Aristophanes

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 3: A dog’s craving for meat as a signal foretelling the death of Aesop

2019.06.11 | By Gregory Nagy §0. It is a commonplace in storytelling to picture the stealing of meat by a hungry dog, as we see in the illustration for this posting. After all, dogs have a natural craving for meat—also for other rich sources of protein, such as cheese. In Part 3 here, I pick up from where I left off in Part 2, where I was analyzing the fable… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 2: The case of a story about Aesop and a barking dog in the Wasps of Aristophanes

2019.06.07 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In Part 2 here, I pick up from where I left off in Part 1, where I studied the possibilities of convergence as well as divergence between fables that focus primarily on beasts as talking characters and other fables where the only talking characters are humans. Here I extend the study, analyzing a special kind of convergence that we find in a fable retold… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

A comparative approach to beast fables in Greek songmaking, Part 1: A would-be Aesopic werewolf

2019.05.31 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In a work of mine on fables, dating back to 2011, I noted a distinction made in the ancient world between two kinds of fable. In the first kind, ordinarily known as the ‘Aesopic’ fable, the storytelling concentrates on animals as characters—from here on I refer to them generically as beasts—whereas the characters we find in the second kind of fable, known as ‘Sybaritic’,… Read more