and then finally a closing comment, which usually carries the moral or lesson of the story. Glance back at “The Bull and the Mouse”: it consists of more than three sentences, but this tripartite structure is plain to see. And this simplicity of structure is supported by simplicity of language. As the rhetorician known as Nicolaus the Sophist said: “The language should be rather simple and uncontrived…so that the meaning is perfectly clear and what is said does not seem more elevated than the protagonists, especially when they are animals” (Progymnasmata 11).

I can think of two main reasons for the proliferation of animals in fables. First, animal fables are bound to be lighthearted in tone, so that the sting of the message is mitigated. Second (and although the fables themselves also greatly contributed to this), many creatures had already been endowed with human characteristics by the popular imagination: the crafty fox, the savage wolf, the timid hare, the mighty lion, the foolish donkey, the proud horse, the patient ox. The fact that these animals had been endowed with such characteristics made things easier for the fabulist. If they wrote or spoke directly about human beings they would have had to spend time assigning the relevant characteristics to their human protagonists. This way, the stories could remain pithy.

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Robin Waterfield’s Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation is available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.