The Life and History of Æsop is involved, like that of Homer, the most
famous of Greek poets, 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 the birthplace of Æsop. Although the honour 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, both inhabitants of Samos, Xanthus and Jadmon,
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 travelled 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. He met
at the court of Crœsus 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 he applied to him an
expression which has since passed into a proverb, “μᾶλλον ὁ Φρύξ.” “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, endeavouring, by the narration of some of his wise
fables, to reconcile the inhabitants of those cities to the
administration of their respective rulers Periander and Pisistratus.
One of these ambassadorial 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
provoked 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. This cruel death of Æsop
was not unavenged. The citizens of Delphi were visited with a series of
calamities, until they made a public reparation of their crime; and,
“The blood of Æsop” became a well-known adage, bearing witness to the
truth that deeds of wrong would not pass unpunished. Neither did the
great fabulist lack posthumous honours; for a statue was erected to his
memory at Athens, the work of Lysippus, one of the most famous of Greek
sculptors. Phædrus thus immortalizes the event:—
Æsopo ingentem statuam posuere Attici,
Servumque collocarunt æternâ in basi:
Patere honoris scirent ut cuncti viam;
Nec generi tribui sed virtuti gloriam.
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. They
were first brought to light, after a patient search and diligent
perusal of ancient authors, by a Frenchman, M. Claude Gaspard Bachet de
Mezeriac, who declined the honour of being tutor to Louis XIII. of
France, from his desire to devote himself exclusively to literature. He
published his Life of Æsop, Anno Domini 1632. The later investigations
of a host of English and German scholars have added very little to the
facts given by M. Mezeriac. The substantial truth of his statements has
been confirmed by later criticism and inquiry. It remains to state,
that prior to this publication of M. Mezeriac, the life of Æsop was
from the pen of Maximus Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, who was
sent on an embassy to Venice by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus the
elder, and who wrote in the early part of the fourteenth century. His
life was prefixed to all the early editions of these fables, and was
republished as late as 1727 by Archdeacon Croxall as the introduction
to his edition of Æsop. This life by Planudes contains, however, so
small an amount of truth, and is so full of absurd pictures of the
grotesque deformity of Æsop, of wondrous apocryphal stories, of lying
legends, and gross anachronisms, that it is now universally condemned
as false, puerile, and unauthentic.[20] It is given up in the present
day, by general consent, as unworthy of the slightest credit.