Types of Women women to different animals in the poem is not an invention of Semonides, but seems to have been based on a pre-existing folk tale. Aesop's fables were attributed in ancient Greece to the sixth-century BCE slave of that name, but many of them are likely to be much older than that; one of these fables, that of Zeus and Prometheus, has a similar premise to Semonides' poem, and may have been known to him. Later poets tell similar stories, probably also inspired by these folktales. An elegiac fragment by Phocylides describes women as having originated from one of four different
Aesop's Fables adapted to the Seychelles dialect around 1900 by Rodolphine Young (1860–1932) but these remained unpublished until 1983. Jean-Louis Robert's recent translation of Babrius into Réunion creole (2007) adds a further motive for such adaptation. Fables began as an expression of the slave culture and their background is in the simplicity of agrarian life. Creole transmits this experience with greater purity than the urbane language of the slave-owner. Fables belong essentially to the oral tradition; they survive by being remembered and then retold in one's own words. When they are written down, particularly in the dominant language of instruction, they lose