Hello!
We all know that Aesop wrote fables; but he wasn't the only one. Hesiod and Archilochus preceded him, and a great many authors came after him. For example, the Panchatantra is an Indian collection of animal fables that was written down in the 3rd Century BC, possibly by the writer Vishnu Sharma. For centuries afterwards, other authors also attempted the composition of fables. Phaedrus, the Roman fabulist, flourished in the 1st Century AD and was the first to write fables in Latin; Vardan Aygektsi was an Armenian priest who wrote fables in the 13th Century; Leonardo Da Vinci made his own contribution to the genre two hundred years later; and let us not forget Jean de La Fontaine, the most sophisticated fabulist of them all, who turned Aesop into delightful verse in the 17th Century.
Those are just a few authors who have accepted the challenge of writing fables. There were many others. Fables are for everyone. There's no reason why we can't all be fabulists!
So please find here a selection of exactly 50 of my own fables. In keeping with tradition, each fable is followed by a brief moral. I have written 207 fables in total and 150 of them can be found in my Rhysop's Fables ebook, available both from Smashwords and Amazon. I hope that you will find wit and wisdom here. If you don't, remember this fable (that I made up just now):
There once was a reader who didn't like the fables that he read. He was so dismayed that he began shouting and waving his arms. The vibrations of his tantrum caused all the heavy pots and pans on the shelf above him to fall onto his head. As he lay in agony on the floor, bleeding from a serious head wound, he lamented to himself, "How I wish I had been less pompous and critical! But now it's too late for such regrets and I am doomed!"
Thanks for listening!