Aesop's Fables (4 page)

Medieval imitations of Aesop led to a new word in French,
ysopet
(also spelled
isopet),
referring to a collection of freshly minted fables in the Aesopic tradition. The most famous of these
ysopets
are the Fables of Marie de France, numbering 103 and composed in French verse between about 1160 and 1190. Although she is celebrated as the greatest woman author of the Middle Ages, almost nothing is known about the person Marie de France, except that she lived in French-speaking Norman England.

The re-creation of Aesopic fables in verse form was brought to its highest level some 500 years later by another French-language poet, Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695). In about 240 poems, published in twelve books between 1668 and 1694, La Fontaine captured the essence of the Aesopic tradition with wit and charm. In fact, many readers of our era know Aesopic fables primarily through the graceful renditions of La Fontaine. The didactic nature of the fable, its pragmatic this-worldly view, and its roots in classical antiquity appealed to many other gifted European writers of the Age of Reason. Three additional names stand out: John Locke (1632 1704) and John Gay (1685-1732) from England, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) from Germany.

The nineteenth century produced two writers of beast stories deserving special notice. Possibly the greatest nineteenth-century author to rewrite Aesopic fables was Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who incorporated both traditional and original material into fables and fairy tales for primers and readers that he wrote in the 1870s to teach Russian peasants’ children how to read. From a different world, but still drawing on the same traditional material, was Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), whose Uncle Remus stories contain many episodes also found in Aesopic fables. The prevailing view that African-American folklore provided much of Harris’s raw material opens up the possibility that Africa may have played a substantial, but largely unheralded role in the development and transmission of Aesopic fables from the earliest times. Remember that according to some sources the man Aesop was a native of Ethiopia.

Many writers in the twentieth century have written imitations and parodies of traditional fables for their own social-critical purposes, but no one more successfully than the American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) in his witty and ironic Fables for Our Time (1940). Also following in the satirical spirit of Aesop, if not imitating his terse style, was George Orwell (1903-1950), whose Animal Farm (1945) is often referred to as a “political fable.”

The preceding list of editors and authors, covering more than 2,000 years of time and extending across the length and breadth of Europe, and beyond, illustrates the timeless appeal of the Aesopic tradition. Many additional names could be added to the list. Aesopic fables are a cultural legacy whose importance can hardly be overstated.

The history of Aesopic and Aesop-inspired fables in Europe outlined above follows a tradition beginning in Greece, nurtured in Rome, then expanded and brought to maturity throughout Europe, but this summary has not addressed the questions: Are similar didactic animal fables also native to cultures outside of Greece? And did such tales exist before Aesop? Both questions have affirmative answers, but supporting details are sketchy and sometimes ambiguous, as would be expected of evidence from the very distant past.

Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia have revealed the existence of collections of proverbs and fables featuring animals as actors some 4,000 years ago, and it is assumed that these tablets are based on even older material no longer extant. Did these Mesopotamian stories find their way to Greece and elsewhere in undisclosed prehistoric times, carried orally by ancient travelers? Or did the tales travel from Greece to Mesopotamia? These questions cannot be answered definitively, although experience with other forms of folklore and common sense itself suggest that some stories with universal application may well have been invented independently in more than one area, a process called polygenesis by folklorists. Furthermore, prehistoric travelers, like their modern counterparts, carried both material goods and intellectual property in all directions, both coming and going.

A large number of European folktales (especially the magic stories commonly called fairy tales) have their origin on the Indian subcontinent. Although the prevailing scholarly opinion of today is that Greece, not India, was the ancestral home of most animal fables, some of the latter country’s most venerable literary works feature fables similar to those attributed to Aesop, and I find it hard to conceive that ancient Indian storytellers traveling abroad would omit animal fables from their repertory. In my judgment, the storytelling paths between ancient India and the Mediterranean world were two-way streets, to the mutual benefit of both cultures.

India’s arguably most influential contribution to world literature is the
Panchatantra
(also spelled
Pañcatantra
or Panca-tantra), which consists of five books of animal fables and magic tales (some 87 stories in all) that were compiled, in their current form, between the third and fifth centuries A.D. This work was based on an older Sanskrit collection, no longer extant, dating back as early as 100 B.C. It is believed that even then many of the stories were already ancient, having lived long lives as oral folktales. The anonymous compiler’s self-proclaimed purpose was to educate his readers, a goal shared by publishers of Aesopic fables from the very beginning. Although the original author’s or compiler’s name is unknown, an Arabic translation from about 750 A.D. attributes the
Panchatantra
to a wise man called Bidpai. His name implies “court scholar” in Sanskrit, but nothing else is known about Bidpai as a person. Discussions of the fables in the
Panchatantra
inevitably lead to comparisons with Aesop, and indeed, about a dozen tales (or close variants) are found in both collections. Did the ancient Greeks learn these fables from Indian storytellers? Or was it the other way around? Again, a definitive answer probably will never be known, but given the rich narrative traditions of both cultures, it is unlikely that the influence was not mutual, with each side learning from and giving to the other.

Another great collection of didactic stories from India are the
Jataka
tales. Part of the canon of sacred Buddhist literature, this collection of some 550 anecdotes and fables depicts earlier births and incarnations—sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a human—of the being who would become Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha. Traditional birth and death dates of Gautama are 563-483 B.C. The
Jataka
tales are dated between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., but many of them undoubtedly have antecedents in older folklore. A number of the
Jataka
fables have close parallels in Aesop.

