In Our Time - Aesop

Episode Date: November 20, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aesop. According to some accounts, Aesop was a strikingly ugly slave who was dumb until granted the power of speech by the goddess Isis. In stories of his life he's often found outwitting his masters using clever wordplay, but he's best known today as the supposed author of a series of fables that are some of the most enduringly popular works of Ancient Greek literature. Some modern scholars question whether he existed at all, but the body of work that has come down to us under his name gives us a rare glimpse of the popular culture of the Ancient World.WITHPavlos Avlamis, Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Trinity College at the University of OxfordSimon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of CambridgeLucy Grig, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of EdinburghProducer: Luke Mulhall.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, look before you leap. Slow but steady wins the race. Pride comes before a fall. They are sayings that are so familiar, they hardly seem worth a second thought, but they're all morals that come at the end of fables attributed to the ancient Greek sage, Esop. Esop's fables have kept children entertained for generations. They present a world in which animals can talk, the wind and the sun can have an argument,

and underdogs have a knack about witting stronger, more dangerous foes. In ancient Greece, Esop was a folk hero, a clever slave, supposedly, hiddishly ugly, but with a knack for outwitting his master and for speaking truth to power. Today, scholars interpret Esop as a rare example of popular culture from the classical world that has survived to the present day.

They claim ESOP gives us a window into the everyday life and thought of the common people of ancient Greece and Rome. With me to discuss ESOP are Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Lucy Grigg, Senior Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Edinburgh, and Pavlos Avlamis, Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford. Simon Goldhill, when people in the ancient world talked about ESOP, Who was the character they had in mind? Well, it's a little bit like Robin Hood and other legendary figures. There were multiple versions of who he might be.

But the absolute essence is that he was always a slave. He was a slave from someone who didn't come from the central Greek cities. He was from a marginal place, really. And he was unbelievably ugly, so we're told. And he was a slave, therefore, somebody who you'd think of as being useless or a tool. He turns out to be smart. he turns out to be clever. And above all, he does that

by telling stories. So the simple model is between these paradoxes of the slave who's cleverer than the master, the ugly person who turns out to be fantastically great, as a fabulous, as a someone who tells stories to get what he wants.

Having said all that very authoritatively and gesticulating emphatically, how much of that can you prove? Absolutely none. And that's say he is a legendary figure. It's the same as with Robin Hood. As soon as we hear about him in

Greek, he's already been dead according to the stories for a hundred years. There are already multiple stories circulating. There are already multiple versions of what he might have said. There are literally hundreds of fables. And he can't possibly have written them all down. He comes from a preliterate age anyway

in many ways. Consequently, we're always dealing with these layers of pictures. The important thing is that Isot was very good for Greeks to think with. He was somebody whom they used to tell stories about themselves as well as about ESOP. And that's how he circulates in the imagination.

So what are these sources that you cling on to with your fingertips to say the name at all? Well, he's mentioned in Herodotus, the historian. So he sounds like a historical fact. Can you give the listeners that's a 5th century BC date?

He already thinks of him as being dead for a good long time. But we know that story were already collected in the fourth century BC by a man called Demetrius of Faleron, who we may come back to, but they were written down the versions we have only in the first century AD. And there they're written down once in Latin by a man called Fidrus

and once in Greek by a man called Babrius. They're set in verse, and those give us most of the familiar stories we have. But what that means is those stories come from at least six or seven hundred years after the time that we think, if there was anybody called ESOP, lived. And Aristophanes refers to him, doesn't it, in the wasps? So there's a feeling if Aristophanes is referring to ESOP,

then the audience might think, yes, we know that person. Well, I think they, in the same way as if you said Robin Hood, everyone would have an image. Well, of course Robin Hood existed. I mean, there's no question about that, but that's another programme, Sam. This is okay. So perhaps ESOP existed. Yeah.

What we can say for sure is that in the 5th century, both the public culture which we see in the comic poet, which was made for the whole city, and the more elite culture, which is Herodotus, the historian, both thought he was a real person from 100 years earlier. Lucy Gregg, our main source for the life of ESOP, as Simon said, as referred to, alluded to, is the ESOP romance. Can you tell us when that was written and what we get out of it?

