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 represents an idea that shows up again and again in human history: his fame is deserved precisely because he never really earned it. The solid common sense and the clever insights into uncommon truths found in these fables don't really belong to Aesop — they belong to humanity as a whole. In the earliest stages of human history, anything that feels truly authentic tends to become universal, and anything universal tends to lose its original author's name. In cases like this, there's usually one central figure who first took on the work of gathering these stories — and who later got the credit for creating them. That person got the fame, and, in a sense, deserved it. There must have been something great and deeply human about such a person, something connecting the human past to the human future — even if all he did was borrow from the past or mislead the future.

The legend of King Arthur may actually trace back to the last defenders of Christian Rome, or to ancient pagan traditions buried in the hills of Wales. But the names "Mappe" or "Malory" will always be linked to King Arthur, even if scholars discover older and better sources than the Mabinogion, or even if someone writes a version worse than Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Fairy tales told to children may have traveled from Asia with the Indo-European peoples (who are now, fortunately, gone); they may have been invented by some clever French writer like Perrault; or they might even be exactly what they claim to be. But we will always call the finest collection of such stories "Grimm's Tales" — simply because it's the best collection ever made.

The real, historical Aesop — if he existed at all — was likely a slave from Phrygia (an ancient region in what is now Turkey), and there's no reason to picture him wearing the "cap of freedom" often associated with Phrygia. He probably lived around the sixth century BCE, during the reign of the famous King Croesus, whose story we love and doubt in equal measure, as we do with everything from the historian Herodotus. There are also old tales describing Aesop as physically deformed and sharp-tongued — tales that, as one famous cardinal put it, might explain (though not excuse) his being thrown off a cliff at Delphi. It's up to readers of these fables to decide whether he was really hurled off that cliff for being ugly and offensive, or for being a little too honest and morally sharp. Either way, there's no doubt that the legend surrounding him places him among a group too often overlooked today: the great philosopher-slaves. Aesop may have been partly fictional, much like the American folk character Uncle Remus — but he was also, like Uncle Remus, rooted in fact. It's a historical fact that slaves in the ancient world could be admired like Aesop or loved like Uncle Remus. Interestingly, both of these legendary slaves told their best stories about animals.

But whatever credit belongs to Aesop personally, the tradition of fables as a whole doesn't belong to him. That tradition existed long before any witty freed slave from Phrygia may or may not have been thrown off a cliff, and it continued long after. Recognizing this actually makes Aesop's achievement more impressive than that of any other fable-writer. Grimm's Tales, wonderful as they are, were collected by two German scholars. And if it's hard to know much for certain about a German scholar, we still know far more about him than about a Phrygian slave from antiquity. The truth is that Aesop's Fables aren't really "Aesop's" any more than Grimm's Fairy Tales were truly "Grimm's." But fables and fairy tales are completely different things. There are many differences between them, but here's the clearest one: a good fable can't have human characters in it. A good fairy tale can't do without them.

Aesop — or Babrius, or whoever first told these tales — understood that in a fable, every character must be impersonal, meaning stripped of individual personality. They must function like symbols in algebra, or like pieces on a chessboard. 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 move slyly, just as the knight in chess must always move in an L-shape. The sheep in a fable must always plod forward, just as a pawn in chess must always march ahead. A fable can't allow for a sheep suddenly rebelling against its nature (a French novelist named Balzac once joked about "the revolt of a sheep") — any more than a chess game can allow a pawn to suddenly capture sideways. Fairy tales, on the other hand, depend entirely on individual human personality. If no hero showed up to fight the dragons, we wouldn't even know they were dragons. If no explorer landed on the mysterious island, it would simply remain undiscovered. If the miller's youngest son never finds the enchanted garden where the seven princesses stand frozen in ice, then they'll just stay frozen and enchanted forever. If no prince arrives to find Sleeping Beauty, she simply sleeps on. Fables work on the opposite principle: everything in them is exactly what it is, and will always show its true nature no matter what. The wolf will always act like a wolf; the fox will always act like a fox.

This might be part of why ancient civilizations — the Egyptians, the people of India, and many others — worshipped animals. I don't think people loved beetles, cats, or crocodiles as individuals, the way you'd love a person. Instead, they honored these creatures as symbols of an unnamed, unstoppable force in nature — a force that feels awe-inspiring to anyone, and downright terrifying to someone who doesn't believe in anything greater. In the same way, in every fable credited to Aesop (whether he wrote it or not), the animals behave like unstoppable natural forces — like rivers flowing or trees growing. Their limitation, and their tragedy, is that they can never be anything other than exactly what they are: they can never lose themselves, because they never had a "self" to lose in the first place.

This is exactly why fables have lasted so long: they teach the simplest, most important truths in a way that would be impossible if the characters were human instead of chess-piece-like symbols. We can't talk about such basic truths without using animals that, in reality, can't talk at all. Imagine turning the wolf into a cruel nobleman, or the fox into a sly diplomat. Right away, you'd remember that even cruel noblemen are still human, and that even sly diplomats are still people. You'd start expecting the nobleman to show some accidental kindness along with his cruelty, or expect the diplomat to show some delicate honesty along with his craftiness. The moment you put a creature on two legs instead of four, and strip it of feathers, you can't help but see it as a human being — either a hero, like in fairy tales, or a flawed, ordinary person, like in modern novels.

But by using animals in this strict, symbolic way — the way animals are used on coats of arms or in ancient Egyptian picture-writing — storytellers managed to pass down enormous truths, the kind so basic we now just call them "obvious." If a heraldic lion is shown standing on its hind legs in a fierce pose, it's always shown that way; if a sacred ibis (an Egyptian bird) is shown standing on one leg, it stands on one leg forever. Using this animal "alphabet," people recorded some of humanity's earliest and most solid truths. Just as a child learns "A is for Ass, B is for Bull, C is for Cow," humans learned to connect simple, powerful creatures with simple, powerful truths. A flowing stream cannot poison the very spring it came from, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar and a tyrant (this is the lesson of the fable about the wolf blaming the lamb for muddying the water). A mouse is too weak to fight a lion directly, but strong enough to gnaw through the ropes that trap one. A fox that benefits from eating off a flat dish may end up starving when the food is served in a deep jar. The gods may forbid the crow from having a beautiful singing voice, but they still give it cheese to eat. When a goat insults someone from the top of a mountain, it isn't really the goat being bold — it's the height of the mountain. All of these are deep truths, carved permanently into human memory wherever people have lived. It doesn't matter how old or new these stories are — they form the alphabet of humanity itself, much like the picture-writing of prehistoric peoples, who also preferred to use animal images rather than human ones. These ancient, universal stories are almost all about animals, just as the oldest cave paintings ever discovered are almost all of animals. Early humans apparently felt that they themselves were too mysterious or sacred to be drawn directly. But the lesson carved beneath these simple animal images was the same everywhere. Whether fables started with Aesop or with Adam, whether they took the form of the medieval German tale of Reynard the Fox or the elegant French fables of La Fontaine, they all lead to the same basic point: that arrogance always leads to a fall, because whatever advantage the arrogant have is only ever accidental and temporary; that pride comes before a downfall; and that there's such a thing as being too clever for your own good. You won't find any other lesson carved into the "rock" of human tradition. There are countless types of fables, from every era — but there is really only one moral running through all of them, because, in the end, there's only one moral running through everything.

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 B