Aesop's Life: Fathering the Fable

It happed that the wulf dranke above & the lambe dranke bynethe. And as the wulf sawe and perceyved the lambe he sayd with a hyghe voys Ha knave why hast thou troubled and fowled my water Which I shold now drynke. Alias my Lord sauf your grace [said the lamb] For the water cometh fro yow toward me. Thenne sayd the wulf to the lambe Hast thow no shame ne drede to curse me. And the lambe sayd My lord with your leve. And the Wulf sayd ageyne Hit is not syxe monethes passyd that thy fader dyd to me as moche. And the lambe ansuerd Yet was not I at that tyme born. And the wulf said ageyne to hym Thou hast ete my fader. And the lambe ansuerd I have no teeth. Thenne said the wulf thou art wel lyke thy fader and for his synne & mysdede thow shalt deye. The wulf thenne toke the lambe and ete hym. This fable sheweth that the evylle man retcheth not by what maner he may robbe & destroye the good & innocent man.

—William Caxton: Fables of Esope

Discussing the impact of Mikhail Bakhtin on contemporary theories of fiction, Paul de Man cited Hegel's dictum on the ancient fable: "Im Sklaven fangt die Prosa an"; roughly translated, "Prose originates in a slave culture." Hegel hereby granted at least the status of an aphorism to the ancient life of Aesop, father of the fable, and traditionally a hunchbacked slave of the sixth century B.C. De Man's citation, however, is not without historical irony; for Hegel's remark on the causal connection between riddling form and slavery as an institution, which De Man found valuable to connect to the ventriloquist strategies for evading censorship employed in our own century by Bakhtin, was originally, in the Aesthetics, merely contemptuous; and the maxim that prose began with slavery, far from anticipating the birth of the novel (as De Man implied) actually served an equation between the prosaic and the artistically primitive.

What Hegel argued was the remoteness of a fabulist mode of representation—an arbitrary and explicit comparison between an intended signified and some natural phenomenon—from the unconscious, unpremeditated union between symbol and transcendental signified he required for true art. For Hegel, the fabulist deals in mere wit, rather than depth of insight, and he restricts himself to observing such trivialities as animal habits, "because he dare not speak his teaching openly, and can only make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being solved." And even Aesop's legendary place of residence, Phrygia, Hegel defined as "the very land ... which marks the passage from the immediately symbolic and existence in bondage to Nature, to a land in which man begins to take hold of the spiritual and of [the spirit] in himself."

I begin with this misalliance between Hegel and De Man to initiate a theoretical reconsideration of the Aesopian tradition and its place in contemporary culture. If, as seems evident, the cultural value of the fable as a genre at any historical moment depends on the reigning aesthetic, and how hospitable it may be to the sociopolitical dimensions of literature, the end of the twentieth century is surely a time in which we could benefit from fabulist thinking, past and present. De Man's genial perspective, colored by the then new enthusiasm for Bakhtin, was only at the beginning of a cultural shift that has rendered again respectable "political" conceptions of literature; while the ironic relations between Soviet glasnost and Muslim censorship are but the most striking signs of a new international concern with the power of the literary, never more evident than when it is most threatened.

To this truth the fable bears an unusual, if not a unique relationship, thematized in several fables, but most transparently in The Wolf and the Lamb, which stands, in Caxton's English prose translation from the late fifteenth century, as this chapter's epigraph. As England's first printer and a highly influential translator, Caxton's selection of texts for transmission in the vernacular was undoubtedly governed by the needs and special circumstances of his largely aristocratic audience. In this instance his translation carries a strong flavor of genealogical determination, ("thou art wel lyke thy fader and for his synne & mysdede thow shalt deye") that was surely appropriate for a culture struggling to understand the family feuds of the Wars of the Roses. But what that fable also tells us, perhaps more clearly today than it did for Caxton's readers, is that the declared "Moral" of unequal power relations is felt with especial poignance when language itself is seen to be helpless against that inequality, when right wins the argument but might wins the day.

Although this tragic message can obviously be countered by others from the fabulist tradition, for instance, when Chauntecleer, Chaucer's heroic cock in the Nun's Priest's Tale, literally talks himself out of the fox's mouth, the darker message of the Aesopian canon is also thematized in the figure of the Father. I refer to the tradition of the fable's origin in a slave culture, that is to say, the legendary Life of Aesop that typically preceded collections of fables in the late middle ages and the Renaissance. By Hegel's time that legend had already been rendered apocryphal, known to have derived from an Egyptian text of the first century A.D., to have passed through an eleventh-century Byzantine version, and to have been disseminated in two textual traditions, the first represented by the Greek Life attributed to Maximus Planudes, the second by the Latin translation of Rinuccio da Castiglione. Modern textual scholarship regards both strains of this tradition as having accreted the defects and lies of later periods. Yet it was convenient to Hegel (and De Man) to assume that the myth still stood; and I recuperate it now as one of those rare myths of origin whose own structure implies a coherent philosophy of literature larger than itself. For the Life of Aesop offers us, if we read its narrative episodes thoughtfully, a set of propositions that explain what the Aesopian fable can do best, though it does not control these functions exclusively:

1. literature, in its most basic form, has always spoken to unequal power relations;

2. those without power in those relations, if they wish to comment upon them, must encode their commentary;

3. writing is authorized by authorship, texts needing a name to cling to if they are to acquire cultural resonance;

4. wit (literary ingenuity) can emancipate;

5. basic issues require basic metaphors; when, as in the fable, the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body.

