Читать книгу Types of Prose Narratives - Harriott Ely Fansler - Страница 49

Table of Contents

Æsop

The fable is a very old type of narrative, so old that critics are not sure of the place of its origin. Some think that it rose at the court of Crœsus with Æsop and spread eastward and westward. Others maintain that it came from India to the court of the Lydian king, and was adopted by Æsop, the king's state orator, as a most convenient device for impressing political lessons on a restless people in a scattered empire. Others say that there never was a man Æsop at all. But legend goes into detail to the effect that this ancient politician was once a slave and that he rose from his servile condition to be the counsellor of kings by the sheer force of his brains and an appreciation of practical problems (much as our self-made men of today have risen). Once even, when sent as a royal messenger to a rebellious and distant part of the empire, he quelled a mob and saved his own life by his ready wit in telling a story and applying the moral. He wrote nothing himself, legend goes on to admit, but he scattered his practical narratives far and wide, and they were finally collected as a distinct species of literature.

Other early fabulists

Whatever the truth of the legend may be, it is certain that there were in the Greek language early collections of fables called "Æsop." More than three hundred years before Christ, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle translated stories from "Æsop." Plutarch and Lucian, in the second century after Christ, remade them. In the thirteenth century Marie de France versified a hundred of them, using an old English source which we cannot now find. She called her collection Ysopet, or "Little Æsop." Finally in 1447, Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, put forth in prose a collection of about three hundred stories, which bears the name of "Æsop."