the
classical literature had been lost or forgotten, Aesop, who was called
by the mediaevals "Isopet," was still read in various forms; and in
modern times he has served as a model for a great number of imitations,
of which the most successful are those in French by Lafontaine and those
in English by John Gay.

Whether or not such a person as Aesop ever lived, and whether or not he
actually narrated the fables that are ascribed to him, it is certain
that he did not himself invent them, but merely gave them currency in
Greece; for they can be shown to have existed long before his time, and
in fact to antedate even the beginnings of Hellenic civilization. With
some changes of form they are found in the oldest literature of the
Chinese; similar stories are preserved on the inscribed Babylonian
bricks; and an Egyptian papyrus of about the year 1200 B.C. gives the
fable of 'The Lion and the Mouse' in its finished form. Other Aesopic
apologues are essentially identical with the Jatakas or Buddhist stories
of India, and occur also in the great Sanskrit story-book, the
'Panchatantra,' which is the very oldest monument of Hindu literature.

The so-called Aesopic Fables are in fact only a part of the primitive
folk-lore, that springs up in prehistoric times, and passes from country
to country and from race to race by the process of popular
story-telling. They reached Greece, undoubtedly through Egypt and
Persia, and even in their present form they still retain certain
Oriental, or at any rate non-Hellenic elements, such as the introduction
of Eastern animals,--the panther, the peacock, and the ape. They
represent the beginnings of conscious literary effort, when man first
tried to enforce some maxim of practical wisdom and to teach some useful
truth through the fascinating medium of a story. The Fable embodies a
half-unconscious desire to give concrete form to an abstract principle,
and a childish love for the picturesque and striking, which endows rocks
and stones and trees with life, and gives the power of speech
to animals.

That beasts with the attributes of human beings should figure in these
tales involves, from the standpoint of primeval man, only a very slight
divergence from probability. In nothing, perhaps, has civilization so
changed us as in our mental attitude toward animals. It has fixed a
great gulf between us and them--a gulf far greater than that which
divided them from our first ancestors. In the early ages