Aesop

Aesop is the name attached to several hundred short stories about animals, and it may never have belonged to a real person. Ancient writers place him in the sixth century BC and call him a slave; Herodotus says he belonged to a man of Samos and was killed by the people of Delphi. He wrote nothing down, and no text of his has ever existed.

The fables reached modern readers through verse. Babrius gathered them in Greek, Phaedrus was the first to put a collection into Latin, and in France La Fontaine turned them into poems that schoolchildren still learn by heart. Prose editions came later, and there are a great many of them, because every century has retold Aesop in its own words.

A much later anonymous romance, the Life of Aesop, gave him a hunched back and a tongue that would not work until a goddess loosened it. That book is fiction rather than evidence, and it has nothing to do with the fables.