Aesop's Fables Free Online — Which Version to Read, and Why They Differ
Aesop's Fables is the oldest book most people have read part of and almost nobody has read all of. There are 284 fables in the standard numbering, they are two paragraphs each, and every version you will find online is free — the collection is around 2,500 years old and no translation still in copyright is the one worth reading anyway.
The awkward part is that "Aesop's Fables" is not one book. It is a body of material that every era has retranslated to its own taste, and the versions differ enormously in tone. Below is how to choose.
If you want to read them all: the complete set in twelve parts
The full 284 fables, twenty-five at a time, in the standard order:
Volume 1 (1–25) · Volume 2 (26–50) · Volume 3 (51–75) · Volume 4 (76–100) · Volume 5 (101–125) · Volume 6 (126–150) · Volume 7 (151–175) · Volume 8 (176–200) · Volume 9 (201–225) · Volume 10 (226–250) · Volume 11 (251–275) · Volume 12 (276–284)
Twenty-five fables is about fifteen minutes, which makes a volume an unusually well-sized thing to read in a gap.
If you want one book: the single-volume collections
Æsop's Fables is the plain complete collection and the one to open if you just want to start. Aesop's Fables: A New Translation is V. S. Vernon Jones's 1912 version, which is the most readable prose of any of them — unfussy, and it trusts the fable to make its own point instead of hammering the moral.
The Aesop for Children is the 1919 Milo Winter edition, and it is the one to read to a child: short sentences, one fable a page, and the illustrations are the ones most adults are half-remembering.
The versions that are doing something odd
This is where it gets interesting, because for two thousand years writing your own Aesop has been a standard literary exercise.
- Æsop's Fables in Words of One Syllable — a Victorian reading primer, and a genuinely strange constraint to watch someone work under.
- Some of Æsop's Fables with Modern Instances — each fable paired with a contemporary parallel, illustrated by Randolph Caldecott.
- Aesop Dress'd — Bernard Mandeville's verse rewriting from 1704, sharper and more cynical than the source.
- The Baby's Own Aesop — every fable compressed to a rhymed couplet by W. J. Linton, with Walter Crane's illustrations. Very short and very good.
- Fables for the Frivolous — Guy Wetmore Carryl's parodies. Not Aesop, but funny about him.
La Fontaine: the other great fable tradition
Jean de La Fontaine published his Fables in France between 1668 and 1694, and they are the reason "fable" means something more literary in French than in English. He took Aesop's plots and rewrote them as verse — properly good verse, of the kind French schoolchildren still memorise. The moral is often ironic rather than instructive, and several of the best fables end by refusing to draw one.
A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine is the best English introduction. Fables of La Fontaine — a New Edition, with Notes is the fuller scholarly version, and Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks is the children's selection. If you read French, Fables de La Fontaine, livre second is in the original.
Fables that are not Aesop at all
Two worth knowing, because both are excellent and neither is what you expect:
- Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson — twenty short pieces, closer to parables, and much darker than Treasure Island would lead you to expect.
- Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce — the form used as a weapon. Two hundred–odd fables about American politics and human vanity, and the meanest funny book in the public domain.
- Fables in Slang and More Fables by George Ade — turn-of-the-century American vernacular fables that were a genuine publishing sensation in 1899 and read like nothing else.
Why fables suit reading in gaps
A fable is the shortest complete literary form there is: a situation, a reversal, and a line. That makes the whole genre unusually well matched to reading on a phone — there is no thread to hold and no chapter to be halfway through, so five minutes gets you three or four whole things rather than a fragment of one.
There are 25 fable collections in the BingeReaders free library, and the Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine pages hold everything attributed to each of them. All of it opens in the browser, free, with nothing to download.