{"id":130724,"date":"2018-11-07T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T16:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130724"},"modified":"2018-11-30T12:35:58","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T17:35:58","slug":"new-morals-for-aesops-fables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/07\/new-morals-for-aesops-fables\/","title":{"rendered":"New Morals for Aesop\u2019s Fables"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration from a 1912 edition of Aesop\u2019s Fables<\/p><\/div>\n

Aesop\u2019s fables. How many do you know? Probably between five and ten. The tortoise and the hare, the grasshopper and the ants. Good. Squeeze for a minute, you\u2019ll come up with more. The lion who spares the mouse and then she helps him later. The goose who lays the golden omelets. Go ahead and recite a couple, right now. Do your heart some good.<\/p>\n

But wait. Go back a second. When you recited \u2019em, did you forget to add the morals? I bet you did. It\u2019s not as easy to remember to put the moral in there.<\/p>\n

Try again. There was a grasshopper (in the original Greek, it\u2019s never a grasshopper; it\u2019s a cicada or a cricket or a scarab beetle, but never mind). This grasshopper diddled around, all summer, while the ants were sweating. Then, winter came. It always does. Uh-oh! Grasshopper didn\u2019t have anything to eat. The ants all gathered \u2019round and said, Ah-hah, you are justly served for being such a lazybones! Now starve, shithead.<\/p>\n

And the moral of the story is \u2026 See, you\u2019re kinda forced to invent it spontaneously. The moral of the story is: Instead of sitting around, getting high all the time, how \u2019bout you get a job? The moral of the story is: All play and no work means you fail out of community college. The moral of the story is \u2026<\/p>\n

But there are other ways of looking at it, y\u2019know. The lesson could be: People wouldn\u2019t mind starving so much if they didn\u2019t have to listen to others telling \u2019em they deserve it. The grasshopper just made a mistake, y\u2019all. It\u2019s not like it\u2019s an unalterable fact that he needs to be punished. Indeed, the moral could be: People who have evaded a calamity inevitably enjoy tormenting those who must bear the calamity\u2019s brunt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But do you see what I did there? I didn\u2019t just take the grasshopper\u2019s side. I inverted the moral universe. You\u2019re supposed to want to imitate the ants; I gave you a reason not to. Here, look at the original moral:<\/p>\n

This fable shows that in all things one should beware of negligence, if one wishes to avoid danger and trouble.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See? Be like the ants. Now, there are other Greek fables, where ants are painted as greedy or foolish, so it\u2019s not like the Greeks were just in love with ants. Yet, in the above story, the meaning was obvious: ants, yes; grasshopper, no. The moral that I drew (\u201cPeople who have avoided a calamity \u2026\u201d) would not have occurred to 99.99% of people anywhere in the world at the time these fables were composed.<\/p>\n

And why not? That\u2019s easy. In 500 B.C.E.<\/small>, the world religions with which we are familiar today did not exist\u2014or might as well not have. Morals hadn\u2019t gotten very far. Mainly, you were just supposed to watch your back. Take what\u2019s yours, watch your back\u2014that pretty much covers it. The idea that you shouldn\u2019t sneer at the unfortunate? Anyone looking for that concept will search the Homeric poems in vain.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t even worry about that. That\u2019s not important. The important thing is that the story can be turned upside down and not only does it still make sense, it becomes its own opposite. You should be alarmed. You should think, Wait, is this true of all fables? And, further, is it true of all<\/em> narratives<\/em>?<\/p>\n

If the answer to those questions should turn out to be yes, then the so-called moral of every story is not present in it at all, but is imported into it by its audience. And if that\u2019s true, then the stories don\u2019t teach us anything. We teach them.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For the last twenty years, anyone interested in the Greek fables has had easy access to a couple of exquisite indispensables: the Penguin and the Oxford World Classics editions. You kinda have to get both.<\/p>\n

The Penguin edition gives you three hundred and fifty-eight fables, all translated from the Greek. No Latin allowed, no medieval stuff. There are no notes in the back (there\u2019s not even an index back there). The footnotes are on the same pages as the fables, and are deliciously personal, grumpy, witty, and eccentric. In one place, you get a whole page on the word amaranth<\/em>. This is my go-to Aesop.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Oxford World Classics paperback is also dreamy, but it\u2019s a different dream. For starters, it\u2019s more like six hundred fables, \u2019cuz Phaedrus and Babrius and Avianus and guys like that are allowed in. Basically the Christian-era versifiers, and the like. Everything is cross-referenced and footnoted and indexed to a wonderful degree. Here, you can watch the handling of the morals develop in a way that is impossible when using the Penguin.<\/p>\n

Be it noted, both books are completely exhausting. You can only take so much Aesop in one session. There are a number of factors involved. One, a great many of the fables are so slight that you marvel that anyone thought it worth the trouble to write them down. Or even to say them. For example:<\/p>\n

A fisherman drew in his net from the sea. He could catch big fish, which he spread out in the sun, but the small fish slipped through the mesh, escaping into the sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s it. You read it, and you\u2019re like, Right? That\u2019s\u2026how nets work? Then you read the moral:<\/p>\n

People of mediocre fortune escape danger easily, but one rarely sees a man of great note escape when there is a disaster.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And you\u2019re like, Okay, sure. But isn\u2019t that more like an idea for a fable, rather than a fable? (A lot of \u2019em are like this.)<\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t even what kills you. The thing that truly wearies your spirit, in reading these things, is the fact that roughly half the morals either have no warrant for existing at all (because they\u2019re just blindingly obvious), or worse, they seem to have been written by someone who, in all appearances, has not read the fable.<\/p>\n

