The Moral at the End Is Optional

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ask most readers what makes a fable a fable and they will mention the moral, the tidy sentence at the end telling you what the animals just taught you. That sentence, the epimythium in the classical terminology, is often not original to the story it closes. Many of the fables collected under Aesop's name circulated for centuries as oral tales whose point was left for the audience to draw, and the explicit closing moral was frequently added later, by an editor or a schoolmaster, when the fable was written down for a specifically didactic purpose, moral education in a classroom rather than entertainment among adults. The animals, the trouble they get into, and the shape of the story carry the argument regardless; the sentence naming that argument out loud is a teaching aid layered on afterward, which is part of why the same fable can circulate with different morals attached in different collections without the story itself changing at all.