Aesop

Almost everything we know about Aesop comes from stories told long after he lived, which is fitting for the world's most famous storyteller. The Greek historian Herodotus is the earliest writer to mention him, and reports only that he was enslaved on Samos. The birth date of around 620 BC comes from later tradition. Later tradition places his birth in Thrace, a region that includes modern Bulgaria, though other accounts say Phrygia in what is now Turkey. He was said to be strikingly ugly but quick-witted. He was so clever with words that his master Iadmon, a citizen of the Greek island of Samos, eventually freed him. Freedom mattered enormously because a freed slave could travel, speak in public and advise the powerful. Aesop reportedly did all three. The fables gathered under his name include The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. They use talking animals to expose human folly, which let a former slave criticize the mighty without naming them. Tradition says he died around 564 BC at Delphi, thrown from a cliff by citizens angered by his sharp tongue. Whether or not every detail is true, the voice behind Aesop's Fables is real. It is sly and economical, and it is still teaching us twenty-six centuries later.