Well, when that was written, that is a debatable point. first to second century AD probably we might have different views I don't think we can tell whether it's based on an earlier source going back to the 5th century BC some scholars would say

so I personally probably wouldn't the story of the life of ESOP goes at the detail the stories that we've already come into contact with he's a slave originally dumb and that's the exciting bit he is a dumb slave who is given the gift of the gab

in a sense of mute yes mute he's given the gift of the gab by the goddess Isis, so the first association with a god we get in the text. He goes to work for a philosopher who he outwits constantly. There's lots of battles of wit between slave and philosopher. How does he outwit him? Can you give us a few examples?

Okay, so lots of it is wordplay, and what he will do is do very literally what he's asked to do. So his master will say, bring my flask, bring my oil flask to the barbs, and then when ESOP comes, he says, but there's no oil in the flowers. You know what you didn't tell me to bring it full of oil. He tricks him in, he sort of gets the better of him and helps him out of a tight squeeze as well

because the philosopher's a teacher and there's lots of scenes where they're around the dinner table with philosopher's students and ESOP outwits the students and the philosopher. And what ESOP is always trying to do is to get his freedom. And this is the one thing the philosopher doesn't want to give him is his freedom. So there's this endless battle between slave and master going on in this text.

So do you get a feeling from that ESOP romance? Again, we're still sort of nosing around the reality or possible historical certainty of the man. You get a feeling that they're writing about somebody who was a person, not that they've resigned themselves to the fact that he's Robin Hood. I think there isn't a sense that he is a person. He is some kind of an archetype, and that's made all the more clear by the fact that the text contains embedded in it an account of a completely different character, also non-historical, from the Near East.

In the middle of the story, we have a bit where he's at the court of Babylon, and this comes from a near-eastern romance of Ahikar. So we're completely who becomes Esop in this story. So it's definitely a case of floating stories, floating figures. So this connection, do we have in this book, the connection of Isop with the gods, again, which Simon alluded to? Well, first of all, he is given the power of speech by the goddess Isis, but there's also a rivalry with Apollo, which turns out to be his undoing. Apollo is offended by Esop

Apollo being Apollo being the leader of the muses The god who's had You don't want to anger Apollo There are other mythological stories that tell you what happens If you anger Apollo It's death really Yes death horrible death

You might say Esop gets off quite lightly He gets thrown off a cliff At Delthi And then the gods take their revenge On Delphi We are told that Delthi is is cursed. So he angers Apollo,

but the muses are definitely his friends and his supporters. When you come out of this of reading this, what's your view? I mean, I know, hedge it around as much as you want. What's your view about ESOP after studying it for so long? I like an idea,

one school has said that the story of ESOP is a meta-fable. That is, it's a fable about fables. You could, the story of the ugly slave who speaks truth to power, does unexpected things. He's the cunning trickster. He's the little man. He's the slave outwitting his master. He tells us something about the Greek

world, about the Roman Greek culture without him having to be a real person. I think the story works very nicely whether or not he's a real person. Pablo's Amlamis, why if he wasn't a real person, we seem to be, there seems to be two-person agreement on that so far.

Why in your view did they want to construct him as if he were a real person? Well, Isop becomes a marker of the genre of fable from the late 5th century, as Simon said, from the time of Throdotus and from the time of Aristophanes.

So much later, when you see Fidreus wanting to claim for himself the genre of fable, he necessarily refers to the figure of Isop. He says, I am writing fables that are not esophic, that is, fables that are not written

by Isop himself, but esopian. So Isop becomes a way to signal that a particularly kind of allegoric short narrative belongs to particular genre. Having said this, Isop doesn't only work as a marker of genre. As Simon and Lucy said, it's important that he's a slave because he, in a sense, Isop stands and encapsulates the genre fable. So when people talk about Isop, they talk also about Fable. The fact that he's a slave, that he's a slave means, talks about Fable being a bottom-up kind of cultural phenomenon, speaking truth to power, as Lucy said.

On another level, the fact that he's a slave, the way that it plays out in the Isop romance, we see Isop following his master's anthras in the bathhouse, is holding his towel or even in the toilet holding her bowl. of water. So we see all the little ugly details of everyday life and that is very much where Fable is. That Fable picks up elements from the street level of experience of a cat, a dog, a jug, a pebble on the street and turns them into symbols

of an allegory that speaks to humans about their everyday life. Finally, the fact that he's so ugly in the Isop romance has to do also with elements of the fable. It's a way of discussing what the fable does through the figure of Isop.

