Aesop's fables have been told for over 2,500 years — the tortoise and the hare, the fox and the grapes, the boy who cried wolf. But the man himself is a phantom. Ancient sources disagree on everything: whether he was a slave, where he came from, how he died, and whether he existed at all. The most famous storyteller in Western history may be as fictional as his talking animals.

This episode investigates the Aesop question — weighing the ancient biographical traditions against the scholarly arguments that he was a composite figure or a convenient attribution for anonymous folk wisdom.

• The ancient biographical traditions — slave, Phrygian, thrown from a cliff at Delphi
• The contradictions between sources and the evidence that the biography was invented after the fables
• The oral tradition theory — why fables do not ne ...