ÆSOP.
'Nature formed but one such man.'
BYRON.
'The hungry judges soon the sentence sign.'
POPE.
Æsop is justly regarded as the foremost inventor of fables that
the world has seen. He flourished in the sixth century before
Christ. Several places, as in the case of Homer, are claimed as his
birthplace--Sardis in Lydia, Ammorius, the island of Samos, and
Mesembra, a city of Thrace; but the weight of authority is in favour of
Cotiæum, a city of Phrygia in the Lesser Asia,[19] hence his sobriquet
of 'the Phrygian.'
Whether he was a slave from birth is uncertain, but if not, he became
such, and served three masters in succession. Demarchus or Caresias
of Athens was his first master; the next, Zanthus or Xanthus, a
philosopher, of the island of Samos; and the third, Idmon or Jadmon,
also of Samos. His faithful service and wisdom so pleased Idmon that he
gave Æsop his freedom.
Growing in reputation both as a sage and a wit, he associated with
the wisest men of his age. Amongst his contemporaries were the seven
sages of Greece: Periander, Thales, Solon, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias
and Pittacus; but he was eventually esteemed wiser than any of them.
The humour with which his sage counsels were spiced made these more
acceptable (both in his own and later times) than the dull, if weighty,
wisdom of his compeers.
He became attached by invitation of Crœsus, the rich King of Lydia,
to the court at Sardis, the capital, and continued under the patronage
of that monarch for the remainder of his life. Crœsus employed him
in various embassies which he carried to a successful issue. The last
he undertook was a mission to Delphi to offer sacrifices to Apollo, and
to distribute four minæ[20] of silver to each citizen. To the character
of the Delphians might with justice be applied the saying of a later
time: 'The nearer the temple and the farther from God.' Familiarity
with the Oracle, as is the case in smaller matters, bred contempt,
for the meanness of their lives was due to the circumstance that the
offerings of strangers coming to the temple of the god enabled them to
live a life of idleness, to the neglect of the cultivation of their
lands.
Æsop upbraided them for this conduct, and, scorning to encourage them
in their evil habits, instead of distributing amongst them the money
which Crœsus had sent, he returned it to Sardis. This, as was
natural with persons of their mean character, so inflamed them against
him that they conspired to compass his destruction. Accordingly (as
the story goes), they hid away amongst his baggage, as he was leaving
the city, a golden goblet taken from the temple and consecrated to
Apollo. Search being made, and the vessel discovered, the charge of
sacrilege was brought against him. His judges pronounced him guilty,
and he was sentenced to be precipitated from the rock Hyampia.
Immediately before his execution he delivered to his persecutors the
fable of _The Eagle and the Beetle_,[21] by which he warned them that
even the weak may procure vengeance against the strong for injuries
inflicted. The warning was unheeded by his murderers. The shameful
sentence was carried out, and so Æsop died, according to Eusebius, in
the fourth year of the fifty-fourth Olympiad, or 561 years before the
Christian era. The fate of poor Æsop was like that of a good many other
world-menders!
According to ancient chroniclers, the death of Æsop did not go
unavenged. Misfortunes of many kinds overtook the Delphians; pestilence
decimated them; such of their lands as they tried to cultivate were
rendered barren, with famine as the result, and these miseries
continued to afflict them for many years. At length, having consulted
the Oracle, they received as answer that which their secret conscience
affirmed to be true, that their calamities were due to the death of
Æsop, whom they had so unjustly condemned. Thereupon they caused
proclamation to be made in all public places throughout the country,
offering reparation to any of Æsop's representatives who should appear.
The only claimant that responded was a grandson of Idmon, Æsop's former
master; and having made such expiation as he demanded, the Delphians
were delivered from their troubles.
Not only was Æsop unfortunate in his death: his personal appearance has
suffered disparagement. The most trustworthy chroniclers in ancient
times describe him as a man of good appearance, and even of a pleasing
cast of countenance; whereas in later years he has been portrayed
both by writers and in pictures as deformed in body and repellent in
features. Stobæus, it is true, who lived in the fifth century A.D., had
written disparagingly of 'the air of Æsop's countenance,' representing
the fabulist as a man of sour visage, and intractable, but he goes no
farther than that.
