Fables are probably the best known and most widely used stories in our mythological traditions. These are simple stories that frequently include animal characters. What is their appeal? Do they offer us more than a laugh?
In this episode we make some leaps, from a fable about frogs to practical philosophy, to an angry goddess, an ancient Greek comedy, and the mythological history of frogs.
I hope you find something entertaining and useful.
“We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.”
— Loren Eisley, The Unexpected Universe
Transcript of Fables, frogs, and philosophy
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
There was once a country of frogs, all free creatures with plenty of fresh water reeds, mud, and food who nonetheless sought to change their situation. So begins a very short story of the sort that we call fables attributed to Aesop.
Since National Poetry Month is just ended, and the classical versions of the fable are poems, I really wanted to use one of the English translations that retains this form, to tell the fable to you. Alas, all of them are a little, well, the language is a little dated. So, although they’re great fun to read, I think they might be a little hard for us to share in this context.
I’m going to post one of the English translations on my website, in the notes to this episode, along with a couple of useful links to some others. And in the meantime, you will have to be satisfied with my prose version of this short little fable.
The Frogs Asking for A King
There was once a country of frogs, all free creatures, with plenty of fresh water, and reeds, and mud, and food. However, they were not happy. Some of them were disturbed by the behavior of their neighbors, and others of them were not happy with their own lack of character. They called on Zeus to send them a king. A king, who would provide order and keep them in check.
Well first, Zeus threw down a log. The log landed was such a terrific splash that it scared the frogs, them being rather timid people. They dove into the mud and hid. But after a while, a couple of them came out to investigate. Before long, they realized that it was a log. That it was not some monstrous fro who had been sent down to rule the bog, but rather a block of wood. And they began to use it as a diving board and as a place to sun.
They got bolder and bolder and soon perched on the royal shoulder. And when their relief and calm gave way to disgust, they resumed their prayers to Zeus, to send them a king.
“We want a king,” the people said, “A real king, one that will move and rule.” Well, Zeus laughed—and then he sent down a water snake. A water snake, who caught and slew them without measure, a king who ate their carcasses at pleasure. Now the frogs complained. They complained bitterly and Zeus said, “You think that your government is bad? You should have kept what at first you had.”
The situation you’re in now is your own damn fault.
I’ll leave it to you to consider the applicability of this fable to current circumstances. What I want to talk about is fables and frogs and philosophy. Kind of crazy to realize, don’t you think, that a story like this was being told more than 2000 years ago? There are so many things that humans have to learn over and over and over again, given our nature and that of life itself. What endures? The wisdom gathered by one generation is hard to hold onto and it doesn’t always translate well into what comes next.
Stories like this fable have been an important tool, perhaps our most important tool, for teaching and passing along valuable information and insight. Fables are a very old form of storytelling. The word “fable” comes from Latin. It means “story” and is derived from the root fari, “to speak.” Fables are part of mythological traditions around the world and are probably the best known and most well-used part of the mythological canon. Some fables are so well-known that the titles are enough to make the point.
You probably know and perhaps invoke titles or aphorisms derived from fables whose details you may or may not recall. For example, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” The Ant and the Grasshopper,” “The Tortoise and the Hare,” or my personal favorite, “Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire.”
What is it about fables that makes them so compelling? Fables are short, provocative, and often funny. They’re easy to remember. Fables work by analogy, which this is how we learn. We learn by comparing things to each other and discovering the similarities and differences. Analogy is also a recognized form of philosophical argument. Many invite philosophical reflection.
What comes to mind when you think about the frogs and their desire for a king, their willingness to give up their democracy and freedom for a monarch who would maintain order? I couldn’t begin to trace the outlines of this tension between freedom and order, individual action and the common good, and the burden of personal freedom, in the history of human thought. These are perennial, existential, philosophical questions. Nietzsche and Erich Fromm come to mind as modern influences. Now, the fable is short. It’s tempting to move on. But you may be rewarded if you sit with it for awhile.
Fables deal with complex ideas in a simple form. Over the centuries, commentators and translators of these tales have often disregarded the nuances and pressed the stories into service to support moral agendas. As is the case with any moral truth, if you take what’s handed out at face value, you may end up the fool or the villian. In any event, you miss the opportunity to develop your own authority and conscience.
A fable can be very good to think with. In fact, the ancient Greeks recognized fables as a practical philosophy, a philosophy that dealt with real life issues faced by regular people, as opposed to the ivory tower. A philosophy that can help you figure out how to act in a given situation with compassion or virtue, while recognizing the difficulty or impossibility, of coming up with an absolute definition or principle that is universally applicable.
I’m talking about the Greeks because this is the origin of our frog story but the use of fables as teaching tools and a form of practical philosophy is ubiquitous. So is the struggle for absolutes and the mounting arguments against the possibility of their ever being established.
