Author Description

While most people think that Greek and Latin are dead languages, classical ideas and expression live on right up to modern times. Aesop, the teller of animal stories is familiar to generations going back over two millennia. But Aesop also was a teller of proverbs, only recently collected together from scattered sources and now translated into English for the first time. These proverbs are an older sort of wisdom, older than Greek philosophy itself, having a rustic, plain spoken, often earthly common sense style that at once amuses as well as instructs at the same time. These ancient zingy one-liners will frequently invoke a modern era one-liner that is surprisingly similar. The reader will also discover that when it comes to human common sense there really is nothing new under the sun. But this book does more than that! But using a Commentary for each of these proverbs, this book lets the reader understand how our distant ancestors, the founders of Western civilization, understood these proverbs in their own times. The Commentary weaves the nearly 200 proverbs into a rich tapestry of 85 Aesop fables, 35 Greek quotations and about 100 Latin quotations. The result is amusing, delightful, inspiring, edifying all at the same time. What emerges is a triumph of the human spirit to evaluate plain-spoken common sense as the final and absolute measure of all things. This is a book you will never forget.