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Aesop’s Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Aesop lived in Ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE.

The modern view is that Aesop probably did not solely compose all those fables attributed to him, if he even existed at all. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of “Aesopic” form existing in both ancient Sumer and Akkad, as early as the third millennium BCE.

The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many of the stories, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom “sour grapes” derives), The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Ant and the Grasshopper, and The North Wind and the Sun, are well-known throughout the world.