[In the following excerpt, Daly asserts that the morals that appearat the end of Aesopic fables are additions made by later generations which do nothing to clarify the meaning of the original tale.]

The Fables. "Know thyself," commanded one of the legends inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and Socrates echoed to the Athenian court that condemned him, "the unexamined life is not worth a man's living." This introspective bent, this disposition toward self-criticism, was part of the Greek genius for "seeing life steadily and seeing it whole." It might express itself in tragedy, or it might express itself in comedy; Nietzsche labeled its more austere and measured expression Apollonian, its more enthusiastic and irrational side Dionysian.

When the Greek looked at himself, he was not always happy with what he saw. The extreme reaction is represented in the story of King Midas' capture of the sage Silenus, the boon companion of Bacchus and an embodiment of the proverb in vino veritas. When forced to answer the foolish king's question, Silenus said that the best thing for man was never to be born and the second best to die as soon as possible. The outlook finds its standard portrayal in the legend about the philosopher Diogenes who went about with a lantern and, when asked what he was looking for, replied simply, "An honest man." Though ancient Cynicism did not deny human sincerity and goodness, it found these qualities rare.

The Aesopic fables are one of these reflections from the mirror of self-examination. The Greek looks into his glass and sees a horrible picture of himself. It is always difficult to be honest with oneself, and it is as though the fables were saying, "It is not I but the animal in me that is like this." Then comes the moralist and says, "No, you fool; this is yourself even more truly than any ideal you may have." The Aesopic fables have been pap for children in schools for so many hundreds of years that it is perhaps difficult to think of them in any other light, but the cynical vein of the stories themselves runs so strong that it must be obvious they were not intended for the edification of youth, and it is in such a light that I would present them in this new translation, freed from the encumbrance of the added morals, which are at best supererogatory.

If we dispense with the morals, which are little more than an insult to our intelligence, how are we to understand the existence of such a collection of tales? If these fables were not intended to serve a moral and instructional purpose, were they brought together to serve any other purpose? The answer to this question is not, perhaps, too difficult to divine, for we know something of the place the fables occupy in our own consciousness. Pointed stories capable of a wide variety of application have always been in demand. We have only to recall fishing in muddy waters, out of the frying pan into the fire, the goose that laid the golden eggs, the dog in the manger, the boy who cried wolf the ant and thegrasshopper, the hare and the tortoise, and the wolf in sheep's clothing to realize the proverbial and paradigmatic function the stories serve with us. We depend on the very mention of a fable to say, "Oh yes, everyone recognizes that kind of behavior; it's just like that of the animal in the fable." Still, the analogy of modern understanding is not always a reliable index to the attitudes of other times or other places, and a proper insight into a literary product of any age other than our own can be gained only by looking at it in the light of what we know of its genesis and development.

The first appearance in the Hellenic world of anything that can be identified as an Aesopic fable is in the Works and Days (lines 201 ff.) of the poet Hesiod, whom the ancients regarded as a contemporary of Homer and who may have lived as early as the eighth century before Christ. Hesiod says:

And now I will tell a fable for kings even though they are wise: Thus spoke the hawk to the speckled-necked nightingale as he seized her in his claws and carried her up among the clouds—and pitifully did she whimper as the crooked claws pierced her through—masterfully did he bespeak her: "Simple creature, why do you cry aloud? One far mightier than yourself now holds you in his grip, and you will go wherever I take you for all your singing, and I will make a meal of you if I choose, or I will let you go. Foolish is he who would match himself against those who are stronger; he is robbed of victory and suffers pain as well as shame."

The fable is told as something that is already familiar, for it begins in the middle; to judge from the lesson that is drawn, it should have begun by saying that the nightingale was inordinately proud of her song, so proud that she boasted she was the better of any winged creature.

Other early Greek poets make use of similar talking-beast tales, but it is not until the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ that we find such writers as Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle ascribing the stories they tell to Aesop. These stories obviously had currency by word of mouth for a long time, even, to use a close parallel, as shaggy-dog stories have in recent times.

