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Aesop's Fables (Signet Classics)

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great book. my kids just love the stories in this book. I love to read these stories to them also.cIt reminds me so much of when I was a kid

The biographical history of the person who was behind Aesop's Fables thought to have been intended as children's easy-to-understand literature. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even though he gave the animals human traits, as C. S. Lewis did in THE NARDIA CHRONICLES, they were meant for adults and gained wide recognition as they were passed along for centuries through oral (word of mouth, as many of his companions could not read) tradition. His start in life was lowly, born into slavery in 620 B.C. as a hunchback with a speech impediment. His early years were spent on the Balkan Peninsula, a part of Turkey, where "slaves toiled hard as miners, plantation workers, or if they were lucky, household servants. It was possible [then] for a slave to earn freedom (called manumission) through diligent work and loyal service." Freed slaves were permitted to "engage in civic affairs and to travel wherever they wanted."

Aesop served two masters during his enslavement, but was eventually granted his freedom because of his "intelligence, wit and tact as a servant." As he traveled and observed how underlings were treated, he began his story-telling (with morals) and, after a time, "his reputation grew as a wise and 'noble' man." He went to Sardis in Asia Minor where the King sent him on diplomatic missions to Athens and Corinth, and he used his fables to calm tensions. Because of his keen mind, tactfulness and honesty, the King trusted him to distribute a large amount of gold fairly to the citizens of Delphi, which at that time was "the home of the Oracle and the most influential religious sanctuary in ancient Greece." He was unjustly murdered by being thrown off a cliff around 560 B.C.

The people of Delphi eventually atoned and made amends for their crime against Aesop. "Lysippus, a famous Greek sculptor, immortalized the fabulist by erecting a statue to him in Athens." In 300 B.C., two hundred of his fables were compiled in written form as ASSEMBLIES OF AESOP'S FABLES. "Three centuries later, another freed Greek slave named Phaedrus translated the collection of stories into Latin for a much broader audience. About AD 230, a Greek poet named Valerius Babrius combined fables from India with their Greek counterparts and published the entire collection of tales in the most widely read set of fables in world literature today. Later they were translated into Arabic. "After the Third Crusade these fables, expanded by 60 new ones from the Arabian writer Bidapi, were translated by an Englishman named Alfred. Some of Alfred's fables, attributed to Aesop, were translated into English verse."