Author: AESOP
Biography:
AESOP (fl 6th century BCE: OCD)
Attempts to identify Aesop, the supposed author of a collection of Greek fables, with an historical individual have been unsuccessful. He is said to have been a sixth century slave in Samos or possibly an advisor to King Croesus. A romanticised account of his life is in “The Aesop Romance” which dates from the second century. However, there is no evidence for Aesop’s existence, nor is it likely that any one person wrote the fables which are traditionally associated with his name. Fables were used by other Greek writers as illustrative examples or as anecdotes but over time the name Aesop became inseparable from the genre. Fables, in both prose and verse, were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were sometimes but not always marketed as for children. John Dryden in 1700 and John Gay (q.v.) in 1737 published fables in verse which were often reprinted. Robert Dodsley’s Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists, a collection of prose tales labelled as “classical,” “modern,” or “original,” was first published in 1761 and frequently reissued including in the period 1770-1835. At least some of the editions of fables in verse and listed here may have been adapted from these earlier treatments and are not strictly translations. Separate headnotes are in this database for H. Steers, Richard Scrafton Sharpe, and Jefferys Taylor. The writers responsible for the verse fables in the other editions remain unidentified. (OCD 27 Feb. 2025; Robert Dodsley, Select Fables [1761]) SR