Animals are often the central characters in fables. Let’s think about this for a minute, before we consider the possible significance of frogs in our story. Today, many of us have relatively little contact with animals, especially animals freely doing their thing in nature. Animals of all types were a very big part of daily life in the past, however. Animals were physically present, and the uncountable ways in which they determined the form of human life– what was eaten and worn, the raw material for everything from candles to paper– early texts were written on animal skins- transportation and tools, protection, valuable property for barter and religious sacrifice, the list goes on.
The use of animals and the human partnership with them was very visible, in a way that it isn’t today, for many of us.
Animals were, and they arguably still are, despite their relative invisibility in our daily routines, our most accessible partners in consciousness. The ones who, through their being and ways of living, we observe and compare to ourselves. The animal Others are essential to the ongoing project of defining what it is to be human, human nature, and human ways of life.
In childhood, when we begin to construct our identities, we look at animals. When we learn body parts, we discover what has ears like us, and what doesn’t, for example. I know this sounds very basic but the fact that it’s very basic doesn’t render it unimportant.
Animals and the information that we collect about them, and the way that they inspire us, are a crucial basis for our thought. A crucial basis for the images and perceptions that become analogy, information, metaphor, idea, meaning. This is a collective, ongoing project and a personal one, which is a point that I’ll return to later.
In doing my research for this episode, I came across some information about Aesop that feels relevant to our discussion of fables, philosophy, and animal characters. Aesop is presumed to have lived sometime in the 6th century BCE. Details about his life are mentioned by later writers and philosophers, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch, for example. But it’s not clear that there ever was an Aesop, or if there was such a person, that he authored the fables that are attributed to him.
According to the story, which may or may not have biographical truth, Aesop was an especially ugly man, born a slave in Greece, who ended up in Rome. I think it’s interesting that this story about Aesop has been cultivated, or was cultivated by thinkers in classical times. It suggests that this story itself informs the fables by providing context. In the story, Aesop was born a slave and ended up in Rome. In ancient Greek society, his status as a slave put him on the boundary between human and animal. Like animals, slaves had no legal identities. It was said that they had no speech because they couldn’t represent themselves in public. They couldn’t speak up for themselves.
So, we have an author who was seen as a speechless animal, offering stories in which animals speak.
Like the fables, this story of Aesop can be read a number of ways. One can conclude that Aesop and slaves generally, like animals, will always be such and can’t change their status because they don’t actually have speech. If you are among the rich and powerful and secure in your position, certain that you know what’s up and will never lose your privileged grasp, this interpretation may seem obvious. If you are less complacent and more philosophical, the parallels between the story of the author and the stories that he tells may remind you that the lines between human and animals are blurry, and reveal an interdependency and shifting locus of power. If you are one of the common people, or perhaps a slave yourself, you may notice that subversive meaning is conveyed below the obvious.
It wouldn’t be the first time that cleverness prevailed.
The appropriate animal has to be chosen in order for the analogy, and so the fable, to work. The tremendous variety has led our species to construct a large and nuanced vocabulary of traits and qualities symbolized by animals, a vocabulary that is used to point at our similarities to them, and on occasion our differences. Although modern life is far from the original animal inspiration as I’ve said, the symbolic vocabulary and web of associations has been elaborated on over millennia. We are familiar with it to some degree. In fact, we can’t extricate ourselves from it. As I said earlier, our relationship with animals has been part of our species process of self-identification from the beginning.
Which brings us to the frogs and some thoughts about the use of frogs in this fable. Why did Aesop use frogs? Here are a few of my thoughts about this. There is a physical similarity between the forms of frogs and humans. Frogs have longer back legs and shorter “arms” in the front, and faces. So they do remind you of the human body. Frogs congregate, they converse, and they are always by water. A frog lives a good portion of its life in the water and of course humans don’t, and yet we do seek out and live in proximity to stable water sources whenever possible.
Frogs often seem lighthearted and playful. It’s easy to imagine that they could be frivolous or quick to leap into things, and they live through clear, visible stages. They are other stories about frogs making a leap that was ill-advised. What do you think?
One is the myth of Leto, the mother of the goddess Artemis and her twin brother, the god Apollo. Leto was a Titan goddess from the pre-Olympian generation of gods and the father of her children was Zeus. Hera, Zeus’s wife, found out about Leto. She was jealous and in the manner common to her myths, sought her revenge by making Leto’s life hell. When Leto’s time came, Hera forced her to travel hither and yon, in a frantic search for a safe place to deliver her children.
Now, the frog has an ancient mythological history. To explore this, let’s leap off from the story with its Greek origins. Are there other references to frogs in Greek mythology that may have been familiar to listeners of this fable? Two come to mind.