The ancient Life of Aesop was itself a complex fable whose "moral" subsumes all of these insights about itself and the genre to which it traditionally served as introduction. At first sight it might easily appear to be just a collection of old jokes, many of them scatological, strung together in a rudimentary narrative which gradually acquires an unexpected seriousness and ends badly. It has three disproportioned stages. In the first, born not only physically deformed but with a speech impediment, Aesop is miraculously given the gift of articulate wisdom in return for an act of hospitality; in the longest second phase, he is sold as a slave to a renowned philosopher, Xanthus of Samos, whom he entertains with his witty tricks, solutions to problems, and general one-upmanship. Toward the end of this phase, Aesop wearies of his role as servile prankster and begins to lobby for his freedom, which he achieves by maneuvering Xanthus into an awkward position concerning their respective abilities to interpret portents. In the third phase, having accomplished his manumission, Aesop quickly acquires an international reputation as a counselor to kings and city states, which eventually becomes his undoing; for the people of Delphi, anxious to secure their own reputation as the keepers of the oracle and correctly fearing competition from this new political soothsayer, conspire against him, have him framed for sacrilegious theft, and throw him over the cliff at Delphi into the ocean.

Judged by the standards of probability, let alone historical verifiability, this story fails. One can understand, without approving, the rationalist exasperation of Sir Roger L'Estrange, Licenser of the Press and royalist polemicist, preparing his own collection of fables at the end of the seventeenth century. L'Estrange's scholarship informed him that "it would be labour lost to Multiply Unprofitable Conjectures upon a Tradition of so Great Uncertainty.... For the Story is come down to us so Dark and Doubtful." And after listing a series of chronological contradictions and impossibilities from the Life, he concluded:

This is enough in All Conscience, to Excuse any Man from laying overmuch Stress upon the Historical Credit of a Relation, that comes so Blindly, and so Variously transmitted to us ... it is not one jot to our Bus'ness ... whether the Man was Streight, or Crooked; and his Name Aesop, or (as some will have it) Lochman: In All which Cases, the Reader is left at Liberty to believe his Pleasure.

And there is also good sense and explanatory force in the demythologizing conclusions of Joseph Jacobs, the nineteenth-century editor of Caxton's Aesop, and one of the greatest deconstructors of "Aesopus auctor." Jacobs asked himself why, despite the characteristic anonymity of folktales everywhere, the Greek beast fable was connected from a very early stage with a specific personality and name, and answered his own question as follows:

[Aesop's] was the epoch of the Tyrants, and I would conjecture that his connection with the Beast-Fable originally consisted in its application to political controversy under despotic government, and that his fate [as recorded by Herodotus] was due to the influence of one of the Tyrants with the Delphic authorities.... The Fable is most effective as a literary or oratorical weapon under despotic governments allowing no free speech. A tyrant cannot take notice of a Fable without putting on the cap that fits.

"Much of our ancient evidence," Jacobs continued, "points this way," and he cited Jotham's fable against Abimelech, "the Israelite tyrannos," and comparable fables by Theognis and Solon. And since Aesop could not have introduced the beast-fable into Greece, as it preexisted him, the only way "we can explain the later identification of his name with it is to suppose some special and striking use of thefabellae aniles familiar to all Greek children. Considering the age he lived in and the death he died ... Aesop's name was associated with the Fable, because he made use of it as a political weapon."

And so, Jacobs concluded, in language that itself invokes the power of the idea it denies, "Aesop was not the Father of the Fable, but only the inventor (or most conspicuous applier) of a new use for it." That new use, he imagined (another version of Hegel's dictum on slave culture) vanished with the development of "outspoken democracies," but Aesop himself survived as "a convenient and conventional figurehead round which to gather a specialised form of the Greek jest."

