Most nations develop the Beast-Tale as part of their folk-lore, some go further and apply it to satiric purposes, and a few nations afford isolated examples of the shaping of the Beast-Tale to teach some moral truth by means of the Fable properly so called.[1] But only two peoples independently made this a general practice. Both in Greece[2] and in India we find in the earliest literature such casual and frequent mention of Fables as seems to imply a body of Folk-Fables current among the people. And in both countries special circumstances raised the Fable from folklore into literature. In Greece, during the epoch of the Tyrants, when free speech was dangerous, the Fable was largely used for political purposes. The inventor of this application or the most prominent user of it was one Æsop, a slave at Samos whose name has ever since been connected with the Fable. All that we know about him is contained in a few lines of Herodotus: that he flourished 550 B.C.; was killed in accordance with a Delphian oracle; and that _wergild_ was claimed for him by the grandson of his master, Iadmon. When free speech was established in the Greek democracies, the custom of using Fables in harangues was continued and encouraged by the rhetoricians, while the mirth-producing qualities of the Fable caused it to be regarded as fit subject of after-dinner conversation along with other jests of a broader kind (“Milesian,” “Sybaritic”). This habit of regarding the Fable as a form of the Jest intensified the tendency to connect it with a well-known name as in the case of our Joe Miller. About 300 B.C. Demetrius Phalereus, whilom tyrant of Athens and founder of the Alexandria Library, collected together all the Fables he could find under the title of _Assemblies of Æsopic Tales_ (Λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαι). This collection, running probably to some 200 Fables, after being interpolated and edited by the Alexandrine grammarians, was turned into neat Latin iambics by Phædrus, a Greek freedman of Augustus in the early years of the Christian era. As the modern Æsop is mainly derived from Phædrus, the answer to the question “Who wrote Æsop?” is simple : “Demetrius of Phaleron.”[3] [1] _E.g._ Jotham’s Fable, Judges ix., and that of Menenius Agrippa in Livy, seem to be quite independent of either Greek or Indian influence. But one fable does not make Fable. [2] Only about twenty fables, however, are known in Greece before Phædrus, 30 A.D. See my Caxton’s _Æsop_ vol. i. pp. 26–29, for a complete enumeration. [3] For this statement and what follows a reference to the Pedigree of the Fables on p. 196 will be found useful.