Aesop

Aesop (Greek Αἴσωπος Aisopos, Latinized Aesopus, Germanized Aesop, Aisop, rare Aisopus ) was a famous Greek poet of fables and parables and lived about 600 BC It applies to Europe as the founder of fable and so was his name for the genus name for the fable at all.

Biography

Because of Aesop almost only applied adhesive and legendary, almost mythical, reports, little is known about his person, except that he was a Greek slave ( gr δοῦλος, Dulos ). Since fables in Greece, about Hesiod or Archilochus, the oral culture of the people rather low descent, not of the nobility belonged, it is believed that Aesop, like his audience, a man of the people has been.

According to tradition, it should come from Phrygia, according to Aristotle, but he was Thracians. He is located by Herodotus in Ionia, in Samos in the 6th century BC, coinciding with Sappho. He should have served as a slave several gentlemen, to let him free of the Samians Iadmon. Allegedly, he then came to the court of King Croesus, whose confidence he gained through his clever wit to such an extent that he sent him on several missions; on such Aesop to Delphi was murdered by the local priests for blasphemy, as Aristophanes says.

What is reported by his ugliness and Eulenspiegelhaftigkeit, is attributable to later inventions, especially, dating from the Roman Empire, common in the Middle Ages Aesop Roman, a legendary tale from Aesop's life.

Fables

Aesop's Fables received in prosaic form only by long tradition in the oral tradition of the people; a collection of fables should first Demetrios of Phalerum have made around 300 BC, but that has gone lost in the 10th century. The various Aesopian fables to us -down collections are partly prosaic late resolutions of metric processing of Babrius, partly products of the rhetoric from different time and different value.

Aesop's fables are known to us from the ancient world only in the metrical arrangements of the Phaedrus, Babrius and Avianus. In the Aesop's Fables is mythic and secular short stories that occur as a parable in appearance. The aforementioned human weaknesses are never exceptional: envy, stupidity, avarice, vanity, etc fabrics and figures come from the horizon of the little man in the Greece of the 6th century BC, actors are animals, plants, even gods or known people of the time. The events in the Aesop's fables had an immediately obvious statement or a carefully packaged in the form of an allegory meaning for the people of his time. Aesop's Fables values, judgments and indeed unmask or destroy but not condemn.

Influence

The European fable goes back to Aesop, not to similar stories with allegorical character, which have been already told in the ancient Orient as in Sumer around 3000 BC. Only two of the fables of Aesop Fables resemble the Indian Pancatantra, the basis also of the Persian and Arabic fable. It was only in the 13th century were the European fables, according to its unfolding in the Middle Ages, again enriched with Indian- Arabic Good. Lessing appealed in writing during the investigation of his fables to Aesop. Even today we find Aesop's Fables in common idioms; so for example, going " Adorn themselves with borrowed plumes " according Büchmann back to the fable of the jackdaw and the birds.

Examples

• The Eagle and the Tortoise
• The ant and the grasshopper
• The Fox and the Stork
• The Fox and the Grapes
• The dog and the piece of meat
• The lion with other animals on the hunt
• The Lion and the mice
• The Prodigal youth and the swallow
• The Sun and the Wind
• Hic Rhodus, hic salta
• From Fox and cock
• From the Fox and Raven
• The Fox and the Sheep
• The Lamb and the Wolf
• The boy who cried wolf
• The Wolf and the Crane
• The Tortoise and the Hare

Tradition

Μῦθοι ( Mythoi; Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum; fables ) from the 6th century. Small fragments are preserved in the Papyrus Rylands 493 from the 1st century. The selection of fables preserved in Codex sine pari suppl. 690 gr obtained from the 12th century.

The fables of Aesop were a commonly used reading material in the medieval monastic schools. After the invention of printing a plurality of outputs of the Aesop fables published. As an outstanding edition applies Heinrich Steinhöwels published in 1476 in Ulm Aesop, because of its high-quality woodcut illustrations. The so-called " Ulm Aesop " contained all the then-known Aesop's fables. The 190 magnificent woodcut illustrations are the masters of Ulm choir stalls, Jörg Syrlin attributed. Steinhowel allowed to follow the Latin text made ​​of him a German translation.

In the 17th and 18th centuries busy Jean de La Fontaine ( 1621-1695 ) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ( 1729-1781 ) the fable Aesop's new.

Others

Aesop is also the name of the supposed author of a novel-like story of Alexander the Great, who around 400 AD by a Julius Valerius under the title: translatae Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis has been ex Aesopo Graeco translated into Latin. Later, however, the Greek original was discovered in the Paris library, where Callisthenes is named as the author.