Little is authentically known regarding the career of the renowned fabulist, who is supposed to have been born about B.C. 620, and, as in the case of Homer, various places are assigned as that of his nativity—­Samos, Sardis, Mesembria in Thrace, and Cotiaeium in Phrygia.  He is said to have been brought as a slave to Athens when very young, and after serving several masters was enfranchised by Iadmon, the Samian.  His death is thus related by Plutarch:  Having gone to Delphos, by the order of Croesus, with a large quantity of gold and silver, to offer a costly sacrifice to Apollo and to distribute a considerable sum among the inhabitants, a quarrel arose between him and the Delphians, which induced him to return the money, and inform the king that the people were unworthy of the liberal benefaction he had intended for them.  The Delphians, incensed, charged him with sacrilege, and, having procured his condemnation, precipitated him from a rock and caused his death.—­The popular notion that Esop was a monster of ugliness and deformity is derived from a “Life” of the fabulist, prefixed to a Greek collection of fables purporting to be his, said to have been written by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century, which, however apocryphal, is both curious and entertaining, from whatever sources the anecdotes may have been drawn.

According to Planudes,[130] Esop was born at Amorium, in the Greater Phrygia, a slave, ugly exceedingly:  he was sharp-chinned, snub-nosed, bull-necked, blubber-lipped, and extremely swarthy (whence his name, Ais-opos, or Aith-opos:  burnt-face, blackamoor); pot-bellied, crook-legged, and crook-backed; perhaps uglier even than the Thersites of Homer; worst of all, tongue-tied, obscure and inarticulate in his speech; in short, everything but his mind seemed to mark him out for a slave.  His first master sent him out to dig one day.  A husbandman having presented the master with some fine fresh figs, they were given to a slave to be set before him after his bath.  Esop had occasion to go into the house; meanwhile the other slaves ate the figs, and when the master missed them they accused Esop, who begged a moment’s respite:  he then drank some warm water and caused himself to vomit, and as he had not broken his fast his innocence was thus manifest.  The same test discovered the thieves, who by their punishment illustrated the proverb: 

  Whoso against another worketh guile
  Thereby himself doth injure unaware.[131]

  [130] Fabulae Romanenses Graece conscriptae ex recensione et
        cum adnotationibus, Alfredi Eberhard (Leipzig, 1872),
        vol. i, p. 226 ff.

  [131] It would have been well had the sultan Bayazid compelled
        his soldier to adopt this plan when accused by an old
        woman of having drunk up all her supply of goat’s milk. 
        The soldier declared his innocence, upon which Bayazid
        ordered