Aesop

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aesop. According to some accounts, Aesop was a strikingly ugly slave who was dumb until granted the power of speech by the goddess Isis. In stories of his life he’s often found outwitting his masters using clever wordplay, but he’s best known today as the supposed author of a series of fables that are some of the most enduringly popular works of Ancient Greek literature. Some modern scholars question whether he existed at all, but the body of work that has come down to us under his name gives us a rare glimpse of the popular culture of the Ancient World.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Pavlos Avlamis No other episodes
  Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford
• Simon Goldhill 8 episodes
  Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge
• Lucy Grig 2 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh

Reading list

• Slaves Tell Tales and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece
  Sara Forsdyke (Princeton University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Aesop's Fables
  Laura Gibbs (trans.) (Oxford World's Classics, 2008) Google Books →
• Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature
  William Hansen (ed.) (Indiana University Press, 1998) Google Books →
• The Ancient Fable: An Introduction
  Niklas Holzberg, Christine Jackson-Holzberg (trans.) (Indiana University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose
  Leslie Kurke (Princeton University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire
  Teresa Morgan (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History
  Annabel Patterson (Duke University Press, 1991) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b04pbq9l

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pbq9l

Auto-category: 398.2 (Fables and folklore)