SOURCE: Agnes Perkins, in an introduction to "The Five Hundredth Anniversary of Aesop in English," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 60-75.

[In the following essay, Perkins argues that Aesop's fables do not promote the morality of kindness and generosity that the fables of the Indian "Jatakas" do, and that Aesop's fables present what is to one's personal advantage through a satiric representation of human-like foibles.]

In 1484, William Caxton printed his translation of Aesop's Fables on the first English press. It has remained in print ever since; the book is still available in at least sixteen versions for children published in the United States alone. Five hundred years is a good long run for a book; it behooves us to try to understand its lasting quality.

When a current political figure proposed that the budget could be balanced by increasing defense spending and cutting taxes, and an opponent called it a scheme to bell the cat, he did not need to explain or add the "moral": "It is easy to propose impossible remedies." We are so familiar with Aesop's stories that we seldom look closely at just what they are saying and how they are saying it; as Aesop himself would say, "Familiarity breeds contempt." We may dismiss them as we do much of the didactic literature of the past as too moralistic for modern taste. But a rereading of Aesop convinces me that the fables are not so much lessons advocating moral goodness as sharply ironic, and often humorous, pictures of human foibles.

Aesop's fables are, of course, much older than five hundred years, having been in the oral tradition for perhaps twenty centuries before Caxton translated and printed them. We know little about Aesop the man. Tradition has it that he was deformed or crippled, a slave on Samos in the sixth century B.C. He is mentioned by several ancient writers, including Herodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristotle, and is pictured as using fables to plead various cases on trial. It is unlikely that he wrote down any fables, and unclear whether he composed those attributed to him or simply gathered those already known. The earliest collection was made by Demetrius Phalereus, founder of the Alexandrian library, about 320 B.C., but it has not survived. The Roman writer Phaedrus of the first century A.D. wrote at least five books of fables in Latin verse, which he called Fabulae Aesophiae and which were popular through the middle ages. It may well be that Phaedrus composed many of these himself, as in the seventeenth century Jean de La Fontaine wrote fables in French verse, some taken from earlier Aesop collections and some his own compositions. More important than speculation about Aesop as a person is that the Western body of fable from the oral and early written traditions has been assembled and known by his name.

By definition, a fable is a didactic story, usually a brief tale meant to teach a specific lesson. In distinguishing fables from novels, Mary McCarthy writes:

Another class of prose fiction is the fable—from the Latin fabula, which in turn goes back to an ancient term fari, meaning simply "to speak"—the root, incidentally, of fatum, or "fate", i.e., "what has been spoken." …

[Fables] did not go out with Aesop. The obvious contemporary example is Animal Farm, but I think 1984, a cautionary tale, must be a fable too, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, most of Golding, probably, also Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and quite a lot of science fiction.

Fables, with or without talking animals, are allegories—allegoria, the description of one thing under the image of another—and, whatever a novel may be, it is not an allegory.

Her definition would, I think, include as fables such books as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, and The Velveteen Rabbit, all of which are, in my experience, more popular with pedogogically oriented adults than with children, who sense in them the lesson thinly veiled by story. Such books lack the saving irony of humor of Aesop. Even if one sticks to a more conventional definition of fable, one finds that most strongly contrast with Aesop's, particularly the Jataka Tales, the fables from India which ostensibly tell of the various incarnations of Buddha.

A comparison with Jataka Tales points up some of the non-moralistic qualities of Aesop's fables. A number of the Jatakas teach the moral value of self-sacrifice. The king of the Banyan Deer lays his head upon the butcher's block to save a pregnant doe, and is rewarded not only with his life, but with a promise that henceforth all the deer will be spared, or, in some versions, that the king and all his country will become vegetarians. The Spirit of the Sal tree pleads that, if the tree must be cut down, it be done painfully, little by little, so that the young trees nearby will not suffer in its crash, and the king promises that the tree shall be allowed to live on. The Hare, having nothing to offer a beggar except grass, which the man is unable to eat, willingly jumps into the fire so that his roasted flesh may feed the beggar, who turns out to be a god in disguise and saves the hare from the flame. The monkey leader saves his eighty thousand followers from the king's archers by making a bridge of vines from the mango tree where they are trapped, using his own body as the essential final link, and, though he dies as a result, he is honored by a magnificent funeral pyre and a shrine built on the site.

Other Jatakas are concerned with the value of kindness or good example. When the Brahmin bets that his ox can pull a hundred wagons and shouts at him, "Rascal!" and "Devil!", the ox plants his feet and will not move, and his master loses the bet. The next day, the ox having explained his grievance, the owner bets again and calls him "fine fellow" and "Great Joy," and the ox pulls willingly, winning great wealth for his master. The good-natured elephant is turned into a rogue when her kingly keeper is replaced by a stable hand who drinks, gambles, steals and quarrels; when his place is taken by wise counselors who are courteous and who discuss honesty, wisdom, and respect each night, the elephant again becomes gentle, good-natured and dependable.

Some Jatakas show how harmony is achieved when one works willingly for a weaker or less able friend. An elephant, seeing that his owner, an old woman, is growing feeble, sets out to earn money and relieves the old woman of her burdens. A white elephant, grateful to some carpenters who pull a splinter from his foot, roots up the trees and does other labors for them until his good deeds catch the attention of the king, who takes him to live in the palace, presumably a more desirable fate than staying in the forest.

