Aesop's Fables

You've all certainly heard of Aesop, that ancient Greek slave who told all kinds of decent animal-based stories with morals. You've also no doubt heard or read many of these famous fables of his. I was always a fan of the little one-paragraph stories and the simple lessons they taught, so I went into this collection of nearly 300 such fables with high hopes. Sadly, those hopes weren't met. I guess there's a reason that Aesop's ten or twenty most well-known fables are, you know, ten or twenty in number. Most of these were just plain garbage, and what's more, many weren't really "fables" in the sense I knew that genre to be; instead, plenty of these little stories seemed like bad jokes with bad punchlines, dark stories with no real moral to them, or creation myths. Like apparently all ants used to be men but then Zeus turned them into ants and... nope, that's just one of these "fables" in a nutshell. Or how about the one where the snake gets stung on the head by a wasp and decides to fling his head under a wagon wheel to kill them both? That's just a tale of reckless revenge, right? Or the one where a guy's wig blows away and he asks, with a chuckle, "why should I have expected it to stay on my head when it didn't stay on its original owner's head?" That's not poignant, clever, or funny. (Is it? Am I missing something?) Furthermore, many of the fables directly contradict one another; there's one where the gods punish a dishonest man, and its moral is that "honesty is the best policy," but there's another where a man gives a king his honest and unflattering opinion and is killed on the spot - the moral, this time around, is that sometimes it's best to lie. Yes, plenty of these fables were groan-inducing, if not downright pointless. One involves a farmer starving in the winter to the point where he eats his sheep, and then his goats, and then his oxen. And then his dogs say, "we should get out of here; we're next." The fable ends there. There's no twist ending. There's no dramatic irony. This is just basic pattern recognition and a group of characters using common sense. Maybe something was lost in translation from the Greek in a number of these stinkers. I don't know. What I do know is that I came away from these hundreds of fables with far less an appreciation for Aesop and his tonal inconsistencies and moral contradictions. So I did a little research, and it turns out - and maybe I should have known this all along - that "Aesop" probably wasn't even a real guy, and that what I'd just spent hours reading was no cohesive work by a single author with a single vision, but instead just a hodgepodge collection of popular stories from ancient Greece. Blech. I always figured that we were in our modern era probably falsely attributing a number of "Aesop's fables" to Aesop, but I at least figured he was like Shakespeare - definitely a real person who may be falsely credited for too many works - and not so much like fucking Mother Goose. Oh well. The joke's on me. Maybe someone can write a fable about my follies and cram it into the next edition of "Aesop's" works. The simple one-sentence moral? "Stick with the ten or twenty popular fables you already know and stay away from the collection at large."