A fable is a short tale that features animals or other non-human entities (the sun, the wind, trees…), and concludes with an explicit moral lesson, often expressed in the form of a pithy maxim or saying.

Animals that feature in fables are anthropomorphized, that is, attributed human qualities, especially speech and reason. But other than that, the fable is fairly realist or true to life, with much more humble characters and commonplace events than the legend and certainly the myth.

According to his student Plato, Socrates spent the days leading up to his execution putting Aesop’s Fables into verse—which is all the more surprising when one considers that Socrates never wrote anything down. Other famous collections of fables include the Buddhist Jataka Tales and the Hindu Panchatantra, and there is likely to have been some crossover between the fabulary of Greece and that of India. For instance, there are both Greek and Indian declensions of The Tortoise and the Birds, not to mention a number of African........

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