Nevertheless, legends grew up around the storyteller. Aesop’s Fables may have been the work of many hands, part of an oral tradition that gradually accumulated. If he did, it was probably in around the sixth century BCE, several centuries after Homer, if Homer himself ever existed. William Caxton printed the first English translation of the Fables in 1484, enabling such phrases as ‘sour grapes’ and ‘to cry wolf’ to enter the language.Īs with Homer, we can’t be sure an ‘Aesop’ ever actually existed. Several centuries earlier, Hesiod – who is now best-known for his two poems, Theogony and Works and Days (a fascinating poem which we have analysed here) – had written one about a hawk and a nightingale, while a poet named Archilochus penned several, including one about an eagle and a vixen, and one about a fox and a monkey.īut Aesop would turn the fable into a popular form. Aesop wasn’t the first person to write animal fables.
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