The Aesop for Children - Kostenloses Hörbuch

The Aesop for Children is an American collection of fables published in 1919, with pictures by the illustrator Milo Winter. It gathers more than a hundred of the short animal stories traditionally credited to Aesop, the storyteller said to have lived in ancient Greece around the sixth century BC, and retells them in plain, simple language for young listeners and readers.

Each fable is only a page or so long. Animals that talk and act like people find themselves in small dilemmas that expose a human strength or failing: pride, greed, laziness, vanity, kindness or quick thinking. Familiar pieces include the hare who races the tortoise, the fox who decides the grapes he cannot reach must be sour, the shepherd boy who raises false alarms about a wolf, and the lion helped by a mouse. Every story finishes with a one-line moral that states its lesson directly.

These fables have been retold for well over two thousand years, and many of their morals have passed into everyday speech. Because the stories are brief and self-contained, the collection works well for bedtime listening, for early readers, and for families or teachers who want short tales that start conversations about honesty, patience and fairness. Adults may also enjoy revisiting the sources of so many common sayings.