Aesop

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2014

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aesop. According to some accounts, Aesop was a strikingly ugly slave who was dumb until granted the power of speech by the goddess Isis. In stories of his life he's often found outwitting his masters using clever wordplay, but he's best known today as the supposed author of a series of fables that are some of the most enduringly popular works of Ancient Greek literature. Some modern scholars question whether he existed at all, but the body of work that has come down to us under his name gives us a rare glimpse of the popular culture of the Ancient World.

WITH

Pavlos Avlamis, Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford

Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge

Lucy Grig, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Transcript

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0:42.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:44.0	Hello, look before you leap.
0:47.0	Slow but steady wins the race.
0:49.0	Pride comes before a fall.
0:50.0	They are sayings that are so familiar they hardly seem worth a second thought, but they're
0:54.6	all morals that come at the end of fables attributed to the ancient Greek sage
0:59.2	ESOP.
1:00.2	ESOP's fables have kept children entertained for generations.
1:03.4	They present a world in which animals can talk,
	...

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