Aesop's Fables have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop: The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that "Aesop the fable writer" was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE. Among references in other writers, Aristophanes, in his comedy "The Wasps", represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in "Phaedo "that Socrates whiled away his time in prison turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into
The Greek Slave between "The Greek Slave" and the slaves who were concurrently working on the plantations of the American South. Such parallels were initially lost upon much of the statue's American audience, but as the American Civil War neared, abolitionists began to take the piece as a symbol, and to compare it with "the Virginian Slave". The comparison was the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. The statue also inspired a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning called "". Abolitionist Maria White Lowell wrote that "The Greek Slave" "was a vision of beauty that one must always look back to the