Patti Fox, age 10, of Melan, Ohio, for her question:

Was Aesop ever a real person?

Your birth certificate is acceptable proof of where and when you were born and there you stand to prove that you are a real person. But let's not expect this sort of proof for Aesop. He belonged in the Golden Age of Greece and his birth certificate would date back more than 2500 years.

A group of quarrelsome frogs asked the king of the gods to give them a ruler. Zeus gave them a log. But they did not sit on it there and think out their problems. They just squatted and complained. So Zeus sent them a friendly eel who let them do as they chose. They complained again and Zeus lost his patience. He sent them a hungry stork who solved their problems for them. He gobbled them all up. That story has been told in many lands through 25 centuries. It is one of Aesop's famous animal fables. Sensible people catch the hidden message in such a fable and think, "This could mean me."

There are experts who claim that Aesop was never a real person. Maybe a birth certificate would convince them, but no levelheaded historian expects this sort of proof from the time of ancient Greece. As a true scientist he neither accepts nor denies a fact without proof, so he looks for other evidence. However, not everyone follows this strict fact nding method. Some claim that Aesop must have been a real person just because his name was on a collection of fables written many centuries ago. Other experts firmly deny that Aesop ever existed perhaps because they do not find enough provable evidence to convince a modern court of law.

Most historians agree that the detailed proof of Aesop's life is not complete, but they do not expect that detailed evidence could survive from the year 620 B.C. They depend on writers of ancient Greece who left many reliable news records of their day. Sifting through the writings of such trustworthy reporters as Herodotus, Plutarch and Aristotle, they find references to the man Aesop and believable descriptions of events in his life. We know of ten lost books of Aesop's collected fables that were written around 300 B.C. We have later versions and maybe they were copied from earlier versions. The reliable old reporters on whom the historians depend wrote several centuries after the time of Aesop. But they were so sure of the man Aesop that they must have had trustworthy earlier reports.

The scraps of evidence can be pieced together to outline the life of Aesop, that fabulous teller of animal tales with hidden messages. He was born in slavery around 620 B.C. on the Greek island of Samos. Later he was freed and visited many cities where he was greatly respected. In Corinth he banqueted with the greatest scholars of his day. He defended a preacher in the courts. Around 560 B.C. at the ago of 60, the wise old gentleman angered the people of Delphi and a furious mob threw him down a steep cliff to a violent death.

You may agree if you choose with those who deny that Aesop ever existed. Andy prefers to believe that he was indeed a real person. A 14th century monk added his own notion that Aesop was a deformed cripple. However an early Greek writer reports that the people of Athens made a noble statue of the fabulous storyteller. If we accept the scraps of reliable evidence, perhaps we should forget the deformity and see Aesop the man as a noble figure.