Aesop
By J. H. DRIBERG.
ITTLE is known of Aesop till after he had won his -1-4 freedom. Some say that he was a Phrygian slave —but that, perhaps, is because his master was Iadmon of Samos, who doubtless visited Phrygia from time to time. The more general view, however, is that he was an African, who, taken in slavery, drifted to Asia Minor and the Islands. His very name, Aesop, perverted from Aethiop, indicates his African origin. He visited the court of Croesus as a freed-man, and later met his death at Delphi, possibly (again accounts vary) for peculating trust funds—how could modern financiers survive such drastic treatment ?—but more probably because, as was the way of Archilochus, his tongue was barbed with a greater degree of malice and sarcasm than the worthy Delphian could tolerate. That his fables early won him a reputation may be readily inferred, and it is remarkable that by Mohammed's time his reputation was so firmly established that the Prophet inscribed the thirty-first sura of the Koran to his name, Lokman as he was known to the Mohammedan world, the greatest fabulist then as now.
. Caxton's translation from the French has now been worthily published by the Gregynog Press, a superb example of craftsmanship, beautifully and faithfully reproducihg Caxton's delightful English and admirably decorated with engravings on wood by Agnes Miller Parker.* Such a volume reminds us of the debt which we owe to Aesop and which civilization owes to Africa. For many of the fables which the African slave wrote down for posterity in the country of his adoption are still current to-day in the country of his origin. Despite the trans- mutations they have suffered in their cultural migration their parenthood is still recognizable. They have acquired a new infection of morality : virtue is rewarded and wickedness punished : the evildoer does not "get away with it as he so often does in Africa : the malicious joker .falls into the snare which he sets for others, though we may perhaps see here the origin of the malice which was Aesop's own undoing. Certainly there is more than a trace of malice in many of his stories, and in African folk- tales the hare, the father of mischief-makers, is compact of malice, cunning, falsehood, trickery and all the dubious elements which go to the making of a shady company- promoter.
How nearly he kept to his originals may be seen in his fable of the Wulf and of the Dogge, the moral of which, as Caxton remarked, is that " lyberte or freedome is a moche swete thynge," or in the fable of the Two Rats, in which we learn that it " better worthe is to lyve in poverte surely than to lyve rychely beyng ever in daunger." What is this but the story of the Dog and the Jackal, current to-day in the folk-repertoire of so many tribes ? The dog having visited the jackal repays his hospitality by inviting him to a meal at his kind master's village.
Truly," cries the jackal, after seeing the dog soundly thrashed, " truly I, even if I live in the bush, am better off than you."
The crane, who was appointed their lord and master and ate up all the frogs, finds his prototype in many creatures
* The Fables of Esope. The Gregynog Prose. Limited to 250 Opies. £5 Ss. as destructive of their subjects' lives. The fable of the Good Man and of the Serpente is reflected in the habitual kindness shown to snakes by many tribes : for snakes are the repoSitories of the souls of ancestors and they are cherished therefore and invited to live in the houses of men by daily gifts of milk. When the good man " was angry ageynste the serpent and took a gretc staf and smote at hym . . . and felle ageyne in to gretc poverte " as a result, his fate was what a good animist might have predicted for him. Frogs are still as arrogant as they were 2,400 years ago, when their ancestor puffed itself up to bovine proportions and burst : they never learn, it seems, but go on bursting themselves in the old way, and all because, just as Rostand's chanteelecr brought in the sun, they bring in the rain—the proof of which lies in the fact that after a drought frogs croak with the first rains.
Less well known is the fable of the Foxe and of the Cooke. Caught by a trick—for the cunning fox had flattered the cock into singing—the cock in his turn tricked the fox into speaking, whereon " the cok soaped fro the foxc mouthe and Hough upon a tree "—of which the moral is that " over moche talkyng letteth : and to moche crowynge smarteth : therfore, kepe thy self fro over many wordes." Is this not one with the guinea-fowl, which, caught in a hunter's snare, kept first his daughter, then his son, then his wife and finally the hunter talking and arguing, and incidentally bragging, till with a sudden flutter of wings it flew out from the cooking pot, in which it had been placed alive, and (as the African tersely puts it) left the family and their friends to the joy of anticipation ? " Words," it cried, as it flew away, " never cooked a guinea-fowl."
Then there is the Montayn whiche shoke, and all the people were " aferd and dredeful, and durst not wel come ne approche the hylle "—till they discovered that it was a mole which " caused this hylle shakynge," when " theyr doubte and drede were converted into Joyc." There arc hundreds of stories like this one in Africa, which tell of the fears and doubts of a people coming into a new country. The Lango, for example, coming to marshy lowlands from their old mountain homes were at first afraid to walk more than a cautious step at a time, lest the not too solid earth should engulf them, and their fears were only dissolved by the sight of an antelope running at full speed in front of them. But more often than not the modern fabulist reverses Aesop's order of things and tells how what is apparently harmless is found to be disconcerting or dangerous. In this class of stories is the enchanted stook of stubble, behind which two lovers lay in secluded contentment, till they were dragged back from their transports by the harsh voice of the stook—an uncompromising bachelor—telling them to be gone or he would turn them into slugs.
The Asse that frightened all the Beestes by his braying and would even have frightened the lion, if he had not been a party to the experiment, recalls the proverb Which Aesop must have known that a roaring lion misses his prey. Even a cursory reading of his fables is enough to show how often Aesop embroidered this motif : for then, as now, the virtue of silence was well esteemed.
• Assuredly, if Aesop was not an African, he ought to
have been. For his fables, for all their gloss of an alien orthodoxy, have the fragrance of African forests, the malice of the hare that tricked the leopard to matricide, and the versatility of the chameleon who, sharing the cunning of the hare, possesses nevertheless an ambiguous morality which places it definitely on the side of the angels.
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