Aesop
- Books on site
- 1
- Total words
- 39,579
- Reading time
- 2.2 h
- Years covered
- 1912
- Longest
- Aesop’s Fables
Aesop is a name rather than a documented life. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, places him on Samos as a slave; later tradition makes him a Phrygian, ugly and sharp-tongued, killed at Delphi. The fables themselves were collected and versified long after any Aesop could have told them — by Phaedrus in Latin, Babrius in Greek, and by the medieval and Renaissance compilers who carried them into every European language. The short animal story that ends in a one-line moral is one of the oldest continuous forms in Western literature, and the 1912 translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is the version most English readers still meet.
Aesop’s Fables| Year | Title | Words | Reading time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1912 | Aesop’s Fables | 39,579 | ~3 h |
Part of the complete catalogue, alongside the author index and the word count and reading time table.