After a very long and difficult labor, in which the infant Artemis helped her mother bring forth Apollo, Leto assumed the shape of a she-wolf and took her babies to Lycia. There she assumed human form and stopped by a spring to refresh herself and her infants. Some herdsmen were nearby. When they saw the tired woman, they stirred up the water and muddied it, to make it unpalatable. Leto turned them into frogs.
The other reference that comes to mind is a comedy written by Aristophanes called “The Frogs.” The play was performed in 405 BCE, a year after the death of another great playwright, Euripides. The play begins with the god of poetry and theater, Dionysos, and his slave Xanthias. Dionysos is frustrated by the quality of Greek drama since Euripides’ death and decides to journey to the underworld to bring Euripides back from the dead. Xanthias, being a slave, must go with him and this partnership is the vehicle for many jokes, some vulgar, and most at the expense of the god.
Because Dionysos doesn’t know how to make the journey, he goes to visit his half-brother Heracles, who has been there. Dionysos shows up dressed in a lionskin, in the fashion of Heracles, and Heracles finds this very amusing. The costume doesn’t fit the character of the effeminate style of Dionysos and does the god think that what he wears to Hades is going to matter anyway? So, when Dionysos asks Heracles how to get to the underworld, Heracles suggests that he drown, poison, or hang himself. “Very funny,” says Dionysos. Heracles tells him how to get to lake Acheron and Charon’s ferry, which is the traditional approach for those who wish not only to go to the underworld, but to return.
Dionysos and Xanthias head off. When they arrive, Charon won’t let Xanthias onto the ferry because he is a slave. He has to take the long way and walk around the lake. Charon then forces Dionysos to help with the rowing. The ferry slowly makes its way across the lake. A great chorus of frogs sing a loud, repetitive song. Bereek, bereek, bereek. Bereek, bereek, bereek Dionysos thinks this will drive him crazy!
Finally, Dionysos and Xanthias are reunited on the far shore. They have a series of adventures that comment on the relationships between identity, costume, playing parts, life consequences, and transformation. When they arrive at the Hall of Hades, they find that the playwright Aeschylus, who proceeded Euripides in death, has issued a challenge to the newcomer. The two playwrights are engaged in a contest to win the seat of Best Poet in the Underworld. Dionysos is called upon to judge.
I leave it to you to find out how the play ends. It’s a very funny work and worth the effort of tracking down a translation from your local library. It’s very accessible reading. And the irritating song of the frogs in the murky underworld lake is the sole appearance of the amphibian. That is what we have to work on, for our purposes here.
So, let’s look at these two additional references to frogs in the Greek canon. Now, in the myth of Leto, I imagine the goddess turned the herdsmen into frogs because they were acting in a frog-like manner in stirring up the water and mud. Their action provided the form of the curse. In other words, if you like playing in the water so much, try living a life of it, I imagine her saying.
The use of frogs in Aristophanes’ play takes us a little deeper into the mythological history of the frog. Frogs in the underworld express the transformation that takes place in death and the fact that death is essential to the recycling that makes the birth of the new possible. The life cycle of the frog, from egg to tadpole to adult frog, and its connection to water–the womb– and later as an adult, to the earth as well, is easily taken as metaphor for metamorphoses and transformation.
The frog is a symbol of primeval matter, the origin of all material manifestation. In Vedic mythology, the Great Frog is the undifferentiated matter that supports the earth.
Frogs are also keenly attuned to sound. They have a special organic called the tympanic organ, over each ear canal. They sing distinctive songs and water, which is their primary home, is an excellent conductor of sound. In Aristophanes’ play, the matter of the frogs is the repetitive sameness of their song. Could these frogs be poets, reduced to this state? Or perhaps the quality of their talent, or lack thereof, in life, is revealed in the underworld?
The play is about poets, the quality of their songs, and the necessity for good poetry in the living world. Aristophanes wants to us think about the transformative power of the arts. If you’re curious about this, you now have another reason to investigate the play. But I think we need to consider these themes more broadly. Each of has a poem to live, a song to sing, after all. That may be why we’re here. And it is part of our response to life and death.
What do we make of life, living as we do, with an awareness of our mortality? Do we make a tragedy or comedy? Is the focus the ending or the enjoyment of being here?
Very long ago, the frog was a face of the great goddess, the cycle of material and spiritual life. Over time, as the aspects of this goddess figure were differentiated into a pantheon of deities, the frog was associated with Aphrodite and with the Egyptian goddess Heket.Both of these goddesses are connected to lunar energies, to moisture, and fluidity. They also protected the dead on their way to the afterlife, the sunless world.
Over time, the birth stage of the cycle of transformations came to dominate the character of Aphrodite and Heket. Heket the frog goddess– she was often represented as a woman with a frog head– became the goddess of childbirth and midwifery. An important image from her mythology is the annual flooding of the Nile, a flooding that replenished and watered the soil, bringing green life and many, many frogs. The flooding of the Nile sustained the life of the region.
