Aesop's Fables, or the 

Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller

believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories
associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and
continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries
after Aesop's death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed
to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the
Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the
fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The
process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they
are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.
Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical
treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections
of Aesop's fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of
later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's reputation as a fabulist was
transmitted throughout the world.
Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They
were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for
the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction
in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In
addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over
time.