In my way. So an example is in the Isop romance when Isop first enters the theatre of Samos, the city where he has all his little fights with the philosopher Xanthus, the Samians see him for the first time ever and they exclaim, oh my God, we've never seen ugliness like this.

He looks like a jug with a hernia or a galloping pig or a sergeant of monkeys or a cook's toolbox. So they start assimilating him to everyday objects or to animals in the same way that fable takes human experience, expresses it through animals or everyday objects and reveals certain truth to us about everyday life. Is it the use of animals and everyday objects

that defines him as part of the, or one of the few parts we know, a popular culture in the ancient world? To a certain degree, yes, that we see that the world of fable is populated by artifacts of everyday life of popular culture. There's a different dimension, according to which we can call impopular, that we know that fables are circulated orally as well as in written form. And we can see that from the fact that the fable collections that we have in writing change over time, and there's always an influx of new material coming from outside, and that outside must be the wide oral circulation of narratives

that fit to that particular mould that we call a fable. Can you give us some idea of the impact these fares about tortoises and hars and ants and bulls and eagles and foxes and stags? Can you, have we any idea of the impact? Let's put this up to one side. The fables and say any idea of the impact they had on people, were they... How much it mattered to them?

Was it the currency of their conversation? Do you want to talk? Yes. Simon. Simon, you. Simon. I think fables are always there to be used. People don't just tell fables. They tell fables for a purpose. And so we can see them being used in various places from the earliest of Greek literature.

So why are they particularly useful as fables? because they're childlike. You can get away with things in fables that you can't get away with if you were just going to stand up and make a speech to somebody. So when we say talking truth to power, it's the idea that a slave to a master

is one power relation, but we're all in positions where there are people more powerful than us who we want to try and somehow say things to. And particularly in a dramatically hierarchical culture like Rome or Greece, where somebody could have the power of life and death over you, it's really important that you don't step out of line

with the way you talk. So the way you might talk to somebody who's more powerful, you have to be extremely careful. So if you have something nasty to say, maybe you would say it in the form of a fable and it would get turned around in that way. Lucy. In fact, Fidreus' collection of fables

in the prologue to book three, he actually has a little story where he says fables were invented so slaves could talk about things without getting into trouble. And the fabulous, Fidress actually says, oh, that's sort of what I'm doing here,

then debate about whether he himself was really a slave and so on and so on. but there's always this idea there. And some of the fables definitely tell that. The wolf and the lamb, or an ancient version is the cat and the cockerel. The idea of the story is that the wolf wants to eat the lamb. The wolf wants an excuse for killing the lamb. So the wolf comes up with all of these things the lamb should have done.

The lamb proves that the lamb hasn't done any of them, and the wolf eats it anyway. And the moral of the story is people in power, tyrants will always get the weak. And that's the moral of the tale, a pretty depressing one. Yes, and there is also the flip side of that, that sometimes fable is used to communicate to popular audiences, but to enforce a top-down approach to power. So we see in Livy a story that in the first secession of the plebs, when the plebs protest the authority of the patricians in the early 5th century,

Menenius Agrippa, a former consul, talks to them in a fable. And the fable is the fable of the stomach and the limbs of our body. So the hands and the feet rebel against the stomach because they're tired of the stomach sitting in the center of power and digesting all the food. And so the hands do not carry food to the mouth and the feet will not walk to procure food. But eventually as the stomach starts shrinking,

the feet become feeble and the hands become feeble. So he says essentially what he's trying to. say is that the Senate is the stomach and you, the plebs are the feet and the hands and we all need to work together and they come to this form of first resolution of their dispute. Lucy Greek, is there one hold-all definition of a fable or are they too buried? I think one I like, there's one, an ancient definition, Elias Theon, a fiction picturing a truth. And so these are crucial points. It's got to be a fictitious story. That's why it's different from a proverb, it's about a story that happened in the past,

