The Vita Aesopi is a fictional biography of the fabulist Aesop. The author is unknown, as is the date of the text’s composition. Indeed, the contradictory details in the text suggest that there was not a single author, but rather a compiler.
These contradictory details include:
The Life of Aesop is not a biography in the sense that it records the deeds attributable to a historical person. Instead, it is a work in which the author enumerates the divine origins and praise worthy deeds and wisdom of Aesop. By writing Aesop’s life as outside of history, the author positions his deeds and wisdom as transcending history.
When confronted with texts such as the Life of Aesop, modern historians first attempt to contextualize. But this particular text is difficult to contextualize because while parts of it clearly date to the period when the Romans controlled Greece (the first century BCE and onwards), other parts of the text correlate with stories alluded to by writers from classical Athens (fifth and fourth century BCE). Therefore, it is best to read the Life of Aesop that we have as a compilation of many different stories.
Some of these stories, specifically the end of the Life which describes Aesop’s death, date to the fifth century BCE. But scholars disagree to the extent to which the details in the Life are “fossils” of such an old story. For example, the Life ends with Aesop telling two fables to the Delphians as they push him off a cliff, one about a donkey-driver and another about a man who rapes his daughter. Did the author know that these two stories were associated with Aesop’s death? Or did he simply know that Aesop was supposed to have recited a fable as he was about to die? Or he himself compose the two fables?
The above problems are stock and trade of philology, a discipline that studies ancient texts, in part, to reconstruct a possible ur-text. The problem is, as F.A. Wolf argued about the Homeric poems in 1795, when it is accepted that the text in question is the result of an oral tradition, the idea of an ur-text itself becomes suspect, as it is based on the rather shaky assumption that the hundreds manuscripts that survive in monasteries and university libraries are themselves directly descended from a single manuscript. What if there was no single manuscript, no single beginning, but rather multiple beginnings and multiple originary manuscripts?
I turn to the example of Homer for two reasons. First, there is a similar friction of oral versus written, singular origin or many origins. Second, just as the very genre of the Homeric poems, epic, is closely associated with the vision and values of Greek aristocrats, so too are the vision and values of parables associated with slaves and other people of the underclass in antiquity. However, aristocrats had access to the resources and skills required for the composition and preservation of written literature, but slaves and the ancient underclass did not, except when serving aristocrats. How then to explain why the Life of Aesop was written down?
Some scholars, such as Keith Hopkins, read the Life as presenting only the fantasies and desires of slave-owners. The pains that Aesop suffers as a slave, and the strategies that he uses to escape it, are generic enough that slave-holders themselves conjectured them and wove them into this story. The vignettes in Life are indicative of anxieties that (male) slave-owners had about their relationship to their slaves (e.g. that the slave might sleep with their wife, that they willfully disobey orders, that the slave embarrasses them in front of others).
However, other scholars, such Sara Forsdyke and Leslie Kurke, question the dominance of aristocratic and slave-owning values in the text. Pointing out that Greek culture writ large always included the participation of marginalized figures such as slaves, they argue that the connection between slavery and Aesop, a connection that the ancients themselves asserted, should not be dismissed, but rather embraced in order to form a more complicated picture of Greek culture, for Forsdyke, and the origins of Greek prose, for Kurke.
With all that in mind, let’s turn to the manumission of Aesop.
Niklas Holzberg argues that the structure of the Life includes five parts:
Aesop gains his freedom from Xanthus, a slave-owning philosopher who lives on the island of Samos. Notably, Aesop is quite concerned about his freedom, and presses his owner for it. Xanthus refuses (74). However, Aesop then seizes upon a situation in order to compel Xanthus to free him. The people of Samos ask Xanthus to interpret an omen for them, something that Xanthus is reluctant to do, in part because of his training as a philosopher. But he can’t refuse. Aesop offers to help Xanthus, but once he is in front of the Samians, he lays down the following condition:
“Fellow Samians, it is not a sensible arrangement to have a slave interpret an omen for a free people. Therefore, grant me the right to say what I about to say openly and freely, so that if I succeed, I shall receive the appropriate honors as a free man, and if I fail, I shall be punished as a free man and not a slave. If, indeed, you grant me the right to speak as a free man, I shall begin to interpret with full confidence.”
The Samians said to Xanthus, “We entreat you, Xanthos, free Aesop.”
The presiding officer added, “Make him a free man.”
When the officer saw that Xanthos would not relent, he said, “Accept the price you paid for him, give him to me, and I shall release him on behalf of the city.”
But when Xanthos considered that he had only paid seventy-five denarii for him, in order not to appear stingy to the gathered crowds, he decided to free Aesop. He took Aesop before them all and said, “I, Xanthos, in response to the request of the people of Samos, grant Aesop his freedom.”
Vita Aesopi (recension G), 89-90, trans. Wills.
The manumission is an arrangement that demands Xanthus’ approval, but occurs within a context in which Aesop and the Samians play a key role. This manumission is not a reward for Aesop’s loyalty or good service, but is rather the result of Aesop’s scheming and public pressure. Is this account of manumission a counter-account to those of slave-owners, who frame manumission as the result of loyal service?
These contradictory details include:
- Many scenes set in public baths, which are structures synonymous with Roman living, not Greek living (38, 66).
- One of the characters is Croesus, the king of Lydia (92). The Persian king Cyrus defeated Croesus in 546 BCE.
