Hello there, and thank you very much.
We move on now from the grand genre of
epic poetry to the humbler type of mini story, that is fable.
But as you'll see from the baby's own Aesop, here,
we're staying with texts that
carry moral messages that we think of in
the modern world as being particularly suitable for
teaching children. And fables are
perhaps the ancient texts that are
best known to more people today than any other.
The stories of the tortoise and
the hare and the boy who cried wolf,
for example. Next slide, please Matt.
So first, I want to think briefly
about possible audiences of fable.
And then we'll think about what a fable is and what it's for.
And then I'll move on to what we think we know
about Aesop himself before ending
with examples of his influence. On to Slide three.
If you search online for Aesop's Fables,
the kind of thing you find is a host of
modern retellings of the best-loved fables
for children of all ages.
And we find this idea that they are particularly
suitable for children in the ancient world too.
And we'll see that on the next slide,
where we have a description of Aesop in
a Greek texts from the second or third century AD.
The author Philostratus is taking us
on a tour of a gallery of paintings,
among which is a depiction of Aesop with his Fables.
Here's what Philostratus says:
"Aesop told stories about all aspects of human life.
And he has given the animals speech so as to make a point."
So talking animals are being seen here
as making it easier to get the deeper
meaning across in a way that highlights aspects
of human behaviour. He continues.
"For Aesop criticises greed and
he goes off to insolence and deceit."
And insolence there is hubris that
ancient Greek idea of getting to arrogance,
doing violence to other people as a result.
It's a lion, he says, or a fox,
or by Zeus a horse that plays this part for Aesop.
And not even a tortoise is without a voice.
And we're going to hear from a tortoise a bit later on.
Through these animals
children become students of the business of life.
So what we see here is the idea that Fables are
particularly used in the education of children.
And interestingly, Philostratus talks about
them being students of the business of life.
And that perhaps reflects the way that many of
these fables carry a message that basically says,
this is how the world is.
People just are greedy and insolent and so on
and we have to find ways of dealing with that reality.
And the modern translators of Aesop, in
the Penguin Classics and the Oxford World's Classics series,
do make this point that much of what happens in
these little stories is quite violent and unpleasant,
reflecting harsh realities of life.
And particularly once we get beyond
the most familiar fables that we feel today
are most suitable for a young audience. Next slide, please.
But as we see in Socrates words, in this excerpt from Plato,
Aesop is something for adults and
for philosophically minded adults too.
Socrates while in prison,
composes his poetic versions of Aesop,
because the stories are easy to remember,
"which I had at hand and knew", he says
presumably, that's because they're
short and because he learned them at a fairly young age,
so they are very familiar to him.
And in fact, we know from later collections of exercises that
survive for people learning the art of public speaking,
that the first exercise you would do in that training was
the retelling of a familiar fable in your own words,
particularly suitable for retelling then and
not just by children or for children.
You'll notice Socrates uses the word mythos, a story or
a myth, to describe the things that Aesop writes.
And this might make us wonder what is specific to
a fable that makes it a special kind of story.
If we move on to slide six.
Here are some factors that scholars generally point to.
A key factor is that Fables are very short stories.
Secondly, many feature talking animals,
but not all of them.
For example, the boy who cried wolf has only humans speaking,
and some have talking objects like a pot that talks to the rain.
One important aspect of these stories
is that they're fundamentally jokes,
either describing amusing situations
or ending with a kind of punchline.
This idea that one can use humorous means to put across
serious messages is prominent in ancient Greek literature.
And I've given the Greek term for it here,
'spoudogeloion (σπουδογέλοιον)'
or serious, but a source of laughter.
And of course, a fable contains an explicit
moral which sometimes comes first to introduce the story,
or more often at the end of the story,
sometimes spoken by one of the characters,
but often added by a narrator.
On the next slide. The great scholar of fable.
Ben Perry, points out that fable has to be
short because it has to make
this moral message as clear as possible.
The teller of a fable, he says,
is concerned before all else
with the metaphorical meaning of his story,
which he consciously aims to impart without delay,
and to which his story as such,
must be strictly subordinated and made summary
in nature and thereby brief and fast.
I've summarised in slide eight a
story that is traditionally included as one of the fables.
Herakles, Hercules, finds an apple in his way.
Being Hercules, he smashes it up with his club.
But whenever he does this, it grows bigger.
The first thing that's unusual here is that
we have a named mythological character.
And also that we don't have any talking animals or objects.
What's also unusual is that
a new character pops up at the end, here
the goddess Athena, to interpret the meaning.
And it's also unusual for something in
the story to represent an abstract concept,
quarrelling and strife in quite this direct way.
Nonetheless, this is a short and simple story
and it has a clear moral message,
which recalls what I said earlier about the
message often being about how we can best deal with the way
that things are in the world.
In the next slide, I've given a couple of quotes from
a survey of fable by the novelist and literary critic Lee Rourke,
who highlights how the humour in fables, that spoudogeloion
that I talked about, is often quite nasty.
It's mockery, ridicule, and outrage.
In that last slide, we are
perhaps meant to laugh at Hercules for
his tendency to use rather
unnuanced means to deal with problems.
And the second passage here highlights how
the world of fable is exaggerated,
sufficiently different from the real world,
where animals don't talk in this way,
that it feels a safer way of examining
human behaviour by getting us to
quote "distance from ourselves so that we
can observe our own actions from afar."
