Aesop’s fables

Aesop’s fables, short enough to read in a minute or two, each ending on its moral: The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Ant and the Grasshopper, and Belling the Cat.

Tradition puts Aesop in the sixth century BC and makes him a slave on Samos. Whether he existed at all is not something anyone can settle. What is certain is that his name stayed attached to stories people still tell.

A fable is short, and that is where its strength lies. Animals behave like people, the quarrel is settled in half a page, and one sentence is left standing at the end. Each takes a minute or two to read, which suits the evenings with no room for a whole tale.

You know most of them without having read them: the fox that cannot reach the grapes, the tortoise that beats the hare, the lion saved by a mouse. They passed into ordinary speech and we use them without remembering where they came from.