Three Hundred Aesop's Fables

Three hundred short fables, each ending in the line that turns a story about animals into a judgement on people: the fox and the grapes, the boy who cried wolf, the town mouse and the country mouse. George Fyler Townsend's 1867 English version is the one that fixed these tales for the Victorian schoolroom and for everyone taught from it since. The morals are blunt and very old, and they remain the shortest route to why fables outlived the empires that told them. Twenty-four plates after painters including Adriaen van de Velde and Thomas Sidney Cooper carry the cattle, markets and woodland of the old animal world that the fables turned into judgements.