picturing it's metaphorical, obviously it's an allegory, but the idea is that there's a truth at the end. The truth might not be a moral in a sense of Christianising moral sense, but it tells you something there's a point to be had in this fictional story. Can you give us a neat example of that now? Well, of course, some fables will tell you this is a story about, or they'll put the story at the end,

or they'll put it in the middle. so whether the tortoise and the hair slow and steady wins the race that's one we all know suitable for children some of them are rather more rather more glum of course and sometimes the point at the end might not even be that which you get in the middle isn't there a lot of eating through them quite a lot of end with some animal eating the other animal

yes it's an awful lot of them yes the dog eat dog except it's generally not dog eat dog it's actually more there's an animal hierarchy One I like, which is I seem to think of all the glum ones, is the story of the donkey with the pack bags. And there's an old man with a donkey, and he's being chased. He sees an enemy army coming, and he says to the donkey,

come along, come along, and we'll get caught. And the donkey says to the man, will the enemy make me carry two packs instead of one? The man says, no. The donkey says, oh, well, in which case, I don't care. And the point of the story is it doesn't matter which master you serve, you know, you still have the same service. Is there a theme, Simon Goldhill, can you say there's a theme running through the fables? You said, The Slave Against the Master, that was a good starting one,

especially, I think it was in your own, it's that in the romance, which is written in the time of the Roman Empire, when it was much more hierarchical, as you say, much more regimented in its hierarchy than the Greek world. I would say that the dominant theme is power. It's about how power relations work in a complex society. and I don't think one can underestimate how difficult it was in the new republic

as it turned into an emperor at the imperial power to know exactly where you stood. People were constantly looking, left and right, in terms of who was in top of them, who was below them, who was the side of them. You had a patron, many people had to deal with, and there were very complex social situations, and the fables became a way of thinking through

those complex situations. And as you said, a lot of them, end in disaster. A lot of them people go, well, I've got that one wrong. And that's quite an important. That story is also being told

for a purpose. It's a sort of warning story. And it gives you a way, if you like, of navigating through these complex social situations. Can we return back to the... Can we go back to the idea of how they were used at the time? Have you given any

examples how they could have been used at the time? Yes. One of the interesting things that gives us a hint about their use is what we call the epimetrema or the moral of the fable. So in fable collections, as Lucy said, there's usually a moral that precedes the fable or follows the fable. And this has to do with the particular applicability of the fable. And we know that these texts were used also in rhetorical education.

So we've evidence that they're used in schools and academies. Yes. So, for example, we can see that in an epimetium, so the moral that follows a myth, that comes from a fable about the useless liar player. So there's a useless liar player, worthless, who sits in his room and sings all day. And as he has recently repainted his walls,

his voice reverberates and echoes in the room, to the point that he's convinced that he's the new Pavarotti. So he goes into the theatre in town, and he starts singing in these awful sounds start coming out of his mouth and the audience pelt him with stones. So he runs away. And the moral of the story is quite tenuous. It says, so also young readers while they're in school,

they think they're fantastic, but when they go into town to practice their skills, they're proven worthless. Now, this is a very particular kind of applicability for this fable. We can see that it has to do with a particular school context in which they were performed. But we also see something else that this particular kind of story

is a good yarn to begin with and then people collect it in these, they put it in these fable collections and try to find a way to use it. We know that similar stories were used for other purposes. This particular type of the worthless liar player or worthless doctor or worthless flute player, they appear in another kind of collection

collection from the period they're called the philogulus, the laughter lava, which is a collection of jokes, which didn't have any moral, and they were told simply for the pleasure of a joke often in barbershop or in baths. Simon Goldhill, when I was reading these for this programme, some of the morals at the end seem to be, you could have said the opposite or something adjacent that it would have been just as good, am I the only one of things? No, it's like proverbs, isn't it? I mean, proverbs can be told in both ways. I mean, you always know that many hands make light work

and too many cooks, spoil the broth. You can use them for either story you want to tell. That's what I mean about them being used. You use the story when you want to say, don't do that. You find the story and then you tell the moral, and it works somehow. I think it's very important that they're also used in children's education. So they're a way in which you socialize people into certain relationships.

And the fact that they might not quite work is part of the lure. So when you're a child and you read them the first time and the parent says, and the moral of the story is, the child is going, really? And so you're actually getting engaged in that particular way. Didn't I wake up in time?

