Fables are traditionally short stories with talking animals as main characters.
These animals have all the usual shortcomings of people and get themselves in all kinds of trouble.
Fables typically carry a cautionary tone or convey a moral lesson.
But the very nature of these stories with amusing animals instead of people makes them more palatable. They don't come across a scolding.
People have been telling these kinds of stories forever. It's part of what we call the oral tradition of storytelling.
Eventually, someone started writing fables down. We've been reading them ever since.
The most famous of these stories are aesop's fables. These include the tortoise and the hare
a story with the Moral slow and steady wins the race
There's also the boy who cried wolf
Which teaches the importance of telling the truth
So your word may be trusted.
Many of our oldest truisms like "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched"
Or "Look before you leap", come from Aesop's fables
There are hundreds of these tales attributed to Aesop, each serving as a gentle guide.
Aesop legend has it was born around 620 BC in Greece.
Some say he was a slave who told such clever stories, he eventually rose to a position of great influence.
Some say he was an odd-looking fellow short pot-bellied with squinty eyes who people made fun of
until he started telling his ingenious tales. Other people say he never existed at all.
Aesop was just a name someone made up. We don't know for certain, since there is no direct evidence proving Aesop's existence.
He was mentioned in the writings of Aristotle
Herodotus and Plutarch, but of course they lived hundreds of years after Aesop's time.
Even if Aesop's fables were not written by one man named Aesop, they represent wit and wisdom passed down from the ancient Greeks.
Nowadays Aesop's fables are often considered kid stuff, but they are much more than that.
They have endured as one of the earliest forms of western literature and can serve as a Moral compass:
everyone needs to learn right from wrong.
