ÆSOP'S FABLES

A NEW TRANSLATION

BY V. S. VERNON JONES

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

AND ILLUSTRATIONS

BY ARTHUR RACKHAM

1912 EDITION

INTRODUCTION

Aesop's story is a strange but common one in human history: he became famous partly because he didn't fully earn that fame. The fables are full of good, solid common sense, along with clever insights that go against ordinary thinking. But these ideas don't really belong to Aesop alone—they belong to all of humanity. When we look at the earliest parts of human history, we find that anything truly authentic tends to be universal (shared by everyone), and anything universal tends to have no single known author. In cases like this, there's usually one central person who first took the trouble to gather these shared ideas together—and who later got the credit for inventing them. That person gets the fame, and honestly, they usually deserve some of it. There must have been something remarkable and deeply human about someone who could pull together ideas connecting humanity's past and future, even if all they really did was borrow from the past to shape the future.

Think about the legend of King Arthur. It might be tied to the fierce Christian soldiers of the crumbling Roman Empire, or to old pagan legends hidden in the Welsh hills. But when we say "Malory" or reference old texts, we automatically think of King Arthur—even though better, older versions of the story exist elsewhere, and worse, more recent versions have been written since. The same goes for classic fairy tales. They might have traveled from Asia along with ancient European peoples. They might have been invented by a clever French writer like Perrault. They might even be exactly what they claim to be—true stories. But no matter their real origin, we'll always call the best collection of them "Grimm's Fairy Tales," simply because that collection is the best one.

As for the real, historical Aesop—if he truly existed—he was likely an enslaved person from Phrygia (an ancient region in what is now Turkey). He probably lived around the 6th century BCE, during the time of King Croesus, whose story we read about (and partly doubt) in the writings of the ancient historian Herodotus. Legends describe Aesop as having an ugly appearance and a sharp, mocking tongue—traits that, according to one old story, explain (though don't excuse) why he was supposedly thrown off a cliff at Delphi. It's up to readers of the fables to decide whether he was really killed for being rude and unattractive, or for being too honest and morally correct. Either way, the legends about him place him among an important but often-overlooked group: wise enslaved people who used storytelling as a form of philosophy. Aesop might be partly fictional, much like the character Uncle Remus from American folklore. But he was also, in a sense, real—because it's a historical fact that enslaved people in the ancient world could become as beloved and respected as Aesop was, just as Uncle Remus became a beloved figure in his own storytelling tradition. Interestingly, both of these famous enslaved storytellers are best known for telling stories about animals.

But no matter how much credit belongs to Aesop personally, the tradition of "fables" doesn't actually start or end with him. Fables existed long before any witty Phrygian slave supposedly got thrown off a cliff, and they continued long afterward. It's actually helpful to understand this difference, because it makes Aesop's fables stand out even more clearly compared to other fable collections. For example, Grimm's Fairy Tales were collected by two real German scholars—but even though we know more historical facts about them than about a Phrygian slave, the truth remains the same: Aesop's fables aren't really "his" fables, just as Grimm's fairy tales weren't truly invented by the Grimm brothers. Still, fables and fairy tales are two very different kinds of stories. There are many differences between them, but one is the clearest: a good fable never has human characters in it, while a good fairy tale always does.

Aesop (or whoever first shaped these fables) understood something important: in a fable, every character must be impersonal—meaning they represent an idea or type, not a specific individual personality. They work like pieces in a chess game or numbers in an algebra equation. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, the same way four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must always act sly and "crooked," just as the knight in chess always moves in a bent, angled path. The sheep must always simply move forward, like a pawn in chess. A fable doesn't allow for surprises—it wouldn't make sense for the sheep to suddenly rebel, the way the writer Balzac once imagined in his phrase "the revolt of a sheep."

Fairy tales work in the opposite way—they depend completely on individual human personalities. If there's no hero to fight the dragons, we wouldn't even know the dragons were dragons. If no adventurer washes up on a mystery island, the island stays undiscovered. If the miller's third son never finds the magic garden where seven enchanted princesses stand frozen, then they simply remain frozen forever. If no prince arrives to find Sleeping Beauty, she just keeps sleeping. Fables work on a completely different idea: that everything simply is what it is, and will act accordingly, no matter who's watching. The wolf will always behave like a wolf; the fox will always act foxy. This idea is similar to why ancient peoples—like the Egyptians and Indians—worshipped certain animals. People probably didn't love beetles, cats, or crocodiles the way they love other people. Instead, they respected these animals as symbols of powerful, mysterious natural forces—forces that might feel awe-inspiring to a religious person, and frightening to someone who doesn't believe in anything greater than nature. In the same way, in Aesop's fables (whether he wrote them all or not), every animal represents a steady, unchanging force of nature—like a flowing river or a growing tree. That's both the strength and the limitation of these animal characters: they can never be anything other than exactly what they are. In a way, that's their tragedy—they can never lose themselves, because they never really had individual souls to begin with.

This is exactly why fables have lasted so long: they let us teach simple, important truths without turning people into mere chess pieces. We can't easily explain certain basic ideas about life using human characters, so instead we use animals that don't actually talk in real life. Imagine turning the wolf into a cruel nobleman, or the fox into a sly diplomat. Right away, you'd start thinking, "But wait, even harsh noblemen have some human kindness sometimes," or "Even sneaky diplomats can have some good qualities." As soon as a character stands on two legs instead of four, and loses its feathers, we can't help but see it as a real person—either heroic, like in fairy tales, or flawed and ordinary, like in modern novels.

By using animals in this strict, symbolic way—similar to how animals are used on family crests or in ancient Egyptian picture-writing (called hieroglyphics)—storytellers have managed to preserve some of the biggest, most obvious truths about life: the kind of truths we sometimes call "truisms" because they're so widely accepted. If a lion on a knight's shield is drawn red and rearing up, it's forever red and rearing up in that fixed pose. If a sacred bird stands on one leg in a picture, it stands on one leg forever. In this animal "alphabet," some of humanity's earliest and most solid beliefs are written down. Just like a child learns "A is for Apple" or "C is for Cat," people long ago learned to connect simple, powerful animals with simple, powerful truths. For example: a flowing stream can't pollute the water above it, so anyone who claims otherwise is lying or acting like a bully (this comes from the fable of the wolf and the lamb). A mouse is too weak to fight a lion directly, but strong enough to chew through the ropes that trap one. A fox who benefits from eating off a flat plate might struggle to eat from a deep jar. The crow, who the gods never gave a beautiful singing voice, still gets given cheese by fate. When a goat insults someone from high on a mountain, it's really the height of the mountain giving the goat its confidence—not the goat itself. All of these truths are like messages carved permanently into stone wherever people have lived. It doesn't matter how old or new these stories are—they form a kind of universal "alphabet of humanity," much like early cave drawings, which almost always show animals instead of people. Long ago, humans may have felt that they themselves were too complicated and mysterious to be simply drawn or explained. But the deeper lesson hidden underneath these old animal symbols remained basically the same everywhere—whether the fables started with Aesop or with Adam, whether they came from medieval Germany (like the story of "Reynard the Fox") or French Renaissance writers (like La Fontaine). The final lesson is always this: feeling superior always leads to arrogance, because any advantage a creature has is often just an accident of nature; pride comes before a fall; and there's definitely such a thing as being "too clever for your own good." You won't find any other lesson carved into the "stone" of these ancient tales. There are many types of fables from many times and places—but they all share just one moral. That makes sense, because in the end, there's really only one moral to everything in life.

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