Yeah, exactly. And I think people forget that one of the purposes of these fairy stories is also so that children explore them imaginatively and then they become part of culture and you take them on. Lucy, you

You referred earlier to the Fadres, the addition of Fadres. Now he, too, we're told, was, all right, we're back in the same old, carry on. He was, yes, all right, then. Are we going to forget whether it was a slave or not, and just go on with Fadres? But it matters. If he, too, was a slave,

then a slave translating something that belonged to a slave will have a different aspect to it, no? Can you talk about Fadres' edition, please? Yes, Fadris edition is great, because it does give us a much more concrete historical situation. So part of the reason why lots of classicists don't really look at these texts is because they're so difficult, they're so free

floating, we've got hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition. Friedras, very nicely, yes, there are historical references to the Sejanus, the famous henchmen of Tiberia, so we can nicely plot them into a first century AD. And they do, unlike

lots of fables which give you a kind of timeless feel, they do seem they are set in first century, city of Rome. There are references to the to the law courts, I think to gardens. And so if you want to think about this early empire changing in power relations that Simon mentioned, Fiedress is your place to come.

I think it's worth saying that he does say fairly explicitly that he comes from this background. But of course he would. If you wanted to write a fable, you're going to present yourself as a slave. And that's why we have the problem. We know that it was a dream. Why are you going to present yourself as a slave?

Well, the emperor doesn't tell fables because he's the one in power. No, there's a lot of people between. the emperor and the slave. So why don't some of the categories between emperor and slaves tell fables? Or are not thought to have told fables. They use fables, but they're not the source. They're not the authority for fables.

Why are they beneath them to make them up? To make them up, yes. I think it's partly what Pavlos said at the beginning that Isot becomes the marker. And because he becomes the marker of fable, it becomes useful to be a slave or to pretend to be a slave. It's also worth remembering who these are addressed

to. He actually addresses these fables to a guy called Uticus. Now, as far as we know, he is the gladiator of the emperor. And a gladiator is one of those fascinatingly in-between people. You know, a great celebrity, but at the same time, really in for a dig. And so you've got this sort of mix. In for a big dig sometimes. And so the gladiator was a person who precisely made power relations problematic.

And so if you've got someone pretending to be a slave talking to. to somebody who's a gladiator about how to talk to power. You can see why it's a good scene for writing fables. But let's give this another minute or two, Pavos. Is the fact that these are composed by slaves, does that say something about their place in the hierarchy of culture at the time? Yes. I mean, fable is truly popular in the sense that everybody participates in this kind of discourse.

That would include slaves as well. And so when I said that we don't really know whether Isab was truly a slave. In some ways, if you were truly a foreign slave in 6th century Samos, it would really fit some historical realities quite nicely. We would need somebody who's biculture and bilingual to bring in the pre-existing genre fable from the Near East to Greek culture. So we have fables going back to Mesopotamian literature

to 3,000 BC. In Greek literature, there appears sometime in the 8th century. If you were a slave, he would be somebody who has the ability to move from one culture, or rather by necessity, would move from one culture to the other and would bring in these narratives in. So we can imagine that these narratives of speaking truth to power would also appeal to slaves,

would also satisfy their social needs. But there is a continuum of relationships of power where we're always stuck between some who's superior to us and inferior to us in the Roman Empire. So this dialectic between master and slave always comes handy because it always talks about us in relation to superiors and inferiors. It's worth saying that our sort of standard image

of high Greek culture in particular is the body beautiful, standing tall, reading out epic verse. This is the opposite. This is an ugly guy doing small things in prose. That's it. So it is really the lowest genre you can get in that sense. So if you want a hierarchy of genres,

This is at the bottom. What's your view, Lucy, have the connection between the moral and the fable? Well, this is where you can try and do all kinds of interesting things and try and use the fables as evidence for, I think, potensions, a dialectic you might call it, in ancient society. And so one thing we might look for is where, and I think we've already mentioned, the moral of the story seems to be at odds with the actual fable.