Born and nurtured somewhat closer to Europe, and ultimately of even greater influence worldwide than the previously discussed two collections, is the great compilation of Arabic short fiction The 1001
Nights,
also known as
The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.
Based on Nights, also known as Arabic folklore, this work dates back about Indian, Persian, and Arabic folklore, this work dates back about 1,000 years as a unified collection, with many of its individual stories undoubtedly being even older. Although heralded primarily for its romantic tales of fantasy and magic, The 1001 Nights also contains a number of Aesop-like animal fables.

The fable, in keeping with its simple form, is easily defined. It is a short fictitious work, either in prose or in verse, frequently (but not necessarily) using animals or even inanimate objects as actors, and having the exposition of a moral principle as a primary function. It has an obvious relationship with other simple forms of literature such as the folk or fairy tale, the proverb, and the riddle. At their best, fables are compactly composed and, like all allegories, gain extended, unwritten meaning through the use of symbols.

Brevity is the fable’s first requirement, with many of the best samples of the genre comprising only three or four sentences. “The Fox and the Grapes” (no. 1), with its mere three sentences, is exemplary in this regard. The first sentence sets the stage and introduces the problem: “A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air.” The second sentence emphasizes the futility of the fox’s efforts: “But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach.” And the final sentence describes how he salvaged psychological victory from physical defeat: “So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, ‘I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.’ ”

Viewed as an allegory—and to an extent all fables are simple allegories—the grapes represent any unattainable goal, and because from time to time all humans are confronted with impossibilities, the story assumes universal applicability. Interpreted symbolically, the story is thus more than the description of one individual seeking a single goal; it is the account of everyone pursuing fulfillment.

The crux of “The Fox and the Grapes” obviously is not the fox’s failure to get the grapes, but rather his response to that failure. In essence, he rescues his dignity by lying to himself. However, the narrator makes no value judgment here, and precisely therein lies this fable’s universal appeal. Each individual reader can respond to the fox’s self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.

The essential quality of a fable is that it delivers a moral teaching, or, at the very least, that it presents an ethical problem, with or without a suggested solution. Modern readers have come to expect a fable to end with a succinct, proverb-like restatement of the moral illustrated by the tale. However, there is good reason to believe that in their original oral form, Aesopic fables stopped short of this restatement. After all, a well-crafted story does not require a summary any more than a well-told joke needs an explanation of the punch line. It could thus be argued that restating “the moral of the story” at the end of a fable is an insult both to the intelligence of the reader and to the skill of the author. Nevertheless, collectors and editors of Aesopic fables, almost from the beginning, have provided their readers with tacked-on explanations of some, if not most, of the fables in their collections.

In many of the oldest collections this statement comes at the beginning of the tale and describes its moral application. For example, in
The Aesopic Fables of Phaedrus
the familiar tale of “The Dog Carrying a Piece of Meat Across the River” is prefaced with the sentence “He who goes after what belongs to another deservedly loses his own” (Perry, p. 197). Such a preface, known to specialists as a
promythium
(plural,
promythia),
was probably not intended to be read or recited with the fable itself, but provided the readers with a suggestion as to how they might best use the fable to illustrate a point in a speech or literary composition. Furthermore, these succinct summaries served as guide words in published collections, helping the reader to find a fable illustrating a particular point of view.

Attached to the end of a fable, the moral application is called an
epimythium
(plural,
epimythia),
and this is the position favored by most editors during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some instances the epimythium is not appended to the completed story, but constitutes a final statement by one of the characters. I offer but two from dozens of possible examples of this technique: “The Old Hound” (no. 126) ends with the old dog’s complaint, “You ought to honor me for what I have been instead of abusing me for what I am.” And “The Miller, His Son, and Their Ass” (no. 172) ends with the narrator’s conclusion that the unfortunate miller was now convinced “that in trying to please all, he had pleased none.”

What is the moral philosophy preached by the ancient Greek creators of Aesopic fables? “The Man and the Lion” (no. 80) concludes that “There are two sides to every question,” a view that could serve not only as a moral for this one story, but also as a motto for almost the entire body of Aesopic fables. Given the prevailing view that these tales were actually composed and assembled by many different storytellers and editors, it should come as no surprise that the fables, in spite of their nearly unanimous interest in moral issues, do not form a self-consistent ethical system. In fact, quite the contrary is the case. Paradox, ambiguity, and irony permeate the collection.

Folklore wisdom often contradicts itself from one expression to another. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is a familiar and ostensibly time-proven proverb, but then so is its opposite, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Some proverbs promote caution (“Look before you leap”), while others preach aggressiveness (“Nothing ventured, nothing gained”). “He who is not with me is against me” and “He who is not against me is with me” are equally familiar proverbial formulations with a biblical background.

Similarly, numerous pairs of Aesopic fables can be found that seemingly contradict each other. Are the contradictions unintentional oversights? Or do they represent the cynical view that there are no universal rules for ethical behavior? Here each individual reader must reach his or her own conclusion, and once again, that is part of the universal appeal of these fables.

My first example deals with the problem of vengeance. In “The Horse and the Stag” (no. 264) a horse recklessly avenges himself against a stag, but in the process loses his freedom. However, vengeful or hasty behavior does not always lead to injury. In “The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox” (no. 255) a quick-thinking fox successfully takes revenge against a spiteful wolf by telling a sick lion that he can be cured by wrapping himself in the skin of a freshly killed wolf. Thus the morality proposed by these two stories, taken as a pair, is neither always to forgive one’s enemies, nor to be consistently harsh in retribution, but rather, if the opportunity presents itself, to be cunningly clever in planning revenge.