Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/168

146 146 HISTORY OF THE invented or derived from any other source, were attributed. His history has been dressed out by the later Greeks, with all manner of droll and whimsical incidents. What can be collected from the ancient writers down to Aristotle is, however, confined to the following. jEsop was a slave of the Samian Iadmon, the son of Hephaestopolis, who lived in the time of the Egyptian king- Amasis. (The reign of Amasis begins Olymp. 52, 3, 570 b. c.) According to the state- ment of Eugeon, an old Samian historian, * he was a native of the Thracian city Mesembria, which existed long before it was peopled by a colony of Byzantines in the reign of Darius f. According to a less authentic account he was from Cotyaeon in Phrygia. It seems that his wit and pleasantry procured him his freedom ; for though he remained in Iadmon 's family, it must have been as a freedman, or he could not, as Aristotle relates, have appeared publicly as the defender of a dema- gogue, on which occasion he told a fable in support of his client. It is generally received as certain that iEsop perished in Delphi ; the Del- phians, exasperated by his sarcastic fables, having put him to death on a charge of robbing the temple. Aristophanes alludes to a fable which yEsop told to the Delphians, of the beetle who found means to revenge himself on the eagle J. The character of the iEsopian fable is precisely that of the genuine beast-fable, such as we find it among the Greeks. The condition and habits of the lower animals are turned to account in the same manner, and, by means of the poetical introduction of reason and speech, are placed in such a light as to produce a striking resemblance to the inci- dents and relations of human life. Attempts were probably early made to give a poetical form to the /Esopian fable. Socrates is said to have beguiled his imprisonment thus. The iambic would of course suggest itself as the most appro- priate form (as at a later period it did to Phsedrus), or the scazon, which was adopted by Callimachus and Babrius§. But no metrical versions of these fables are known to have existed in early times. The aenus was generally regarded as a mode of other sorts of poetry, particularly the iambic, and not as a distinct class. § 17. The other kind of poetry whose origin we are now about to trace, is the Parody. This was understood by the ancients, as well as by ourselves, to mean an adoption of the form of some cele- brated poem, with such changes in the matter as to produce a totally different effect; and, generally, to substitute mean and ridiculous for elevated and poetical sentiments. The contrast between the grand and f Mesembria, Pattymbria, and Selymbria, are Thracian names, and mean the cities oi'Meses, Pattys, and Selys. + Aristoph. Vesp. 1448. cf. Pac. 129. Coraes, ^sop. c. 2. § A distich of an .^Esopian fable is, however, attributed by Diogenes Laartius to Socrates. Fragments of fables in hexameters also occur.
 * Euyiuv, or Eliyuav, falsely written Evyi'ir&iv, in Suidas in v. A'/o-wz-o;.