Aesop was an ancient Greek fabulist, or writer/teller of fables. Fables are very short stories, often only one paragraph long, that are designed to teach a moral, or lesson, about how to live a good life to the reader or listener. Fables typically feature animals or inanimate objects as characters, although the characters are anthropomorphized, or given human qualities, such as the ability to speak. Aesop lived around 600 B.C.E., and was a slave. It is not clear whether Aesop was a real, individual person, and he never wrote his fables down himself; he was an oral storyteller instead. However, over the centuries, other people wrote down collections of fables attributed to Aesop, and these fables remain some of the most well-known and celebrated today. Aesop was the author of ''The Ant and the Grasshopper'' fable, as well as other famous fables, such as ''The Tortoise and the Hare'' and ''The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.'' Aesop's fables often include a clearly spelled out moral at the end, stating in no uncertain terms what the educational point of the story was. However, this is not always included, and sometimes readers are left to interpret the moral for themselves. The moral of fables is typically not too difficult to decipher, though, since the main point of these stories is to convey a moral.

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