But such rationality has its limitations. What L'Estrange dismissed as "not one Jot to our Bus'ness" and Jacobs saw as a more or less accidental convention—the use of Aesop's name as a magnet to which all subsequent fables would be drawn—has a more than antiquarian interest. Even in Jacobs's terms, the thought that a Greek slave could be given the right, fictionally, posthumously, to a body of writing comparable in scale to other classical authors, is extraordinary. That corpus in whole or in part was edited by Aldus Manutius, commented upon, among others, by Valla, Politian, and Erasmus, translated into French by Marie de France, into German by Heinrich Steinhöwel, and into English by Caxton. Steinhöwel produced the largest and most lavish edition, based on the Romulus collection supplemented by both Avianus and Rinuccio, and offered a bilingual text supported by highly influential woodcuts. First published in Ulm in 1476–77, and immediately thereafter in Augsburg, it was quickly translated into French, and it was this version, published in Lyons in 1480, that Caxton used as the base of his own translation, along with freehand copies of the illustrations, which thus became part of Aesopian tradition in England.

By the end of the seventeenth century "Aesop" as the Father of the fable had become an institution. In France the appearance in 1668 of La Fontaine's Fables with his own version of the Life evidently gave the legend a new cultural significance. This resituating of Aesop at court (for La Fontaine dedicated hisFables to the six-year-old son of Louis XIV) led to the creation of an Aesopian labyrinth in the gardens at Versailles, with a statue of Aesop (paired with Apollo) at the entrance (figure 1), a cogent example of reification, or the literal creation of a cultural icon.

In Restoration England there were rival illustrated editions, with the Life translated into the major European languages; and in 1687 Francis Barlow, the distinguished animal painter, collaborated with Aphra Behn in an extraordinarily lavish polyglot edition, prefaced with a new series of engravings illustrating the Life, and drawing "morals" from each episode, which thus became formally equivalent to the illustrated fables that follow. Barlow's thirty-one designs for the Life were, moreover, faithfully copied by Augustin Legrand for a late eighteenth-century edition of La Fontaine's Recueil des fables d'Esop et autres mythologistes (Paris, 1799). My point, then, is that the imaginative power of the fictional Life of Aesop long survived its loss of credibility as legitimate history or biography; and if it went out of circulation during the last two centuries, that fact alone might encourage us to take another look, knowing as we now do how often nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century aesthetics concealed a social agenda.

Indeed, even in antiquity it appears that there were rival interpretations of Aesop's social character and function. In Plutarch's Symposium of the Seven Sages (12), Aesop is one of the guests; and apart from the fact that Plutarch describes him as adviser to Croesus, king of Lydia, who did not rule until after Aesop was supposed to have died, in 564 B.C.—an anachronism that contributed to later skepticism—his character as there represented conflicts so markedly with the other ancient references that one might well suspect some revisionary intention. In contrast to the sage implied by the Phaedo, whose truths Socrates, himself a prisoner, might legitimately metaphrase for his own spiritual improvement, the Aesop of Plutarch is a grumpy elitist, isolated from the group by his ill will, whereas political wisdom and egalitarianism are the attributes instead of Solon. In one incident, for example, Aesop complains that their conversation ought to be more private, "lest we be accounted antimonarchical." And Solon replies reproachfully, "Do you not perceive the aim of our friends is to persuade the king to moderation, and to become an agreeable tyrant, or not to reign rather than to reign ill?" Whereas this Aesop is a cynic, Solon is also the idealist in the soul-body dialectic, which, like Socrates in the Phaedo, he defines in terms of the Master-Slave economy: "As slaves who have gained their freedom but seldom do the drudgeries for themselves they were heretofore forced to do for their master's advantage, so the mind of man, which at present is enslaved by the body, when it once becomes free, will take care of itself, and spend its time in contemplating truth undisturbed by physical wants" (p. 249). Yet the entire discussion, and especially this Platonic commonplace, is ironized by its context—a scene of heavy eating and drinking. Suspect, therefore, on more than one account, it was Plutarch's dialogue as much as Herodotus' history that influenced the supposedly more authentic biographers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in their attempt to replace the Planudes Life, and hence to neutralize its powerful social valence.

In fact, the ancient Life of Aesop is brilliantly designed, and extraordinarily susceptible to contemporary strategies of reading. I shall cite it from Barlow's 1687 edition, as some kind of culminating statement, which in its expansions on the ancient and medieval versions of the story not only sounds distinctive, the strong voice of an early modern sensibility, but also incorporates hundreds of years of absorption of, and meditation on, the meaning of Aesop as a cultural signifier. The first issue there foregrounded (and it was one that would later be the subject of intense scholarly dispute) was that of Aesop's ugliness—a mixture of actual deformity and racial stereotypification. For "as to the Features and Dimensions of his Face and Body," we are told:

they were so shuffel'd and hudled up, that Nature in his Production, did seem to insinuate that she oftentimes does set the most refulgent Gems in the most uneven and ragged Collets: for he was of a sharp Head, flat Nos'd, his Back roll'd up in a Bunch or Excrescence, his Lips tumerous and pendant, his Complexion black—from which dark Tincture he contracted his Name (Aesopus being the same with Aethiops) Large Belly, Crooked Bow-Legs.... But above all his Misfortunes, this was the most Eminent, That his Speech was slow, inarticulate and very obscure.