In the case of the Greek Aphrodite, her role as the escort and protector of the dead continued in the symbolic form of one her other animals, the dove. Her frog aspect was derived from the animal’s imagined libidinous, their energetic mating and the vast quantity of eggs produced. Aphrodite as the goddess of sexual love and relatedness. And yet the fecund creativity in Aphrodite and the image of the frog eggs is more than sexual.
I’ve talked about Aphrodite in other recent episodes, so you may recall that she is the goddess of beauty and of love in the particular, and so a creative perspective in the arts and the art of life, as well as the erotic. In other words, the eggs themselves are creative possibility.
Earlier I said that animals are a crucial basis for our thought, for the images and perceptions that become analogy, information, metaphor, idea, meaning. Today, the common lack of knowledge about animals and the other-than-human beings in the world limits our ability to understand all the analogies and symbols in our stories have to offer, and so to miss nuances of meaning. I think this matters. If the old stories are our human heritage, the thread that connects us to the mythic dimension of our lives, this is a real loss.
I encourage to investigate the characters in stories that intrigue you, to go beyond what you know or you think that you know, to make new understanding and insights possible. This is so easy to do–especially with the internet– and yet, so difficult. You have to overcome the cultural training to dismiss and undervalue our storied life and the idiosyncracies of our attention.
The habitual dismissal is part of the “nothing but” culture as C.G. Jung called it, the banality that we cultivate through our reductivist view of the world. The loss of wonder at it all. That wonder is our aliveness, my friend.
In these times, dismissing simple stories, and especially stories with animal characters who are talking or doing other things that we consider to be human, is easy. Merely use the word “anthropomorphic” and the story is judged as unsophisticated, even silly, a story suitable for children who are naive and can afford such fantasies. Adults who anthropomorphize or find too much enjoyment in stories that attract this criticism, are considered sentimental and immature. So, we are taught.
The difference between anthropomorphizing and truly being in the world with the Others is worth contemplating and teasing out together. I plan to talk more about anthropomorphizing and the great many animals in myths, in future episodes. I wonder how myths might help us develop a mature relationship to other animals? What are the implications of such a deepening, for our personal lives and human societies?
In The Unexpected Universe, Loren Eisley writes, “We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.”
And now, welcome to new email subscribers Chris and Mary. Welcome! If you’re new to Myth Matters, or if you haven’t visited the Mythic Mojo website for a while, I invite you to head over and check out some of my other offerings. I can work with you in a variety of ways, to bring the insights gained from story to the quests and challenges in your life.
Many thanks to the patrons and supporters of this podcast. Today I want to give a shout out to long time patrons, Mark, Fred, and Belinda. Thank you so much! If you are finding something of value here in Myths Matters and can afford $5 or $10/month, I hope that you’ll join me on Patreon too. The link to my Patreon program and the benefits my patrons receive is on the mythic mojo website.
I invite you to email me if you have comments or questions about today’s episode. I always enjoy hearing from you.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself, and until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life alive.
Here is an English translation of the fable as poem.
The Frogs Asking A King
A certain commonwealth aquatic,
Grown tired of order democratic,
By clamouring in the ears of Jove, effected
Its being to a monarch’s power subjected.
Jove flung it down, at first, a king pacific.
Who nathless fell with such a splash terrific,
The marshy folks, a foolish race and timid,
Made breathless haste to get from him hid.
They dived into the mud beneath the water,
Or found among the reeds and rushes quarter.
And long it was they dared not see
The dreadful face of majesty,
Supposing that some monstrous frog
Had been sent down to rule the bog.
The king was really a log,
Whose gravity inspired with awe
The first that, from his hiding-place
Forth venturing, astonished, saw
The royal blockhead’s face.
With trembling and with fear,
At last he drew quite near.
Another followed, and another yet,
Till quite a crowd at last were met;
Who, growing fast and strangely bolder,
Perched soon on the royal shoulder.
His gracious majesty kept still,
And let his people work their will.
Clack, clack! what din beset the ears of Jove?
“We want a king,” the people said, “to move!”
The god straight sent them down a crane,
Who caught and slew them without measure,
And gulped their carcasses at pleasure;
Whereat the frogs more woefully complain.
“What! what!” great Jupiter replied;
“By your desires must I be tied?
Think you such government is bad?
You should have kept what first you had;
Which having blindly failed to do,
It had been prudent still for you
To let that former king suffice,
More meek and mild, if not so wise.
With this now make yourselves content,
Lest for your sins a worse be sent.”
Links to material you might find interesting
Christopher Smart’s 1753 English translation of The Fables of Phaedrus at Gutenberg
Phaedrus was the first to translate Aesop’s Fables from the Greek into latin and preserved their poetic meter.
