The images of animals have a parabolic meaning. The donkey is use to express the characteristics of a hard working and stupid man, the sheep - of the gentle and harmless, the snake - of the evil, wicked and unkind, and the wolf exposes the nature of an evil and cruel man.
In that sense Aesop reviews the essential morals of his time, giving them a humorous evaluation. Aesop often relates people with animals and plants. This particular sense of expression has been combined with Aesop's fables throughout the centuries. This was started from ancient Greece, going into Rome, Byzantium and reaching the civilizations to civilizations and surviving until today. Since the time of Aesop, the fable was a powerful tool to expose and ridicule our characteristics and vices as people and as a society.
In ancient Greek and Roman education, the fable was one of the exercises in prose composition and public speaking—wherein students would be asked to learn fables, increase upon them, formulate their own and finally use them as convincing examples in their speeches. Plato wrote in "Phaedo" that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses.
Aesop's fables may be short, but it offers a wise lesson in the end. It helps us to discover ourselves. It helps us to find out the hidden lesson behind the images presented by the author.
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