The Life and History of Æsop is involved, like that of Homer, the most
famous of Greek poets, in much obscurity. Sardis, the capital of Lydia;
Samos, a Greek island; Mesembria, an ancient colony in Thrace; and
Cotiæum, the chief city of a province of Phrygia, contend for the
distinction of being the birthplace of Æsop. Although the honor thus
claimed cannot be definitely assigned to any one of these places, yet
there are a few incidents now generally accepted by scholars as
established facts, relating to the birth, life, and death of Æsop. He
is, by an almost universal consent, allowed to have been born about the
year 620 B.C., and to have been by birth a slave. He was owned
by two masters in succession, both inhabitants of Samos, Xanthus and
Jadmon, the latter of whom gave him his liberty as a reward for his
learning and wit. One of the privileges of a freedman in the ancient
republics of Greece was the permission to take an active interest in
public affairs; and Æsop, like the philosophers Phædo, Menippus, and
Epictetus, in later times, raised himself from the indignity of a
servile condition to a position of high renown. In his desire alike to
instruct and to be instructed, he travelled through many countries, and
among others came to Sardis, the capital of the famous king of Lydia,
the great patron in that day, of learning and of learned men. He met at
the court of Crœsus with Solon, Thales, and other sages, and is
related so to have pleased his royal master, by the part he took in the
conversations held with these philosophers, that he applied to him an
expression which has since passed into a proverb, "μᾶλλον ὁ Φρύξ"--"The
Phrygian has spoken better than all."

On the invitation of Crœsus he fixed his residence at Sardis, and was
employed by that monarch in various difficult and delicate affairs of
state. In his discharge of these commissions he visited the different