So there is one example. there's a slightly strange story about an eagle who has his wings clipped by one man. He goes to another owner who restores his wings and he goes off and gets a hair, which he takes to the nice man who'd restored his wings to him as a present. A passing fox, fox is a big in ESOP, says to him, hey, you, why are you doing that? You ought to give it to the first man, so he'll treat you better if he catches you again. The epimetheum, the moral of the tale, appended at the end,

says this shows that we should always give thanks. to our benefactor. No, that is not what the story says. It's a Machiavellian story about how you ought to, you know, you want to be on the right side of the bad people. And so what's going on here? You might say, oh, here's a tension in society.

These stories can work in different ways. The case of the body, the stomach and the arms, famously used by Livy, texts can work in different ways. They might be applied for a conservative ideology or they might have been used in a different context. for a different kind of ideology, a different kind of story about relations. I'm walking on broken ice already here, Sam,

but there's any way of connecting the morals with the favour itself? Did the same manned person's collective write both, or were the morals clipped on later? When we have Fidreus and Babrius, we can see that sometimes they are the same person and they're explicitly written by the same person. But obviously, if you want to use it, you could drop the moral and put it.

another moral in, as you're telling it. These are very fluid texts in general. And so the idea that there's always one fable, one moral, isn't really work like that? We know they're all over the place, their oral literature. You tell the story differently depending on whether you're telling it to a big child, a small child or a senator.

One of the longer ones, the dying, lying, the fox and the stag, half a dozen interpretations, are not there? Anyway, let's move on to this one, Simon. What do they tell us about the ancient world, these fables, that we don't get anywhere else? I think they tell us something specifically about anxiety, about power, which we get elsewhere but from a much higher, much more theoretical level,

and they tell us something about the day-to-day popular culture. I think particularly the life of ESOP, you get a sense of what it's like to go to the baths, what it's like to go to the toilet, what it's like to go to the law court when you're not a grand lawyer but you're the slave sitting on the side. and I think those sorts of little insights that way are quite important for us in understanding popular culture. What significance do you think in the fact that the fables are entirely populated

by common animals or common objects? I mean, we have the sun and the north wind, and they're speaking and so and so forth. It's almost as if you can't go outside this particular circle. I think it's very important that there are no real people. There's no historical setting for a lot. a fable in that way. You need the metaphor to work. You need to allow the imagination

to come in. And the very simple units that they work with then give you the space for the imagination to create the force that you want in the story. The more you tie it down, the more people say, well, I don't think Sir Janus was quite like that, or this. You can't tell a fable about a real politician. Because people would then argue about the biography, or they'd say it's wrong.

You tell a fable about a politician. Can we just Lucy Greek? The word sets these Esops fables apart from other works of literature are there any comparable works of literature in the ancient world?

Well, yes, there are. Pavlis already mentioned the joke, the famous collection, the joke book. So there are these kind of floating collections that presumably started off in pre-literate society, but then they continue. Obviously other cultures,

the proverbs, the Near Eastern texts, the Bibles, we know that there are these kind of cross-cultural comparisons to be made between oral texts. Stories, narratives, fairy tales, they're all part of this. Let me add a more provocative version. Maybe we should think about the parables and the Gospels.

I just made a note, Christ, that I put on the phone on the thing. There you go. It is a fascinating thought because there's a text that appears to be made out of an oral culture. It claims to be telling the story of some who doesn't fit into power relations quite as we expect, and who is prepared to speak truth to power, and tells stories which, of course, have multiple meanings,

which have been argued about for ages, and therefore popular people to understand or not understand, depending on whether you read Gospel of Mark or the other Gospels. And they're written down about the give or take, about the same time as these fables are written down, Lucy. And indeed, if you want to get provocative, thinking about what kind of figure we have, we have ESOP, who dies this,

this unjust death. One idea of him as an interpretation is that he's a pharmacos, a scapegoat, it's a scapegoat ritual. Another figure he's been compared to is Socrates, who Plato tells us while awaiting death, while awaiting in trial. He writes into, he versifies some of