It is to Maximus Planudes, a Constantinople monk of the fourteenth
century, nearly two thousand years after the time of Æsop, that the
burlesque of the great fabulist is due. Planudes appears to have
collected all the stories regarding Æsop current during the Middle
Ages, and strung them together as an authentic history. Through
ignorance, or by intention, he also confounded the Oriental fabulist,
Locman,[22] with Æsop, and clothed the latter in all the admitted
deformities of the other. He affirmed him as having been flat-faced,
hunch-backed, jolt-headed, blubber-lipped, big-bellied, baker-legged,
his body crooked all over, and his complexion of a swarthy hue. Even
in recent years, accepting the description of the monk, Æsop has
been thus depicted in the frontispiece to his fables. This writer is
untrustworthy in other respects, for in his pretended life of the sage
he makes him speak of persons who did not exist, and of events that did
not occur for eighty to two hundred years after his death.
That the story of Æsop's hideous deformity is untrue is clear from
evidence that is on record. Admitted that this evidence is chiefly of
a negative kind, it is sufficiently strong to refute the statements
of the monk. In the first place, Planudes, as we have seen, is an
untrustworthy chronicler in other respects, and an account of Æsop,
written after the lapse of two thousand years, could only be worthy of
credence issuing from a truthful pen, and based on documentary or other
unquestionable evidence. Of such evidence the Constantinople monk had
probably none.
Again, it is related that during the years of his slavery Æsop had as
mate, or wife, the beautiful Rhodope,[23] also a slave--an unlikely
circumstance, assuming him to have been as repulsive in bodily
appearance as has been asserted. At all events, any incongruous
association of this kind would have been remarked and commented on by
earlier writers.
Further, none of Æsop's contemporaries, nor any writers that
immediately followed him, make mention of his alleged deformities. On
the contrary, the Athenians, about two hundred years after his death,
in order to perpetuate his memory and appearance, commissioned the
celebrated sculptor Lysippus to produce a statue of Æsop, and this they
erected in a prominent position in front of those of the seven sages,
'because,' says Phædrus,[24] 'their severe manner did not persuade,
while the jesting of Æsop pleased and instructed at the same time.' It
is improbable that the figure of a man monstrously deformed as Æsop
is said to have been would have proved acceptable to the severe taste
of the Greek mind. An epigram of Agathia, of which the following is a
translation,[25] celebrates the erection of this statue:
'TO LYSIPPUS.
'Sculptor of Sicyon! glory of thy art!
I laud thee that the image thou hast placed
Of good old Æsop in the foremost part,
More than the statues of the sages graced.
Grave thought and deep reflection may be found
In all the well-respected rolls of these;
In wisdom's saws and maxims they abound,
But still are wanting in the art to please:
Each tale the gentle Samian well has told,
Truth in fair fiction pleasantly imparts;
Above the rigid censor him I hold
Who teaches virtue while he wins our hearts.'
Philostratus, in an account of certain pictures in existence in the
time of the Antonines, describes one as representing Æsop with a
pleasing cast of countenance, in the midst of a circle of the various
animals, and the Geniuses of Fable adorning him with wreaths of flowers
and branches of the olive.
Dr. Bentley, in his 'Dissertation,' ridicules the account of Æsop's
deformity as given by Planudes in face of all the evidence to the
contrary. 'I wish,' says he, 'I could do that justice to the memory
of our Phrygian, to oblige the painters to change their pencil. For
'tis certain he was no deformed person; and 'tis probable he was very
handsome. For whether he was a Phrygian or, as others say, a Thracian,
he must have been sold into Samos by a trader in slaves; and 'tis well
known that that sort of people commonly bought up the most beautiful
they could light on, because they would yield the most profit.'
Bentley's conjecture that Æsop was 'very handsome' does not find
general acceptance; it has, nevertheless, a solid foundation in the
fact that the Greeks confined art to the imitation of the beautiful
only, reprobating the portrayal of ugly forms, whether human or other.
It is not to be believed, therefore, that the chisel of Lysippus
was employed in the production of a statue to a deformed person,
which not even the gift of wisdom would have rendered acceptable to
the severe taste of his countrymen. Without going so far, however,
as to accept the view of the learned Master of Trinity, that Æsop
was probably _very_ handsome, we may with safety conclude that the
objectionable portrait of the sage as drawn by the Byzantine is without
justification.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Suidas.
[20] The mina was twelve ounces, or a sum estimated as equal to £3 15s.
English.
[21] See _post_, p. 76.
[22] Spelt variously Locman, Lôqman, Lokman.
[23] This woman is notorious in history as a courtesan who essayed to
compound for her sins by votive offerings to the temple at Delphi. She
is also said to have built the Lesser Pyramid out of her accumulated
riches, but this is denied by Herodotus, who claims for the structure a
more ancient and less discreditable foundation, being the work, as he
asserts, of Mycerinus, King of Egypt (Herod., ii. 134).
[24] Phædrus, Epilogue, book ii.
[25] Boothby, Preface, p. xxxiv.