A story told by Plato of Socrates sheds an interesting light on the status of the fables in his day. In the Phaedo (60 D ff.) one of the friends of Socrates, who is in prison awaiting execution of his sentence, asks him about some poems he is said to have been composing there. Socrates says that he has been doing this in response to a command that he had often received in a dream. He says that he has composed a hymn but "realizing that the poet, if he is really to be a poet, must write stories rather than addresses, and since I was no storyteller, I took the fables of Aesop, which I knew and came readily to hand, and turned the first ones that occurred to me into verse." It is reasonably certain that Socrates is not supposed in this anecdote to have had a copy of Aesop's Fables at hand in the prison. Indeed there is no reason to suppose that there was in existence among the Greeks any such collection of what would have been looked upon as trivialities in this day when books were still a relatively scarce commodity. Socrates would merely have drawn on his familiarity with such fables for simple plots. It will also bear noticing that this is the first instance in which there is any suggestion of the idea of versifying Aesop, an idea that has since borne generous fruit.

These instances in which fables were used by ancient poets and other writers of Greece also give us an opportunity to see in what way the fables were used in this period before there is any evidence of their having been brought together into a collection. The example chosen from Hesiod above is perhaps somewhat misleading, for it is only he and a moralist such as the Socrates of Xenophon's Memorabilia (II 7, 13) who make use of a fable to point a generalized moral lesson. In most of the other instances in which there is sufficient context preserved to allow us to make any observation, the fables are used to make a point or support an argument. The Greeks are known for their love of disputation, and this use of the fable is only one of their many devices for forceful expression aimed at making a point or carrying conviction. And there was more than one way of using a fable for such a purpose. Herodotus in his History (I 141) tells how Ionian Greeks, who had resisted the Persian king, Cyrus, once they heard that Croesus and the Lydians had already been subjugated, sent an ambassador with offers of submission. Cyrus' only reply was to tell a fable. "A flute player saw some fish and started to play, with the idea that the fish would come out on the land. When they disappointed him, he took a net, cast it, and hauled out a great quantity of fish. When he saw them jumping around, he said to them: 'You don't need to dance for me now, since you wouldn't come out and dance when I played my flute."' Herodotus assures us the Ionians did not miss the point of Cyrus' fable.

The romanticized biography of Aesop gives a perfect illustration of this allegorical use of a fable. Aesop, a slave recently freed for his good advice to the people of Samos, was called upon for further advice. Croesus had demanded tribute of the Samians, and their public officials had advised sending it. But the assembly of the people asked Aesop's advice. The master of the fable replied, "If I say 'don't give it,' I'll mark myself as an enemy of Croesus." The assembly still called loudly for him to speak, and reluctantly he responded, "I will not give you advice but I will speak to you in a fable. Once, at the command of Zeus, Prometheus described to men two ways, one the way of freedom and the other that of slavery. The way of freedom he pictured as rough at the beginning, narrow, steep, and waterless, full of brambles and beset with perils everywhere, but finally a level plain amid parks, groves of fruit trees, and water courses where the struggle reaches its end in rest. The way of slavery he pictured as a level plain at the beginning, flowery and pleasant to look upon with much to delight, but at its end narrow, hard, and like a cliff." In his Rhetoric (1120) Aristotle comments on this use of the fable. "Fables," says he, "are suited to popular oratory and have this advantage that, while historical parallels are hard to find, it is comparatively easy to find fables. For fables have to be invented, like illustrations, if one has a faculty of seeing analogies, and invention is facilitated by cultivation."

The first indication that any Greek took the fables seriously enough to make a written collection of them does not come until the fourth century B.C. Diogenes Laertius in his biography of Demetrius of Phalerum (V 5, 80) reports that this scholar left, among many other works, "collections of Aesopic Fables." These collections have not survived, but fragments of a papyrus scroll of the first century after Christ have been found containing fables in Greek prose, and this scroll may well be a copy of them.

