Introduction

Geeraerts, Marcus (Flemish, ca. 1520-1604). The Fox and the Goat, from Edewaard de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der Dieren (Pieter de Clerck, Bruges, 1567) Etching. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittlesey Fund, 1958. (58.540).

In 1484, William Caxton printed his translation of Aesop's Fables on the first English press. It has remained in print ever since; the book is still available in at least sixteen versions for children published in the United States alone. Five hundred years is a good long run for a book; it behooves us to try to understand its lasting quality.

When a current political figure proposed that the budget could be balanced by increasing defense spending and cutting taxes, and an opponent called it a scheme to bell the cat, he did not need to explain or add the "moral": "It is easy to propose impossible remedies." We are so familiar with Aesop's stories that we seldom look closely at just what they are saying and how they are saying it; as Aesop himself would say, "Familiarity breeds contempt." We may dismiss them as we do much of the didactic literature of the past as too moralistic for modern taste. But a rereading of Aesop convinces me that the fables are not so much lessons advocating moral goodness as sharply ironic, and often humorous, pictures of human foibles.

Aesop's fables are, of course, much older than five hundred years, having been in the oral tradition for perhaps twenty centuries before Caxton translated and printed them. We know little about Aesop the man. Tradition has it that he was deformed or crippled, a slave on Samos in the sixth century B.C. He is mentioned by several ancient writers, including Herodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristotle, and is pictured as using fables to plead various cases on trial. It is unlikely that he wrote down any fables, and unclear whether he composed those attributed to him or simply gathered those already known. The earliest collection was made by Demetrius Phalereus, founder of the Alexandrian library, about 320 B.C., but it has not survived. The Roman writer Phaedrus of the first century A.D. wrote at least five books of fables in Latin verse, which he called Fabulae Aesophiae and which were popular through the middle ages. It may well be that Phaedrus composed many of these himself, as in the seventeenth century Jean de La Fontaine wrote fables in French verse, some taken from earlier Aesop collections and some his own compositions. More important than speculation about Aesop as a person is that the Western body of fable from the oral and early written traditions has been assembled and known by his name.

By definition, a fable is a didactic story, usually a brief tale meant to teach a specific lesson. In distinguishing fables from novels, Mary McCarthy writes:

Another class of prose fiction is the fable—from the Latin fabula, which in turn goes back to an ancient term fari, meaning simply "to speak"—the root, incidentally, of fatum, or "fate", i.e., "what has been spoken." . . . [Fables] did not go out with Aesop. The obvious contemporary example is Animal Farm, but I think 1984, a cautionary tale, must be a fable too, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, most of Golding, probably, also Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and quite a lot of science fiction.

Fables, with or without talking animals, are allegories—allegoria, the description of one thing under the image of another—and, whatever a novel may be, it is not an allegory.

Her definition would, I think, include as fables such books as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, and The Velveteen Rabbit, all of which are, in my experience, more popular with pedogogically oriented adults than with children, who sense in them the lesson thinly veiled by story. Such books lack the saving irony of humor of Aesop. Even if one sticks to a more conventional definition of fable, one finds that most strongly contrast with Aesop's, particularly the Jataka...