Except for "Androcles and the Lion," which is sometimes included with Aesop's fables, it is hard to find an example in Aesop of this sort of idealistic philosophy. A direct comparison can be made between the Jataka tale, "Friends and Neighbors" and Aesop's "The Wolf and the Crane." In each a weaker animal aids one stronger and fiercer. In the Jataka, a jackal helps a lion who is stuck in the mud; in the Aesop, a crane with its long beak extracts a bone stuck in a wolf's throat. When each asks for a reward, the lion promises to be friend and to share with the jackal for life and even enforces this friendship, in later years, upon his mate. The wolf, however, tells the crane, "Ungrateful creature! It is reward enough to put your head into a Wolfs jaws, and take it out again alive!"

Even when the stories are similar, as many of them are, the ending of the Jataka tale is often kinder or more philosophical than that of the Aesop fable. In Aesop's "The Flies and the Honey-pot" and "The Jataka Sweet Tooth", creatures are attracted by love of honey into danger. In the Jataka tale, the king, having made his point, allows the rare Wind Antelope to return to the freedom of the forest. In Aesop, the flies bemoan their foolishness, which costs them their lives. One can imagine other Aesop tales with a more philosophical moral: the lion might let the mouse go, not because the mouse will return and free the lion from the net (i.e., even the least likely person may be of later use), but because compassion is a noble quality or because the strong have a moral obligation to aid the weak; the ant might welcome the grasshopper into its home to share in its winter stores so that they both can survive until spring; the crow or jackdaw which dresses in peacock feathers and is driven off by the offended birds might be welcomed back among his fellows with forgiveness, instead of being ostracized by his own kind as well. An Aesop fable, however, rarely promotes this sort of generosity or tells of reform in its characters.

What lessons, then, do Aesop's fables teach? A surprising number condemn, not evil intent, but foolishness. The frogs who want a king find themselves with a tyrant whose appetite they do not survive. The donkey who, seeking a lighter load, twice deliberately falls into the water so that the salt he is carrying will wash away, discovers how stupid his trick is when he is loaded with sponges. The frog who tries to blow himself up as big as the ox bursts in the attempt. The goat, seeing a fox in the well, jumps in without considering how he will get out, and the fox, having climbed out with the aid of the goat's back, laughs at him. Often foolishness is combined with vanity. Chaucer's Nun's Priest's tale of Chanticleer is based on an Aesop's fable. "The Fox and the Crow" is a similar tale, in which the fox gets the crow's cheese by flattery. Others concern foolishness combined with greed. The man kills his goose which lays golden eggs in an attempt to achieve more wealth; the widow overfeeds her hen, hoping to get twice as many eggs, but instead makes the hen so fat that she stops laying entirely. The milkmaid, planning all the good things she will get when she sells the milk and raises chickens, stumbles and spills the milk and so has nothing. The boy, reaching into the jar and taking a fistful of nuts, finds he cannot get his hand out again because he has grabbed too many. Some teach that one should be content with his place in life. The donkey masquerading in the lion's skin is recognized and beaten for his pretentions; the ass who envies the war horse decides, on the day of the battle when the horse is killed, that its humble, hard-working life is better after all. A few of the fables promote cooperation. The old man teaches his sons that together they are strong, individually weak, when he shows them how easy it is to snap a single stick and how difficult to break a bundle. The great trees sacrifice their small neighbor, the ash, to the woodcutter who wants an axe handle, and soon find themselves victims of the axe.

This last is a good example of the negative presentation of the lesson, a method frequently found in Aesop; not "cooperate and you will save yourselves," but "fail to cooperate and you will be destroyed." In fact, the lesson itself is often not a moral in the sense of an exhortation to a virtuous act, but a cautionary anecdote followed by an application that would hardly be a desirable pattern to follow. When the fox invites the stork to dinner and serves its food on a flat plate and the stork returns the invitation with a dinner served in a narrow-necked jar, the "moral" that follows is, "One bad turn deserves another."

The lessons of Aesop's fables are less directions to righteousness or goodness than patterns of practical advantage; they are not about how to lead a good life but about how to get along in the world. They present practical "peasant wisdom" in a tone that is realistic, even callous. No sympathy is wasted on the boy who cries "Wolf!" and loses his sheep or, in some versions, his life. No tears are shed over the sick lion who is mistreated by his subjects or over the lion in love, who allows his claws to be trimmed and his teeth extracted until he becomes a laughing stock. No pity is extended to the man who lets his young wife pick out all his white hairs and his elder wife pluck out all the black ones, until he is bald. The characters' suffering is the way of the world and results from their own foolishness; it serves them right! Most of us do not enjoy being preached at. Most moralistic literature is short-lived, and one might expect that, in the modern world at least, such tales would be relegated to those with a taste for the obscure or quaint. Instead, they are continually being revived in new collections or used as subjects for dramatizations and picture books. I suspect that their continued popularity is not because of any moral value they promote, in the sense of piety or virtue, but because they take a sharp, satiric view of the world and make us laugh ironically at the faults we recognize in our neighbors and, all too often, in ourselves.

References

Aesop's Fables for Modern Readers. Peter Pauper Press, 1941.

Aspinwall, Margaret. Jataka Tales Out of Old India. E. P. Dutton, 1920.

Babbitt, Ellen C. Jataka Tales. Century, 1912.

DeRoin, Nancy. Jataka Tales. Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Gaer, Joseph. The Fables of India. Little Brown, 1955.

Jacobs, Joseph. The Fables of Aesop. 1894, rpr. Macmillan, 1964.

McCarthy, Mary. "Novel, Tale, Romance," The New York Review of Books, May 12, 1983.

Perry, Ben Edwin. "Aesop," Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1966), 1:220.