AESOP (Gr. A'icrcoros), author of Fables about animals, gen erally with a didactic purpose, which have given their name to a whole class of stories, is supposed to have lived from about 62o to 56o B.C. The place of his birth is uncertain. He was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. When a pestilence came upon them, the Delphians offered compensation for his death, and the award was claimed by Iadmon, grandson of his old master. Herodotus, who ks authority for this (ii. does not state the cause of Aesop's death ; various reasons are assigned by later writers—.
his insulting sarcasms, the em bezzlement of money entrusted to him by Croesus for distribution at Delphi (Schol. Ar. Vesp.
1446), the theft of a silver cup.
Aesop must have been freed by Iadmon, or he could not have conducted the public defence of a Samian demagogue (Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 2o). Legend says that he afterwards lived at the court of Croesus, where he met Solon, and dined in the company of the Seven Sages of Greece with Periander at Corinth. But it is impossible to say whether there is any grain of fact in this con fused chronology. During the reign of Peisistratus he is said to have visited Athens, on which occasion he related the fable of The Frogs asking for a King, to dissuade the citizens from changing Peisistratus for another ruler.
The current stories about him are derived from a life, or rather romance, prefixed to a book of fables, purporting to be his, col lected by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century. This describes him as ugly and deformed, as he is represented in the marble figure in the Villa Albani at Rome. That this life, however, was in existence a century before Planudes, appears from a 13th century ms. of it found at Florence. In Plutarch's Symposium of the Seven Sages, at which Aesop is a guest, there are jests on his original servile condition, but nothing derogatory is said about his personal appearance. We are further told that the Athenians set up a noble statue of him by Lysippus, which furnishes a strong argument against the fiction of his deformity. The obscurity in which the history of Aesop is involved has induced some scholars to deny his existence altogether.
It is probable that Aesop did not commit his fables to writing (Wasps, 1259; Plato, Phaedo, 61 b). Demetrius of Phalerum (345-283 B.C.) made a collection in ten books, probably in prose, which has been lost. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, cited by Suidas, but the author's name is unknown. Babrius, a Roman, turned the fables into choliambics in the earlier part of the 3rd century A.D. The most celebrated of the Latin adapters is Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus. Avianus (of uncertain date, perhaps the 4th century) translated 42 fables into Latin elegaics. The collections, which we possess under the name of Aesop's Fables, are late renderings of Babrius's version, or Babrius was translated into Syriac, and back again into Greek. Ignatius Dia conus, in the 9th century, made a version of 53 fables in choliambic tetrameters. Stories from Oriental sources were added, and from these collections Maximus Planudes made and edited the collection which has come down to us under the name of Aesop, and from which the popular fables of modern Europe have been derived.
further information see the article FABLE ; Bentley, Dissertation on the Fables of Aesop; Du Meril, Poesies inedites du moyen age (1854) ; J. Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop (5889) ; i. The history of the Aesopic fable ; ii. The Fables of Aesop, as first printed by William Caxton (1484), from his French translation; Hervieux, Les Fabulistes Latins (1893-99). Before any Greek text appeared, a Latin translation of zoo Fabulae Aesopicae by an Italian scholar named Ranuzio (Renutius) was published at Rome, 1476. About 148o the collection of Planudes was brought out at Milan by Buono Accorso (Accursius) , together with Ranuzio's translation. This edition, which contained 144 fables, was frequently reprinted and additions were made from time to time from various mss.—the Heidel berg (Palatine), Florentine, Vatican and Augsburg—by Stephanus (1547), Nevelet (I6io), Hudson (1718), Hauptmann (1741), Furia (I8io), Coray (I8io), Schneider (1812) and others. A critical edition of all the previously known fables, prepared by Carl von Halm from the collections of Furia, Coray and Schneider, was published in the Teubner series of Greek and Latin texts. A Fabularum Aesopicarum sylloge (233 in number) from a Paris ms., with critical notes by Sternbach, appeared in a Cracow university publication, Rozprawy akademii umiejetnosci (1894).