Esop's fables. He's another ugly figure who spoke the truth gets, suffers an unjust death. And then there's Jesus who tells Farables dies as a scapegoat dies for our sins. So there are these figures, they're looking less like Robin Hood now, I think. And Pablo, this is going into what we now call, we go away from the age of, I begin to think of as an early European

and an anti-European tradition. Do you want to take that forward a bit? Yes. Well, the fable had, as we said, had both an oral circulation and a written circulation. It's very hard to trace the oral circulation with any amount of specificity. But it's quite easy for us to look at the written

collections, and if we follow them, we see how a fable comes from antiquity into the Renaissance and spreads out into all the vernacular languages. So, as Simon said, the first ever collection that we know of is by this man called Dimitius Ophaloran in the 4th century BC. There are more fable collections in Greek that are compiled under the empire. We have several surviving. there's Fidrus on the Latin side and a late antique collection called Romulus

and this is, Fidus and Romulus are what influence the Western Latin tradition in the Middle Ages. In Byzantium, the texts continue, the fable collections continue to be copied. We have various recensions, various versions of the life of Issef

and of the fables of Issov. Finally, in the 15th century, we have a very important, translation from the Greek into Latin by the humanist Renutio da Castiglione. And based on this translation, we have the German edition, the German translation of the life and fables by Heinrich Steinhevel. And based on this German edition, we have a French translation, the French translation, the English translation of the fables is based on the French,

the Spanish translation is based on the German again. we eventually have through this network even a Japanese translation by Portuguese monks in the 17th century so there's a very rich network of textual transmission that brings a fable into early modern Europe but there is also an eastern branch

of this kind of transmission what we see is that in the 9th century CE there is in western China in the Takla Makand Desert archaeologists in the early 20th century found the remains

of a Manichian library there and among the papyri fragments they found an Uyghur translation of the life of Yusup accompanied by some fables Now Uyghur is an old Turkic language how did the life of Yusup

reach Western China. We assumed that it followed the merchants that were traveling across, along the Silk Road, as well as the Manichians who first were persecuted in the ancient Mediterranean, then in the Sasanid Empire, and they eventually reached the Western China. Well, that's a tour of their reason. If I remember that way. Simon, Simon Gold Hill, how are people, along that journey that's been so brilliantly, given us by public. How are people receiving the fables, reacting to the fables? Can you see marked

changes? I think you can you can see them being used very firmly in education in the Renaissance and beyond. They've become a way in which we introduce children, first to classical culture, which is so important for the whole of Renaissance culture, and then to a certain sense of what is a moral life, what is a virtue. And it's a way of doing it really bypassing certain sorts of Christianity

certain sorts of heavy duty religious education it becomes a more gentle more friendly way of doing it it becomes a very popular form of nursery work then moving on from there so in some senses they become childlike in a way that they weren't in the early period I think that's very important Lucy

when did they become emerge from these fragments as these are for children When did, there was a specific century or a specific one of these translations that Pavlis been talking about, when did they emerge as tales for children? I think this is actually an interesting one. There's a bit way back in the Roman Empire

in Flotet's Life of Apollonius of Tiana. He says, oh, you might think therefore all the old wives and children, but they're not, everyone can make sense of them. They are school texts. We know this from a wax tablet from the third century AD found in Parmira where a student has been writing them out

and so they are associated with education. But in the late medieval Britain, we have Lydgate, where he talks about them again as kind of fables for those without power to use against the powerful. The Scottish poet Henriessen, again, he is pretty clear that the bad guys, the wolves are like the oppressive landowners and the greedy lawyers. And so I think right up in there's the medieval English tradition

up to Caxton still sees these as stories suitable for adults. So the idea that they're just beautiful for children, I think it comes quite late in a way, although it's always part of the reason they're there. Would you take this tradition, it's fascinating that it goes into Christianity and so on? Do you think it goes right up to animal farm, Pabels? Yes, in many ways animals continue to be, I mean, we see it in Disney as well. they continue to be a very potent allegorical symbol right down to our times

because we can vocalise a variety of things through the fact that... And they can't answer back really, can't. They can't. We can't say we aren't like that. We demand our eagle rights. It's also, I mean, if you think of animal farms seriously, it's obviously drawing on the fabled tradition and it's an attempt to say something about power.

