According to tradition the Greek fabulist Aesop of the 6th century B. C. was a slave much below the usual size of a grown up man. Samos, an island in the Aegean Sea, claims the honour of being his birthplace.
After obtaining his freedom he visited Lydia and Greece successively, and lived in Greece until his death.
Of the So-called ‘fables’ of Aesop there have been several editions but most of them are considered fake.
Indeed, Aesop was not an actual historical personage. Several of the fables which he is popularly supposed to have written, have been traced to sources which considerably antedates his own alleged period of life.
Some in fact are found in Egyptian materials dating from 14th century B. C. and some are found in Buddhist Jataka Stories of India dated few centuries earlier than the 6th century B. C. “The Ass In A Lion’s Skin’ a fable attributed to Easop is very similar to the Buddhist Jataka Story ‘Siha Chamma Jatakaya’.
Aesop was represented in later art as deformed, perhaps to indicate his nearer approach to lower animals such as jackals and asses and his peculiar sympathy for their behaviour depicted in his fables.
What was a fable? It was a brief story with characters who are usually animals, occasionally people or inanimate objects. The characters in a fable always talk. And act like human beings, and most fables lead to a moral in the form of a proverb that teaches the lesson of the tale.
According to legend Aesop was a widely travelled person but not much is known of his life.
Traditions say that Aesop passed away in Thebes, Greece in 560 B. C.
