Aesop is one of the most beloved and well-known authors, although for his life, in the sixth century BC, more information is provided by legend than by history. His name is inextricably linked with a literary genre - which the rhetorician Theon defined, in the second century AD, as a false narrative that depicts the truth.

The Aesopian fables, which not only include stories with animals, have been translated into almost all languages and today constitute an integral and beloved part of children's literature. For many centuries, however, collections of Aesopian fables also functioned as popular reading for adults, entertaining and teaching generations of readers.

The first prose modern Greek translation of a collection of 150 Aesopian fables is the work of the Corfiot Andronikos Noykios (circa 1556). It was printed in Venice in 1543, reprinted many times, and for over three centuries it was a particularly popular folk book. Shortly thereafter, Georgios Aitolos (1580) prepared the first metrical modern Greek translation of a collection of 144 fables in Constantinople. This work, the best of the author, although it possesses qualities that should normally have secured it a better fate, remained unpublished until 1896.

Today, only a few philologists and folklorists deal with Aesopian fables; the others regard them as reading suitable for children, and indeed for small children. Things were not always so. For many centuries, reasonable people considered the fables to be quite a serious matter, capable of engaging the minds and talents of poets, rhetoricians, politicians, and philosophers.

I hope that this small book, if it does not change the reading habits of those adults who happen to read it, will at least challenge some of the ideas they have about this genre of literature. This edition is a by-product of my broader engagement with the history of the formation and evolution of anonymous ancient and Byzantine collections of Aesopian fables.