Audiobook · read by volunteers
Aesop's Fables, Volume 09 (Fables 201-225)
Aesop (620–564 BC)
Read by OldakQuill, Curtis Brown, Tae Jensen, Aaron Hochwimmer, Mariann Margitics, Bronwyn Kate Gannan · 25 chapters · 30 min
About the book
Imagine twenty-five tiny theatres, each with a cast of animals and a single lesson to teach. That is volume 09 of Aesop's Fables, covering numbers 201 to 225. It opens with The Pack Ass, The Wild Ass and The Lion, passes through The Lion, Jupiter and The Elephant and ends with The Fisherman Piping. The wolves are hungry, the foxes cunning, the donkeys put upon, and the humans, as usual, are not much wiser than the beasts. Told in V. S. Vernon Jones's crisp English, these stories take barely a minute each, and their morals are stated plainly enough for a child to repeat. Together they make a half-hour of easy, thoughtful listening, shared among several voices. Whether you grew up with these tales or are meeting them for the first time, you will probably find that one or two of them stay with you for the rest of the day.
Introduction
Few names in literature are as famous as Aesop, and few are as hard to pin down. The traditional dates place him in the sixth century BC, but almost nothing is known about his life, and scholars have long questioned whether he really existed. The fables survive in countless retellings, in many languages and many forms. Because there is no continuing plot, you can start anywhere, and each fable stands by itself. Many of them have given English some of its proverbs and figures of speech.
The LibriVox project divided its recording into twelve volumes of about twenty-five fables each. Volume 09 contains fables 201 to 225, read from the English translation of V. S. Vernon Jones (1875-1955), published in 1912. His version is known for its economy and good humour, and it keeps the moral at the end of every story, where a listener can weigh it.
Among the fables here are The Pack Ass, The Wild Ass and The Lion, The Lion, Jupiter and The Elephant and The Fisherman Piping. Each is a separate chapter, and the volume lasts around half an hour in total. The reading is shared among six volunteers, so you hear a different voice at almost every turn.
Fables like these reward repeated listening. Their brevity makes them easy to remember, and their situations, the boastful, the greedy and the foolish meeting their match, are timeless. Parents will find them useful for bedtime, teachers for the classroom and everyone else for a pleasant half hour. You can listen in order or in any order you like; the point of each tale stands on its own.
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