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Aesop

steve_bank

Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
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Nov 9, 2017
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Location
seattle
Basic Beliefs
secular-skeptic
As his tales are morality vignettes I put the thread here. When I was a kid there was a sturday morning cartoon on his fables.

Ever thought of his fables in a situation? From the book I read he achieved the status of a comic strip like Doonesbury or BC today.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop

The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, indicate that Aesop was born around 620 BCE in Thrace at a site on the Black Sea coast which would later become the city Mesembria. A number of later writers from the Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin) say that he was born in Phrygia.[2] The 3rd-century poet Callimachus called him "Aesop of Sardis,"[3] and the later writer Maximus of Tyre called him "the sage of Lydia."[4]

From Aristotle[5] and Herodotus[6] we learn that Aesop was a slave in Samos and that his masters were first a man named Xanthus and then a man named Iadmon; that he must eventually have been freed, because he argued as an advocate for a wealthy Samian; and that he met his end in the city of Delphi. Plutarch[7] tells us that Aesop had come to Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus of Lydia, that he insulted the Delphians, was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, and was thrown from a cliff (after which the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine). Before this fatal episode, Aesop met with Periander of Corinth, where Plutarch has him dining with the Seven Sages of Greece, sitting beside his friend Solon, whom he had met in Sardis. (Leslie Kurke suggests that Aesop himself "was a popular contender for inclusion" in the list of Seven Sages.)[8]

Problems of chronological reconciliation dating the death of Aesop and the reign of Croesus led the Aesop scholar (and compiler of the Perry Index) Ben Edwin Perry in 1965 to conclude that "everything in the ancient testimony about Aesop that pertains to his associations with either Croesus or with any of the so-called Seven Wise Men of Greece must be reckoned as literary fiction," and Perry likewise dismissed Aesop's death in Delphi as legendary;[9] but subsequent research has established that a possible diplomatic mission for Croesus and a visit to Periander "are consistent with the year of Aesop's death."[10] Still problematic is the story by Phaedrus which has Aesop in Athens, telling the fable of the frogs who asked for a king, during the reign of Peisistratos, which occurred decades after the presumed date of Aesop's death.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop's_Fables

Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.

The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the later Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.

Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop's fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world.

Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time.

The fables...

http://aesopfables.com/
 
I have a book of these at home that I've read a few times.

The ones that always come to mind..

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Sour grapes

The grass is always greener
 
I have a book of these at home that I've read a few times.

The ones that always come to mind..

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Sour grapes

The grass is always greener

It shows that human nature has not changed much in recorded history.
 
I have a book of these at home that I've read a few times.

The ones that always come to mind..

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Sour grapes

The grass is always greener

It shows that human nature has not changed much in recorded history.

Agreed. I used to think that 100 BC was the distant past, but after studying history for a while I'm now more apt to think of 50 000 BC as fitting that bill, at least as far as people are concerned.

We really aren't much different than Ancient Greeks, Chinese, or Romans, we've just figured out how to put oil to productive uses.
 
Never bite the hand that laid the golden goose, because a zebra cannot change its spots.

LOL, I love mixing those together. We read aesop to the kids. I think they can spark some good discussions.
 
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