The Life of Aesop the Philosopher, an anonymous Greek literary work, presents one version of the novelistic biography of Aesop, which dates to the fourth to fifth century CE. In this volume, Grammatiki A. Karla offers an extended introduction to the Life of Aesop in general, the history of the textual tradition, and the MORN manuscript family and its relationship to other versions and papyrus fragments. She then presents a new edition of the late antique version (MORN) alongside David Konstan’s English translation. A commentary addresses editorial choices and focuses on words and phrases that are of interest for the history of the Greek language.

Grammatiki A. Karla is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is the author of Überlieferung, Sprache und Edition einer frühbyzantinischen Fassung des Äsopromans (2001) and coeditor of Cyprus in Texts from Graeco-Roman Antiquity (2023).

David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. His most recent book is The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (2022).