| Summary: | This paper argues that Aesopic fables are an under-used but valuable resource for the study of Graeco-Roman cognitive religiosity. The world of fables is ruled by a restricted group of divinities – an ‘oligotheon’ – dominated by Zeus, the largely benign creator who gives living beings their characteristic qualities and regulates their behaviour. Divine-human relations typically take place informally and/or in private, rather than in public and/or through cult acts. Fables present the gods as spontaneously interested in human beings and as having a tendency to interfere uninvited in their affairs; one can sometimes even detect development in a divine-human relationship in the course of a story. A few fables play with the tensions endemic in divine-human relations, such as the unequal value of what each party brings to the other, and the paradox of human stories’ power to capture in narrative what in principle is beyond the bounds of human control. Carefully handled, fables can be taken seriously as evidence of one, sometimes unexpectedly sophisticated strain in Graeco-Roman religious thinking, which persisted over a long period of time and across a wide spectrum of society.
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