Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to
Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece
between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with
his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and
continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in
popular as well as artistic media. The fables originally belonged to the
oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after
Aesop's death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and
proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was
from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural
sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with
some of the fables unrecorded before the later Middle Ages and others
arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories
are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are
demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.
Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission,
although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed
another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop's fables were
among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of
later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's
reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world. Initially
the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and
political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from
the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of
children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world
through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means,
as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been
reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over
time.
