Aesop's Fables

Introduction

The fox and the grapes, the tortoise and the hare, the boy who cried wolf, the goose that laid the golden eggs: almost everyone has heard these stories since childhood, yet few have read them in their earliest Greek form. Aesop's fables are mostly brief and pointed; animals talk, scheme and make mistakes like people, and a closing line often states the moral. In antiquity they were used as exercises in the schools of rhetoric, and later, retold by the Latin poet Phaedrus and the French poet La Fontaine, they travelled the whole world. This translation will follow the ancient Greek collections and include the principal fables.