Aesop

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Aesops The Wolf and the Crane and The Fox and the Lamb , Fontana Maggiore in Perugia by Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano (1278)

Aesop ( ancient Greek Αἴσωπος Aísōpos , Latinized Aesopus , Germanized Aesop , Aisop ) was an ancient Greek poet of fables and parables , who probably lived in the 6th century BC. Lived. He is considered the founder of European fable poetry and his name became the generic name for the poetic fable.

Life

Aesop , Velázquez (1640)

There are numerous legends about Aesop's life, many of which were already in circulation as early as the second half of the 5th century BC. The written tradition about his person began. There is therefore hardly any reliable information about his biography. The Aesop novel , compiled in the early Roman Empire , does come up with numerous details about his travels to important kings such as Kroisos of Lydia and about his physical deficits (he was very ugly and initially mute), but it is clearly legendary.

Thrace is given as the place of origin Aesops , in later sources also Phrygia , Lydia or the island of Samos . After the name Aisopos on a Greek inscription from the 6th century BC. BC from the Black Sea region is proven, he probably came from Thrace.

According to Herodotus († around 424 BC, the earliest mention of Aesop) he was a poet, a slave of Iadmon of Samos, who also owned the well-known hetaera Rhodopis , and was killed in Delphi . Aristophanes mentions in The Wasps (premiered 422 BC) that he was charged with theft of a sacred object in Delphi. According to Plutarch († around 125 AD), Aesop was the victim of a judicial murder: When he did not consider the Delphians worthy of the generous gifts he had received from King Kroisus for them, they sentenced him to death and overthrew him Rock.

The late antique world chronicle of Hieronymus († 420 AD) dates Aesop's execution to 564/563 BC. However, modern research puts the reign of Kroisos a few years later (around 555–541 BC). Whether Aesop actually died in this way or whether there is an aitiological legend that is supposed to explain the handling of sacraments in Delphi cannot be decided today due to the unfavorable sources.

Fables

Aesop, Schedelsche Weltchronik (1493)

content

The Aesopian fables (Greek Μῦθοι Mýthoi; Latin Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum ) are short mythical and secular stories that appear as parables . The human weaknesses mentioned are never exceptional: envy, stupidity, avarice, vanity, etc. Fabrics and figures come from the horizon of the little man in Greece in the 6th century BC. BC, characters are animals, plants, even gods or well-known people of the time.

For the people of his time, what happened in the Aesopian fables had an immediately illuminating statement or a meaning carefully packaged in the form of an allegory . Aesop's fables may evaluate, judge and unmask, but not destroy or condemn.

Lore

Aesop's fables were only preserved in prosaic form for a long time through tradition in the oral tradition of the people; a collection of fables is said to have been made by Demetrios of Phaleron around 300 BC. BC, but was lost in the 10th century. The various collections of Aesopian fables that have come down to us are partly late prosaic resolutions of the metrical arrangement of the Babrio , partly products of the rhetorical schools from different times and of different value.

Aesop's fables are known to us from antiquity only in the metrical arrangements of Phaedrus , Babrios and Avianus . Small fragments are preserved in the Rylands 493 papyrus from the 1st century. The surviving selection of fables is in the Codex parisinus suppl. gr. 690 from the 12th century.

reception

Aesopus moralisatus , 1485

European fable poetry goes back to Aesop, not to similar narratives with a parable character, which already existed in the ancient Orient in Sumer around 3000 BC. Have been told. Only two of Aesop's fables resemble the fables of the Indian Panchatantra , the basis of the Persian and Arabic fables.

Aesop's fables were frequently used reading material in medieval monastery schools.

After the invention of printing, a large number of editions of the Aesop's fables appeared. Because of its high quality woodcut illustrations, Heinrich Steinhöwel's Aesop, published in Ulm in 1476, is considered an outstanding edition. The so-called Ulmer Aesop contained all of Aesop's fables known at the time. The 190 splendid woodcut illustrations are attributed to the master of the Ulm choir stalls, Jörg Syrlin . Steinhöwel had the Latin text followed by a German translation he had made.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) revived the fables of Aesop. Lessing explicitly referred to Aesop when writing his fables.

Even today we find Aesop's fables in common phrases; so z. B. " adorn yourself with strange feathers " according to Georg Büchmann back to the fable of the jackdaw and the birds.

