There is no fixed text even for the nucleus collection contained in this book. Æsop himself is so shadowy a figure that we might almost be forgiven if we held, with regard to him, the heresy of Mistress Elizabeth Prig. What we call his fables can in most cases be traced back to the fables of other people, notably of Phædrus and Babrius. It is usual to regard the Greek Prose Collections, passing under the name of Æsop, as having greater claims to the eponymous title; but modern research has shown that these are but medieval prosings of Babrius’s verse. I have therefore felt at liberty to retell the fables in such a way as would interest children, and have adopted from the various versions that which seemed most suitable in each case, telling the fable anew in my own way.
Much has been learnt during the present century about the history of the various apologues that walk abroad under the name of “Æsop.” I have attempted to bring these various lines of research together in the somewhat elaborate introductory volume which I wrote to accompany my edition of Caxton’s Æsop, published by Mr. Nutt in his Bibliothèque de Carabas. I have placed in front of the present version of the “Fables,” by kind permission of Mr. Nutt, the short abstract of my researches in which I there summed up the results of that volume. I must accompany it, here as there, by a warning to the reader, that for a large proportion of the results thus reached I am myself responsible; but I am happy to say that many of them have been accepted by the experts in America, France, and Germany, who have done me the honour to consider my researches. Here, in England, there does not seem to be much interest in this class of work, and English scholars, for the most part, are content to remain in ignorance of the methods and results of literary history.
I have attached to the “Fables” in the obscurity of small print at the end a series of notes, summing up what is known as to the provenance of each fable. Here, again, I have tried to put in shorter and more readable form the results of my researches in the volume to which I have already referred. For more detailed information I must refer to the forty closely-printed pages (vol. i. pp. 225-268) which contain the bibliography of the Fables.
JOSEPH JACOBS.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ÆSOPIC FABLE
Most nations develop the Beast-Tale as part of their folk-lore, some go further and apply it to satiric purposes, and a few nations afford isolated examples of the shaping of the Beast-Tale to teach some moral truth by means of the Fable properly so called.[[1]] But only two peoples independently made this a general practice. Both in Greece[[2]] and in India we find in the earliest literature such casual and frequent mention of Fables as seems to imply a body of Folk-Fables current among the people. And in both countries special circumstances raised the Fable from folklore into literature. In Greece, during the epoch of the Tyrants, when free speech was dangerous, the Fable was largely used for political purposes. The inventor of this application or the most prominent user of it was one Æsop, a slave at Samos whose name has ever since been connected with the Fable. All that we know about him is contained in a few lines of Herodotus: that he flourished 550 B.C.; was killed in accordance with a Delphian oracle; and that wergild was claimed for him by the grandson of his master, Iadmon. When free speech was established in the Greek democracies, the custom of using Fables in harangues was continued and encouraged by the rhetoricians, while the mirth-producing qualities of the Fable caused it to be regarded as fit subject of after-dinner conversation along with other jests of a broader kind (“Milesian,” “Sybaritic”). This habit of regarding the Fable as a form of the Jest intensified the tendency to connect it with a well-known name as in the case of our Joe Miller. About 300 B.C. Demetrius Phalereus, whilom tyrant of Athens and founder of the Alexandria Library, collected together all the Fables he could find under the title of Assemblies of Æsopic Tales (Λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαι). This collection, running probably to some 200 Fables, after being interpolated and edited by the Alexandrine grammarians, was turned into neat Latin iambics by Phædrus, a Greek freedman of Augustus in the early years of the Christian era. As the modern Æsop is mainly derived from Phædrus, the answer to the question “Who wrote Æsop?” is simple : “Demetrius of Phaleron.”[[3]]
[1] E.g. Jotham’s Fable, Judges ix., and that of Menenius Agrippa in Livy, seem to be quite independent of either Greek or Indian influence. But one fable does not make Fable.
[2] Only about twenty fables, however, are known in Greece before Phædrus, 30 A.D. See my Caxton’s Æsop vol. i. pp. 26–29, for a complete enumeration.
[3] For this statement and what follows a reference to the Pedigree of the Fables on p. 196 will be found useful.
In India the great ethical reformer, Sakyamuni, the Buddha, initiated (or adopted from the Brahmins) the habit of using the Beast-Tale for moral purposes, or, in other words, transformed it into the Fable proper. A collection of these seems to have existed previously and independently, in which the Fables were associated with the name of a mythical sage, Kasyâpa. These were appropriated by the early Buddhists by the simple expedient of making Kasyâpa the immediately preceding incarnation of the Buddha. A number of his itihâsas or Tales were included in the sacred Buddhistic work containing the Jātakas or previous-births of the Buddha, in some of which the Bodisat (or future Buddha) appears as one of the Dramatis Personæ of the Fables; the Crane, e.g., in our Wolf and Crane being one of the incarnations of the Buddha. So, too, the Lamb of our Wolf and Lamb was once Buddha; it was therefore easy for him—so the Buddhists thought—to remember and tell these Fables as incidents of his former careers. It is obvious that the whole idea of a Fable as an anecdote about a man masquerading in the form of a beast could most easily arise and gain currency where the theory of transmigration was vividly credited.