The life of Æsop, like that of Homer, the most famous of Greek poets,
is involved in much obscurity. Sardis, the capital of Lydia; Samos,
a Greek island; Mesembria, an ancient colony in Thrace; and Cotiæum,
the chief city of a province of Phrygia, contend for the distinction
of being his birthplace. Although the honor thus claimed cannot be
definitely assigned to any one of these places, yet there are a few
incidents now generally accepted by scholars as established facts
relating to the birth, life, and death of Æsop. He is, by an almost
universal consent, allowed to have been born about the year 620 B.C.
and to have been by birth a slave. He was owned by two masters in
succession, Xanthus and Jadmon, both inhabitants of Samos, the latter
of whom gave him his liberty as a reward for his learning and wit. One
of the privileges of a freedman in the ancient republics of Greece was
the permission to take an active interest in public affairs; and Æsop,
like the philosophers Phædo, Menippus, and Epictetus in later times,
raised himself from the indignity of a servile condition to a position
of high renown. In his desire alike to instruct and to be instructed,
he traveled through many countries, and among others came to Sardis,
the capital of the famous king of Lydia, the great patron, in that day,
of learning and of learned men. At the court of Crœsus he met with
Solon, Thales, and other sages, and is related so to have pleased his
royal master by the part he took in the conversations held with these
philosophers that Crœsus applied to him an expression which has since
passed into a proverb—μαλλον ὁ Φρὑξ, “The Phrygian has spoken better
than all.”
On the invitation of Crœsus he fixed his residence at Sardis, and was
employed by that monarch in various difficult and delicate affairs of
state. In his discharge of these commissions he visited the different
petty republics of Greece. At one time he is found in Corinth, and
at another in Athens, endeavoring, by the narration of some of his
wise fables, to reconcile the inhabitants of those cities to the
administration of their rulers. One of these missions, undertaken at
the command of Crœsus, was the occasion of his death. Having been sent
to Delphi with a large sum of gold for distribution among the citizens,
he was so indignant at their covetousness that he refused to divide the
money and sent it back to his master. The Delphians, enraged at this
treatment, accused him of impiety and, in spite of his sacred character
as ambassador, executed him as a public criminal. But the great
fabulist did not lack posthumous honors, for a statue was erected to
his memory at Athens, the work of Lysippus, one of the most famous of
Greek sculptors. These few facts are all that can be relied on with any
degree of certainty in reference to the birth, life, and death of Æsop.
* * * * *
The fable on pages 197-200 is a translation of La Fontaine’s metrical
version of one of the most popular of the Æsop Fables. La Fontaine, who
died at Paris in 1695, was a popular writer of drama and the most noted
of the French fabulists. Following this, on pages 201-214, are fables
from the Russian of Kriloff, a writer who for nearly twenty years was
one of the librarians at the Imperial Public Library at St. Petersburg,
in which city he died in 1844.