How do fables teach? Reading the world of the fable in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit narratives

Fable, which the rhetorician Aelius Theon defined during the first century C.E. in his Progymnasmata as muthos pseudês eikonizôn alêtheian or "a false tale picturing reality" (van Dijk), has primarily been examined in modern scholarship (Perry et al.) as narrative, not as illustration intended to stimulate thought by appeals to imagination. Theon's emphasis on eikôn ("image") and the idea of the fable as a metaphor (van Dijk) suggest that the fable is similar to another rhetorical device, the ekphrasis or descriptive narrative, and needs to be understood as a mode of visualization. Aristotle earlier defined metaphor in part as a way of putting an image depicting activity before the eyes of the audience. Modern ideas of signification—which reflect the speaker's or writer's role in creating a sign and the audience's role in interpreting this coded information—accordingly suggest how the ancient fable can function visually as a way of conveying knowledge about a problem or situation. Folkloric rhetoric (Abrahams) provides a method for unraveling the complex layers of speech and narrative found in fable by examining three structural levels: the materials of language and narrative, the themes constructing the dramatic conflict, and the context connecting the fable to the external world. The fable—when read as a complex made up of narrative event, image and metaphorical trope—creates a miniature world that encodes a problem or conflict within a fictional world. This world of the fable (cp Nørgaard) can be seen as inhabited by animal and other characters which speak to the behaviors of humans in early Indo-European societies such as Greece, Rome and India. What modern literary critics of characterization reveal as partial forms of characterization appear in fables to explain how the workers, rulers and thinkers of these societies may have functioned in relationship to one another. Rather than being a sub-literary form for entertaining children, fables in these societies actually communicate beyond the narrative itself by depicting workers who persevere or resist labor, rulers fragmented to demonstrate the use and abuse of power, and thinkers who educate audiences to perceive solutions to their problems.