Abraham Lincoln was shaped by one book more than any other. You might guess that would be the Bible, given the ease with which he would quote and allude to ideas from it in his speeches and letters over the years. But Lincoln’s faith was something that evolved more slowly over time, especially after the tragedies that rocked him later in life.
Instead, when he was young, he fell in love with Aesop’s fables (our favorite edition for kids and adults is here). This was a book he read, “over and over again,” one friend observed. These fables, written by a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece around 620-564 BC, spoke to Lincoln’s soul. He memorized large chunks of the book. His mind, which had always tended towards anecdotes and story, just locked on to Aesop’s brilliant method for teaching complicated moral lessons in clever little fictions about mice and lions and foxes. It became a lens through which he came to understand human nature, the language with which he would try to communicate reality through. You know his famous line about how a ‘house divided against itself cannot stand?’ That was Jesus he was quoting, but he did it next to a recounting of Aesop’s story about the ‘bundle of sticks’ (Aesop has a second fable illustrating the same point but told about a lion and three bulls).
Where would Lincoln have been had he not been introduced to this wisdom early? Where might the country have ended up without that wisdom making its way into his brain as a child? And the same could be said for thousands of generations of men and women who were introduced to Aesop and his lessons—whether they were learning about sour grapes or golden eggs or that slow and steady win the race. And the fact that you almost certainly recognized at least a couple of these phrases or ideas without hearing the full stories demonstrates how indelibly they have made their way through western culture.
However old your kids (or grandkids) are, you should take some time to read them these stories.Talk about them with them. Illustrate the lessons and ideas you want your kids to know through them. They are timeless for a reason. It’s because they’re true, because they work.
P.S. We carry the Word Cloud Classics edition of Aesop’s Fables at the Painted Porch and consider this idea of reading fables to kids so important, we wrote two of our own fables about the Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus—The Boy Who Would Be King and The Girl Who Would Be Free—which you pick up at the Daily Dad Store and read to your kids and grandkids today!
