Who Was Aesop?

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Recommended: Importance of fables

Who Was Aesop? Fables have become a big part of our society in these past years and in recent times. Fables today are mainly read for entertainment and the idea of animals having the ability to speak to one another. The truth is that fables have a deeper use that is not the same as what they are used for today. The definition of a fable is “a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim”. So, why and who would think of making story’s like this? Well, Aesop of Sardis was the one to use this structure of story. It …show more content…

Aesop was a slave at an early age, but probably was released near the time of his death due to him being an advocate for a wealthy Samian. Aesop’s end soon came when he was executed in Delphi for insulting the Delphi’s. During most of his lifetime, Aesop was a slave to the Greeks. He was very ugly and was deemed invaluable and dumb to the public. But there is more than what’s meets the eye in Aesop’s case. Aesop was a genius and had great ideas of who humans were and would communicate this through his Fables. Fables were an easy way for slaves to communicate strong ideas to one another without punishment from their masters. Aesop wrote more and more fables to explain human behavior, creating more ways to help slaves share their ideas. Aesop wasn’t the creator of the fables, but popularized the works of a fable with his collection of “Aesop’s Fables”. This collection of fables was translated by many people to help preserve the morals and lesson that can be taken from his works. So how come “Aesop’s Fables” has been used for entertainment and not for teaching morals and sharing knowledge? The answer is how they were treated by new

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