The earliest extant collection is a versified Latin version of some of the fables done by the freedman Phaedrus in the first century of our era. The five short books of Phaedrus contain not only Aesopic fables but also anecdotes and topical material of contemporary interest, which indicates how little feeling there was that the fables had a fixed form and independent existence in their own right rather than being floating, common property. Phaedrus retold the fables he chose in iambic verse, which had always been felt to be appropriate for satire or invective. The fables do not in themselves point a satirical finger at anyone, at least not explicitly. In a collection who can say that any one fable is aimed at an individual? Some of them may be so aimed, and those who are sensitive or vulnerable may feel wounded. Some, at least, of Phaedrus' fables were taken as personal satire, for we are told that under the emperor Tiberius he was punished for offence he gave through his fables to the emperor's powerful favorite, Sejanus. This satirical bent eventually found its fullest expression in the French Fables of La Fontaine, many of which are based directly upon Phaedrus.

In France the Fables of La Fontaine have been familiar to generations of school children through exercises in memorization, recitation, and paraphrasing. This is precisely the pedagogical practice advocated for Roman school children by Quintilian in the first century in his Education of the Orator (I 9, 1). The pupils of the elementary teacher "should," he says, "learn to paraphrase Aesop's fables, the natural successors of the fairy stories of the nursery, in simple language, and subsequently to set down this paraphrase in writing with the same simplicity of style: They should begin by analyzing each verse, then give its meaning in different language, and finally proceed to a freer paraphrase in which they will be permitted now to abridge and now to embellish the original so far as this may be done without losing the poet's meaning." The poet in this case we can only presume to have been Phaedrus.

Phaedrus did not find an emulator in Latin until about 400 A.D., when Avianus turned forty-two fables into elegiac verse, which enjoyed the greatest popularity throughout the Middle Ages and served as a mediator of the fable to modern times. But Avianus' model was not Phaedrus. His stories are all taken from Babrius, who, at an uncertain date not later than the second century, did the work Socrates had conceived and left iambic renderings in Greek of the fables in ten books, of which we now have two.

But it is the prose versions of the fables with which we are here concerned. Aside from the one small papyrus fragment already referred to, the Greek prose versions are preserved by manuscripts written at various times ranging from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Yet the formation of the collection upon which these late copies are based may be assigned with confidence to some time within the first three centuries after the birth of Christ. This is not to say that every fable in the collections has been preserved in precisely the form in which it would have appeared in the original collection; it is, in fact, clear that the precise literal form of the fables was not regarded as anything like sacrosanct and that variations on the nature of the collections were produced from time to time by the addition, omission, and rearrangement of fables.

It is these prose versions of the Fables which may be considered as the true Aesop, the basis in one sense or another for all others. While it is clear from allusions in the poet Archilochus that some of these fables are as old as the seventh century before Christ, at least one (262) was pretty clearly added in Christian times, since it is the fable told by Jotham to the men of Shechem in the book of Judges (IX 8).

The fables are, as everyone knows, beast stories in which the beasts not only talk but also behave in other ways very much like humans. Isidore, the seventh century Bishop of Seville, says that fables are told in order to produce a recognizable picture of human life through the conversations of imaginary dumb animals. He goes on to say that fables are either Aesopic or Libystic. "They are Aesopic when dumb animals or inanimate things such as cities, trees, mountains, rocks, rivers are supposed to have talked to one another, but they are Libystic when there is supposed to be some oral communication of men with beasts or beasts with men." There are fables of both kinds represented in our collections, but there are also other kinds, and the distinction is of no significance. Some fables, such as that of The Thieving Boy and His Mother (200), have only human characters.