You have to see it to believe it. Here\u2019s an example of a superfluous moral:<\/p>\n

Some flies had found some spilled honey in a cellar and started to eat it. It was such a sweet feast that they couldn\u2019t stop. But their feet became stuck to the spot so that they couldn\u2019t take flight. And, as they began to suffocate, they said:
\n\u201cHow wretched we are! We are dying for a moment\u2019s pleasure.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moral: Gluttony is often the cause of much harm.<\/em><\/p>\n

At least half the Greek set is like that.<\/p>\n

Now here\u2019s a specimen of what the Penguin translators call idiotic morals:<\/p>\n

Zeus entertained all the animals at his wedding feast. Only the tortoise was absent. Puzzled by his absence, Zeus asked her the next day:
\n\u201cWhy, alone among the animals, did you not attend my wedding feast?\u201d
\nThe tortoise replied:
\n\u201cThere\u2019s no place like home.\u201d
\nThis aroused the anger of Zeus and he condemned her to carry her home everywhere on her back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, pause a second before I read you the moral. What moral would you give that story? Personally, I wouldn\u2019t give it a moral at all; it\u2019s not that kind of a story. It\u2019s a just-so story, like how the camel got his hump, or why skunks have stripes. It is meaningless. But what if, for the sake of completeness, you had to put a moral at the end. You\u2019ve glue gunned morals onto every other story in the collection, so you have to hunt up a moral for this one, too. A couple glasses of wine later, you come up with:<\/p>\n

It is thus that many prefer to live simply at home than to eat richly at the tables of others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Please recall that I brought all this up to explain why reading Greek fables en masse is tiring. It\u2019s like sitting at a table loaded with jars and lids, and, maddeningly, the lids are all either too small or too big. You keep dropping the lids into the jars!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I am about to read you another one, not out of Aesop. Except it is<\/em> out of Aesop, or there\u2019s one just like it in Aesop. My source text is a beloved book called The Languages of the World<\/em>\u00a0by Kenneth Katzner (Funk and Wagnalls, 1975)\u2014in particular, the entry for Amharic<\/em> (the national language of Ethiopia). The book gives the original apologue in Amharic script, and then translates it:<\/p>\n

A hare lived in a country where there was no other kind of animal. \u201cThere is no animal as big as I and none whose voice can equal mine,\u201d he said to one of his friends. \u201cThat is true,\u201d replied the other, for they had never seen another. One day, hearing a lion roar, the first hare said, \u201cI shall cry like him.\u201d \u201cGood. I\u2019ll stay to hear you. Cry!\u201d said his friend. \u201cListen,\u201d said the hare, and, swelling his chest, he cried. His friend said to him, \u201cThe lion\u2019s voice is strong; yours, on the other hand, cannot be heard.\u201d The hare became very angry and said a second time, \u201cWatch and listen how I cry.\u201d And under the illusion of roaring like a lion, he split in two and died. The same fate awaits the poor man who vies with the rich.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Greek, it is a worm or a fox imitating a huge snake\u2019s length. In Phaedrus\u2019s Latin, it\u2019s a frog imitating an ox\u2019s bulk. But in every version of the story, the foolish imitator is destroyed. The heartlessness of the moral is best captured in the passage quoted above, with its run of monosyllables and long vowels and closely packed stresses: \u201cThe same fate awaits the poor man who vies with the rich.\u201d I doubt it\u2019s more pungent in the Amharic.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, that moral is typical. \u201cBe content with your lot.\u201d \u201cPipe down.\u201d \u201cShut up and do what you\u2019re told.\u201d \u201cBlunderers deserve what they get.\u201d \u201cYour tears are amusing to us.\u201d These are not direct quotes, but they might as well be. I am giving you a pr\u00e9cis of archaic ethics. About half the ancient Greek fables end on one of these five or six notes.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there is nothing those old boys loved more than having the dying or humiliated animal say: \u201cI deserve this completely!\u201d Here are a few examples. In each case it\u2019s the last sentence in the fable:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have only myself to blame; for I ought not to have damaged that which could have saved me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI deserve this fate! I, who lived in the sea, had the folly to imagine I could live on the land!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAlas, what has befallen me! Because I didn\u2019t want to carry a light load, now here I am carrying it all, even the skin as well!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt serves me right,\u201d he said. \u201cI forfeited the meal I had right at hand for the hope of a better catch.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so on, forever. It makes you want to write a set of a dozen parodies, in which you somehow find a way to spoof the meanness by taking it to some absurd level. However, there would be absolutely no point in doing that. Just look at Twitter, look at Facebook. We have maxed out on absurd levels.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I predict that, five hundred years from now, if the human race still exists, scholars will be sifting through our hard drives, straining to comprehend the relationship between our stories and our morals, so to speak. In a state of perpetual mismatch, somebody\u2019s going to have to figure out which part is the joke. Were we joking? I mean, where did all these lids come from, if not even one of them fits any<\/em> of these jars?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is\u00a0<\/em>Try Never<\/a>. He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The grasshopper just made a mistake, y\u2019all. It\u2019s not like it\u2019s an unalterable fact that he needs to be punished. Indeed, the moral could be: People who have evaded a calamity inevitably enjoy tormenting those who must bear the calamity\u2019s brunt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[17266,22261,5864,40383],"class_list":["post-130724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aesops-fables","tag-greek-myths","tag-phaedrus","tag-the-languages-of-the-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNew Morals for Aesop's Fables<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The grasshopper just made a mistake, y\u2019all. It\u2019s not like it\u2019s an unalterable fact that he needs to be punished. 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