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me with your lying, but you can’t cheat the gods, and they won’t let you off so lightly.” Nor do the gods necessarily wait until the next life to reward virtue and punish vice, as evidenced in the fable “Mercury and the Woodman” (no. 17), in which a god rewards an honest woodcutter with a golden ax and a silver ax, in addition to the ordinary one that he had lost in a river, while a dishonest companion loses everything. Other examples of omniscient divine intervention are found in “The Rogue and the Oracle” (no. 273), where the Oracle at Delphi exposes a scoundrel who attempts to ridicule a venerable religious institution, and in “The Eagle and the Fox” (no. 250), with its conclusion that “False faith may escape human punishment, but cannot escape the divine.”
    The examples from the previous paragraph notwithstanding, the moral view reflected in most of the Aesopic fables is human-centered and of this world. In “The Astronomer” (no. 187) the leading character is so absorbed by his vision of the sky that he falls into a dry well. Adding insult to injury, a cynical passerby chides him, “If you... were looking so hard at the sky that you didn’t even see where your feet were carrying you along the ground, it appears to me that you deserve all you’ve got.” Mortals themselves, not the gods, bear the primary responsibility for their own welfare. Only rarely do the deities of these fables intervene on man’s behalf. Even if they were able to, which is no sure thing, the gods could not possibly answer all of humankind’s prayers, for they often contradict one another, as stated explicitly in “The Father and His Daughters” (no. 197), when a father, desiring to pray for his two daughters’ happiness, learns that one of them, a gardener’s wife, wants rain, while the other one, a potter’s wife, wants dry weather. In the end, as we learn either implicitly or explicitly from “The Snake and Jupiter” (no. 237) and “Hercules and the Wagoner” (no. 102), the gods help those who help themselves.

Fables and Folklore
    “I already know this story” is a common response, even to first-time readers of Aesop. And for good reason, for many of these fables have found their way back into the repertories of oral storytellers, thus creating for themselves a new life independent of paper and ink. Most of these tales probably came from the folk in the first place, having long circulated as retold stories before they were committed to parchment or paper. The first creation of these fables lies too far in the past for us to be able to ascertain whether a particular tale was originated by a Greek scholar, quill pen in hand, or by an illiterate grandmother entertaining her extended family with bedtime stories. Whatever their origin, many of Aesop’s fables have had a life of their own as orally told folktales, some having escaped the boundaries of the printed page at a relatively late date, others having followed unwritten folkways from the very beginning.
    Folklorists use a cataloging system devised by the Finnish scholar Antti Aarne and his American counterpart Stith Thompson. The final version of this system was published in 1961 under the title The Types of the Folktale , and has proven itself an indispensable tool for the comparative study of international folktales. In essence, Aarne and Thompson identify some 2,500 basic folktale plots, assigning to each a type number, sometimes further differentiated by letters or asterisks. Only those Aesopic fables that have been found in folklore sources apart from Aesop have been assigned Aarne-Thompson type numbers. These fables, characteristically and understandably among the best known, are identified by their type numbers in an appendix to the present collection.

Modern Translations of Aesop
    Editors and translators of every age must come to terms with essentially the same questions: What text shall I use for my source? And what style shall I adopt for the