ÆSOP'S FABLES

A New Translation

By V. S. Vernon Jones

With an Introduction by G. K. Chesterton

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

1912 Edition

INTRODUCTION

Aesop is famous for a funny reason: he probably doesn't even deserve all the credit he gets! The wise sayings and clever ideas in these fables don't really belong to one man. They belong to all of humanity. Long ago, wise old stories usually didn't have just one inventor — they belonged to everyone. But there was always someone who first gathered these stories together, and that person got to be famous for it, even if he didn't invent them all himself. That person must have understood people very well, whether he was collecting old wisdom or passing it on to the future.

Think about King Arthur. His story might come from brave Christian fighters in ancient Rome, or from old legends in Wales. But we still connect the name "Arthur" with certain storytellers, even though better and older versions of his story exist. It's the same with fairy tales. They might have traveled from Asia long ago, or been invented by a clever French writer named Perrault. But we still call the best collection of them "Grimm's Fairy Tales" — simply because it's the best one.

As for the real Aesop — if he truly existed — he was probably a slave from a place called Phrygia, living around 600 years before Jesus was born. That was around the same time as a king named Croesus, whose story comes from an ancient Greek historian named Herodotus. Old legends say Aesop was not handsome and had a sharp, teasing tongue. Some stories claim this is why he was thrown off a tall cliff at a place called Delphi. We can't be sure whether people got rid of him because he was rude, or because he was too honest and correct. But it's clear that Aesop belongs to a special group of people we often forget about today: wise slaves who used stories to share deep truths. Aesop may be partly made-up, like a storyteller named Uncle Remus from American folktales. But both men are also based in truth. In the old world, slaves really could become loved and respected through their storytelling — and it's interesting that both Aesop and Uncle Remus told their best stories using animals instead of people.

Still, whatever we owe to Aesop personally, we don't owe him the idea of fables. People were already telling these animal stories long before any Phrygian slave supposedly fell off a cliff — and people kept telling them long after. This is actually helpful to remember, because it makes Aesop's role even more impressive. The wonderful Grimm's Fairy Tales were collected by two German scholars. And even though we know more about these scholars than we know about an ancient Phrygian slave, the truth is the same either way: Aesop's fables aren't really "his" fables, just like Grimm's fairy tales weren't really "theirs." But fables and fairy tales are two very different things. Here's the simplest way to explain the difference: a good fable can't have human characters in it. A good fairy tale needs them.

Aesop (or whoever really wrote these tales) understood that in a fable, every character has to represent something bigger than itself — kind of like pieces in a chess game or numbers in math. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, the same way the number four is always double the number two. The fox in a fable always sneaks and tricks, the way a knight in chess always moves in an L-shape. The sheep in a fable always plods forward, just like a chess pawn always moves straight ahead. In a fable, the sheep never suddenly rebels and starts acting differently — everything stays true to its "role."

Fairy tales work in the exact opposite way. They depend completely on human characters and their choices. If there's no hero to fight the dragon, we wouldn't even know a dragon was there. If no explorer discovers a hidden island, then the island stays undiscovered. If nobody finds the enchanted garden with the frozen princesses, they simply remain frozen forever. Fables work differently — everything in them is exactly what it is, and acts exactly how you'd expect. The wolf is always wolf-like. The fox is always foxy. This might be similar to why ancient peoples in Egypt and India worshipped animals: not because they loved the animals personally, but because animals seemed to represent powerful, mysterious forces of nature — forces that could feel both amazing and a little frightening. In fables, animals act like rivers flowing or trees growing: powerful and unstoppable, always following their true nature. That's both their strength and their limitation — they can never become anything other than themselves.

This is exactly why fables are so useful and long-lasting: they teach the simplest, truest lessons in the simplest way possible — without turning people into game pieces. We can share these basic truths using animals precisely because animals don't really talk. Now imagine if you replaced the wolf with a cruel nobleman, or the fox with a sneaky diplomat. Right away, you'd start thinking about their human side too — maybe the nobleman has moments of kindness, or the diplomat has some hidden virtue. As soon as a character stands on two legs instead of four, you naturally expect them to be a real, complicated human being — heroic, like in fairy tales, or flawed, like in modern novels.

