Aesop's Fables
The Greek fable collection whose closing morals became a durable source of proverbs.
The fables attributed to Aesop — a semi-legendary figure placed in sixth-century BC Greece — survive not as a single book but as a shifting corpus, transmitted through Demetrius of Phalerum, Phaedrus in Latin verse, Babrius in Greek, and hundreds of later editions.
Their importance to quotation is the epimythium: the moral tacked onto the end. These one-line summaries detached themselves from the stories and entered everyday speech as proverbs — 'sour grapes', 'familiarity breeds contempt', 'slow and steady wins the race'.
Because the morals were added, revised, and translated repeatedly, the wording varies enormously between editions. A quotation from Aesop is really a quotation from a translator, most often L'Estrange (1692), Croxall (1722), or Townsend (1867).
Common mistake: citing a moral as 'Aesop' without an edition. Name the translation and date; the phrasing you are quoting has an author, even if the fable does not.
“It is easy to despise what you cannot get.”
Keep reading the glossary
A traditional saying that expresses a generally accepted truth — almost always anonymous.
The Sanskrit frame-story collection that carried fable maxims across Eurasia.
A short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson — most famously, the parables of Jesus.
A short anecdote or saying attributed to a named figure — a classical rhetorical unit for teaching, arguing, and remembering.