352
extending their fabulist emendations for over two millennia, absent any author or
singular cultural matrix, are precisely what humanity’s childhood and old age, both,
required: In the quest to learn the languages and souls of other species in order to
better understand ourselves. The same man who would drive home the message of
his freedom—a freedom given by Mother Nature—to then go on and pose the central questions of philosophy and science for all succeeding centuries.
This Aesop is the same figure portrayed as a physically modest (short and
stooped) ecological alchemist in a 1489 Spanish edition of the “fabulous histories”
of one “Ysopet.” An archaeologist, Otto Jahn, rummaging through the Vatican
Museum in 1843 famously discovers the fifth-century Grecian cup with an image,
he believed, of Aesop. That man has been described as one who “listens carefully to
the teachings of the fox sitting before him”.
1
The 1640 portrait of “Aesop” by Diego
Velázquez in the Prado has him brilliantly unconventional, far more like a bullied,
beaten-down victim of Thomas Hobbes’ universe, uncannily anticipatory of
Rembrandt’s “Self-portrait as St. Paul” (1661) with the almost identical large manuscript in hand. Indeed, Rembrandt’s self-portraits from 1669 onward each contain
the life-weary look of Aesop. But through Velázquez’s deeply dispiriting sieve, a
world gripped by too much of itself, there is also the evocative toll that too many
years have taken, whether on a Leonardo (always said to look older than he was, in
his mid-60s) or on a Tolstoy. Aesop is said by some chronological storytelling to
have been thrown off the cliff above the oracle at Delphi. Most historians are skeptical of this (Fig. 40.1).
But there is, in the Velázquez’s portrait, a sense of coming doom atop years of
hardship. Aesop stands so uneasily, worrisomely out there and exposed, cloaked in
a flowing red robe that is signaling only the most tentative command over nature,
perhaps meant to incite the unrecorded volumes of blood that have soaked the
world. Life has wrapped herself around his wrinkles. With a large manuscript worn
down to palimpsest leather and fragile paper in his right hand, his gaze at once
invites the sadly respect of a Biblical scholar or of a seriously concerned individual
who had his deeply contemplated reasons to deflect any more attention, let alone the
canonization by children around the world for whom his fables conveyed more than
mere sapience can explain.
Within two centuries of Aesop’s life, a student of Aristotle, Demetrius Phalerum
(c. 350–c. 280) would compile Aesop’s many tales and fragments into the
“Aesopica,” which would eventually segue into Latin translations by Horace, and
then find their expression in languages and illustrations around the world. The fable,
children’s story, nursery rhyme, riddle, simile all shared an ethos. It came from
diverse sources in Egyptian and Mesopotamian precursors, a semiotic of particularly progressive, signaling prowess, involving humans and other species, specific
species like Aesop’s wolf, fox, and crow; or the hawk and nightingale in Hesiod; the
lion in Homer’s “Iliad”; the wolf and lamb in the Babrius (second century CE)
1 Zanker, Paul, 1995. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Berkeley:
University of California Press, pp. 33–34.
40 The Zoosemiotic Paradox of Aesop
extending their fabulist emendations for over two millennia, absent any author or
singular cultural matrix, are precisely what humanity’s childhood and old age, both,
required: In the quest to learn the languages and souls of other species in order to
better understand ourselves. The same man who would drive home the message of
his freedom—a freedom given by Mother Nature—to then go on and pose the central questions of philosophy and science for all succeeding centuries.
This Aesop is the same figure portrayed as a physically modest (short and
stooped) ecological alchemist in a 1489 Spanish edition of the “fabulous histories”
of one “Ysopet.” An archaeologist, Otto Jahn, rummaging through the Vatican
Museum in 1843 famously discovers the fifth-century Grecian cup with an image,
he believed, of Aesop. That man has been described as one who “listens carefully to
the teachings of the fox sitting before him”.
1
The 1640 portrait of “Aesop” by Diego
Velázquez in the Prado has him brilliantly unconventional, far more like a bullied,
beaten-down victim of Thomas Hobbes’ universe, uncannily anticipatory of
Rembrandt’s “Self-portrait as St. Paul” (1661) with the almost identical large manuscript in hand. Indeed, Rembrandt’s self-portraits from 1669 onward each contain
the life-weary look of Aesop. But through Velázquez’s deeply dispiriting sieve, a
world gripped by too much of itself, there is also the evocative toll that too many
years have taken, whether on a Leonardo (always said to look older than he was, in
his mid-60s) or on a Tolstoy. Aesop is said by some chronological storytelling to
have been thrown off the cliff above the oracle at Delphi. Most historians are skeptical of this (Fig. 40.1).
But there is, in the Velázquez’s portrait, a sense of coming doom atop years of
hardship. Aesop stands so uneasily, worrisomely out there and exposed, cloaked in
a flowing red robe that is signaling only the most tentative command over nature,
perhaps meant to incite the unrecorded volumes of blood that have soaked the
world. Life has wrapped herself around his wrinkles. With a large manuscript worn
down to palimpsest leather and fragile paper in his right hand, his gaze at once
invites the sadly respect of a Biblical scholar or of a seriously concerned individual
who had his deeply contemplated reasons to deflect any more attention, let alone the
canonization by children around the world for whom his fables conveyed more than
mere sapience can explain.
Within two centuries of Aesop’s life, a student of Aristotle, Demetrius Phalerum
(c. 350–c. 280) would compile Aesop’s many tales and fragments into the
“Aesopica,” which would eventually segue into Latin translations by Horace, and
then find their expression in languages and illustrations around the world. The fable,
children’s story, nursery rhyme, riddle, simile all shared an ethos. It came from
diverse sources in Egyptian and Mesopotamian precursors, a semiotic of particularly progressive, signaling prowess, involving humans and other species, specific
species like Aesop’s wolf, fox, and crow; or the hawk and nightingale in Hesiod; the
lion in Homer’s “Iliad”; the wolf and lamb in the Babrius (second century CE)
1 Zanker, Paul, 1995. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Berkeley:
University of California Press, pp. 33–34.
40 The Zoosemiotic Paradox of Aesop