Aesop is the Homer of the animal fable, both figures of uncertain historicity, but personifying in a single teller of tales myriad performers of traditional oral narratives in their respective genres. Minna Skafte Jensen in Writing Homer: A Study Based on Results from Modern Fieldwork (2011) describes the inherent thoughtfulness, insight and “inclusivity” of these traditional art forms, performed before live auditors year after year, at festival after festival, hearthside to hearthside, face-to-face with diverse audiences to whom the storytellers look for mutual understanding and appreciative response. Epic poems “are so sophisticated,” she argues, “because they were orally composed” (my emphasis, 213). The same could be said of Aesop’s fables whose comparative simplicity and succinct thematic punch make them instantly memorable and applicable to multiple familiar situations in their auditors’ experience, anecdotes appropriate to all epochs, age-groups, genders and social classes. The thrust of these tales is universalized by their popular and quotidian appeal in which human voices are ventriloquized through animal or other commonplace interlocutors. As Ezra Pound says in his ABC of Reading (1934): “literature is news that stays news,” in this case offering trenchant observations of human behavior and eventuality through colorful cartoonlike characters. Aesop’s fables are the “funny pages” of the ancient world, generalizing the news of the day into the human condition.
The figure of Aesop may not be impaired by physical blindness like Homer, who thus gained deeper insight into human character through his handicap, but the imagined slave is similarly enabled by his social impairment, just like the black slave Uncle Remus in a later age, an invention of the southern American Joel Chandler Harris (1881). Aesop’s servile status provides him with a distinctively upward insight, a “worm’s-eye view” of human foibles. This is neither the superior perspective of Juvenal looking down on the sins and follies of his fellow Romans from the moral high ground nor the more “latitudinarian” amusement of Horace who sometimes includes himself in his satires, but rather “bottom-up” like that of the pilgrim-narrator in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales who saw so much more of his fellow travelers from below. “No man is a hero to his valet,” said Otto von Bismarck, so that the Greek slave, even if imaginary, had more than ample opportunity to observe the behavior of his betters. It also gave him a certain impunity for his acerbic honesty and satirical barbs, as illustrated in the biographical fables in which Aesop himself figures. Here, the shrewd sage can speak his mind and utter home-truths to master and mistress or others since, like Diogenes the Cynic, he can fall no further in the social pecking order.
Waterfield’s anthology renders neatly into colloquial modern English prose the 398 Greek prose and Latin verse fables that he has culled from the 725 examples published in Ben Edwin Perry’s standard edition Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him (1952), though he sometimes chooses an alternate form of the same or similar fable “from Latin where Perry printed the Greek version, or vice versa” (p. 321). For the most part, these renderings are straightforward and unexceptional, and thus faithful to Aesop’s simple and direct demotic style. Occasionally, Waterfield admits vulgarisms which have become more familiar in our own contemporary public discourse—words like f**k, s**t, etc.—which, though often apt and effective, may offend the taste of some readers or give them pause over offering the volume as a gift to children. Examples include, “Why We Examine Our Own Shit” (#333, p. 262) or “A Mother and Her Foolish Daughter” (#351, p. 274), the latter involving bestiality with a donkey, the f-word and a naïve girl who loses her virginity. Other fables may offend the sensibilities of our contemporary moment in time as well, expressing a degree of trans- or homophobia as in “Prometheus’s Errors” (#392, p. 301), “Zeus and Shame” (#398, p. 304) or “The Hyena Couple” (#203, p. 166), this last one referencing modes of intercourse once quietly omitted from such collections or euphemized in translation, depictions of what Waterfield feels comfortable rendering simply as “anal sex.”
The tales have been organized by the translator into clusters according to the kinds of protagonists or interlocutors involved:
Inanimate Objects or Parts of the Human Body
Trees and Plants
Insects, Invertebrates and Arachnids
Rodents, Insectivores and Small Mammals
Birds
Birds of Prey
Reptiles and Amphibians
Fish and Other Sea Creatures
Cats, Dogs and Farmyard Animals
Larger Mammals
Fox Fables
Monkeys
The Lone Wolf
Lions
Working Animals
Hunters and Fishers
Farmers, Smallholders and Herdsmen
Human Characters, including Aesop Himself
Other Mortals
Gods and Goddesses
This taxonomy, as well as the gracious spacing of these anecdotes on the page, makes the volume convenient both for casual browsing and quick reference. In addition, Waterfield has provided brief explanatory notes in the back, along with recommendations for further reading and a concordance to Perry’s Aesopica, indicating whether the translator has preferred the Latin or Greek version of a fable for his rendering.
