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Aesop Biography

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ÆSOP, The name of a famous Greek writer of fables, who is said to have been born a slave in Samos late in the seventh century b.c., but to have gained his freedom by his cleverness. We may, however, well doubt whether he ever existed; we have the most varied accounts of him, many of which on their face are pure inventions; and the fables which passed under his name were certainly not written until long after the period in which he is supposed to have lived. Socrates in prison turned some of the current Æsopic fables into elegiac verse; and about 320 b.c. Demetrius of Phalerum made a prose collection of the fables known to his day. Whatever the facts as to Æsop's existence, it is certain that his soon became a generic name attached to those beast fables which are part of the common property of the Indo-European peoples. The collection which now bears his name consists for the most part of prose paraphrases of the collection of fables made, in choliambic verse, by Babrius (q.v.), edited by Halm (2d ed., 1860). Consult Jacobs, Introduction to the Fables of Æsop (New York, 1896); Keidel, "The Editio Princeps of the Greek Æsop," in American Journal of Philology, xxiv, 304-317 (1903). See Phædrus.

The New International Encyclopædia, Vol. I (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 191.