Aesop
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Aesop is probably the most famous author from antiquity, judging by the ongoing sales of his fables about animals. It should be easy to do a show about him, thinks Natalie. But it turns out that everything we know, or think we know about Aesop, is contradicted somewhere. He may have been Thracian, Phrygian or Ethiopian; mute - or talkative; clever, provoking and possibly blasphemous.
It's a complicated story, and fables aren't even a Greek invention. With guests Edith Hall and Adam Rutherford, Natalie also takes advice from comedian Al Murray.
'Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for ESOP. |
| 0:18.2 | Now, I'm not going to lie to you, standing up for ESOP seemed like it would be easy and turned |
| 0:23.9 | out to be difficult. And that is because he must be, I would guess, the best known author from |
| 0:30.9 | antiquity. He certainly must be the most read author from antiquity, I think, given all those |
| 0:35.3 | children's editions of ESOP that have existed over the ages. |
| 0:38.3 | And the only slight problem, therefore, with talking about an author who everyone already knows something about |
| 0:43.3 | is that we're not fully sure that he existed. |
| 0:46.3 | So, in varying sources, at varying times, he is described as being Thracian, that's from north of Greece, |
| 0:56.5 | Phrygian, so, ooh, not far from Troy. Ethiopian, ancient Greek idea of Ethiopia and modern |
| 1:00.8 | Ethiopia don't overlap as much as you might hope, but anyway, Africa is what he's aiming for. |
| 1:05.4 | Enslaved, ugly, mute, talkative, clever, provoking, pious, blasphemous, and finally, a scapegoat who is framed by a god and killed by a mob. |
| 1:22.1 | So, you know, it's a complicated story, is what I'm saying. |
| 1:26.7 | I thought in the end that what we should do was look at some of the fables that are ascribed to ESOP, |
| 1:32.2 | some or none of which he may have written or said. |
| 1:37.1 | And then maybe we'll be able to decide who we think he was. |
| 1:40.4 | So that's my plan. |
| 1:41.6 | The first thing that I need to tell you is that fables aren't a Greek invention. |
| 1:45.7 | They come to ancient Greece from the ancient near east. So they're Mesopotamian or Assyrian or |
| 1:53.3 | Samarian. And they tend to have a one-liner kind of quality to them. So here is an example. I think this one is |
| 1:59.4 | Samarian. There's a mouse on the run |
| 2:01.8 | from a mongoose and it enters a snake's den. He says, a snake charmer sent me, hi. Now here's the thing. |
... |
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