GENIUS IN FABULIS

(This Aesop entry’s title is a play on the Latin saying Lupus in fabula, earliest found in Terence. It continues the theme of the previous entry Quandoque Bonus Dormitat Homerus, denying legitimacy to the “personal” investigations of critical historians into the proper identities, or non-identities, of the holiest cultural icons of our Western Civilization.)

The genre of fable was not created by Aesop. Hesiod, who lived more than a century before him, is known to have used fables in his poems, such as the fable of hawk and nightingale, in Works and Days. Here it is, slightly shortened, in order to make an important comparison:

A hawk carrying a nightingale in his talons high up in the clouds, as she was crying pitifully, thus spoke to her with disdain: “Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. If it pleases me, I will make my meal of you, or I will let you go. Only the fool tries to withstand the stronger, for he cannot get the upper hand, but suffers pain besides shame.”

Here, for comparison, is a fable of Aesop, needless to say, one of many:

A fly was sitting on the axle of the fast-moving chariot. “What a dust do I raise!” it exclaimed.

No disrespect to Hesiod, the genius of Theogony and Works and Days, he is not a genius of fable. Aesop is. Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes, to name just these three, speak of him as a genius, and are quite familiar with his works. We are told that the only genre of poetry that Socrates really appreciated was the Aesopian fable. (Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)

And yet none of Aesop’s fables are extant as originals, but only in retellings. Judging by one of his fables, retold above, they were incredibly easy to memorize and retell.

Aesop, the reputed author of Aesop’s Fables, is believed to have lived about 620-560 BC. He is also said to have been ugly and deformed, and to have been born a slave. Like many other ancients, perhaps, to an even greater extent than Homer and Pythagoras, Aesop is considered by many scholars to be a purely legendary figure. The few “facts” of his life are mutually contradictory, and there is a theory that his name was a pure invention, to give authorship to a collection of folk tales which used beasts as their allegorical characters to convey straightforward morality messages attached to them.

Here is another very ugly example of critical (nitpicking) history deflowering the lady of her monumental charms, to the point that our poor lady is no longer a lady, but a damsel in extreme distress. Had there been only that first kind in existence, I would never have developed a love for history. Not surprisingly, my earliest books of history (before the age of seven) were fairytales and mythology.

Thus, it has no significance for me whether a real Aesop had ever walked the earth (or whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare for that matter), as all history at its very best, is pure mythology, to me, anyway, of which the Lives of Plutarch are among the most convincing and endearing examples. Aesop is thus a genius fable-teller, a symbol incarnate, if you like, but he is no less real for that than anybody else who had lived and died in historical actuality.

My attitude should not come as a surprise to anyone. I believe in historical symbolism, and fully share Stalin’s genuine conviction that “Stalin” (like “Homer,” “Aesop,” “Pythagoras,” “Shakespeare,” etc.) are not merely names of real or imagined men, but exceptional cultural and national symbols. By the same token, many well-known names have become exactly such symbols, not just of national significance, but embodying the glory of the whole Western civilization. For this worthy reason, Aesop, like all other glorious symbols of world culture, has remained a man, rather than some meaningless, phony ghost, which is what must perforce happen to all disembodied symbols…