Not Aesoppy at all - his fables were filthy

From: The Independent (London, England) | Date: January 15, 1998| Author: | Copyright information

Aesop's Fables, far from being children's stories, were coarse, violent and cruel. David Lister, Arts News Editor, reports on a new book that discovers 100 missing fables and causes us to revise our judgement on one of history's greatest story-tellers.

We all know Aesop's Fables. The tortoise who won a race against the hare; the mouse that helped a lion by biting through the rope that entrapped it: moralistic stories about lovable animals that have sent children off to pleasant slumbers for over a century, since the Victorians translated them from the ancient Greek.

But what of the tale of ...

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