1st Post- Aesop's Fables

            My educational experience lightly touched the topic of fables. Before reading, Aesop’s Fables, I assumed the morals were going to be obvious. After reading the fourteen mini-stories I realized the relevance these stories had to real life experiences. Morals have the possibility of having multiple significances.

            The fable that caught my attention the most is, The Wolf in Sheep’s clothing. While reading this mini-story I understood the origin of this lesson because of my older brother. Several years ago my brother got the image, a wolf in sheep’s skin, tattooed on his arm. It was done for a cheap price, so it resulted in looking like I drew it for him. After laughing at him, he proceeded in telling me the reason behind wanting to get the tattoo. The moral behind the fable is, looks can be deceiving. In other words, don’t judge a book by its cover. In my opinion, this is an international lesson because any individual can create assumptions about others.

            The second reading, Aesop, Aristotle, and Animals: The Role of Fables in Human Life, by Edward Clayton, was completely different than the previous reading. This article was longer, contained footnotes, a bibliography, and focused on the origin of fables. A question I have about this article is are fables still used to argue about politics? “Aristotle... rhetorical strategy in politics.” (Clayton, 186). According to Clayton, Greek philosopher Aristotle used fables as a strategy for relevance to real life experiences. As stated before, I am not very familiar with fables therefore I am not sure if this is the structure for writing a fable. Another question I have is do the animals in fables always represent the poor and/or weak?