Aesop's Fables - Volume 02

Twenty-five centuries of wisdom, and still no one has found a better way to say it. These 25 fables (numbers 26-50 in the collection) continue Aesop's ancient project: teaching us exactly who we are through creatures who are decidedly not us. A fox serves the Stork a meal in a flat dish and learns what it feels like to be mocked. A lion shows mercy to a wounded slave and receives the same in return. Bees petition Jupiter for stings that never dull, and get exactly what they asked for. Each tale runs just a few paragraphs, yet contains an entire education in human nature. The moral arrives like a gift, unexpected and irrefutable. These aren't children's stories dressed in animals. They are philosophical distillations, compact as aphorisms, vast as the human condition. For anyone who believes wisdom must be complicated, Aesop offers a gentle, devastating correction.