Living with the Gods in Fables of the Early Roman Empire

This essay builds on work by the author on ancient cognitive religiosity and the Aesopic corpus. Focusing on fables datable to the early principate, it argues that, despite their debt to Aesop, their representations of divine-human relations are in some ways distinctive. Three fables are read closely to show the complexities of religious thinking, particularly about relations between individuals and gods, that may be embedded in apparently naive stories.