And it produces, just like he's... Sop does, phrases that have become part of our language. All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others. And that's a very esopian moment, it seems to me. It's one of those moments in which you use a pig, an animal, a simple thing, in order to tell a very simple story, which has a nice little moral, but boy, does it have purchase in the real world? Pablus is taking it back 3,000 years, Lucy,

and Simon has just now brought Orwell into the case. Do you think there's something about fables that in themselves, are bound to have a continuous life. I think it can often be wary. We're all very culturally relativistic talking about universality, but clearly there is a purchase. The idea of these stories do continue

to stick with us, they're part of our language, they're part of our culture, and I think that the fables have definitely come on. If anything, what today, hopefully we tell people about is they're not just stories for children and we can and perhaps should take them more seriously. I was a bit confused there by the messages coming to me so can I take them more seriously

so let's go back to the beginning how does this how does this the fables challenge our views of the ancient world I receive views sorry I receive views of the ancient world yes and no I would say that on the one hand the views of animals of slavery, of deformity, that are encapsulated in Issef and the fable, in some way they're very much part of the view that we find in high literature,

that is that they are suppressed, they consider elements of low culture. And at the same time, they challenge that, in that they give voice to this low level of culture. I think it's very important to remember that Greek culture in particular, but also Roman culture has played an absolutely fundamental role in the idealism of the West,

certainly since the Renaissance, and particularly, say, in the 19th century, with both German idealistic philosophy, with philhellenism, with the idea that the Greeks provided the ideals of beauty, of political thought, of philosophy, of medicine, and then you get ESOP, you know, an ugly guy coming in telling you about a pig. I think it does provide you with a subversive view, not necessarily of the ancient world, but of our construction of the ancient world as an ideal place.

Last word from you, Lucy. Yes, I have a number of colleagues who have never actually really thought of ESOP as a classical text. They're so much part of our culture, but they're not part of classical high culture. And so looking at ESOP's text, indeed, they can affect our view of this given ancient culture. Thank you very much, Pavlos Alamis, Lucy Grigg and Simon Goldhill.

Next week, it's a listener week, and in our time we'll be discussing a topic, by listener. There were over 900 came in. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I've got a signal where I thought it was two minutes to go and then I got another single later saying there was two minutes ago. So this is rather confusing. And I recovered rather badly, but it all proved that it's live, doesn't it? Yes. The animal farm, I was out for dinner with friends last night

and they immediately brought up animal farm as the fable, so I'm glad we got to that. And it is extraordinary to think that it goes from ancient Greece to China. I mean, that's the sense that you can do that. Oh, your tutor is almost terrific. I was very impressed with your narrative. There are several other translations as we know of, but I was getting a little bit too long way.

No, it was fascinating. And the funny thing is that people don't really read It's the life of Isop. Now, the Isop fables are very affinner. What we didn't get to was the fact that the life of Isop is really rude as well. We get to do that. We couldn't really talk about.

We knew that. We were being very, very polite. Well, as long as you observe the water show, why do we just get the polite? I don't know. It didn't somehow come up, did it? I think it turns up in Boccaccio, the story, about having,

she wants him to sleep with her 10 times and he can't quite manage the 10th time and then he has to tell a fable about it later and yeah yeah yeah I was ready for you to do it I didn't think I could do it you were asking how they use these fables I mean this particular story survives in one manuscript

and if you look at the person who saved it in his book copied it he's hiding it among grammatical treatises so it's a book that's full of grammar and high education and elements of high culture and there you have the most risque version of the life of Issa. Actually, the idea of a slave sleeping with his master's wife isn't too terrible, is it?

Why are we all so sort of walking around the edges of it? No, I think it's told in quite a smutty way in the story. That's different. Well, you weren't going to quote from it anyway. Very few of our listeners have fluent in Latin. It is actually parallel to that. there's a popular theatrical piece of the period, a mime, where there is a slave called ESOP.

There's no indication that he is the actual ESOP. But there, the mistress tries to poison the husband, have sex with a slave, and the young slave Isop is trying to have sex with his fellow slave, another girl. So there's this whole triangulation of power and desire going on. Isn't the one story in the romance where the ESOP is,

hired as the slave and the wife is furious because he's so ugly she wanted a good-looking handsome young slaves. I've got this very traditional, very misogynistic tradition in this text with the flusie wife, sex crazed, ungrateful wife. I don't know why we didn't get there really. Well, thank you very much. There are many more radio for arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com. slash radio 4