Aesop
c. 620–564 BCE
Biography
Aesop is the name given to the fables that were told in ancient Greece and gathered for centuries afterwards. Almost nothing certain is known about the man himself. Herodotus, Aristotle and Plutarch all mention him, but their remarks do not agree, and a later romance about his life turns him into a clever, ugly slave who wins his freedom. The dates here are conventional, and no writing by him survives, so whether a real person stood behind the name remains an open question.
The fables are short tales, usually about animals that talk and act like people, and most end with a moral. A fox that cannot reach some grapes decides they must be sour, a tortoise beats a hare in a race, and a thirsty crow drops pebbles into a pitcher until the water rises within reach. Collections in Greek and Latin, including the verse of Babrius and Phaedrus, carried the stories forward, and they were retold in countless languages in the centuries that followed.
The Aesop for Children on this site is a retelling for young readers, and it is the form in which many people first meet these fables. The stories were never written down by the man whose name they carry, so any book of them is one more link in a long chain of retelling. Read it with that in mind: what has lasted is the storytelling and the morals, passed from one teller to the next.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The Aesop for Children: With pictures by Milo Winter
by Aesop
A set of Aesop's fables told simply for children, from the tortoise and the hare to the fox and the grapes, each ending with a moral. Milo Winter's illustrations accompany this popular edition.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.