Fabellarum philosophus : un aspect d’Ésope et de la fable à l’époque hellénistique et impériale

From its very beginning down to Hellenistic and Imperial times, the character of Aesop, the eponymous author of fables, is constructed among others by means of some differential features shared with a different cultural agent, the Philosopher. This development is supported by the rhetorical and literary exploitation of the Aesopic genre, conceived as a kind of alternative and often polemical discourse. This image becomes final in the fictitious late biography known as the Vita Aesopi, which represents Aesop as an apparent “anti-philosopher” who indeed strives to assert some authentically philosophical values