Aesop's Fables

A vast body of fables credited to Aesop, a storyteller traditionally said to have lived in ancient Greece between about 620 and 564 BCE, most of them brief animal tales that end in an explicit moral. The fables survive as an oral tradition rather than a single authored text, first gathered into a written collection roughly three centuries after Aesop's traditional lifetime and repeatedly re-collected, translated and expanded through antiquity, the medieval period and beyond, so that scholars now doubt any single historical author produced all, or even most, of the tales that carry his name.