Æsop is justly regarded as the foremost inventor of fables that the world has seen. He flourished in the sixth century before Christ. Several places, as in the case of Homer, are claimed as his birthplace—Sardis in Lydia, Ammorius, the island of Samos, and Mesembra, a city of Thrace; but the weight of authority is in favour of CotiÆum, a city of Phrygia in the Lesser Asia,[19] hence his sobriquet of 'the Phrygian.'

Whether he was a slave from birth is uncertain, but if not, he became such, and served three masters in succession. Demarchus or Caresias of Athens was his first master; the next, Zanthus or Xanthus, a philosopher, of the island of Samos; and the third, Idmon or Jadmon, also of Samos. His faithful service and wisdom so pleased Idmon that he gave Æsop his freedom.

Growing in reputation both as a sage and a wit, he associated with the wisest men of his age. Amongst his contemporaries were the seven sages of Greece: Periander, Thales, Solon, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias and Pittacus; but he was eventually esteemed wiser than any of them. The humour with which his sage counsels were spiced made these more acceptable (both in his own and later times) than the dull, if weighty, wisdom of his compeers.

He became attached by invitation of Croesus, the rich King of Lydia, to the court at Sardis, the capital, and continued under the patronage of that monarch for the remainder of his life. Croesus employed him in various embassies which he carried to a successful issue. The last he undertook was a mission to Delphi to offer sacrifices to Apollo, and to distribute four minÆ[20] of silver to each citizen. To the character of the Delphians might with justice be applied the saying of a later time: 'The nearer the temple and the farther from God.' Familiarity with the Oracle, as is the case in smaller matters, bred contempt, for the meanness of their lives was due to the circumstance that the offerings of strangers coming to the temple of the god enabled them to live a life of idleness, to the neglect of the cultivation of their lands.

Æsop upbraided them for this conduct, and, scorning to encourage them in their evil habits, instead of distributing amongst them the money which Croesus had sent, he returned it to Sardis. This, as was natural with persons of their mean character, so inflamed them against him that they conspired to compass his destruction. Accordingly (as the story goes), they hid away amongst his baggage, as he was leaving the city, a golden goblet taken from the temple and consecrated to Apollo. Search being made, and the vessel discovered, the charge of sacrilege was brought against him. His judges pronounced him guilty, and he was sentenced to be precipitated from the rock Hyampia. Immediately before his execution he delivered to his persecutors the fable of The Eagle and the Beetle,[21] by which he warned them that even the weak may procure vengeance against the strong for injuries inflicted. The warning was unheeded by his murderers. The shameful sentence was carried out, and so Æsop died, according to Eusebius, in the fourth year of the fifty-fourth Olympiad, or 561 years before the Christian era. The fate of poor Æsop was like that of a good many other world-menders!

According to ancient chroniclers, the death of Æsop did not go unavenged. Misfortunes of many kinds overtook the Delphians; pestilence decimated them; such of their lands as they tried to cultivate were rendered barren, with famine as the result, and these miseries continued to afflict them for many years. At length, having consulted the Oracle, they received as answer that which their secret conscience affirmed to be true, that their calamities were due to the death of Æsop, whom they had so unjustly condemned. Thereupon they caused proclamation to be made in all public places throughout the country, offering reparation to any of Æsop's representatives who should appear. The only claimant that responded was a grandson of Idmon, Æsop's former master; and having made such expiation as he demanded, the Delphians were delivered from their troubles.

Not only was Æsop unfortunate in his death: his personal appearance has suffered disparagement. The most trustworthy chroniclers in ancient times describe him as a man of good appearance, and even of a pleasing cast of countenance; whereas in later years he has been portrayed both by writers and in pictures as deformed in body and repellent in features. StobÆus, it is true, who lived in the fifth century A.D., had written disparagingly of 'the air of Æsop's countenance,' representing the fabulist as a man of sour visage, and intractable, but he goes no farther than that.

It is to Maximus Planudes, a Constantinople monk of the fourteenth century, nearly two thousand years after the time of Æsop, that the burlesque of the great fabulist is due. Planudes appears to have collected all the stories regarding Æsop current during the Middle Ages, and strung them together as an authentic history. Through ignorance, or by intention, he also confounded the Oriental fabulist, Locman,[22] with Æsop, and clothed the latter in all the admitted deformities of the other. He affirmed him as having been flat-faced, hunch-backed, jolt-headed, blubber-lipped, big-bellied, baker-legged, his body crooked all over, and his complexion of a swarthy hue. Even in recent years, accepting the description of the monk, Æsop has been thus depicted in the frontispiece to his fables. This writer is untrustworthy in other respects, for in his pretended life of the sage he makes him speak of persons who did not exist, and of events that did not occur for eighty to two hundred years after his death.

That the story of Æsop's hideous deformity is untrue is clear from evidence that is on record. Admitted that this evidence is chiefly of a negative kind, it is sufficiently strong to refute the statements of the monk. In the first place, Planudes, as we have seen, is an untrustworthy chronicler in other respects, and an account of Æsop, written after the lapse of two thousand years, could only be worthy of credence issuing from a truthful pen, and based on documentary or other unquestionable evidence. Of such evidence the Constantinople monk had probably none.

Again, it is related that during the years of his slavery Æsop had as mate, or wife, the beautiful Rhodope,[23] also a slave—an unlikely circumstance, assuming him to have been as repulsive in bodily appearance as has been asserted. At all events, any incongruous association of this kind would have been remarked and commented on by earlier writers.

Further, none of Æsop's contemporaries, nor any writers that immediately followed him, make mention of his alleged deformities. On the contrary, the Athenians, about two hundred years after his death, in order to perpetuate his memory and appearance, commissioned the celebrated sculptor Lysippus to produce a statue of Æsop, and this they erected in a prominent position in front of those of the seven sages, 'because,' says PhÆdrus,[24] 'their severe manner did not persuade, while the jesting of Æsop pleased and instructed at the same time.' It is improbable that the figure of a man monstrously deformed as Æsop is said to have been would have proved acceptable to the severe taste of the Greek mind. An epigram of Agathia, of which the following is a translation,[25] celebrates the erection of this statue:

'To Lysippus.

Philostratus, in an account of certain pictures in existence in the time of the Antonines, describes one as representing Æsop with a pleasing cast of countenance, in the midst of a circle of the various animals, and the Geniuses of Fable adorning him with wreaths of flowers and branches of the olive.

Dr. Bentley, in his 'Dissertation,' ridicules the account of Æsop's deformity as given by Planudes in face of all the evidence to the contrary. 'I wish,' says he, 'I could do that justice to the memory of our Phrygian, to oblige the painters to change their pencil. For 'tis certain he was no deformed person; and 'tis probable he was very handsome. For whether he was a Phrygian or, as others say, a Thracian, he must have been sold into Samos by a trader in slaves; and 'tis well known that that sort of people commonly bought up the most beautiful they could light on, because they would yield the most profit.'

Bentley's conjecture that Æsop was 'very handsome' does not find general acceptance; it has, nevertheless, a solid foundation in the fact that the Greeks confined art to the imitation of the beautiful only, reprobating the portrayal of ugly forms, whether human or other. It is not to be believed, therefore, that the chisel of Lysippus was employed in the production of a statue to a deformed person, which not even the gift of wisdom would have rendered acceptable to the severe taste of his countrymen. Without going so far, however, as to accept the view of the learned Master of Trinity, that Æsop was probably very handsome, we may with safety conclude that the objectionable portrait of the sage as drawn by the Byzantine is without justification.