Fables

Aesop is said to have been a slave on the Greek island of Samos in the sixth century BC who won his freedom through his wit. The historian Herodotus mentions him, and a later popular romance, The Life of Aesop, made him an ugly, clever storyteller who outwitted his masters and died unjustly at Delphi.

Whether or not he wrote them, the short animal fables told under his name, collected in Aesop's Fables, have been retold for two and a half thousand years. Their cousin in Arabic literature is Kalila wa Dimna.