- Xanthus, a philosopher, quotes one of the plays of Euripides (32). Euripides died in 406 BCE.
- Aesop eventually becomes the advisor of a certain Lycurgos, king of Babylon (101). There is no record of such a king.
The Life of Aesop is not a biography in the sense that it records the deeds attributable to a historical person. Instead, it is a work in which the author enumerates the divine origins and praise worthy deeds and wisdom of Aesop. By writing Aesop’s life as outside of history, the author positions his deeds and wisdom as transcending history.
When confronted with texts such as the Life of Aesop, modern historians first attempt to contextualize. But this particular text is difficult to contextualize because while parts of it clearly date to the period when the Romans controlled Greece (the first century BCE and onwards), other parts of the text correlate with stories alluded to by writers from classical Athens (fifth and fourth century BCE). Therefore, it is best to read the Life of Aesop that we have as a compilation of many different stories.
Some of these stories, specifically the end of the Life which describes Aesop’s death, date to the fifth century BCE. But scholars disagree to the extent to which the details in the Life are “fossils” of such an old story. For example, the Life ends with Aesop telling two fables to the Delphians as they push him off a cliff, one about a donkey-driver and another about a man who rapes his daughter. Did the author know that these two stories were associated with Aesop’s death? Or did he simply know that Aesop was supposed to have recited a fable as he was about to die? Or he himself compose the two fables?
The above problems are stock and trade of philology, a discipline that studies ancient texts, in part, to reconstruct a possible ur-text. The problem is, as F.A. Wolf argued about the Homeric poems in 1795, when it is accepted that the text in question is the result of an oral tradition, the idea of an ur-text itself becomes suspect, as it is based on the rather shaky assumption that the hundreds manuscripts that survive in monasteries and university libraries are themselves directly descended from a single manuscript. What if there was no single manuscript, no single beginning, but rather multiple beginnings and multiple originary manuscripts?
I turn to the example of Homer for two reasons. First, there is a similar friction of oral versus written, singular origin or many origins. Second, just as the very genre of the Homeric poems, epic, is closely associated with the vision and values of Greek aristocrats, so too are the vision and values of parables associated with slaves and other people of the underclass in antiquity. However, aristocrats had access to the resources and skills required for the composition and preservation of written literature, but slaves and the ancient underclass did not, except when serving aristocrats. How then to explain why the Life of Aesop was written down?
Some scholars, such as Keith Hopkins, read the Life as presenting only the fantasies and desires of slave-owners. The pains that Aesop suffers as a slave, and the strategies that he uses to escape it, are generic enough that slave-holders themselves conjectured them and wove them into this story. The vignettes in Life are indicative of anxieties that (male) slave-owners had about their relationship to their slaves (e.g. that the slave might sleep with their wife, that they willfully disobey orders, that the slave embarrasses them in front of others).
However, other scholars, such Sara Forsdyke and Leslie Kurke, question the dominance of aristocratic and slave-owning values in the text. Pointing out that Greek culture writ large always included the participation of marginalized figures such as slaves, they argue that the connection between slavery and Aesop, a connection that the ancients themselves asserted, should not be dismissed, but rather embraced in order to form a more complicated picture of Greek culture, for Forsdyke, and the origins of Greek prose, for Kurke.
With all that in mind, let’s turn to the manumission of Aesop.
Niklas Holzberg argues that the structure of the Life includes five parts:
- Introduction and origins of Aesop (1-19)
- Aesop and his master Xanthus (20-91)
- Aesop helps the Samians (92-100)
- Aesop helps king Lykoros of Babylonia (101-23)
- Aesop in Delphi, where he cannot help himself (124-42)
Aesop gains his freedom from Xanthus, a slave-owning philosopher who lives on the island of Samos. Notably, Aesop is quite concerned about his freedom, and presses his owner for it. Xanthus refuses (74). However, Aesop then seizes upon a situation in order to compel Xanthus to free him. The people of Samos ask Xanthus to interpret an omen for them, something that Xanthus is reluctant to do, in part because of his training as a philosopher. But he can’t refuse. Aesop offers to help Xanthus, but once he is in front of the Samians, he lays down the following condition:
“Fellow Samians, it is not a sensible arrangement to have a slave interpret an omen for a free people. Therefore, grant me the right to say what I about to say openly and freely, so that if I succeed, I shall receive the appropriate honors as a free man, and if I fail, I shall be punished as a free man and not a slave. If, indeed, you grant me the right to speak as a free man, I shall begin to interpret with full confidence.”
The Samians said to Xanthus, “We entreat you, Xanthos, free Aesop.”
The presiding officer added, “Make him a free man.”
When the officer saw that Xanthos would not relent, he said, “Accept the price you paid for him, give him to me, and I shall release him on behalf of the city.”
But when Xanthos considered that he had only paid seventy-five denarii for him, in order not to appear stingy to the gathered crowds, he decided to free Aesop. He took Aesop before them all and said, “I, Xanthos, in response to the request of the people of Samos, grant Aesop his freedom.”
Vita Aesopi (recension G), 89-90, trans. Wills.
The manumission is an arrangement that demands Xanthus’ approval, but occurs within a context in which Aesop and the Samians play a key role. This manumission is not a reward for Aesop’s loyalty or good service, but is rather the result of Aesop’s scheming and public pressure. Is this account of manumission a counter-account to those of slave-owners, who frame manumission as the result of loyal service?