Æsop's Fables: an Anthology of the Fabulists of All Countries
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\ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 3:> ^1 EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE THE FABLES OF ^SOP <Sl OTHERS AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE FABULISTS OF ALL COUNTRIES Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive in 2008 witli funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/aesopsfablesantliOOaeso FABLES JESO? AND OTHERS LTD. LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC. All Tights reserved Made in Great Britain at The Temple Press Letchworth and decorated hj Eric Ravilious Jar Sons ltd. J. M. Bent &_ Aldine House Bedford St, London First Published in this Edition 1913 Reprinted 1918, 1919, 1925, ^9^8, 1931, 1936 College Library INTRODUCTION The fame of /Esop, however we look at it, has this advan- tage, that it is thoroug-hly in keeping with his book. There are all the elements of fable in the old story of his life, and the man himself has been made into a folk-tale creature, as if to suit the atmosphere that surrounds "The Lion and the Fox" and "The Frog and the Mouse" in his pages. Sir Roger L'Estrange in the "Life" which opens his fine seventeenth century folio of the Fables, has described the fabulist with lineaments that have become distinct as the crookback of Richard IIL ^sop was a slave, says Sir Roger (following Camerarius), already twice bought and sold when the record opens, and we see him first on the road to Ephesus to be sold a third time. In his person he was "deformed to the highest degree : flat-nosed, hunch-backed, bladder-lipped, baker- legged," with a long, misshapen head, and "his complexion so swarthy that he took his very name from it, for ^sop is the same with Ethiop." In fact the "most scandalous figxire of a man that ever was heard of," and so tongue- tied that people could hardly understand what he said. This we feel is just as it should be, for it at once brings i^sop into range with the beast-fable and the wonderful array of folk-tale animals that start up in his world. In the frontis- piece to L 'Estrange 's book, he appears surrounded by these creatures. An ape and a fox are at either foot ; a lion is behind him ; a hare is being devoured by an eagle before him. On the tree over his head are grouped a peacock, an owl, and what looks like a mythological jackdaw. Then, to aggravate his own deformity, his hunched shoulders and his protuberant front are encased in steel armour. Final touch of all, he holds in one hand a scroll inscribed " Utile Dulci " and in the other a style. In the following account of his going to Ephesus with 2046567 viii Introduction other slaves to be sold, his wit at once appears. When the burdens they had to carry were allotted, /^sop chose a pannier of bread twice as heavy as the bales the rest lifted, which made the other slaves call him a fool for his pains. But as the bread was to feed the slaves on the road, by the afternoon his burden was reduced by half, and before even- ing he had nothing to carry but an empty basket. Fables to the fabulist : we see how finely this episode falls ioto place in the /Esop legend. When we turn from the pro- verbial ALsop and try to get at his actual or his literary beginnings, we have to go back to the father of history, who again tells us that /4isop was a slave. Herodotus has the pull over the later biographers in that he is able to get into the page an allusion to the pyramids. The pyramids bring him to Rhodopls, a Thracian by birth and the slave of ladmon, and one of her fellow-slaves was /Esop. And as the death of Marlowe is able to add a deeper tinge to his poetry, the murder of iE;sop is made by Herodotus to add a touch of reality to his fables. "The Delphians," he says, "proclaimed that if any one asked compensation for /Esop's death, it should duly be given to him. But the only man to come forward was a grandson of ladmon, bearing the same name." This serves to bear out the fact that he was the older ladmon 's slave, and it lies very near the base of his his- tory. It confirms the popular idea of him as a slave, and it leaves us with the belief that he really was murdered, or as we should say executed, in accordance with the sentence of the Delphic oracle, and in all likelihood because some of the fables had been held to convey a seditious mean- ing that may or may not have been intended by himself. Ergo, if this be true, iEsop, like Socrates, suffered for his wisdom. As Crainquebille went to prison for saying " Mort aux vaches," ^ so we may conjecture ^sop went to his death because he told too feelingly the fable of "The Ox and the Frog" or "The Oak and the Reed." * Can M. Anatole France have recollected, one wonders, how in the Indian fable the tiger confessed to the unpardonable sin — the killing of cows ? Introduction ix The earliest fable of yEsop of which there is any record is found in Aristotle's Rhetoric: "The Fable of the Fox and the Hedgehog," and it is worth notice that in this there is a reference to embezzling the revenues of the State. In other early references ^sop appears to take on some of the features of a court-jester. We see him as one who had freed himself from slavery and had come to the Court of Croesus, and, while Solon edified that monarch, /Esop taught him by inuendo, drollery, riddle and fable. We see him afterwards moving in a kind of fabulous progress from city to city. At Corinth he warned his hearers against mob- law in a fable which Socrates used afterwards. At Athens he taught prince and people by the fable of "The Frogs and Jupiter." Finally, he was sent by Croesus—so the tradi- tion goes—with a sum of money due to the Delphians, and they repaid him, being afraid, no doubt, of his wit, by a cry of sacrilege. It is said that he tried to save himself by appealing to their known reverence for the laws of hospitality, and his appeal was of course a fable, that of "The Eagle and the Beetle." But it was in vain, and the story goes that he was taken to one of the Phaedrian preci- pices and hurled headlong from its summit. Even this was not all : his very death attained an immortality; and the proverb of "iEsop's Blood" lived to remind the Delphians and his own countrymen that the blood of a slain man cries to Heaven. As some sort of reparation, a statue to him was put up two hundred years after his death in front of the statues of the Seven Sages. However we read these memoirs of " the Real ^Esop," we are driven at length to see him in the light they throw over him, and to take him once and for all as the type of his kind. But having decided that, we have to admit that the beast-fable did not begin with him, or in Greece at all. We have, in fact, to go East and to look to India and burrow in the " tales within tales " of the Hitopadesa to get an idea of how old the antiquity of the fable actually is. "The Father of all Fables," Sir Edwin Arnold suggested the Hitopadesa should be called, as from its various adapta- tions and translations have come ^Esop and Bidpai or X Introduction Pilpay, to say nothing of Reinecke Fuchs in later time. So deep is the Indian impress it lays on all its later migrants, that one cannot read of a mouse in a fable with- out remembering that the little beast, as Gunesh's emissary, was of great account in Hindoo legend; or of a crow with- out thinking of the Indian bird of that name with its grey hood ; or of a serpent without recalling Vasuki or Ananta, chief of the snakes that have human heads and live in the subterranean land, P^t^la. Max Miiller even prepared a kind of family tree to show the descent of the modern fables that sprang from this antique stock. He traced one in particular, the fable of Perrette as we know it in La Fontaine's "Milkmaid and her Milkpail "; and showed how it went back to the Indian story of "The Brahman and the Pot of Rice." In this, Perrette's Indian ancestor has a jar into which he puts one day some butter and honey, left over after his repast, and hangs the jar on a nail. Then, leaning back on his couch, a stick in his hand, he falls to musing on the high price of butter and honey, and thinks that when the jar is full he will sell what it holds, and buy ten goats with the money. In two years, he calculates, the ten goats will be four hundred ; and these can be sold and turned into cattle. So he goes on ; adds flock to flock, field to field ; and builds a great house, and sets up a great family, with a son and heir. If this son is good, all will —be well; if not?—at this point the Brahman raises his stick " I shall beat him over " his head with my stick 1 So saying, he strikes the honey- jar and breaks it, and the honey and butter pour down over his head.