Aesop biography

Aesop (VI a.C.) fabulist. This man was described by Herodotus, in his works, as a slave of a citizen of Samos called Xanthus. According to the historical data of historians of his time, Aesop was born in Phrygia; but others postulating that he was born in Samos or Egypt. Xanto decided to grant him freedom, convinced that his ability to write fables was enormous. Usually, he amused Xanto and his family with attractive and thoughtful fables, which he could create in just a moment. At the time he was free, Croesus requested him in his court, offered him a number of favors, then sent him to Delphi to consult the oracle and make sacrifices in his name; besides offering rewards among the inhabitants of the city.

But being in Delphi, he realized that the inhabitants of this site, recognized as the center of the universe, resorted to fraud and were impregnated with greed. As teaching, Aesop addressed them sarcasm and, limited to offer the gods the sacrifices sent by Croesus, returned to this prince the riches for the inhabitants of Delphi. So, this generated a strong quarrel between Aesop and the dolphins, decided to make only the sacrifice to Apollo and returned the rest of the riches to Sardes, so that he would send them to Croesus.

In revenge, the inhabitants of the center of the universe decided to take revenge by making a trap, where they added to their belongings a golden cup that belonged to Apollo’s offerings. Despite expressing his innocence in front of the fact; Aesop was accused of sacrilege and was precipitated from the top of the Hiampa rock. Time later, it was discovered that the death of Aesop was the product of a dishonest action, as the accusation turned out to be false Apollo went into a rage, the dolphins decided to vindicate themselves financially with whom they had the right. Before the call attended a grandson of Yadmon from Samos to collect the compensation, Yadmon had been Aesop’s owner when he was a slave.

Although the death of Aesop was very early, his literary style one of the oldest in world literature, the fable, is characterized by being a type of short story starring animals that assume clear positions and attitudes whose didactic purpose is expressed in a moral at the end of the narrative. The importance of Aesop is such that, the Greece of the classical period attributed to his figure the creation of this genre. It should be noted that Aesop was seen as a writer who was inspired by the plebs, human weaknesses and passions represented by animals.

The historian Herodotus claimed that Aesop’s Fables were very popular in classical Greece, a statement validated by Plato and Aristophanes. His fables at the beginning were divulged orally to the whole community, his fame was such that apart from being orally disclosed, his fables were translated into texts used for teaching in schools. The rhetorician Demetrio de Falero made a compilation of the fables of Aesop in the fourth century b.C. the compilation contained about five hundred fables, which even today are read especially by children.

The fables of Aesop have a simple and clear style since it handles everyday expressions. Usually, the protagonists are animals that embody some human attitude or behavior, for this, they have the ability to think and speak, with the aim of transmitting moral teaching that they can apply to daily life. The main theme of the Aesopic fable is the social relations of humans, usually described from an ironic view of the world and power structures. The animals embody certain qualities these can be negative or positive, and in relation to it will be punished or rewarded in the denouement of the story, after the story is recorded an explicit moral by means of a forceful phrase. Aesop created some typologies, which remained static among the fabulists: the fox is the embodiment of cunning; the wolf, of evil; the ant, of foresight; the lion, of majesty. It is necessary to notice that, in some of the fables of Aesop, human beings or divinities also intervene.

Aesop is considered the father of the fable, reached later centuries in characters like Phaedrus, in the first-century b.C. On the other hand, Babrio is a Greek who lived in the second-century b.C. In the eighteenth century, with the rise of Neoclassicism, authors as prestigious as the French La Fontaine were responsible for promoting the genre, creating a kind of golden age. In the Spanish language the fables of Felix Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, inspired by the legacy of Aesop, reached great fame. There were also complete collections of fables that, although they present new styles, do not lose the legacy of the Aesopic fable: the Collectio Augustana, from the 1st or 2nd-century b.C., the Collectio Vinobenensis, and finally, the Collecursio Accursiana (1479).