Aesop

Ancient Greek storyteller (619 BC–563 BC)

Fame78.9
Momentum0.0
Academics rank#51

Source-basedStable

Fame78.9
Momentum0.0
Academics rank#51
Wikipedia48K

Lived -620–-564, aged 56

AcademicsAcademic

Wikipedia
105 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
-620–-564
Aged 56

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

A Greek storyteller from the 6th century BCE who may never have existed, yet whose name stuck to a vast body of animal fables that shaped moral instruction across two and a half millennia.

Biography

About

Scattered ancient references place Aesop around 620–564 BCE, but no writings by him survive and his existence remains unclear. The Aesop Romance, an ancient literary work, presents him as a strikingly ugly slave who won freedom through cleverness and rose to advise kings and city-states — a biography probably more fiction than fact. What endured was the tradition: fables featuring anthropomorphic animals gathered under his name across centuries and languages. Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch all mentioned him, cementing the association. The tales outlasted their teller, real or invented, and…

Voice