Aesop
20 Nov, 2014
390 Customs, etiquette and folklore
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.
Guests
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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
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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)