I had the pleasure of perusing “The Great Fables of All Nations”.[i] There in the sand and sun I skipped through
delightful anecdotes often of interest to the classicist in me. Here I present one
from Aesop. (b. 620 BC) This version translated
by George
Fyler Townsend
“The Tortoise and the Eagle A tortoise, lazily basking in the sun, complained to the sea-birds of
her hard fate, that no one would teach her to fly. An Eagle, hovering near,
heard her lamentation and demanded what reward she would give him if he would
take her aloft and float her in the air. "I will give you," she said,
"all the riches of the Red Sea." "I will teach you to fly
then," said the Eagle; and taking her up in his talons he carried her
almost to the clouds suddenly he let her go, and she fell on a lofty mountain,
dashing her shell to pieces. The Tortoise exclaimed in the moment of death:
"I have deserved my present fate; for what had I to do with wings and
clouds, who can with difficulty move about on the earth?'"
An enlightening
little tale, but somehow familiar. I
thought of the death of Aesop himself, but that was at the hands of the people
at Delphi as Komroff pointed out. So my
curious had to wait until I crossed the border and was home again. The death I was thinking of was the death of
Aeschylus in 456 or 455 BC
According to Ursula
Hoff [ii] “According to Pliny and Valerius Maximus, Aeschylus, of whom it had been
predicted that he was to meet his death on a certain days as the result of an
object falling on his head, went out into the open, trusting in the clear sky,
and was killed by a tortoise, dropped on to his head by an eagle.” Both Pliny and Valerius Maximus wrote in the
first century AD
So, was Aesop’s
tale inspired by Aeschylus’ death or were the later writers’ anecdotes on Aeschylus’
death inspired by Aesop?
[i] Ed.
Manual Komroff, Tudor Publ. NYC
[ii] Meditation in Solitude, Ursula Hoff, Journal
of the Warburg Institute , Vol. 1, No. 4 (Apr., 1938), pp. 292-294Published
by: Warburg Institute , DOI: 10.2307/749994, Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/749994
Aeschylus was allegedly killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle, Euripides was allegedly eaten by dogs. Both died in exile, so there was no restraints to the imagination of Athenian "news sources". Even Sophocles, who died in Athens, was not protected. Wikipedia: "As with many famous men in classical antiquity, his death inspired a number of apocryphal stories. The most famous is the suggestion that he died from the strain of trying to recite a long sentence from his Antigone without pausing to take a breath. Another account suggests he choked while eating grapes at the Anthesteria festival in Athens. A third holds that he died of happiness after winning his final victory at the City Dionysia." "Eating grapes" here must be a code for "drinking wine", for this is what the Anthesteria was for.
ReplyDeleteI guess that those who could write tragedies, did it, and those who could not, spoke and wrote gossip about how members of the former group died :-). So Aesop must have been first.
Maya,
ReplyDeleteI like your final paragraph. Normally I say those who couldn't write tragedy are named Aristophanes!
Bill
Poor Aristophanes! I mentioned that some participants in your Cafe were ready to surrender his comedies to get back lost works presumed to be more interesting.
ReplyDelete(Nobody thought of Nonnus' Dionysiaca, which I'd put first on any trade-off list. Or maybe some readers like it after all.)
Maya,
ReplyDeleteIn academic circles no one even acknowledges Nonnus! They don't even seem to know the name.
Incase I dont talk to you Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! And Happy New year!
Thank you! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
ReplyDelete