Audiobook · read by volunteers
Aesop's Fables, Volume 04 (Fables 76-100)
Aesop (620–564 BC)
Read by Abraham60, Vicki Barbour, Kristin LeMoine, Leah Baskett, ophul, Marian Brown, Sara Schein, Geetu Melwani, Patti McCoy, Christine Dewar · 25 chapters · 27 min
About the book
The Frogs ask Jupiter for a king, and learn that a wish granted can be worse than a wish refused. That is how this volume of Aesop begins, and it goes on through fables 76 to 100: a vain jackdaw in borrowed feathers, a fox who has lost his tail and would like everyone else to lose theirs, a stag admiring his antlers in a pool and despising his legs, a dog who drops his dinner to snatch at its reflection. Mercury looks in at a sculptor’s workshop, a peacock complains to Juno, and the volume ends with the Ox and the Frog. Told in V. S. Vernon Jones’s crisp English, each fable takes a minute or two and ends with a moral plain enough to repeat. Twenty-five of them make about half an hour of easy listening, whether you take them in order or pick one at random.
Introduction
Very little can be said for certain about Aesop. Tradition places him in the sixth century BC, and scholars have long wondered whether he was one man, several, or a name given to a whole tradition of storytelling. What matters is what survives: brief tales, mostly about animals, that show human foolishness at a safe distance and end with a lesson.
This is volume 4 of the twelve that make up the LibriVox recording. It contains fables 76 to 100 from the 1912 translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, who aimed at a simple, direct English that would neither talk down to children nor bore adults. Among its titles are The Frogs Asking for a King, The Fox Without a Tail, The Stag at the Pool, The Dog and the Shadow, Mercury and the Sculptor and The Ox and the Frog. Several are about the gap between what we want and what we need, a theme that Aesop returns to again and again.
Each fable has its own track, 25 in all, and the volume plays for roughly half an hour, with a team of ten or more volunteers taking turns at the microphone, which gives the set a pleasantly varied sound. Since each tale is complete in itself, you can start anywhere.
Why return to Aesop today? Because the fables are compact, memorable and flexible. A single story can be read as a lesson in prudence, a joke about politics or a parable about pride, and listeners often disagree about the moral, which is half the fun. Keep the volume for a journey, for bedtime or for a short pause in the day.
Public domain
Aesop died in 564 BC: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text