Onto the next slide, please.
I'm going to show you a couple of
fables that illustrate something that
students are taught me when we've
discussed fables and their morals.
Many of these stories suggest
multiple possible messages which are not
necessarily all that well
reflected in the morals traditionally attached to them.
Here's a really short one liner, about a fox,
who was reproaching a lioness for having had only one baby.
Yes, only one, said the lioness, but it's a lion.
The obvious moral is something to do with
maybe quality, not quantity, perhaps.
And the traditional moral for this one talks about having
one really good soldier as being
preferable to having lots of very average ones.
But it seems to me maybe there are
other morals that we can take from this.
I'll leave you to decide for yourself.
But perhaps we could look at it from the fox's point of view.
We might say it has a warning that you can,
we can make ourselves look foolish
if we tried to present ourselves as
superior to other people without
fully thinking through the implications.
And on to the next slide.
Here's another one.
In this one, the traditional
moral might seem a little unsatisfying.
And here's the talking tortoise,
that I mentioned. A tortoise
decides not to take up
the invitation to go to Zeus' wedding.
Zeus gets angry.
And this becomes a kind of a just so story
that explains that it's Zeus' punishment
that means that tortoises have shells.
The moral is therefore something much more about
power and social relations than the one that's given here,
which just says, some people
prefer to stay at home and not go to parties,
which I think is not a particularly deep insight.
Now, I think that this range of
possible ways of interpreting the fables
actually encourages the reader to reflect
on whether a moral fits the story.
So, as I've been suggesting,
they can be a good tool for the reader to actively
engage in working out which option for the moral
in fact teaches the most insightful lesson.
And Laura Gibbs, who has done a lot of study of fable,
talks about this in terms of, to quote,
"different moral codes confronting one another."
So the didactic moralising
a fables can actually make us more aware,
that the same story might have different meanings
to people with different worldviews. Onto slide number twelve.
Okay, then I quickly wanted to give a summary of
some key points in the ancient traditions about Aesop.
As with Homer, there are various different traditions about him.
But there are some things here that seem to have been
generally accepted in the ancient world.
I'll not go through them all. You can have a quick look at them.
Other than to say that most of them are found in a fantastic text
that's a combination of biography and historical novel,
which we call the Aesop romance.
The date is quite uncertain for that,
but it's well worth a read to get an idea of
how Aesop was being thought about as a person.
And moving on to the next slide,
what I want to do is to end by talking about Aesop's influence.
But first, I think it's worth noting that although
Aesop is often thought of as the inventor of fable,
as I was just suggesting.
It's actually a much more ancient story type
And I have given one example here.
It's the familiar story of
the fox who can't reach the grapes.
So he says they aren't worth having anyway.
And that of course gives us
the expression sour grapes in English.
It's widely known because
this is one that appears in lots of modern versions,
like the one that I've given here.
In fact, it goes back to a Near
Eastern Sumerian story from the second millennium BC.
And we have a dog there rather than a fox.
There are dates rather than grapes
but it's recognisably the same story.
The dates he says are
bitter and I'm not going to get them.
So I'm going to say that I didn't want them
anyway. Next slide, please.
Fables have been popular down the ages and I have given here
a selection of European versions through the centuries,
all of which contain different selections of fables.
So there isn't really any one fixed tradition of
what the fables are and dealing
with all these different versions is quite a challenge,
as you will see from the next slide,
where there's a diagram that shows
the complex relationships between the different collections.
But to end, I just wanted to look at
another ancient Greek text which is on the penultimate slide.
This time it's from
the first or second century AD author Plutarch.
And it brings together various aspects of what I've been saying.
Here we have a philosophical investigation
into the question of animal intelligence.
But it's presented in the form of a conversation between
Odysseus and a talking pig called Grunter or Gryllus
He can talk because he is one of
several Odysseus men who have been turned into pigs by Circe
in an episode that's familiar from the Odyssey.
Odysseus begins by saying that he's
asked Circe to turn them back again into humans.
But Gryllus turns down the offer,
explaining that he prefers to be a pig.
On the first slide,
Odysseus thinks that he's done him a favour,
but he's about to learn otherwise.
And this is my final slide number seventeen.
Here we see the spoudogeloion in inaction,
again. A serious discussion of whether it's better to be animal
or human is presented through
this slightly ridiculous image of Odysseus talking to the pig.
And I think Plutarch's readers would surely have
immediately thought of the world of fable.
And this text, I think recalls fable in a few ways.
First, the idea that
an animal could impart wisdom to humans.
And also an animal has an experience
as an animal that has something to teach humans.
But there's also the idea that Odysseus is being like a child.
That we get coming into this,
this final one, running away from lessons.
And that reminds us that fables work well,
precisely because they don't feel like medicine or lessons,
but more like jokes.
And as Gryllus argues that it's
good to change from one shape to another
he reminds Odysseus that Odysseus
himself is like a character in one of these fables,
who thinks he's being clever,
but he's caught out by another animal's
superior understanding of the way the world works.
And Gryllus himself has learned this by
becoming effectively a fable character.
We laugh not only at the odd situation of the talking animal,
but also at Odysseus,
who is now made to realise that the change that we see in fable,
where the human world is transferred to
animal form to allow us to see ourselves anew makes us,
as he says here, healthier and wiser.
And I think that's a good note to end on.