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Aesop's Lessons in Literary Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Anthony Skillen
Anthony Skillen
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

A crow sat in a tree holding in his beak a piece of meat that he had stolen. A fox which saw him determined to get the meat. It stood under the tree and began to tell the crow what a beautiful big bird he was. He ought to be king of all the birds, the fox said, and he undoubtedly would have been made king, if only he had a voice as well. The crow was so anxious to prove that he had a voice, that he dropped the meat and croaked for all he was worth. Up ran the fox, snapped up the meat, and said to him: ‘If you added brains to all your other qualifications you would make an ideal king.’

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 260 , April 1992 , pp. 169 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

1 Fables of Aesop, edited and translated by Handford, S. A. (UK: Penguin Classics, 1954), 12.Google Scholar For a less accessible but scholarly edition see Babrius and Phaedrus, Fables in the Aesopian Tradition, translated, edited and introduced by Ben Elwin Perry. Loeb Classical Library (UK: Heinemann, 1965). See especially Perry's discussion from XI to XLVI of the nature and authorship of Aesop's fables.

2 Fables, 85.Google Scholar

3 Contrast the ‘moral’ in Babrius' collection (circa a.d. 200): ‘You too, man, never be boastful when fortune elevates you above another. Many have been saved by the very fact of not succeeding.’ Whether, as is likely, this is added by the collector, it certainly fits better than that of the Penguin edition's moralist. See Perry, , op. cit., 11.Google Scholar

4 Op. cit., 139.

5 Op. cit., 129.

6 Op. cit., 5.

7 The Life and Fables of Aesop, selection from Sir Roger L'Estrange's version of 1692, S. Stern (ed.), (UK: Kahn and Averill, 1970), 79.

8 Caxton's Aesop, (Leneghan, R. T. (ed.), (USA: Harvard UP, 1967), 122.Google Scholar

9 Op. cit., 153.

10 ‘When I had finished my hymn, I reflected that a poet, if he is to be worthy of the name, ought to work on imaginative themes, not descriptive ones, and I was not good at inventing stories, so I availed myself of some of Aesop's fables, which were ready to hand and familiar to me, and I versified the first of Euvenus that suggested themselves. You can tell Euvenus this, Cebes, and bid him farewell from me. Phaedo 61 (li) (Hugh Tredennick's translation).

11 Phaedrus, unlike Babrius, makes the crow take the cheese from a window, the neutral impression seeming merely to provide narrative background, Phaedrus' crow is anxious to show that he did have a voice', Babrius' bird crows because ‘puffed up with conceit’. Babrius has the fox deliver the lesson, Phaedrus attaches one. See Perry, , op. cit., 97, 209.Google Scholar

12 The Fables of La Fontaine, transl. Bell, E. Wright, London, 1913, 3. La Fontaine follows Babrius.Google Scholar

13 Luke, II, 25–37.Google Scholar

14 Matthew, , XXV, 34–41.Google Scholar

15 Émile, translated Foxley, B. (London: Everyman, Dent, 1974), 79–80.Google Scholar

16 Fables, 27.Google Scholar

17 Op. cit., 55.

18 A fine example is Faithful Ruslan by the hounded Georgy Vladimor (Penguin, 1979).

19 Op. cit., 26.

20 Thanks to Richard Norman for suggestions.