Why Do We Still Care About Aesop?

Think Tank #106

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham for a 1912 edition of Aesop’s Fables.

A few days, ago, I had the very rare experience of actually learning something from Twitter.

Scrolling along, I stumbled upon this thread from The Cultural Tutor (a fantastic Twitter account) about how animals have been represented in art throughout history.

The thread included this quote:

“The same reason that George Orwell wrote Animal Farm is the same reason Aesop's Fables were about animals.
Animals help us to tell and understand stories... and still do in the 21st century.”

It’s a good point, but wait—weren’t Animal Farm and Aesop’s fables written within like 200 years of one another? I always thought they were written in the 17-1800s.

Turns out, they’re not.

Aesop’s fables are really old. Aesop is thought to have lived between 620 and 564 BC in ancient Greece. Socrates read Aesop’s fables. Aesop’s fables are older than Christianity.

Am I the only person who didn’t know this?

Stunning lack of worldly knowledge aside, this got me thinking. What is it about these things that has stood the test of time? These things cross cultural and religious lines. They’ve been translated into Latin and Japanese and Urdu.

Aesop was a slave. He was a common man. He understood the real world. There’s evidence to suggest that not all fables that were attributed to Aesop were actually penned by him—“The Aesopica” likely contains stories originating from a number of sources, only one of which being the ‘real’ Aesop. However, regardless of who (or how many people) wrote these stories, they were ordinary people, and their fables passed via oral tradition throughout Greece and would go on to stand the test of time.

They’re so simple and so true—that’s why they reach people. They speak to the realities of life, and it turns out that life’s most basic truths don’t change all that much.

But wait…

To refresh my memory of the stories, I decided to read a few of them. What I noticed was that versions of these tales vary.

Take, for example, “The Ant and the Grasshopper”: a classic that you may remember from your childhood and probably have not thought about since.

The story has two characters: a lazy grasshopper and a hardworking ant. Throughout the story, the grasshopper sits back and enjoys the sunshine, while the ant passes him day after day toiling in preparation for winter, constantly urging the grasshopper to do the same.

From here, endings diverge a bit.

In one version, the ants, pitying the grasshopper, share their shelter and stores of food with him. In the other, they laugh and let him freeze.

I assume the latter was the original ending, and I suppose it already says something about our culture that it has been altered to shelter children from the brutal realities of life.

However, doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose? If the point is to teach children the realities of life, the former ending fails miserably. Kind strangers are rare. In reality, if the grasshopper didn’t have a willing and able friend or relative to help him out, he would starve.

It’s not all that strange that there are variations. After all, these things were passed down orally for thousands of years, translated into countless languages. There are probably more versions of them than we can even fathom. But it poses an interesting question. Versions of these stories contradict each other, but only one of them can be ‘the truth.’

Are the remainder mere propaganda pieces (e.g. the version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” in which the ants share with the grasshopper, ostensibly penned by someone who decided that ‘be kind’ was the right message to teach children, albeit arguably less useful than the original ‘if you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will.’)?

I’m sure this is the case sometimes. Even these cases are explained by the simple fact that times change, and as our opinions shift, our fables do, as well.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition. Times change, and the fables change a bit as a result. However, even though many other stories and trends and even faiths have come and gone, these have endured, indicating that ‘Truth’ (with a capital ‘T’) still reigns.

I don’t know what exactly this means, but I’m sure it means something.

I hope this one made you think (and I genuinely hope I’m not the only one who always envisioned Aesop as an American).

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