Aesop

(redirected from Aesopic)
Also found in: Dictionary, Medical, Wikipedia.
Related to Aesopic: Aesopian Language, Aesopus

Aesop

?620--564 bc, Greek author of fables in which animals are given human characters and used to satirize human failings
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Aesop

semi-legendary fabulist of ancient Greece. [Gk. Lit.: Harvey, 10]
Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

AESOP

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Aesop

Greek author of fables in the sixth century B.C. According to legend, Aesop was a Phrygian freedman who was employed at the court of the Lydian king Croesus and died a violent death in Delphi. Biographical information on Aesop is drawn from legend.

Aesop has been credited with supplying the themes of most of the fables known in antiquity. Short written versions of these fables were collected in the fourth and third centuries B.C.; more than 300 fables with short “morals” appear in many later manuscripts ranging in time from the tenth to the 15th century. Ideologically, Aesop’s fables are skeptical and pessimistic; their protagonists—mainly animals—are avowedly conventional figures, the narrative is concise and straightforward, and the language is simple and close to the colloquial. Aesop’s fables are the basic source of themes for the European literary fable from Phaedrus and Babrius to La Fontaine and I. A. Krylov.

PUBLICATION

Aesopica, vol. 1. Edited by B. E. Perry. Urbana, 1952.
In Russian translation:
Basni Esopa. Moscow, 1968.

REFERENCES

Gasparov, M. L. Antichnye literaturnye basni, Moscow, 1971.
Nøjgaard, M. La Fable antique, vol. 1. Copenhagen, 1964.

M. L. GASPAROV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
Romulus was the source of all medieval knowledge of the Aesopic fables; he was turned back into verse by an unknown "Walter" in the twelfth century, and Walter's version was the basis for the Esopus Moralisatus of the thirteenth century, which added much extra moralisation, and proved the most popular of all the collections.
The Politics of Beastly Language: John Lydgate as Fabulist and Translator
The Aesopic collection was part of a schoolboy's initiation into the masculine culture of classical Latin, and was taken as normative in both the linguistic and moral spheres.
Trial by Beffa: retributive justice and in-group formation in day eight
Whereas this reviewer had concentrated on a few familiar favourites, often struggling with unrewarding configurations of fragmentary variants to find incomplete traces of Snow White or Red Riding Hood, Hansen has for the most part 'played safe' and stuck to the nearly incontrovertible on a much broader front, including the whole range of folk- and fairytale evidence, including 'Aesopic' materials and jokes and anecdotes.
William Hansen: Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales found in Classical Literature
Renaissance Fables: Aesopic prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernardino Baldi.
Books received 2004
Smirin, "Evgenii Onegin i 'Domik v Kolomne': Parodiia i samoparodiia u Pushkina," in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye Tynianovskie chteniia (Riga: Znanie, 1986), 254-64; Michael Finke, "The Aesopic Meaning of Pushkin's 'Domik v Kolomne,'" Russian Literature Journal 43:144 (1989): 199-229, reprinted in Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1995.
Pushkin's shifting poetics: deceptive subtexts in "Domik v Kolomne"
In the 'Vie d'Esope' we can detect a second type, the Aesopic reader, more in tune with the poet's endeavours.
Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de la Fontaine
In a way, it was easier to write before, when there was oppression to be fought and censorship to be evaded with the help of the subtle literary devices of Aesopic language that brought the written text to a level of great complexity and at times great depth.
Post-Soviet literature in Lithuania: an overview
Among the features of the text which he believes signal its radical orientation are the choice of a low, 'rusticall' diction, the use of Aesopic fables which can be understood by the `ignorant', the deployment of woodcut illustrations somewhat in the manner of almanacs and other widely distributed books, and the frequent allusions to the Plowman, figure who can function as a `spokesman for the common people.
Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calender' and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society