AESOP
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Fables
Enough of all this literary seriousness, high or not. The Classical Greeks also had a lot of fun, in the theater and out.
All the evidence suggests that Aesop was not a real person. As early as five centuries before our era the name “Aesop” came to be given to all stories in which animals talked and acted like human beings. Thus it is actually redundant to refer to “Aesop’s Fables.” A fable is an Aesop, as it were, and an Aesop is a fable.
Let us retain the traditional usage. The question is why fables, and Aesop’s fables in particular, are important as well as popular.
Actually, it’s not easy to answer the question. It may help to remember the inveterate human habit of treating animals as though they were people. Farmers, pet owners, and other people who live in some sort of intimacy with animals talk to them all the time. Why? The animals don’t answer back. What kind of conversation is it that is so completely one-sided and at the same time so satisfying?
Or do animals answer back? Every pet owner believes his or her pet not only understands but also responds. People who don’t own pets think this is nonsense.
Conversations with animals are not always confined to repartee between one human and one animal. Often a single animal plays an important, though dumb, part in a conversation involving two or more persons. Husbands and wives can converse with one another through or via their pets.
Wife to dog: “Duke, the garbage has to be taken out. Help Daddy take out the garbage.” Duke looks baffled.
Husband to Duke: “Let’s take out the garbage, Duke.” Duke jumps with joy. The garbage is taken out without the wife having to ask the husband to do it. Nor has she called him by his name nor he her by hers. Taking out the garbage is an unpleasant duty which by this round-about device has been made as pleasant as possible. If the wife had said, “George, take out the garbage,” she would probably have started a fight.
The fables of Aesop—indeed, all fables—express home truths that in another guise would be hard to accept. Putting them in the form of a fable makes them palatable, even enjoyable, without detracting from their effectiveness. Take the fable of the Wolf and the Dog. The Wolf meets the Dog after a long separation. The Dog is sleek and fat, the Wolf skinny and hungry. The Dog explains that he has found an exceptional situation in which he receives regular meals, a warm place to sleep, and so forth. The Wolf could have it too. The Wolf says, “Let’s go!” But as they trot side by side the Wolf notices a worn place in the fur of the Dog’s neck. “What’s that?” he asks.
“That’s where my collar rubs,” says the Dog, continuing to trot home.
But the Wolf has stopped in the road. “No thanks!” he says as he runs back to the forest.
The moral of this fable doesn’t need to be made explicit. We all know how to apply it to our own lives. None of us is completely free. We all wear collars of one sort or another. Even the Wolf wears the “collar” of necessity. He has to seek his sustenance and sometimes fails to find it. He is almost always hungry. What is your “collar”? What is mine? As you think about this fable you may begin to ask the question in a way you never did before. An explicit discourse on freedom and necessity, about the kinds of deals we make with life—which are different for everybody and even different at various times in everybody’s life—might have little effect or none. It would go in one ear and out the other. Distancing the story by putting it in the mouths of animals serves to bring it closer to home. Even more important, maybe, is that these home truths can be immediately perceived by children, who may need them the most.
All of Aesop’s fables are like that one. All are wonderful. If there ever were any bad ones, they have long since fallen by the wayside.
HERODOTUS
484?–425? BCE
The History
Herodotus was born about four years after the battle of Salamis, in Halicarnasus in Asia Minor, around 484 BCE. This Greek colony had been subject to Persia for many years and remained so for half of Herodotus’s life. The Persian tyranny made free life impossible, and the future historian prepared himself by wide reading of the “classic” literature of his time. In his History he shows familiarity not only with Homer but also with Hesiod, Sappho, Solon, Aesop, Simonides, Aeschylus, and Pindar.
More important were his incessant travels all over the world as he knew it, from Sicily in the west to the islands of the Aegean and to Susa in Persia, Babylon, and Colchis, as well as Scythia, Palestine, Gaza, and other places in Asia Minor. He traveled to Egypt and remained there for years, learning the language and discoursing with priests about the history and customs of their ancient land. Wherever he went he continued writing his History.
When he was about thirty, the tyrant of Halicarnassus was overthrown with the help of the Athenian navy and Herodotus returned to his home. But not to stay: After less than a year he went to Athens, where he was welcomed into the brilliant Periclean society. He gave readings of his History to enthusiastic audiences. Uncomfortable with the fact that he was not a citizen, he left Athens and joined a new colony Pericles had founded at Thurii in southern Italy. From that time forth we know nothing of him. He probably died around 425. We can guess that he never stopped writing until his death.
Herodotus was the first historian: no one before him had ever written a book that could be called a history. And few after him, writing history, have wanted or been able to ignore his work.
Herodotus didn’t think of his book as what we might call a finished history. It was not a completely consistent or coherent account of its subject matter, nor did Herodotus really desire it to be that. He preferred to call what he had done “researches,” and we may think of him as preparing the way for another, more formal historian, who would write the “true” history of his time. Such a history did not get written for two millennia after Herodotus. Such is the power of a great—even if defective—book!
His time was the first half of the fifth century BCE, the great age of Greece, before it ruined itself in the terrible waste of the Peloponnesian or Greek Civil War. Herodotus tells how Hellas forged a unity against the common enemy—the Persians, how it defeated the Persian army and navy (vastly larger and more powerful than anything the Greeks could pose against them) by adhering to a set of ideas that were radically different from those by which the Persians lived. It is a moving story that still deeply influences how we think about the ancient Greeks, and how we think about ourselves.
Let us take a moment to review the background of the events that Herodotus describes in the History. Even late in the seventh century BCE, Greece consisted of small settlements surrounding the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, trading and fighting with one another and with neighbors of other races, but having very little conception of “Greekness.” Around 600 BCE, Greece emerged as a coherent entity on the world stage, but it was still small and weak compared to the great Persian Empire, which stretched from Asia Minor all the way to India and was, compared to Greece, almost unimaginably rich and powerful.