This project will develop a new perspective on Aesopica by emphasizing the conditions under which this prototypically oral form of storytelling came to be collected and written down in antiquity.  By turning attention to the goals and motivations of those who wrote Aesop’s fables in Greek and Latin, and by considering what the figure of Aesop may have stood for as an authorial figure and literary model, my project seeks to situate the Aesopic tradition in the learned, elite contexts from which our surviving texts inevitably emerged. My interest in processes of writing and archiving will lead to questions about the putative lowness of fable and, more broadly, to fundamental questions about our access to the popular cultures of the ancient world.