Whether or not such a person as Aesop ever lived, and whether or not he actually narrated the fables that are ascribed to him, it is certain that he did not himself invent them, but merely gave them currency in Greece; for they can be shown to have existed long before his time, and in fact to antedate even the beginnings of Hellenic civilization.  With some changes of form they are found in the oldest literature of the Chinese; similar stories are preserved on the inscribed Babylonian bricks; and an Egyptian papyrus of about the year 1200 B.C. gives the fable of ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ in its finished form.  Other Aesopic apologues are essentially identical with the Jatakas or Buddhist stories of India, and occur also in the great Sanskrit story-book, the ‘Panchatantra,’ which is the very oldest monument of Hindu literature.

The so-called Aesopic Fables are in fact only a part of the primitive folk-lore, that springs up in prehistoric times, and passes from country to country and from race to race by the process of popular story-telling.  They reached Greece, undoubtedly through Egypt and Persia, and even in their present form they still retain certain Oriental, or at any rate non-Hellenic elements, such as the introduction of Eastern animals,—­the panther, the peacock, and the ape.  They represent the beginnings of conscious literary effort, when man first tried to enforce some maxim of practical wisdom and to teach some useful truth through the fascinating medium of a story.  The Fable embodies a half-unconscious desire to give concrete form to an abstract principle, and a childish love for the picturesque and striking, which endows rocks and stones and trees with life, and gives the power of speech to animals.

That beasts with the attributes of human beings should figure in these tales involves, from the standpoint of primeval man, only a very slight divergence from probability.  In nothing, perhaps, has civilization so changed us as in our mental attitude toward animals.  It has fixed a great gulf between us and them—­a gulf far greater than that which divided them from our first ancestors.  In the early ages of the world, when men lived by the chase, and gnawed the raw flesh of their prey, and slept in lairs amid the jungle, the purely animal virtues were the only ones they knew and exercised.  They adored courage and strength, and swiftness and endurance.  They respected keenness of scent and vision, and admired cunning.  The possession of these qualities was the very condition of existence, and they valued them accordingly; but in each one of them they found their equals, and in fact their superiors, among the brutes.  A lion was stronger than the strongest man.  The hare was swifter.  The eagle was more keen-sighted.  The fox was more cunning.  Hence, so far from looking down upon the animals from the remotely superior height that a hundred centuries of civilization have erected for us, the primitive savage looked up to