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Introductory Note
Introductory Note
The habit of telling stories is one of the most primitive characteristics
of the human race. The most ancient civilizations, the most barbarous savages,
of whom we have any knowledge have yielded to investigators clear traces of
the possession of this practise, The specimens of their narrative that have
been gathered from all the ends of the earth and from the remotest times of
which we have written record show traces of purpose, now religious and
didactic, now patriotic and political; but behind or beside the purpose one
can discern the permanent human delight in the story for its own sake.
The oldest of stories are the myths: not the elaborated and sophisticated
tales that one finds in, say, Greek epic and drama, but the myth pure and
simple. This is the answer of primitive science to the question of the
barbaric child, the explanation of the thunder or the rain, of the origin of
man or of fire, of disease or death. The form of such myths is accounted for
by the belief known as "animism," which assumed personality in every object
and phenomenon, and conceived no distinction in the kind of existence of a
man, a dog, a tree, or a stone. Such myths are still told among, e. g., the
American Indians, and the assumption just mentioned accounts for such features
as the transformation of the same being from a man into a log or a fish, or
the marriage of a coyote and a woman. Derived from this state of belief and
showing signs of their origin, are such animal stories as form the basis of
the artistically worked-up tales of "Uncle Remus."
Thus in primitive myth, the divinities of natural forces are not
personifications, for there was no figure of speech involved; the storm, the
ocean, and the plague were to the mythmakers actually persons. The symbolical
element in literary myths is a later development, possible only as man
gradually arrived at the realization of his separateness in kind from the non-
human objects of his senses. With this realization came the attempt to adapt
the myths that had come down from more primitive times to his new way of
thinking, and the long process of making the myths reasonable and credible set
in.
But while the higher myths were being thus transformed into the religions
of the civilized man, the ways of thinking that had produced them in their
original form survived to some extent in stories of less dignity, which made
no pretensions to be either science or religion but which were told only
because they entertained. Tales of this kind have come down from mouth to
mouth in less sophisticated communities to our own day, and are now being
killed out only by the printing press and the diffusion of the art of
reading.
Far earlier written down, but less primitive in kind, are the Aesopic
Fables. In these allegorical tales, the form of the old animistic story is
used without any belief in the identity of the personalities of men and
animals, but with a conscious double meaning and for the purpose of teaching a
lesson. The fable is a product not of the folk but of the learned; and though
at times it has been handed down by word of mouth, it is really a literary
form.
Aesop is little more than the shadow of a name. He was a slave from the
island of Samos, who flourished, according to Herodotus, about the middle of
the sixth century before Christ; and his name is associated with the special
use of the fable for political purposes at a time when the reign of the
tyrants in Greece made unveiled speech dangerous. About two hundred and fifty
years after Aesop`s time, Demetrius of Phaleron collected a large number of
fables and called them by Aesop`s name, and a version of these was turned into
Latin verse by one Phaedrus in the time of Augustus. This Phaedrus is the main
source of the modern "Aesop," but no one can point to any one fable existing
today as certainly the invention of the Samian slave.
In India as well as in Greece the fable was common from very early times;
and near the beginning of our era a Buddhist collection that had come west by
Alexandria was combined with that of Demetrius, and later turned into Greek
verse by Valerius Babrius. A Greek prose version of Babrius was accepted for
centuries as the original Aesop. The habit of summing up the lesson of the
fable in a "moral" at the end seems to have come in with the Oriental
contribution.
The history of collections of fables in Europe from Phaedrus and Babrius
down is one of incredible complexity, on many of the details of which scholars
are yet far from agreement. Additions to the common stock have come in from a
vast variety of sources; the stories have been retold scores of times, so that
there is nothing approaching an authentic text; yet the name of Aesop has
clung till it has become merely a convenient name for this particular type of
allegorical beast-tale.
In the present collection, the fables have been retold in simple language
by Mr. Joseph Jacobs. He has chosen those examples that have become most
universally popular, and at the same time has given representatives from all
the main sources. A glance at the titles will be sufficient to show to what an
extraordinary extent these simple stories have become the common property of
all peoples.
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