How Aesop’s Fables drew on Theogony/Works and Days
A documented line of influence: Aesop demonstrably engaged Hesiod’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Theogony/Works and Days
Hesiod · c. 700 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Aesop’s Fables
Aesop · c. 560 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
7/10
On Aesop’s Fables’s page
- The fable was already old when the Aesopic collection took it up — and Hesiod has the oldest one
- His hawk and nightingale in Works and Days is the earliest recorded Greek fable; the Aesopic "Hawk, Nightingale and Birdcatcher" is a direct retelling
- Read Hesiod first and you see the genre being invented — the same beasts, the same blunt lesson about who holds the power
On Theogony/Works and Days’s page
- The very first Greek fable on record is buried in Hesiod, not in Aesop
- The hawk-and-nightingale of Works and Days — the hawk seizing the songbird and lecturing it on power — is the earliest recorded fable in the language
- That talking-animal-with-a-moral form is the mold the whole Aesopic tradition would pour itself into