Dzala ertobashia (Georgian: ძალა ერთობაშია, pronounced [d͡zɑlɑ ɛrtʰɔbɑʃiɑ], "Strength is

in Unity") is the official motto of Georgia.

Coat of arms of Georgia

It originally comes from a famous fable by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani of the same name.
According to this fable, once upon a time there lived a king with thirty sons. One day,
when he was dying, he called his sons and asked them to bring arrows. Then king asked
them to break the arrows one by one, and the sons did. The king then asked them to break
the arrows all at once, and they could not. The king said: "Teach O my sons from this fact,
that there is ‘strength in unity.’ If you are together, an enemy cannot do you wrong, but if
you are divided, victory will be on their side."

The problem of unity is very real for the Georgian state, and thus was likely a factor in the
decision to make the phrase the national motto.

Versions of this phrase are the national mottos of Belgium, Bulgaria, and Haiti, and also
formerly in the historical Traansvaal, apartheid-era South Africa (as Ex Unitate Vires),
and Malaya. There is a popular legend in Bulgaria about Kubrat, ruler of Great Bulgaria,
who also gave his sons the same advice by the same example.

The Old Man and his Sons, sometimes titled The Bundle of Sticks, is an Aesop's Fable whose moral
is that there is strength in unity. The story has been told about many rulers. It is numbered 53 in
the Perry Index.

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.

Contents

 1Fictions that point to the truth

o 1.1Fable as a genre

o 1.2Origins

 2Translation and transmission

o 2.1Greek versions

o 2.2Latin versions

 3Aesop in other languages

o 3.1Europe

o 3.2Asia and America

 4Versions in regional languages

o 4.1Minority expression

o 4.2Creole

o 4.3Slang

 5Children

 6Religious themes

 7Dramatised fables

 8Musical treatments

 9List of some fables by Aesop

 o 9.1Titles A–F

o 9.2Titles G–O

o 9.3Titles R–Z

o 9.4Fables wrongly attributed to Aesop

 10References

 11Further reading

 12External links

Fictions that point to the truth[edit]

The beginning of 1485 Italian edition of Aesopus Moralisatus

Fable as a genre[edit]

Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:

like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great
truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he
was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories
in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true,
told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.[1]

Earlier still, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that "Aesop the fable writer" was a
slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE.[2] Among references in other
writers, Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having
learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote
in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his time in prison turning some of Aesop's fables "which he
knew" into verses. Nonetheless, for two main reasons – because numerous morals within Aesop's
attributed fables contradict each other, and because ancient accounts of Aesop's life contradict each
other – the modern view is that Aesop was not the originator of all those fables attributed to
him.[3] Instead, any fable tended to be ascribed to the name of Aesop if there was no known
alternative literary source.[4]

In Classical times there were various theorists who tried to differentiate these fables from other
kinds of narration. They had to be short and unaffected;[5] in addition, they are fictitious, useful to
life and true to nature.[6] In them could be found talking animals and plants, although humans
interacting only with humans figure in a few. Typically they might begin with a contextual
introduction, followed by the story, often with the moral underlined at the end. Setting the context
was often necessary as a guide to the story's interpretation, as in the case of the political meaning
of The Frogs Who Desired a King and The Frogs and the Sun.

Sometimes the titles given later to the fables have become proverbial, as in the case of killing the
Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs or the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. In fact some fables,
such as The Young Man and the Swallow, appear to have been invented as illustrations of already
existing proverbs. One theorist, indeed, went so far as to define fables as extended proverbs.[7] In
this they have an aetiological function, the explaining of origins such as, in another context, why the
ant is a mean, thieving creature or how the tortoise got its shell. Other fables, also verging on this
function, are outright jokes, as in the case of The Old Woman and the Doctor, aimed at greedy
practitioners of medicine.

Origins[edit]

The contradictions between fables already mentioned and alternative versions of much the same
fable – as in the case of The Woodcutter and the Trees, are best explained by the ascription to Aesop
of all examples of the genre. Some are demonstrably of West Asian origin, others have analogues
further to the East. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of Aesopic form existing in both
ancient Sumer and Akkad, as early as the third millennium BCE.[8] Aesop's fables and the Indian
tradition, as represented by the Buddhist Jataka tales and the Hindu Panchatantra, share about a
dozen tales in common, although often widely differing in detail. There is some debate over whether
the Greeks learned these fables from Indian storytellers or the other way, or if the influences were
mutual.

