Aesop, The Complete Fables; Author: Aesop; Author: Translator Temple, Clivia; Paperback; Standard Hardcover size

Author: Aesop; Author: Translator Temple, Clivia
Penguin Classics; Paperback; Standard Hardcover size
288 pages
Published: January 1998
Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 0140446494

This definitive and fully annotated modern edition of the Fables is the first translation ever to make available the complete corpus of 358 fables attributed to Aesop, displaying his humor,insight, and savage wit, as well as affording fascinating glimpses of everyday life in ancient Greece. Earlier English versions have been both sanitized and highly selective. Aesop was probably a prisoner of war, sold into slavery in the early sixth century B.C., who represented his masters in court and relied on animal stories to put across his key points. These tales are brought together with other Aesop-inspired satirical tales, probably originating in Libya and Egypt.This is the first ever complete translation into English of the entire works of Aesop. A translation of the complete Aesopian fables. The introduction looks at the nature of the animals who appear in these fables, and tries to rescue the fables both from a tradition of moralistic interpretation and from the academic perception of the genre as an exclusively populist one.