The Gift of Logos. The Life of Aesop and Socrates’ Poetic Initiation.

Aesop’s Muse-initiation as described in the Life, I argue, is crucially connected with a defin­ing feature of Aesopic fables, namely the major role of speaking animals. Moreover, I argue that the scene closely recalls a number of passages in Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates ech­oes the Dichterweihe tradition in terms of both poetic inspira­tion and conversion to writing. Combined together, the passages under examination amount to a literary manifesto pointing to the canonisation of prose genres.