In 1952, even before he assumed his first professorship in Italy, La Penna proposed a history of the ancient fable, whose title, The Ancient Wisdom of Slaves (L’antica sapienza degli schiavi), anticipates that of the present book. The proposed volume would have covered many of topics treated in this book, with chapters on Phaedrus, the Life of Aesop, and ideological analysis. The principal elements of La Penna’s interpretation of fables were then already in place: the genre reflects a pessimistic vision in which one must accept a world dominated by power, power that could only be blunted by superior cunning — the world of the lion and the fox. La Penna hypothesizes that this pessimism reflects a way of looking at the world characteristic of the weak, a kind of pragmatic realism that he contrasts with the heroic idealism of those in power. The book La Penna envisioned would have reflected not only the ideological views that he acquired at university but also the world into which he had been born in rural Campania, a world of material scarcity and limited aspirations. La Penna, however, never wrote this book although he would return frequently to its themes in essays, reviews, and published talks. Editors Giovanni Niccoli and Stefano Grazzani have assembled into seven chapters a selection of this work, pieces published for the most part in the 1960s and 1990s. Rather than follow the chronology of the original publications, they have chosen an arrangement that displays the breadth and variety of La Penna’s scholarship on the fable and culminates in an essay that makes the case for his ideological reading.