Most nations develop the Beast-Tale as part of their folk-lore, some go
further and apply it to satiric purposes, and a few nations afford
isolated examples of the shaping of the Beast-Tale to teach some moral
truth by means of the Fable properly so called.[1] But only two peoples
independently made this a general practice. Both in Greece[2] and in
India we find in the earliest literature such casual and frequent
mention of Fables as seems to imply a body of Folk-Fables current among
the people. And in both countries special circumstances raised the
Fable from folklore into literature. In Greece, during the epoch of the
Tyrants, when free speech was dangerous, the Fable was largely used for
political purposes. The inventor of this application or the most
prominent user of it was one Æsop, a slave at Samos whose name has ever
since been connected with the Fable. All that we know about him is
contained in a few lines of Herodotus: that he flourished 550 B.C.; was
killed in accordance with a Delphian oracle; and that _wergild_ was
claimed for him by the grandson of his master, Iadmon. When free speech
was established in the Greek democracies, the custom of using Fables in
harangues was continued and encouraged by the rhetoricians, while the
mirth-producing qualities of the Fable caused it to be regarded as fit
subject of after-dinner conversation along with other jests of a
broader kind (“Milesian,” “Sybaritic”). This habit of regarding the
Fable as a form of the Jest intensified the tendency to connect it with
a well-known name as in the case of our Joe Miller. About 300 B.C.
Demetrius Phalereus, whilom tyrant of Athens and founder of the
Alexandria Library, collected together all the Fables he could find
under the title of _Assemblies of Æsopic Tales_ (Λόγων Αἰσωπείων
συναγωγαι). This collection, running probably to some 200 Fables, after
being interpolated and edited by the Alexandrine grammarians, was
turned into neat Latin iambics by Phædrus, a Greek freedman of Augustus
in the early years of the Christian era. As the modern Æsop is mainly
derived from Phædrus, the answer to the question “Who wrote Æsop?” is
simple : “Demetrius of Phaleron.”[3]
[1] _E.g._ Jotham’s Fable, Judges ix., and that of Menenius Agrippa in
Livy, seem to be quite independent of either Greek or Indian
influence. But one fable does not make Fable.
[2] Only about twenty fables, however, are known in Greece before
Phædrus, 30 A.D. See my Caxton’s _Æsop_ vol. i. pp. 26–29, for a
complete enumeration.
[3] For this statement and what follows a reference to the Pedigree of
the Fables on p. 196 will be found useful.
In India the great ethical reformer, Sakyamuni, the Buddha, initiated
(or adopted from the Brahmins) the habit of using the Beast-Tale for
moral purposes, or, in other words, transformed it into the Fable
proper. A collection of these seems to have existed previously and
independently, in which the Fables were associated with the name of a
mythical sage, Kasyâpa. These were appropriated by the early Buddhists
by the simple expedient of making Kasyâpa the immediately preceding
incarnation of the Buddha. A number of his _itihâsas_ or Tales were
included in the sacred Buddhistic work containing the _Jātakas_ or
previous-births of the Buddha, in some of which the Bodisat (or future
Buddha) appears as one of the Dramatis Personæ of the Fables; the
Crane, _e.g._, in our _Wolf and Crane_ being one of the incarnations of
the Buddha. So, too, the Lamb of our _Wolf and Lamb_ was once Buddha;
it was therefore easy for him—so the Buddhists thought—to remember and
tell these Fables as incidents of his former careers. It is obvious
that the whole idea of a Fable as an anecdote about a man masquerading
in the form of a beast could most easily arise and gain currency where
the theory of transmigration was vividly credited.
The Fables of Kasyâpa, or rather the moral verses (_gathas_) which
served as a _memoria technica_ to them, were probably carried over to
Ceylon in 241 B.C. along with the Jātakas. About 300 years later (say
50 A.D.) some 100 of these were brought by a Cingalese embassy to
Alexandria, where they were translated under the title of “Libyan
Fables” (Λόγοι Λυβικοί), which had been earlier applied to similar
stories that had percolated to Hellas from India; they were attributed
to “Kybises.” This collection seems to have introduced the habit of
summing up the teaching of a Fable in the Moral, corresponding to the
_gatha_ of the Jātakas. About the end of the first century A.D. the
Libyan Fables of “Kybises” became known to the Rabbinic school at
Jabne, founded by R. Jochanan ben Saccai, and a number of the Fables
translated into Aramaic which are still extant in the Talmud and
Midrash.
In the Roman world the two collections of Demetrius and “Kybises” were
brought together by Nicostratus, a rhetor attached to the court of
Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier part of the next century (c. 230 A.D.)
this _corpus_ of the ancient fable, Æsopic and Libyan, amounting in all
to some 300 members, was done into Greek verse with Latin accentuation
(choliambics) by Valerius Babrius, tutor to the young son of Alexander
Severus. Still later, towards the end of the fourth century, forty-two
of these, mainly of the Libyan section, were translated into Latin
verse by one Avian, with whom the ancient history of the Fable ends.
