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The historical Aesop, in so far as he was historical, would seem

to have been a Phrygian slave, or at least one not to be

specially and symbolically adorned with the Phrygian cap of

liberty. He lived, if he did live, about the sixth century before

Christ, in the time of that Croesus whose story we love and

suspect like everything else in Herodotus. There are also stories

of deformity of feature and a ready ribaldry of tongue: stories

which (as the celebrated Cardinal said) explain, though they do

not excuse, his having been hurled over a high precipice at

Delphi. It is for those who read the Fables to judge whether he

was really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and offensive, or

rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is no kind

of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him with

a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race

of the great philosophic slaves.