THK PANCHA-TANTRA FABLES 435
of attention. All castes, without any distinction whatever, are allowed to read it. The moral of some of these fables might possibly seem dangerous, because calculated to teach but, speaking
how to do evil rather than how to avoid it; generally, their teachings are praiseworthy enough.
The first of these fables of the Pancha-tantra explains how impostors and clever knaves succeed by artifice and falsehood in causing harm to persons whom they wish to ruin, or in sowing dissension among the most intimate of friends. The object which the author has in view appears to be to warn princes and other great personages, for whose instruction, by the way. the work seems to be principally written, against the intrigues of mean parasites and hypocritical courtiers who throng their palaces, and who, by
base flattery, calumny, deceit, and intrigue, succeed in ruining and supplanting their best friends and most faithful servants.
:
The following is a short resume of the story
In the city of Patali-puram there reigned a king called
Suka Darusha, who had a faithful minister named Amara-
Sati. This good prince had three sons, who were noted for their stupidity and vulgarity, and who were viewed by their father with the most extreme dissatisfaction. The minister Amara-Sati, conscious of the sorrow which was
fable, and Hindustan was the birthplace, if not of the original of these
tales, at least of the oldest shape in which they still exist. The Panchatantra have been translated into almost every language, and adapted by most modern fabulists. The Kalila wa Damna( from the names of
two jackals in the first story), or fables of Bidpai or Pilpay, is an Arab version made about 760 a. d. From the Hebrew version of Rabbi Joel,
John of Capua produced a Latin translation about the end of the fifteenth century, whence all later imitations are derived. The Hitopadesa, or
' friendly instruction,' is a modernized form of the same work, and of it there are three translations into English by Dr. Charles Wilkins, Sir
William Jones, and Professor F. Johnson.
From Hindustan the Sanskrit fables passed to China, Thibet, and
Persia; and they must have readied Greece at an early date, for many
of the fables which passed under the name of Aesop are identical with
those of the East. Aesop to us is little more than a name, though, if wc may trust a passing notice in Herodotus, he must have lived in the
sixth century B. C. Probably his fables were never written down, though several are ascribed to him by Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other
Greek writers, and Plato represents Socrates as beguiling his last days by versifying such as he remembered. Ed.