The Aesop for Children

Fables are stories which impart a moral or practical lesson and which usually feature animals. The most famous creator of fables was Aesop. Various collections that go under the rubric Aesop's Fables are currently available in book form (especially books for children) and the stories are often dramatized as plays and cartoons.Some of the earliest known Aesopic fables concern the Greek gods, but those which are best-known today feature animals which speak and have human characteristics, such as the Tortoise and the Hare or the Ant and the Grasshopper.


Aesop (ca. 620-564 BC), known for the genre of fables ascribed to him, was by tradition born a slave and was a contemporary of Croesus and Solon in the mid-sixth century BC in ancient Greece. The earliest Greek sources (including Aristotle) indicate that Aesop was born in Thrace at a site on the Black Sea coast which would later become the city Mesambria; a number of later writers from Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin), say that he was born in Phrygia. By the 10th century A.D., according to the Suda, Samos and Sardis also claimed to be his birthplace.