Japice Baker, age 13, of Nashville, Tenn., for her question:
WHEN WAS THE FIRST FABLE TOLD?
A fable is a special kind of short story that teaches a lesson. Usually featured in the fable, which often is no longer than a paragraph of prose, are animal characters.
In a fable, animals talk and act like people. The meaning is often made clear at the end by what one of these animals wisely says.
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.
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 arel 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 that 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 famous fable by Aesop tells the story of the hare and the tortoise. Remmber that one? Even though the hare was the swifter animal, a race between the two of them ended in victory for the tortoise.
Another famous fable by Aesop is the one about the man who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs and the one about the shepherd boy who amused himself by calling "Wolf, Wolf!" when there wasn't one.
Beast fables of Reynard the Fox were popular during the late Middle Ages. Fables also turned up in the 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 simple 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 motion picture cartoons of Walk Disney and others.