Aesop's fables

The fox and the grapes, the lion and the mouse, the tortoise and the hare. Short fables of Aesop, each one ending in its moral. Free, no account.

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. Two minutes to read, which fits 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.