The Detailed History of Aesop
The name of Aesop is as widely known as any that has come down from Graeco-Roman antiquity [yet] it is far from certain whether a historical Aesop ever existed ... in the latter part of the fifth century [BC] something like a coherent Aesop legend appears, and Samos seems to be its home.
—Martin Litchfield West[2]
A woodcut from La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas historiadas (Spain, 1489) depicting a hunchbacked Aesop surrounded by events from the stories in Planudes' version of his life
The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, indicate that Aesop was born around 620 BC in Thrace at a site on the Black Sea coast which would later become the city Mesembria. A number of later writers from the Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin), say that he was born in Phrygia.[3] The 3rd-century poet Callimachus called him "Aesop of Sardis,"[4] and the later writer Maximus of Tyre called him "the sage of Lydia."[5]
From Aristotle[6] and Herodotus[7] we learn that Aesop was a slave in Samos and that his masters were first a man named Xanthus and then a man named Iadmon; that he must eventually have been freed, because he argued as an advocate for a wealthy Samian; and that he met his end in the city of Delphi. Plutarch[8] tells us that Aesop had come to Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus of Lydia, that he insulted the Delphians, was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, and was thrown from a cliff (after which the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine); before this fatal episode, Aesop met with Periander of Corinth, where Plutarch has him dining with the Seven Sages of Greece, sitting beside his friend Solon, whom he had met in Sardis. (Leslie Kurke suggests that Aesop himself "was a popular contender for inclusion" in the list of Seven Sages).[9]
Problems of chronological reconciliation dating the death of Aesop and the reign of Croesus led the Aesop scholar (and compiler of the Perry
—Martin Litchfield West[2]
A woodcut from La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas historiadas (Spain, 1489) depicting a hunchbacked Aesop surrounded by events from the stories in Planudes' version of his life
The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, indicate that Aesop was born around 620 BC in Thrace at a site on the Black Sea coast which would later become the city Mesembria. A number of later writers from the Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin), say that he was born in Phrygia.[3] The 3rd-century poet Callimachus called him "Aesop of Sardis,"[4] and the later writer Maximus of Tyre called him "the sage of Lydia."[5]
From Aristotle[6] and Herodotus[7] we learn that Aesop was a slave in Samos and that his masters were first a man named Xanthus and then a man named Iadmon; that he must eventually have been freed, because he argued as an advocate for a wealthy Samian; and that he met his end in the city of Delphi. Plutarch[8] tells us that Aesop had come to Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus of Lydia, that he insulted the Delphians, was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, and was thrown from a cliff (after which the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine); before this fatal episode, Aesop met with Periander of Corinth, where Plutarch has him dining with the Seven Sages of Greece, sitting beside his friend Solon, whom he had met in Sardis. (Leslie Kurke suggests that Aesop himself "was a popular contender for inclusion" in the list of Seven Sages).[9]
Problems of chronological reconciliation dating the death of Aesop and the reign of Croesus led the Aesop scholar (and compiler of the Perry