Aesop's Fables

"Aesop's Fables

By Robin Waterfield

Basic, 336 pages, $30

According to "The Life of Aesop," a text compiled in ancient Greece from a variety of legends, the man whose name is synonymous with the fable was born a slave in Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey) in the sixth century B.C. Distinguished both for his ugliness and eloquence, Aesop eventually won freedom and became an adviser to the king of Babylon. While traveling to the city of Delphi, his clever criticisms so annoyed the citizenry that they threw him off a cliff. Displeased, the gods punished Delphi with blight and disease.

That biography, of course, is really another fable. Its moral, in the formulaic Aesopian style, might be something like, "Wise counsel is rarely heeded by the wicked." Or maybe: "Don't stand near cliffs with those you have angered." In the absence of verifiable accounts, the classicist Robin Waterfield writes in the introduction to his lively and colloquial translation of the fables, "Aesop" is better understood as "the name of a literary genre . . . than that of a historical person."

The fables attributed to Aesop come from many sources. Some are as old as the eighth century B.C. (the earliest is from the Greek poet Hesiod); other tales were added later by poets and compositors in the Roman period. Pruning to reduce repetition, Mr. Waterfield has translated 400 fables from a treasury of about 700 and has arranged them by subject -- "Birds," "Fox Fables," "Lion Tales" and so on.

Mr. Waterfield calls the assortment a "ragbag," noting the fables' diverse functions and sometimes-contradictory messages. Fables, he reminds us, originated in an oral tradition and were meant to be presented in the context of a larger discourse, not as stand-alone just-so stories. Fable anthologies were like reference guides for speechmakers or rhetoricians looking for colorful anecdotes to tendentiously illustrate an argument.

Even so, there is a certain uniformity to the fables, identifiable if we think of the well-known examples -- "The Tortoise and the Hare," "Sour Grapes," "The Shepherd Who Cried Wolf" -- that we have read as children or simply absorbed through cultural osmosis. Generally, though not always, framed as animal allegories, Aesop's fables are cautionary and frequently scolding. The target of their censure is usually vanity and folly, and their humor -- they are often quite funny -- is laced with nastiness. Their universe is a pitiless place where every bad deed meets a fitting comeuppance.

A case in point is "Two Roosters and an Eagle," which Mr. Waterfield translates thus: "Two roosters were fighting, and the one who lost the fight hid himself away in a corner, while the other one, elated by his victory, stood on the roof of a shed crowing at the top of his voice and exulting in his victory -- until an eagle swooped down and carried him away." This is followed by an italicized moral, known as the epimythium, or afterstory: "The point of this fable is that it's stupid to get stuck up and give oneself airs about one's successes and strengths."

Discounting the sententious afterstory, we find a perfectly rounded tale delivered in a single sentence. The scenario, of a cock whose boastful crowing makes him easy pickings for a bird of prey, is neatly illustrative and viciously amusing. The only broader ethics at play is the law of the jungle -- or the barnyard.

This ideology, which urges pragmatic self-interest in a dog-eat-dog world, has made the fables an odd fit as canonical children's reading. In fact, Thomas Paine, in "The Age of Reason," thought that their cruelty disqualified them as pedagogical tools. Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out a problem with teaching "The Raven and the Fox," which French schoolchildren, then as now, encountered through the marvelous 17th-century verse adaptation of Jean de La Fontaine. In this fable, a fox sweet-talks a raven who has snagged a bit of food, telling the bird its only weakness is that it doesn't sing. The raven, eager to disprove the fox, breaks into song and so drops the meal. What child, asks Rousseau, is actually going to take away the ostensible lessons of prudence and humility? If children learn anything, it's how to become tricky little thieves.

Mr. Waterfield's translation emphasizes the mature -- you might say cynical -- quality of the fables. "The Snail and the Mirror," about a shiny mirror befouled by a snail's slime, "is for women who have sex with men who are too stupid to be anything more than a waste of space." The beast of burden who suffers under increasingly violent owners in "The Donkey and the Gardener" warns us that "enslaved people most miss their first masters when they have had some experience of others." "The Ant and the Dung Beetle," Mr. Waterfield's version of the children's touchstone "The Ant and the Grasshopper," views the ill-prepared dung beetle's starvation with gloating enjoyment. There is no notion that the ant should share its food.

"Aesop is not a good book for reformers," a critic once observed, and it's true that the fables present our natures and social standings as essentially fixed. Foxes are foxy, wolves predatory, mice timid. Trying to be what you are not, like "The Donkey in a Lion's Skin," brings about a fall. The lion is the king of the beasts and many fables are about the foolishness of hoping to challenge its authority. There is no democratic, much less revolutionary, spirit here. With rare exceptions, self-sacrifice is merely another example of naivete.

What the fables offer instead is a wintry, fatalistic kind of knowledge. Mr. Waterfield writes that they were intended for popular audiences, meaning powerless people who could expect no change in their fortunes and might take consolation in seeing the world without illusions and laughing at its inanities. In dark times, I'm glad to have them, but I'll keep my copy on the top shelf of the bookcase, out of reach of little hands.

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Mr. Sacks is the Journal's fiction reviewer." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Back To the Beasts. Sacks, Sam.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Nov 2024: C.10.