Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables

Aesop is the name tradition attaches to the fables of ancient Greece — a slave, according to Herodotus, who lived on the island of Samos and was later put to death at Delphi; tradition dates him to about 620–564 BC. Nothing he wrote survives, and modern scholars doubt that a single historical author lies behind the name: most of what is said of his life comes from a later, largely fictional biography, the Aesop Romance. The fables have been retold under his name, from Demetrius of Phalerum’s lost Greek collection and the Latin verse of Phaedrus and Babrius onward, for over two thousand years.