It is said, and the remark is founded on a generous feeling amongst mankind, that when once we begin to think that the devil is not so very black as the vulgar represent him to be, we never stop till we make him as fair as an angel. In this spirit, Bentley is not content with showing that the popular notion about the deformity and ugliness of Æsop is unfounded, but adduces arguments to make us believe that he was really beautiful; and his arguments are well arranged, and not without weight. He tells us that in Plutarch's 'Convivium: "Our Esop is one of the guests, with Solon, and the other sages of Greece; there is abundance of jest and raillery there among them, and particularly upon Æsop; but nobody drolls upon his ugly face, which could hardly have escaped had he had such a bad one. Perhaps you'll say it had been rude. and indecent to touch upon a natural imperfection. Not at all, if it had been done softly and jocosely. In Plato's 'Feast,' they are very merry upon Socrates's face, that resembled old Silenus; and in this they twit Æsop for having been a slave, which was no more his fault than deformity would have been. Philostratus has given us, in two books, a description of a gallery of pictures; one of which is Æsop, with a chorus of animals about him. There he is represented smiling, and looking towards the ground in a posture of thought; but not a word of his deformity, which, were it true, must needs have been touched on in an account of a picture." This is really ingenious, and in a great degree as solid as it is ingenious. But there is still more in this line of argument in which Bentley has displayed great ability. He alludes to the statue which Phædrus tells us was erected by the Athenians in honour of Æsop, and adds: "But had he been such a monster as Planudes has made of him, a statue had been no better than a monument of his ugliit had been kinder to his memory to have let that alone. But the famous Lysippus was the statuary that made it. And must so great a hand be employed to dress up a lump of deformity?" Bentley next refers to the ness; epigram of Agathias upon this statue, and asks: "How could he, too, have omitted to speak of it, had his ugliness been so notorious? The Greeks have several proverbs about persons deformed. Our Æsop, if so very ugly, had been in the first rank of them; especially when his statue had stood there to put everybody in mind of it." The conclusion of Bentley's argument is admirable. "But I wish,” he says, "I could do that justice to the memory of our Phrygian to oblige the painters to change their pencil. For it is certain he was no deformed person, and it is probable he was very handsome. For whether he was a Phrygian, or, as others say, a Thracian, he must have been sold into Samos by a trader in slaves. And it is well known that that sort of people commonly bought up the most beautiful they could light on, because they would yield the most profit. And there is mention of two slaves, fellow-servants together, Æsop and Rhodopis, a woman; and if we may guess him by his companion and contubernalis, we must needs believe him a comely person. For that Rhodopis was the greatest beauty of all her age, and even a proverb arose in memory of it: Απανθ ̓ ὅμοια, και Ροδώπις ή καλη. Upon the whole, Bentley has been successful in relieving Æsop of the hump which the almost unanimous voice of mankind in modern days had fixed on his back, and the evidence brought to prove that he was really handsome is certainly respectable. From the time that the ugliness of sop was asserted in the romance of Planudes, till Bentley attacked and demolished the credibility of the story, the belief that Æsop was a deformed dwarf appears to have been universal even amongst the learned. Lord Bacon makes use of this belief in his "Essay on Deformity." The author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy" also assumes it as a fact. Ritterhusius, in his Commentary on Phædrus's Fables, while his attention must have been called to the history of Esop, in noticing the line where Phædrus says he has known many excellent persons with ugly faces (et turpi facie multos cognovi optimos), gives Esop as his first instance of a good man with a deformed person.* Bayle, who takes every opportunity of extolling the gifts of the mind over those of the body, tells us that intellect is able to overcome, in the eyes of a beauty, the ill effects of ugliness; Æsop," he says, "the most ugly of men, nevertheless touched the heart of Rhodope."+ It is somewhat remarkable that the old Scottish poet, Robert Henrysoun, writing between 1500 and 1508, in his Prologue to his Fables, which are full of poetical beauty, represents Esop appearing to him in a dream-not as a little hunchback, but as "the fairest man that he had ever seen," and of stature large. It may be worth mentioning, that Dr. Blomfield (in the "Museum Criticum") asserts that the life of Æsop, attributed to Planudes, is more ancient than his time. But what is more to the purpose, as proving that Bentley is so far wrong, though substantially in the right, is this: the Rev. Mr. Dyce, in his annotations on Bentley's works, quotes Huschke, a German * Phædri, "Fabulæ," p. 359. Amstel, 1698. |