But by keeping animals simple and unchanging — the way a lion or an eagle looks the same every time on a family crest or an ancient symbol — storytellers have managed to pass down some of the biggest, simplest truths people have ever discovered. Just like a child learns "A is for Apple," people learned to connect strong, simple animals with strong, simple lessons. For example:

• A flowing stream cannot pollute the water above it — so if someone claims it does, that person is lying to gain power.
• A mouse is too weak to defeat a lion in a fight, but strong enough to chew through the ropes that trap one.
• A fox that tricks someone using a flat plate might just as easily get outsmarted using a deep jar.
• A crow may not be able to sing well, but the gods still gave it cheese to enjoy.
• When a goat insults someone from high on a mountain, it's really the mountain's height doing the insulting — not the goat itself.

These are old, deep truths, carved into human memory wherever people have lived. It doesn't matter exactly when they were first told. They're like an alphabet of human wisdom, using animals as symbols instead of people. These ancient animal tales appear everywhere — even in some of the oldest cave drawings ever found, which are full of animal pictures. Early humans seemed to feel that they themselves were too mysterious and complicated to simply draw. But the lesson carved beneath these ancient animal pictures stayed the same everywhere. Whether fables started with Aesop, or go back to the very first humans; whether they came from medieval tales like "Reynard the Fox," or French stories like those by La Fontaine — the final lesson is always basically the same: pride comes before a fall, and being too clever for your own good never ends well. You won't find any other lesson carved into the "rock" of these old stories — because in the end, there's really only one true lesson in life, and every fable, in its own way, is teaching it.

— G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

THE FOX AND THE GRAPES

THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGGS

THE CAT AND THE MICE

THE MISCHIEVOUS DOG

THE CHARCOAL-BURNER AND THE FULLER

THE MICE IN COUNCIL

THE BAT AND THE WEASELS

THE DOG AND THE SOW

THE FOX AND THE CROW

THE HORSE AND THE GROOM

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB

THE PEACOCK AND THE CRANE

THE CAT AND THE BIRDS

THE SPENDTHRIFT AND THE SWALLOW

THE OLD WOMAN AND THE DOCTOR

THE MOON AND HER MOTHER

MERCURY AND THE WOODMAN

THE ASS, THE FOX, AND THE LION

THE LION AND THE MOUSE

THE CROW AND THE PITCHER

THE BOYS AND THE FROGS

THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN

THE MISTRESS AND HER SERVANTS

THE GOODS AND THE ILLS

THE HARES AND THE FROGS

THE FOX AND THE STORK

THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

THE STAG IN THE OX-STALL

THE MILKMAID AND HER PAIL

THE DOLPHINS, THE WHALES, AND THE SPRAT

THE FOX AND THE MONKEY

THE ASS AND THE LAP-DOG

THE FIR-TREE AND THE BRAMBLE

THE FROGS' COMPLAINT AGAINST THE SUN

THE DOG, THE COCK, AND THE FOX

THE GNAT AND THE BULL

THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELLERS

THE SLAVE AND THE LION

THE FLEA AND THE MAN

THE BEE AND JUPITER

THE OAK AND THE REEDS

THE BLIND MAN AND THE CUB

THE BOY AND THE SNAILS

THE APES AND THE TWO TRAVELLERS

THE ASS AND HIS BURDENS

THE SHEPHERD'S BOY AND THE WOLF

THE FOX AND THE GOAT

THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPRAT

THE BOASTING TRAVELLER

THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER

THE ASS AND HIS SHADOW

THE FARMER AND HIS SONS

THE DOG AND THE COOK

THE MONKEY AS KING

THE THIEVES AND THE COCK

THE FARMER AND FORTUNE

JUPITER AND THE MONKEY

FATHER AND SONS

THE LAMP

THE OWL AND THE BIRDS

THE ASS IN THE LION'S SKIN

THE SHE-GOATS AND THEIR BEARDS

THE OLD LION

THE BOY BATHING

THE QUACK FROG

THE SWOLLEN FOX

THE MOUSE, THE FROG, AND THE HAWK

THE BOY AND THE NETTLES

THE PEASANT AND THE APPLE-TREE

THE JACKDAW AND THE PIGEONS

JUPITER AND THE TORTOISE

THE DOG I