Traditional author of Aesop’s Fables, forefather of the fable
By tradition a slave of ancient Greece famed for telling fables, under whose name Aesop’s Fables has come down more than two thousand years. The Tortoise and the Hare, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Fox and the Grapes, the Ant and the Grasshopper — these little stories that use animals to mirror people and end in a moral are, in nearly every culture, the first literature a child meets. With the simplest tales he told the plainest truths of the world and the human heart — and the fable took root, East and West, ever after.
The fox cannot reach the high grapes, and mutters that they are sour anyway. With a single fox Aesop laid bare one of the commonest of human consolations. Two thousand years on, "sour grapes" is still a phrase everyone uses — the simplest of stories often holds the wisdom that best withstands time.
Whether Aesop truly existed, and which fables are really his, cannot be established; "Aesop’s Fables" is in fact a long-accreted corpus of folk fable, which this site states.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.