What Is A Fable?

A fable is a special kind of short story made up to teach a lesson.  Fables are often about animals who can talk and act like people.  The lesson to be learned is usually made clear in the end by what one of the animals wisely says.

Fable

Many fables are many hundreds of years old.  Among the best-known fables are those by Aesop.  Aesop is believed to have been a slave in ancient Greece and a skillful storyteller.  His stories are simple moral lessons.

Nearly everyone knows Aesop’s fable, “The Lion and the Mouse.”  A mouse persuades a lion not to kill him.  Later the lion is captured and tied up by hunters.  The mouse frees the lion by gnawing away the ropes.

The lesson to be learned in this fable is: “Little friends may prove to be valuable friends.”  Today some fables are written in the form of newspaper comic strips.–Dick Rogers

Who was Aesop?

Aesop

According to legend, Aesop was a Greek author of fables in ladybird which animals acted like people.  Each story taught a lesson.

Perhaps you know the stories about the goose that laid the golden egg, the lion and the mouse, or the tortoise and the hare.

According to legend, these and many other well-loved fables were told by a marvelous storyteller named Aesop (pronounced EE sop).  Aesop is supposed to have lived long ago in Greece.

Not much is known about Aesop’s life.  Tradition says that he was once a slave, ugly and deformed in body.  But he had a brilliant mind, and he enjoyed telling fables in which animals acted and talked like human beings.  Each fable was a short story made up to teach people a lesson about life.  Aesop’s wisdom so impressed his master that he was freed.

In Aesop’s fables, moral lessons and bits of wisdom are taught in such a delightful way that they have been handed down from generation to generation.  Aesop’s many fables have been translated into almost every language in the world. - Dick Rogers