Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables is a collection of short prose tales traditionally attributed to Aesop, a storyteller said to have lived in ancient Greece between roughly 620 and 564 BCE. The fables were not gathered into a single text during his lifetime; the collection took shape over centuries from oral tradition and later Greek and Latin retellings, and different editions vary in which stories they include.

Each fable is brief, usually a paragraph or two, and follows a simple pattern: an incident involving animals, occasionally objects or people, ends in a stated or implied moral. A fox dismisses grapes it cannot reach as sour; a tortoise outlasts a boastful hare; a wolf invents a pretext to justify eating a lamb. The animal casts function as stand-ins for human traits — the fox for cunning, the ant for diligence, the lion for pride — rather than as characters with inner lives of their own.

Though later editions, especially from the Renaissance onward, marketed the fables to children as moral instruction, the earliest versions addressed adult concerns about power, deception, and self-interest. The collection has been translated and illustrated more times than almost any other body of classical literature, and phrases and morals from individual fables — sour grapes, slow and steady wins the race — have passed directly into everyday language.