Born in Mesopotamia, the ancient fable flourished in the Greco-Roman world as a literary genre that expressed the vision of the world matured by slaves across the centuries.

With their dry messages, Aesop’s fables reveals that, to occupy the minds of the lower classes, were mainly the crucial issues of existence: winning or losing, thinking or acting at the right time, knowing how to behave with strength or cunning.

The morality that emerges from Greek and Latin fables, what La Penna calls ‘the wisdom of the slaves’, is dominated by a bitter resignation: in the world of men there is no room for divinity, and power lies in the hands of the strongest, the most violent, the most astute, not the justest. Cunning, skill, energy serve only to survive in such a world, and any hope of changing its fundamental laws is illusory.

The Aesopian fable, although devoid of any revolutionary connotation, was a decisive step in the detachment from religious culture and in the development of a popular secular culture.