A SHORT HISTORY 



OF THE 



^SOPIC FABLE 



OST nations develop the Beast-Tale as part of their 

 folk-lore, some go further and apply it to satiric pur- 

 poses, and a few nations afford isolated examples of 

 the shaping of the Beast-Tale to teach some moral truth by- 

 means of the Fable properly so called. 1 But only two peoples 

 independently made this a general practice. Both in Greece 2 

 and in India we find in the earliest literature such casual 

 and frequent mention of Fables as seems to imply a body 

 of Folk -Fables current among the people. And in both 

 countries special circumstances raised the Fable from folk- 

 lore into literature. In Greece, during the epoch of the 

 Tyrants, when free speech was dangerous, the Fable was 

 largely used for political purposes. The inventor of this 

 application or the most prominent user of it was one iEsop, 

 a slave at Samos whose name has ever since been connected 

 with the Fable. All that we know about him is contained 



1 E.g. Jotham's Fable, Judges lx., and that of Menenius Agrippa in Livy, 

 seem to be quite independent of either Greek or Indian influence. But one 

 fable does not make Fable. 



2 Onlv about twenty fables, however, are known in Greece before 

 Phaedrus, 30 a.d. See my Caxton*s JEsop, vol. i. pp. 26-29, for a complete 

 enumeration. 



b 



