Syntipas is the purported author of the ''

Seven Wise Masters The ''Seven Wise Masters'' (also called the ''Seven Sages'' or ''Seven Wise Men'') is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins. Frame Narrative The Sultan sends his son, the young Prince, to be educated away from the court in ...

'', a cycle of stories of Indian and

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

origin popular in

medieval literature Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages (that is, the one thousand years from the fall of the Western Roman Empire ca. AD 500 to the beginning of t ...

. He first appears in Arabic renditions as an

Indian philosopher Indian philosophy, the systems of thought and reflection that were developed by the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent. They include both orthodox ('' astika'') systems, namely, the Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva-Mimamsa (or Mimams ...

who lived around 100 BC. Due to the popularity of ''Seven Wise Masters'', he was also credited with a collection of Greek-derived fables in

medieval times In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and t ...

Origins and development

The framework story (

story within a story A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometime ...

) in which Syntipas plays a leading part accompanies the immensely popular cluster of tales, reminiscent of the '' 1001 Nights'', known generally in Europe as the ''History of the

'' (''Historia Septem Sapientium'') or ''Dolopathos''. It is conjectured to have been of Indian or Persian origin and was eventually transmitted into many Oriental and Western languages. A Syriac version was translated into Greek by the Byzantine author Michael Andreopoulos at the end of the 11th century under the title of ''The Book of the Philosopher Syntipas''. In his introduction, Andreopoulos describes it as a story which “derides evildoers and, towards its end, praises righteous deeds,” thus excusing a work otherwise characterised by “exoticism and eroticism”. Another version was translated from Arabic into Spanish in the thirteenth century as '' The Book of the Wiles of Women'' (Spanish: ''El Libro de los Enganos e los Asayamientos de las Mugeres''). In the Greek version, Syntipas is counsellor to King Cyrus and tutor to his son who, having taken a vow of silence for seven days, is accused by his stepmother of trying to seduce her. Over successive days there follows a competition of stories and counter-stories told by the king’s advisory philosophers and the stepmother whose advances he has rejected, thus putting off the prince’s execution until he is at liberty to tell the truth. This denouement is followed by a few other tales illustrative of the situation. Although a few of the 27 stories that appear there concern animals, the main protagonists of the majority are humans. This proportion was reversed in ''The Fables of Syntipas'', a Syriac fable collection also translated by Andreopoulos which accompanied the Syntipas romance in some manuscripts. A Latin version of these was published in 1781 by

Christian Frederick Matthaei Christian Frederick Matthaei (4 March 1744 – 26 September 1811) was a German palaeographer, classical philologist, and professor at the universities of Wittenberg and Moscow. Life Matthaei was born in 1744 in the Saxon village of Gröst, we ...

, drawing the attention of scholars interested in the transmission of Aesop’s Fables. Eventually it was demonstrated that most had been translated into Syriac from an old Greek source as recently as the 9th century or later. Nearly a quarter of the 62 appearing there are not Aesopic, but otherwise it includes such well known examples as

The Ant and the Grasshopper The Ant and the Grasshopper, alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 373 in the Perry Index. The fable describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is ...

, The North Wind and the Sun and The Farmer and the Viper.Gibbs
Aesopus
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References

Bibliography

* Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez: ''History of the Graeco-Latin Fable'' Vol.1, Brill NL 1999
pp.132-5
*Gibbs, Laura: “Syntipas” i
''Aesopus''
2009 *Perry, Ben Edward: ”The origin and date of the fables ascribed to Syntipas” in ''Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association'' Vol. 64 (1933), pp.xliv-xlv *Toth, Ida: “Authorship and authority in ''The Book of the Philosopher Syntipas''”, in ''The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature'', Walter de Gruyter 2014
pp.87-102

Origins and development

References

Bibliography

Further reading