Loeb editor Ben E. Perry took the extreme position in his book Babrius and Phaedrus (1965) that

in the entire Greek tradition there is not, so far as I can see, a single fable that can be said to come
either directly or indirectly from an Indian source; but many fables or fable-motifs that first appear
in Greek or Near Eastern literature are found later in the Panchatantra and other Indian story-books,
including the Buddhist Jatakas.[9]

Although Aesop and the Buddha were near contemporaries, the stories of neither were recorded in
writing until some centuries after their death. Few disinterested scholars would now be prepared to
make so absolute a stand as Perry about their origin in view of the conflicting and still emerging
evidence.[10][page needed][11][page needed]

Translation and transmission[edit]

Greek versions[edit]

A Greek manuscript of the fables of Babrius

When and how the fables arrived in and travelled from ancient Greece remains uncertain. Some
cannot be dated any earlier than Babrius and Phaedrus, several centuries after Aesop, and yet others
even later. The earliest mentioned collection was by Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian orator and
statesman of the 4th century BCE, who compiled the fables into a set of ten books for the use of
orators. A follower of Aristotle, he simply catalogued all the fables that earlier Greek writers had
used in isolation as exempla, putting them into prose. At least it was evidence of what was
attributed to Aesop by others; but this may have included any ascription to him from the oral
tradition in the way of animal fables, fictitious anecdotes, etiological or satirical myths, possibly even
any proverb or joke, that these writers transmitted. It is more a proof of the power of Aesop's name
to attract such stories to it than evidence of his actual authorship. In any case, although the work of
Demetrius was mentioned frequently for the next twelve centuries, and was considered the official
Aesop, no copy now survives. Present day collections evolved from the later Greek version
of Babrius, of which there now exists an incomplete manuscript of some 160 fables
in choliambic verse. Current opinion is that he lived in the 1st century CE. The version of 55 fables in
choliambic tetrameters by the 9th century Ignatius the Deacon is also worth mentioning for its
early[clarification needed] inclusion of tales from Oriental sources.[12]

Further light is thrown on the entry of Oriental stories into the Aesopic canon by their appearance in
Jewish sources such as the Talmud and in Midrashic literature. There is a comparative list of these on
the Jewish Encyclopedia website[13] of which twelve resemble those that are common to both Greek
and Indian sources, six are parallel to those only in Indian sources, and six others in Greek only.
Where similar fables exist in Greece, India, and in the Talmud, the Talmudic form approaches more
nearly the Indian. Thus, the fable "The Wolf and the Crane" is told in India of a lion and another bird.
When Joshua ben Hananiah told that fable to the Jews, to prevent their rebelling against Rome and
once more putting their heads into the lion's jaws (Gen. R. lxiv.), he shows familiarity with some
form derived from India.

Latin versions[edit]

12th-century pillar, cloister of the Collegiate church of Saint Ursus, Aosta: the Fox and the Stork

The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin iambic trimeters was performed by Phaedrus,
a freedman of Augustus in the 1st century CE, although at least one fable had already been
translated by the poet Ennius two centuries before, and others are referred to in the work
of Horace. The rhetorician Aphthonius of Antioch wrote a technical treatise on, and converted into
Latin prose, some forty of these fables in 315. It is notable as illustrating contemporary and later
usage of fables in rhetorical practice. Teachers of philosophy and rhetoric often set the fables of
Aesop as an exercise for their scholars, inviting them not only to discuss the moral of the tale, but
also to practise style and the rules of grammar by making new versions of their own. A little later the
poet Ausonius handed down some of these fables in verse, which the writer Julianus Titianus
translated into prose, and in the early 5th century Avianus put 42 of these fables into
Latin elegiacs.[14]

The largest, oldest known and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus bears the name of
an otherwise unknown fabulist named Romulus. It contains 83 fables, dates from the 10th century
and seems to have been based on an earlier prose version which, under the name of "Aesop" and
addressed to one Rufus, may have been written in the Carolingian period or even earlier. The
collection became the source from which, during the second half of the Middle Ages, almost all the
collections of Latin fables in prose and verse were wholly or partially drawn. A version of the first
three books of Romulus in elegiac verse, possibly made around the 12th century, was one of the
most highly influential texts in medieval Europe. Referred to variously (among other titles) as the
verse Romulus or elegiac Romulus, and ascribed to Gualterus Anglicus, it was a common Latin
teaching text and was popular well into the Renaissance. Another version of Romulus in Latin
elegiacs was made by Alexander Neckam, born at St Albans in 1157.[15]
Interpretive "translations" of the elegiac Romulus were very common in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Among the earliest was one in the 11th century by Ademar of Chabannes, which includes some new
material. This was followed by a prose collection of parables by the Cistercian preacher Odo of
Cheriton around 1200 where the fables (many of which are not Aesopic) are given a strong medieval
and clerical tinge. This interpretive tendency, and the inclusion of yet more non-Aesopic material,
was to grow as versions in the various European vernaculars began to appear in the following
centuries.

Aesopus constructus etc., 1495 edition with metrical version of Fabulae Lib. I–IV by Anonymus
Neveleti

With the revival of literary Latin during the Renaissance, authors began compiling collections of
fables in which those traditionally by Aesop and those from other sources appeared side by side.
One of the earliest was by Lorenzo Bevilaqua, also known as Laurentius Abstemius, who wrote 197
fables,[16] the first hundred of which were published as Hecatomythium in 1495. Little by Aesop was
included. At the most, some traditional fables are adapted and reinterpreted: The Lion and the
Mouse is continued and given a new ending (fable 52); The Oak and the Reed becomes "The Elm and
the Willow" (53); The Ant and the Grasshopper is adapted as "The Gnat and the Bee" (94) with the
difference that the gnat offers to teach music to the bee's chil