_Æsop._--It may be said, at first sight, "Why, every body knows all
about him." I answer, Perhaps about as much as modern painters and
artists know about Bacchus, whom they always represent as a gross,
vulgar, fat person: all the ancient poets, however (and surely they
ought to know best), depict him an exquisitely beautiful youth. A
similar vulgar error exists with regard to Æsop, who in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ is pronounced a strikingly deformed personage.
The exact opposite seems to have been the truth. Philostratus has left a
description of a picture of Æsop, who was represented with a chorus of
animals about him: he was painted smiling, and looking thoughtfully on
the ground, but not a word is said of any deformity. Again, the
Athenians erected a statue to his honour, "and," says Bentley, "a statue
of him, if he were deformed, would only have been a monument of his
ugliness: it would have been an indignity, rather than an honour to his
memory, to have perpetuated his deformity."
And, lastly, he was sold into Samos by a slave-dealer, and it is a
well-known fact that these people bought up the handsomest youths they
could procure.