In the two instances referred to, the fable has more the character of the Greek alvog, or supernatural tale (Quintil. Inst. Orat. v, 11), than of the hv£oq, or myth; that is, is less the fruit of a vivid imagination, sport- ing with the analogies between the worlds of nature and of men, than a covert reproof, making the sarcasm which it aflects to hide all the sharper (Milller and Donaldson, I{isto?i/ of Greek Lileralvre, vol. i, c. xi). The appearance of the fable thus early in the history of Israel, and its entire absence from the direct teach- ing both of the O. and N. T., are, each of them in its way, significant. Taking the received clironology, the fable of Jotham was spoken about B.C. 1209. The Arabian traditions of Lokman do not assign to him an earlier date than that of David. The earliest Greek ah'OQ, or proper fable, is tliat of Ilesiod ((7/). et D. v, 202), and the prose form of the fable does not meet us till we come (about B.C. 550) to Stesichorus and ^Esop. The first example in the historj' of Rome is the apo- logue of Menenius Agrippa, B.C. 494, and its genuine- ness has been cpiestioned on the ground that tlie fable could hardly at that time have found its way to Lati- um (]Muller and Donaldson, /. c). It may be noticed, too, that when collections of fables became familiar to the Greeks, thej- were looked upon as imported, not in- digenous. The traditions that surround the name of jEsop, the absence of any evidence that he wrote fa- bles, the traces of Eastern origin in those ascribed to him, leave him little more than the representative of a period when the forms of teaching, Avhich had long been familiar to the more Eastern nations, were trav- elling westward, and were adojited eagerlj' by the Greeks. The collections themselves are described by titles that indicate a foreign origin. They are Libj'an (Arist. Rhet: ii, 20), Cyprian, Cilician. All these facts lead to the conclusion that the Hebrew mind, gifted, as it was, in a special measure with the power of per- ceiving analogies in things apparently dissimilar, at- tained, at a very early stage of its growth, the power which does not appear in the historj' of other nations till a later period. Whatever antiquity may be as- cribed to the fables in the comparatively later collec- tion of the Pancha Tranta, the land of Canaan is, so far as we have any data to conclude from, the father, land of fable. To conceive brutes or inanimate ob- jects as representing human characteristics, to per- sonify them as acting, speaking, reasoning, to draw lessons from them applicable to human life — this
FABLE
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FABLE
must have been common among the Israelites in the time of the jiidi^es. The part assigned in the earliest records of the Bible to the impressions made by tlie brute creation on the mind of man when "the Lord God formed every beast of the Held and every fowl of the air, and l)rought them unto Adam to see what he Avould call them" (Gen. ii, 19), and the apparent sym- bolism of the serpent in the narrative of the P'all (Gen. iii, 1), are at once indications of teachinji; adapted to men in the possession of this power, and must have helped to develop it (Herder, deist der Ehrdischen Po- esie, ]Ver/:e, xxxiv, p. 16, ed. 1S2G). The large num- ber of proverbs in which analogies of this kind are made the bases of a moral precept, and some of which (e. g. Prov. XX vi, 11 ; xxx, 15, 25-28) are of the nature of condensed fables, show that there ■vvas no decline of this power as the intellect of the people advanced. The absence of fiibles accordinglj^ from the teaching of the O. T. must be ascribed to their want of fitness to be the media of the truths which that teaching was to convey. The points in which brutes or inanimate objects present analogies to man are chiefly those which belong to his lower nature, his pride, indolence, cunning, and the like, and the lessons derived from tliem accordingly do not rise higher than the pruden- tial morality which aims at rejiressing such defects (comp. Trench, On the Parables, 1. c). Hence the fa- ble, apart from the associations of a grotesque and lu- dicrous nature which gather round it; apart, too, from its presenting narratives which are "nee vera; nee ve- risimiles" (Cicero, De Invent, i, 19), is inadequate as the exponent of the higher truths which belong to man's spiritual life. It may serve to exhibit the rela- tions between man and man ; it fails to represent those between man and God. To do that is the ofhce of the TARABLE, finding its outward framework in the deal- ings of men with each other, or in the world of nature as it is, not in any grotesque parody of nature, and exhibiting, in either case, real and not fanciful analo- gies. The fable seizes on that which man has in com- mon with the creatures below him ; the parable rests on the truths that man is made in the image of God, and that " all things are double one against another." It is noticeable, as confirming this view of the office of the falda, that, though tliose of ^Esop (so called) were known to the great philosopher of righteousness at Athens, though a metrical paraphrase of some of them was among the employments of his imprisonment (Plato, Ph:edo, p. 60, 61), thej' were not employed by him as illustrations, or channels of instruction. While j Socrates shows an appreciation of the power of such fables to represent some of the phenomena of human life, he was not, he saj-s, in this sense of the word, i.iv- OoXoyiKoi;. The myths, which appear in the Gorr/ias, the Phedrm, the Phcedo, the Pqmblic, are as unlike as possible to the ^Esopic fal)les, are (to take his own account of them) ov /^wdoi dWa \6yoi, true, though figurative, representations of spiritual realities, while the illustrations from the common facts of life which were so conspicuous in his ordinary teaching, though differing in being comparisons rather than narratives, come nearer to the parables of the Bible (compare the contrast between m 'SwKpariKa, as examples of the ■Tzapiij^oXi) and the Xoyoi .MtroTrttoi, Aristot. Ehet. ii, 20). It may be said, indeed, that the use of the fable as an instrument of teaching (apart from the embel- lishments of wit and fancy with which it is associated by such writers as Lessing and La Fontaine) belongs rather to childiiood, and the ciiild-like jjcriod of na- tional life, than to a more advanced development. In the earlier stages of political change, as in the cases of Jotliam, Stesichorus (Aristot. lihei. I. c), Menenius Agrippa, it is used as an element of persuasion or re- proof. It ceases to appear in the higher eloquence of orators and statesmen. The special excellence of fa- bles is that they are C)]fii]yopiKoi (Aristot. Ehet, 1. c.) ; that "ducere aninios solent, priecipuo rusticorum et