Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The Fables of Aesop have been mostly considered, down the Centuries, as children's stories. This collection of 312 Aesop's Fables, based on the 19th Century research and literal translation from the original Greek by George Fyler Townsend, returns these allegories of human strength and human weakness to the adult audience for whom they were written.