Religion

Moral involvement is a quintessential function of the fable, which will often translate into discussions of religion, given the close association in most, if not all cultures between morality and religion. It should thus come as no surprise that religion plays a central role in many of the Aesopic fables.

The religion in question is, of course, that of the ancient Greeks, as interpreted by the Romans, through whose intermediacy the fables have come to us. Thus most of the deities mentioned are identified by their Roman instead of their Greek names. (At the end of this book is a glossary describing the classical gods and heroes featured in the present collection of Aesopic fables.)

The Greeks and Romans did not worship a single, all-powerful, all-benevolent god, but instead recognized an assemblage of deities with varying degrees of power and sometimes bewildering and seemingly contradictory aims and expectations. The resulting ambivalence in the relationship between mortals and the deities surfaces repeatedly in Aesopic fables, some of which depict the great power of the gods, whereas others emphasize their apparent impotence.

Typical of fables reflecting the deities’ weakness is “The Man Who Lost His Spade” (no. 268), in which a farmer goes to a temple in the city, hoping there to gain information from the gods about a stolen spade. Upon his arrival he learns that a reward is being offered for the return of goods stolen from the temple. He concludes, “If these town gods can’t detect the thieves who steal from their own temples, it’s scarcely likely they can tell me who stole my spade.” Even more cynical is “The Man and the Image” (no. 101), in which a man destroys a sacred idol for its unwillingness or inability to grant him riches, and then is rewarded as a direct consequence of his sacrilegious act. Additional fables depicting the weakness of the gods and their prophets include “Mercury and the Sculptor” (no. 88), “The Image Seller” (no. 109), “The Prophet” (no. 130), and “The Eagle and the Beetle” (no. 223).

In other fables the opposite claim is made, namely that omniscient gods will indeed reward moral behavior and punish evil. For example, in “The Butcher and His Customers” (no. 251) a butcher, having lost a piece of meat to two lying thieves, concludes, “You may cheat me with your lying, but you can’t cheat the gods, and they won’t let you off so lightly.” Nor do the gods necessarily wait until the next life to reward virtue and punish vice, as evidenced in the fable “Mercury and the Woodman” (no. 17), in which a god rewards an honest woodcutter with a golden ax and a silver ax, in addition to the ordinary one that he had lost in a river, while a dishonest companion loses everything. Other examples of omniscient divine intervention are found in “The Rogue and the Oracle” (no. 273), where the Oracle at Delphi exposes a scoundrel who attempts to ridicule a venerable religious institution, and in “The Eagle and the Fox” (no. 250), with its conclusion that “False faith may escape human punishment, but cannot escape the divine.”

The examples from the previous paragraph notwithstanding, the moral view reflected in most of the Aesopic fables is human-centered and of this world. In “The Astronomer” (no. 187) the leading character is so absorbed by his vision of the sky that he falls into a dry well. Adding insult to injury, a cynical passerby chides him, “If you... were looking so hard at the sky that you didn’t even see where your feet were carrying you along the ground, it appears to me that you deserve all you’ve got.” Mortals themselves, not the gods, bear the primary responsibility for their own welfare. Only rarely do the deities of these fables intervene on man’s behalf. Even if they were able to, which is no sure thing, the gods could not possibly answer all of humankind’s prayers, for they often contradict one another, as stated explicitly in “The Father and His Daughters” (no. 197), when a father, desiring to pray for his two daughters’ happiness, learns that one of them, a gardener’s wife, wants rain, while the other one, a potter’s wife, wants dry weather. In the end, as we learn either implicitly or explicitly from “The Snake and Jupiter” (no. 237) and “Hercules and the Wagoner” (no. 102), the gods help those who help themselves.