Examples

The ant and the grasshopper , illustration by Milo Winter (1919)

expenditure

  • Perry, Ben E. (dwin) (Eds.): Aesopica . A series of texts relating to Aesop or ascribed to him or closely connected with the literary tradition that bears his name. Collected and critically edited, in part translated from oriental languages, with a commentary and historical essay. I: Greek and Latin texts. Urbana, Ill. 1952 (2nd ed. 2007, ISBN 978-0-252-03192-2 )
  • Hausrath, August (Ed.): Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum . I: Fabulae Aesopicae soluta oratione conscripta. Fasc. 1: Leipzig 2 1970 (1940); Fasc. 2 : Leipzig 2 1959 (1956)
  • Aesopian fables. Compiled and translated into German by August Hausrath. De Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-036040-0 (Greek / German; reprint of the 3rd [abridged in the appendix!] Edition of the edition Heimeran, Munich 1944 [111 p .; 2 1944: 150 p .; 1940]).
  • Aesop: Fables . Greek / German. Exercise and note by Thomas Vosskuhl. Afterword by Niklas Holzberg . Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-018297-2 .
  • Aesop: Fables . Greek-German. Ed. And vrs. by Rainer Nickel . Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf / Zurich 2005 (reprint de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-05-005405-6 ).

literature

  • Manuel Baumbach : Aesop. In: Peter von Möllendorff , Annette Simonis, Linda Simonis (ed.): Historical figures of antiquity. Reception in literature, art and music (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 8). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2013, ISBN 978-3-476-02468-8 , Sp. 1–8.
  • Reinhard Dithmar: Existential and social criticism in the fable from Aesop to Brecht. In: The school attendant. Monthly for teaching and education. Volume 24, Issue 1, 1971.
  • Peter Amelung: The Ulm Aesop from 1476/77. Commentary on the facsimile . Ludwigsburg 1995.
  • Klaus Grubmüller: Master Esopus. Studies on the history and function of the fable in the Middle Ages (= Munich texts and studies on German literature in the Middle Ages. Volume 56). Artemis, Zurich / Munich 1977, ISBN 3-7608-3356-X (also habilitation thesis, University of Munich 1974).
  • Maria Jagoda Luzzatto, Andreas Wittenburg: Aisopos. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 1, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01471-1 , Sp. 360-365.

Web links

Commons : Aesop  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Aesopus  - Sources and full texts (Latin)
Wikiquote: Aesop  - Quotes

Remarks

  1. ↑ Introductory to Maria Jagoda Luzzatto: Aisop-Roman. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 1, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01471-1 , column 359 f. (there also further references).
  2. ↑ Aristotle , fragment 573 Rose ; Euagon (= The Fragments of the Greek Historians 535 F4).
  3. ^ Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen et al. (Ed.): Sylloge inscriptionum Graecarum. 3. Edition. Volume 1, Hirzel, Leipzig 1915, No. 2.
  4. ↑ Herodotus, Historien 2,134,3–4 .
  5. ↑ Aristophanes, The Wasps 1446–1448 .
  6. ↑ Plutarch, Moralia 556f-557a .
  7. ↑ Jerome, Chronicle 2 .
  8. ↑ See Manuel Baumbach : Aesop. In: Peter von Möllendorff , Annette Simonis, Linda Simonis (ed.): Historical figures of antiquity. Reception in literature, art and music (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 8). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2013, ISBN 978-3-476-02468-8 , Sp. 1–8, here 1.
  9. ↑ For the history of transmission cf. the overview in Sibylle Ihm : Aisopus (Aesop). In: Manfred Landfester (ed.): History of ancient texts. Lexicon of authors and works (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 2). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2007, ISBN 978-3-476-02030-7 , pp. 21-23.
  10. ↑ Allegedly the source of the saying Hic Rhodus, hic salta
  11. ↑ Fable The Crow and the Water Jug (this intelligent behavior has now been confirmed by behavioral research )
personal data
SURNAME Aesop
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Αἴσωπος (ancient Greek); Aísōpos; Aisopus; Aesopus (Latinized); Aesop; Aisop
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek poet of fables and parables
DATE OF BIRTH around 619 BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH around 561 BC Chr.