A Tale of Two Aesops

A revised version of the Homee and Phiroze Randeria lecture given to the Bibliographical Society on 17 May 2005

My subject is two editions of Aesop's Fables, both unknown to the bibliographers, very different in style and widely separated in time, yet tied together by their illustration. ¹ The Fables are the only genuinely popular work of literature to have come down to us from ancient Greece and Rome, by a vast and complicated tradition that constantly metamorphosed in the course of the centuries, between the two classical languages and eventually into dozens of vernaculars. We learn from Plato that Socrates whiled away his hours in prison by putting Aesop into verse. ² Nineteen hundred years later, in 1504, Leonardo da Vinci stowed away some 116 books in the monastery of S. Maria Novella in Florence while he took on a job in the Arno valley; three of these books are recorded as Aesops, two in Italian and one in French. Leonardo actually wrote a number of animal fables along Aesopic lines. ³ In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, schoolboys at grammar school commonly took their first steps in Latin by reading Aesop. ⁴ In the Renaissance, for that matter, Aesop supplied the reading matter for beginners in Greek, too. ⁵ At the other end of the literate scale, a person as highly educated as Lorenzo Valla, the great Renaissance critic and philologist, spent time translating the Fables from Greek into Latin. ⁶ A century on from Valla, Martin Luther spent time translating the Fables from Latin into early-modern High German, his autograph manuscript now lodged, curiously enough, in the Vatican. ⁷ There are almost two hundred incunable editions and at least twice that from the sixteenth century. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of editions have been lost, as we may suppose from the fact that so many are known today in a single copy. Those that survive from the incunable period alone are found in more languages than any other book. ⁸

Aesop's simple but acute moralizing appealed to all classes of literate society, from Socrates and Valla to the beginning schoolboy and Leonardo, who called himself, with some irony no doubt, a 'man without letters'. And not just literate society. Fables were in origin orally transmitted, and over the millennia they must have been listened to much more than they were read on the page. There is a charming picture from sixteenth-century France of farmers sitting out 'under a spreading oak tree' during a village festival and listening to a schoolmaster 'reading to us as much as we let him, say from the Shepherd's Calendar or Aesop's Fables or the Romance of the Rose'. ⁹ Another point of access for the unlettered was the illustrations to which Aesop's tales of talking animals naturally gave rise. Text and image became indissoluble, doubtless in manuscripts as old as antiquity — the earliest surviving Greek and Latin fable manuscripts contain pictures ¹⁰ — and very prolifically in medieval books in script and then print. Western culture is saturated by these Aesopic images. One of the great masterpieces of medieval public sculpture is the stonework of the Fontana maggiore of Perugia in central Italy. Among a very varied iconographic scheme we find a panel illustrating two fables of Aesop, the Wolf and the Crane and the Wolf and the Lamb. This was done about 1270 or so. In 1849 a youngish MP, Benjamin Disraeli, moved into Hughenden Manor in Berkshire and had there a library fitted out with shelves and a stucco ceiling and frieze. Among other Aesopic images in the frieze we again come across the Wolf and the Crane. And such depictions did not stop with Disraeli. Twentieth-century cigarette cards, collector's items themselves now, were quite often issued as sets of Aesop pictures, the fables themselves briefly set out on the back. Here yet again we find the Wolf and Crane, transplanted to somewhere in the woods of the USA, but in all essentials the same image. ¹¹

Figure 1.

The Wolf and the...