Janet Bartlett, age 14, of Twin Falls, Ida., for her question:
WHAT IS AN AESOP FABLE?
A fable is a short story that teaches a lesson. Usually featured in a fable, which often is no longer than a paragraph of prose, are animal characters.
The first fables are probably among the best known. They are said to have been written by a Greek slave named Aesop who lived about 600 B.C. About 300 years after Aesop's death, the fables were collected by a man named Demetrius Phalereus, the first manager of the great library of Alexandria.
Later on, all of Aesop's fables were translated into Latin by Phaedrus, a freed slave who once belonged to Augustus Caesar.
In many fables, animals talk and act like people. The meaning of the story is made clear at the end by what one of these animals says wisely.
One of Aesop's most famous fables tells the story of a hungry fox. He saw some luscious grapes hanging from a vine high above his head. He leaped and snapped many times but couldn't quite reach the fruit. Finally he became so tired that he could just barely limp away. As he left the grapes he said in anger: "What sour things those grapes are. No gentleman would want to eat them."
People now say "sour grapes" to someone who pretends he does not want something he cannot have.
To make sure the reader gets the point of the story, a moral is often added to each fable. The moral to the hungry fox fable would be: "Every man tries to convince himself that the thing he cannot have is of no value."
Another of Aesop's famous fables tells the story of the lion and the mouse. A mouse persuades a lion not to kill him. Later on, the lion is captured and tied up by hunters. The mouse comes along and frees the lion by chewing the ropes that bind him.
Another fable by Aesop tells the story of the hare and the tortoise. Remember that one? Even though the hare was the swifter animal, a race between the two of them ended in victory for the tortoise. The hare fooled around and rested a lot while the tortoise plugged away seriously at the race.
Another Aesop fable tells the story of the man who had the goose that laid one golden egg each day. He killed the bird so that he could have the golden eggs all at one time.
Yet another fable by Aesop tells of the boy who amused himself by calling "Wolf, wolf" when there wasn't one. Do you remember how that one ended, and do you know that fable's moral?
Beast fables of Reynard the Fox were popular during the late Middle Ages. Fables also turned up in English literature during the late 1300s and in French literature in the 1600s.
Today fables are usually thought of as a form of children's literature. But in early times, the simplest fable was sometimes a means of hidden satire and a way to express political and social criticism.
Some stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris have certain qualities of the fable. So do some of the early Disney motion picture cartoons.