In the Middle Ages it was naturally the Latin Phædrus that represented
the Æsopic Fable to the learned world, but Phædrus in a fuller form
than has descended to us in verse. A selection of some eighty fables
was turned into indifferent prose in the ninth century, probably at the
Schools of Charles the Great. This was attributed to a fictitious
Romulus. Another prose collection by Ademar of Chabannes was made
before 1030, and still preserves some of the lines of the lost Fables
of Phædrus. The Fables became especially popular among the Normans. A
number of them occur on the Bayeux Tapestry, and in the twelfth century
England, the head of the Angevin empire, became the home of the Fable,
all the important adaptations and versions of Æsop being made in this
country. One of these done into Latin verse by Walter the Englishman
became the standard Æsop of medieval Christendom. The same history
applies in large measure to the Fables of Avian, which were done into
prose, transferred back into Latin verse, and sent forth through Europe
from England.
Meanwhile Babrius had been suffering the same fate as Phædrus. His
scazons were turned into poor Greek prose, and selections of them pass
to this day as the original Fables of Æsop. Some fifty of these were
selected, and with the addition of a dozen Oriental fables, were
attributed to an imaginary Persian sage, Syntipas; this collection was
translated into Syriac, and thence into Arabic, where they passed under
the name of the legendary Lôqman (probably a doublet of Balaam). A
still larger collection of the Greek prose versions got into Arabic,
where it was enriched by some 60 fables from the Arabic Bidpai and
other sources, but still passed under the name of Æsop. This
collection, containing 164 fables, was brought to England after the
Third Crusade of Richard I., and translated into Latin by an Englishman
named Alfred, with the aid of an Oxford Jew named Berachyah ha-Nakdan
(“Benedictus le Puncteur” in the English Records), who, on his own
account, translated a number of the fables into Hebrew rhymed prose,
under the Talmudic title _Mishle Shu‘alim_ (Fox Fables).[4] Part of
Alfred’s Æsop was translated into English alliterative verse, and this
again was translated about 1200 into French by Marie de France, who
attributed the new fables to King Alfred. After her no important
addition was made to the medieval Æsop.
[4] I have given specimens of his Fables in my _Jews of Angevin
England_, pp. 165–173, 278–281.
With the invention of printing the European book of Æsop was compiled
about 1480 by Heinrich Stainhöwel, who put together the Romulus with
selections from Avian, some of the Greek prose versions of Babrius from
Ranuzio’s translation, and a few from Alfred’s Æsop. To these he added
the legendary life of Æsop and a selection of somewhat loose tales from
Petrus Alphonsi and Poggio Bracciolini, corresponding to the Milesian
and Sybaritic tales which were associated with the Fable in antiquity.
Stainhöwel translated all this into German, and within twenty years his
collection had been turned into French, English (by Caxton, in 1484),
Italian, Dutch, and Spanish. Additions were made to it by Brandt and
Waldis in Germany, by L’Estrange in England, and by La Fontaine in
France; these were chiefly from the larger Greek collections published
after Stainhöwel’s day, and, in the case of La Fontaine, from Bidpai
and other Oriental sources. But these additions have rarely taken hold,
and the Æsop of modern Europe is in large measure Stainhöwel’s, even to
the present day. The first three quarters of the present collection are
Stainhöwel mainly in Stainhöwel’s order. Selections from it passed into
spelling and reading books, and made the Fables part of modern European
folk-lore.[5]
[5] An episode in the history of the modern Æsop deserves record, if
only to illustrate the law that Æsop always begins his career as a
political weapon in a new home. When a selection of the Fables were
translated into Chinese in 1840 they became favourite reading with the
officials, till a high dignitary said, “This is clearly directed
against _us_,” and ordered Æsop to be included in the Chinese _Index
Expurgatorius_ (R. Morris, _Cont. Rev_. xxxix. p. 731).
We may conclude this history of Æsop with a similar account of the
progress of Æsopic investigation. First came collection; the Greek Æsop
was brought together by Neveletus in 1610, the Latin by Nilant in 1709.
The main truth about the former was laid down by the master-hand of
Bentley during a skirmish in the Battle of the Books; the equally great
critic Lessing began to unravel the many knotty points connected with
the medieval Latin Æsop. His investigations have been carried on and
completed by three Frenchmen in the present century, Robert, Du Méril,
and Hervieux; while three Germans, Crusius, Benfey, and Mall, have
thrown much needed light on Babrius, on the Oriental Æsop, and on Marie
de France. Lastly, I have myself brought together these various lines
of inquiry, and by adding a few threads of my own, have been able to
weave them all for the first time into a consistent pattern.[6]
[6] _The Fables of Æsop, as first printed by William Caxton in_ 1484,
_now again edited and induced by Joseph Jacobs_ (London, 1889), 2
vols., the first containing a History of the Æsopic Fable.
So much for the past of the Fable. Has it a future as a mode of
literary expression? Scarcely; its method is at once too simple and too
roundabout. Too roundabout; for the truths we have to tell we prefer to
speak out directly and not by way of allegory. And the truths the Fable
has to teach are too simple to correspond to the facts of our complex
civilisation; its rude _graffiti_ of human nature cannot reproduce the
subtle gradations of modern life. But as we all pass through in our
lives the various stages of ancestral culture, there comes a time when
these rough sketches of life have their appeal to us as they had for
our forefathers. The allegory gives us a pleasing and not too strenuous
stimulation of the intellectual powers; the lesson is not too
complicated for childlike minds. Indeed, in their grotesque grace, in
their quaint humour, in their trust in the simpler virtues, in their
insight into the cruder vices, in their innocence of the fact of sex,
Æsop’s Fables are as little children. They are as little children, and
for that reason they will for ever find a home in the heaven of little
children’s souls.