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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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:38.7 | For more details about in our time and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co. UK slash radio for. I hope you enjoy |
| 0:45.9 | the program. Hello look before you leap slow but steady wins the race. Pride comes |
| 0:52.4 | before a fall. |
| 0:54.0 | They are sayings that are so familiar they hardly seem worth a second thought, but they're |
| 0:57.6 | all morals that come at the end of fables attributed to the ancient Greek |
| 1:01.7 | sage ESOP. |
| 1:03.0 | ESOP's fables have kept children entertained for generations. |
| 1:06.0 | They present a world in which animals can talk, |
| 1:09.0 | the wind and the sun can have an argument, |
| 1:11.0 | and underdogs have a knack of |
| 1:12.6 | outwitting stronger, more dangerous foes. |
| 1:15.4 | In ancient Greece, ESOP was a folk hero, |
| 1:17.9 | a clever slave, supposedly, hideishly ugly, |
| 1:21.5 | but with a knack for outwitting his master and for speaking truth to power. |
| 1:25.0 | Today scholars interpret ESOP as a rare example of popular culture from the classical world that has survived to the present day. |
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