rving several masters was enfranchised by Iadmon, the
Samian. His death is thus related by Plutarch: Having gone to Delphos,
by the order of Croesus, with a large quantity of gold and silver, to
offer a costly sacrifice to Apollo and to distribute a considerable sum
among the inhabitants, a quarrel arose between him and the Delphians,
which induced him to return the money, and inform the king that the
people were unworthy of the liberal benefaction he had intended for
them. The Delphians, incensed, charged him with sacrilege, and, having
procured his condemnation, precipitated him from a rock and caused his
death.--The popular notion that Esop was a monster of ugliness and
deformity is derived from a "Life" of the fabulist, prefixed to a Greek
collection of fables purporting to be his, said to have been written by
Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century, which, however apocryphal,
is both curious and entertaining, from whatever sources the anecdotes
may have been drawn.

According to Planudes,[130] Esop was born at Amorium, in the Greater
Phrygia, a slave, ugly exceedingly: he was sharp-chinned, snub-nosed,
bull-necked, blubber-lipped, and extremely swarthy (whence his name,
_Ais-opos_, or _Aith-opos_: burnt-face, blackamoor); pot-bellied,
crook-legged, and crook-backed; perhaps uglier even than the Thersites
of Homer; worst of all, tongue-tied, obscure and inarticulate in his
speech; in short, everything but his mind seemed to mark him out for a
slave. His first master sent him out to dig one day. A husbandman having
presented the master with some fine fresh figs, they were given to a
slave to be set before him after his bath. Esop had occasion to go into
the house; meanwhile the other slaves ate the figs, and when the master
missed them they accused Esop, who begged a moment's respite: he then
drank some warm water and caused himself to vomit, and as he had not
broken his fast his innocence was thus manifest. The same test
discovered the thieves, who by their punishment illustrated the proverb:

Whoso against another worketh guile
Thereby himself doth injure unaware.[131]

[130] _Fabulae Romanenses Graece conscriptae ex recensione et
cum adnotationibus_, Alfredi Eberhard (Leipzig, 1872),
vol. i, p. 226 ff.

[131] It would have been well had the sultan Bayazid compelled
his soldier to adopt this plan when accused by an old
woman of having drunk up all her supply of goat'