This reviewer is most familiar with medieval vernacular adaptations, like the 167 tales in William Caxton’s Fables of Aesop, the first printed version in English (1484), but already anticipated in the prior century by Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” of a proud rooster and flattering fox, as well as in the Breton lais of Marie de France and her Ysopet ‘Mini-Aesop’ (12th century), 102 tales in Old French verse based on the “Romulus” collection of Aesop (5th century CE), itself a rendering into Latin prose of the verse fables of Phaedrus (1st century CE). All these collections of Aesop had “legs” for the future and are now known in various selections and permutations the world over.
What struck this reviewer upon rereading many of them in this volume is how much more piquing and provocative are the anecdotes themselves as compared to the stated morals of the story, the promythia or epimythia offered before or after, a practice apparently introduced by the Roman poet Phaedrus. The “point” thus expressed may be true enough as far as it goes, but is also often quite simplistic or banal, while the fable itself is more like food for thought, offering a worthy warning or cautionary consideration, to be sure, but not an infallible guide to life’s problems. For instance, in the fable of “The Coward and the Crows,” the interpretive gloss declares that it “is about people who are excessively faint-hearted,” whereas the tale itself could just as easily be interpreted as illustrating self-protective prudence, living to fight another day, which might be misperceived as cowardice by others. After the three repeated warnings of these cawing carrion-fowl, the would-be warrior declares: “You can croak as loud as you like, but you won’t be getting a taste of me” (#345, p. 271). As Waterfield reports in his note, this very fable is mentioned by Plutarch in his Life of Phocion (ch. 9), an Athenian general who told it to his overeager troops in order to suggest that wary caution and pious observance of omens may be just as important as rash courage to achieving success in war. Aristotle, too, saw Aesop as a fund of useful exempla with which to illustrate thematic points while speaking in public (Rhetoric 2:20), but the philosopher might just as well have included these tales in his Poetics, since, like Athenian tragedies, they dramatize choices made by their protagonists when the choice is not clear, along with the results of those decisions. The explicit moral of the fable is thus often rather perfunctory or flattening in its effect, sometimes even misconstruing a tale’s main point or purpose. The narratives themselves are heuristic. They function like contradictory proverbs cheek by jowl in the same collection: “he who hesitates is lost” versus “look before you leap,” for instance. These compendia of fables provide a menu of available attitudes, options or alternative scenarios, a multi-purpose repertoire of responses to the opportunities and challenges of life. They also supply useful insight into a hierarchy of competing impulses and values, and thus teach us something about ourselves, since we are querulous, put-upon and judgmental creatures at heart. So, just as Zeus complains at the beginning of the Odyssey that humans blame the gods for troubles which they bring upon themselves, so Aesop can teach us a lesson about our own double standards and misplaced view of our status in the universe. A ship once sank with all hands, Aesop tells us, and a witness upbraided the gods as unjust, punishing the whole crew simply because one bad apple had boarded the ship without their complicity in his crime. When a troop of ants then swarms over the complainer’s foot, one bites him, whereupon he angrily stomps on as many as he can. Hermes appears at just this moment to tap the man with his wand, asking: “can’t you see that the gods pass judgment on you humans just as you do on ants?” (“Hermes and Human Double Standards,” #386, p. 298).
The fables thus make fun of human pride and hypocrisy in general, and illustrate or even provoke our propensity for Schadenfreude, our less-than-friendly amusement or gratification at learning of the misfortunes, often ironic, of others. Plato in his Theaetetus 174a, as well as Chaucer in “The Miller’s Tale,” liked the one about the astronomer who was so rapt in gazing at the stars above that he fell into a pit below (“The Astronomer,” #360, p. 280). In Chaucer, the old carpenter John berates his college-boy boarder whom he believes has fallen into an “agony” by too much star-gazing while trying to prognosticate the future:
So ferde another clerk with astromye;
He walked in the feeldes for to prye
Upon the sterres, what ther sholde bifalle,
Til he was in a marle-pit yfalle.
He saugh nat that!
[The same thing happened to another “genius” with his astro’my;
he walked out in the fields to snoop
at the stars, to find out what’s coming,
until he fell into a compost pit.
He didn’t see that!] (lines 3457-61)
Other fables similarly figure ethnic or civic invidiousness, usually expressed among animal predators and prey, but also among human groups as well. The Samian native Aesop smirks at the spoiled and effete citizens of Athens, as when he makes a drowning Athenian pray fervently for help to the goddess of his city, while a fellow shipwrecked sailor dryly suggests that he might give Athena a hand by swinging his arms to swim (“The Shipwrecked Man,” #367, p. 285). “God helps those who help themselves,” Benjamin Franklin would later put it in his Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-58).
Aesop’s fables are indeed news that stays news, illustrating, celebrating, lampooning, sometimes even provoking the characteristic impulses of our common humanity with their singularly incisive snap. They rarely fail to raise a knowing smile on our part, sometimes wry or sardonic, sometimes smug and self-satisfied, but almost always with a bemused sense of recognition which is why they comprise a genre of such widespread and enduring appeal. They may epitomize the least common denominators of human experience, but that is precisely what makes them work.