Origins
The Greek historian Herodotus mentions in passing that "Aesop the fable writer" was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BC. Among references in other writers, Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses. Nonetheless, for two main reasons - because numerous morals within Aesop's attributed fables contradict each other, and because ancient accounts of Aesop's life contradict each other - the modern view is that Aesop probably did not solely compose all those fables attributed to him, if he even existed at all. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of "Aesopic" form existing in both ancient Sumer and Akkad, as early as the third millennium BC.
Read more about this topic: Aesop's Fables
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