Far from being highly moral stories, the fables are not always even conducive to moralizing. The fable of The Boys and the Butcher (66) presents two juvenile delinquents of antiquity stealing from a butcher. The point of the story lies in the boy who stole the meat saying that he didn't have it and the one who had it saying he hadn't stolen it. The butcher's remark that even if they deceive him with their lies, they will not deceive the gods, is very lameindeed. Again in the story of The Bat and the Weasels (172), in which the bat escaped death at the hands of weasels once by claiming to be a mouse instead of a bird and again by claiming to be a bird instead of a mouse, there is no moral content, and even the moralist can only say, "Obviously, we too must not always stand on the same ground but remember that people who adapt themselves to circumstances often manage to escape the most serious perils." On occasion they may serve very special purposes. For example, the fable of The Bat, the Bramble, and the Coot (171) is aetiological, that is it serves to explain the origin of the peculiar habits of each of the members of this trio. That of Zeus and the Turtle (106) is a Just So Story explaining how the turtle got his shell. Still the vast majority of the fables are paradigmatic, which is to say that, whatever their content, they serve as examples, usually horrible, of human behavior. You may take them as you like, but they must usually have been told in antiquity with the expectation that someone specific would find that the shoe fit and would have to put it on. That is why they so readily turn into satire in the hands of Phaedrus or La Fontaine.

In our collections nearly all the fables are equipped with morals at the end. This fable teaches is one of the familiar introductory formulae. Upon such formulaic pegs are hung the generalized lessons which are independent of the stories and are presented as the comment of Aesop or an anonymous narrator and not of the animals or characters of the stories. There is good reason for retelling the fables without these morals. The history of the collections pretty clearly indicates that the morals were not a necessary or standard accompaniment of the fables from the beginning. The fables are commonly arranged in the collections in an alphabetical order determined by the initial letter of the first word of each so that, for example, all fables beginning with the word Fox are grouped together. It is thus fairly easy to find most of the Fox fables but not so easy to find a fable to illustrate a particular point. It appears that the collectors began to give some help in this direction by adding brief promythia, or explanations, at the head of the fables. As the purpose of writing these shifted from that of indicating interest and point to one of interpretation, it was natural that the explanation should be made to follow rather than precede the fable it explained. As B. E. Perry, who has studied this history, puts it, the collectors "began to think of themselves no longer as mere compilers but somewhat as literary men speaking to the public in the capacity of interpreters and moral advisers."

The style of the fables is simple and direct. They are told in language that is unpretentious and free alike from high-flown verbiage and from colloquialism. When one stops to think that the fables are not all the product of the pen of a single author, he will realize that this feature of their style is one that had been fixed by convention and represents deliberate restraint rather than inept colorlessness. This restraint is in keeping with the general crispness and economy of narrative that is everywhere observed. Thesituation is usually described in a very few words, an incident is outlined with equal brevity, and a result indicated. The fable of The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs (87) is a good example. It consists of three sentences. The first sets the stage: "Hermes was worshiped with unusual devotion by a man, and as a reward he gave the man a goose that laid golden eggs." The second tells what the man did: "The man couldn't wait to reap the benefits gradually, but, without any delay, he killed the goose on the supposition that it would be solid gold inside." The third tells the result: "He found out that it was all flesh inside, and so the result was that he was not only disappointed in his expectations but he also lost the eggs."

Still, even with all this brevity, space may be found for a dramatic touch. Most fables end with the words of the principal character. They may simply be his last words, as in the fable of The Crab and the Fox (116), but very frequently they provide the fable with an epigrammatic climax, a punch line. This punch line can be seen in the fable of The Pig and the Sheep (85), which also shows the further dramatic refinement of miniature dialogue.

Effective character drawing is not to be expected in such brief scope. In the Fables of La Fontaine the individual animals often bear a stock character equivalent to some type or class of person in contemporary court society, but this is not so in the Aesopic fables. The fox may show some signs of being sly like his medieval counterpart Reynard or his more modern descendant Br'er Fox, as in the fable of The Fox and the Leopard (12), but he is so far from being consistently clever that he appears as a very prototype of stupidity combined with gluttony in the fable of The Fox with the Swollen Belly (24). The faithfulness of the dog, the long-suffering of the ass, and the timorousness of the deer are all recognized in the fables, but they are not so fixed as characteristics that these animals cannot be presented in other lights.