Aesop, Aesop, tell us a story, do!

I am occasionally criticized for writing short books. (The Fate of the Ninth comes in at 140 or so pages, Phantom Horsemen at 160 or so.) Admittedly, if something can be said in ten sentences, I’ll probably find a way to do it in four: I dislike flabby or verbose writing and naturally lean towards brevity.

I recently found a beloved book from my childhood that may shed some light on why I’m drawn to short, sharp narrative.

The book is A selection of Aesop’s Fables, “rewritten especially for children” by Barbara Sanders, wife of illustrator Christopher Sanders, RA.

Of course, everyone has heard of Aesop, without (I imagine) quite knowing anything about him or where his fables come from.

In fact, although Aesop is supposed to have told his fables around 600 BC, our earliest collections date from the Roman period, preserved by writers named Babrius (143 fables) and Phaedrus (95 fables), and, by utilizing other anonymous sources, scholars (chiefly, Ben Edwin Perry in the 1950s) have brought the total of “Aesopic” fables to 725! But the important point here is that most fables are pithy single-paragraph tales in which an entire story is distilled down to half-a-dozen sentences.

The Lion and the Mouse

Here is Babrius no. 107 (quite long, at 15 lines of Greek):
“A lion caught a mouse and was about to eat him; as the little house thief patiently awaited his fate, he mumbled these beseeching words: ‘for you, it is fitting to hunt deer and horned bulls to fatten your stomach, but a meal of a mouse would hardly touch the edges of your lips; I beg you to spare me. Though I’m small, I shall repay the favour equally.’ Laughing, the beast allowed the suppliant to live. But when he encountered young hunters, he was caught in a net and tied down. But the mouse, scurrying stealthily from his hole and gnawing the stout mesh with his tiny teeth, freed the lion, granting repayment worthy of seeing the light, having saved his life.”
According to Babrius, the moral of the tale is to “preserve the working poor and do not give up on them”.
(I’ve translated Babrius’ word πένητες, penêtes, as “the working poor”; it’s the word for day-labourers who work to subsist. This is clearly the mouse of the story, who is said to be a thief and an οἰκότριψ, oikotrips, literally “one who is busy around the house”, perhaps implying that he survives by pilfering the houses of others, unless the word has been corrupted from οἰκοτριβής, oikotribês, “one who is ruinous for a household”.)

It is noticeable that, quite often, not a lot of Babrius survives in the retelling! For one thing, Barbara Sanders decides upon a new moral: “The least may help the greatest”. In older editions of Aesop, Vernon Jones (1912) chose the rather obvious “Even a mouse can help a lion”, while the original Penguin edition (1954) helpfully explains that “A change of fortune can make the strongest man need a weaker man’s help”. Thankfully, the Oxford Worlds Classic version of Laura Gibbs (2002) returned to something like the original with “Let no one dare to harm even the smallest among us”.

Everyone loves an animal picture

I must admit to being astounded by the sheer number of children’s illustrated treasuries of “Aesop’s Fables” — the WorldCat search engine claims to have located 6,800 versions, from Aesop’s Fables for Little Children to Aesop's Fables: the Classic Heirloom Edition or The Classic Treasury of Aesop’s Fables.

The selling point, of course, is always the illustrations. It was certainly Christopher Sanders’ drawings that made his wife’s version so memorable for me, as a child. (That’s his picture of the Lion and the Mouse, above — don’t you love the wee mouse rushing to the rescue — and this is another wonderful example of his craft: the Dog in the Manger.)

Likewise, it is the pictures that bring another often-reprinted classic alive: Vernon Jones’ 1912 version, illustrated by the incomparable Arthur Rackham. Even the 1954 Penguin edition translated by S.A. Handford (who also did Sallust, Cicero, and Caesar for Penguin) had wonderful pen-and-ink sketches by Brian Robb, the art teacher who taught Quentin Blake at the Chelsea School of Art.

I often wonder whether the dozens of “children’s retellings” are simply that — a freewheeling spin on what the writer thinks the fable should be, rather than true translations. Be that as it may. But I notice that The Classic Treasury’s version of the Lion and the Mouse bears very little resemblance to Babrius, and teaches us that “Little friends may become great friends”. This last point is important, as there is also a tendency to sanitize the original moral for the consumption of children.

The stag slaughtered at the pool

One of the most haunting tales, I find, is “The stag drinking at the pool”, preserved by both Babrius and Phaedrus. (Handford calls it “The irony of fate”, and unaccountably throws a lion into the mix.)

This is the tale of the stag who, gazing at his reflection, admires his antlers and finds his sinewy legs disappointing. (Babrius has him disparage his “hooves and feet”, but it makes no odds.)

However, having used his legs to escape from a band of hunters, he is subsequently caught in some branches by his beautiful antlers, and falls victim to the pack of hounds. Yet, according to The Classic Treasury, “his antlers came untangled and he bounded away to safety”.

I suppose their version still illustrates Babrius’ moral: “Do not presume reliability beforehand, but neither give up nor lose hope”. (Barbara Sanders went in a different direction with “Beauty can be a very powerful gift, but it can be a dangerous one”.)

But the original moral was that we should not suppose that anything can be relied upon. Don’t take things for granted? Handford’s version was that “It often happens, when we are in danger, that the friends whose loyalty we doubted prove our saviours, while those in whom we put implicit trust betray us”. Odd. But then, he also added a lion.