How are Homer and Aesop alike?

Question

I need a lot of details and references please.

Answer 1

Both were Greeks
Not much is known about both their lives
Both wrote texts that were to form foundations for Western literary and philosophical thought.

AESOP
- the supposed author of a collection of Greek fables, almost certainly a legendary figure. Various attempts were made in ancient times to establish him as an actual personage. Herodotus in the 5th century BC said that he had lived in the 6th century and that he was a slave, and Plutarch in the 1st century AD made him adviser to Croesus, the 6th-century-BC king of Lydia.


HOMER
- the facts of Homer's life -- when he was born or died, where he lived, who he was -- remain unknown and shall most likely never be known, many scholars have doubted the existence of a "Homer" and point to his texts as the work of a collection of authors over a long period of time.
- No other texts in the Western imagination occupy as central a position in the self-definition of Western culture as the two epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey . They both concern the great defining moment of Greek culture, the Trojan War. Whether or not this war really occurred, or occurred as the Greeks narrate it, is a relatively unanswerable question. We know that such a war did take place around a city that quite likely was Troy, that Troy was destroyed utterly, but beyond that it's all speculation. This war, however, fired the imaginations of the Greeks and became the defining cultural moment in their history. Technically, the war wasn't fought by "Greeks" in the classical sense, it was fought by the Myceneaens; the Greek culture that we call "classical" is actually derived from a different group of Greeks, the Dorians and Ionians. However, the Greeks saw the Trojan War as the first moment in history when the Greeks came together as one people with a common purpose. This unification, whether it was myth or not, gave the later Greeks a sense of national or cultural identity, despite the fact that their governments were small, disunified city-states. Since the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining moment in the establishment of "Greek character," they were obsessed about the events of that great war and told them repeatedly with great variety; as the Greek idea of cultural identity changed, so did their stories about the Trojan War.
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Answer 2

Literature by Aesop
• Fables
http://www.elook.org/literature/aesop/fables/

http://www.aesopfables.com/

The Odyssey by Homer Written 800 B.C.E

Study Guides:

These links will give you a chapter by chapter summary of the book, character analysis, plot and much more, so that you will be able to answer literary questions.

http://www.bookrags.com/notes/od/

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/odyssey/

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-99.html

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmOdyssey02.asp

Study Guides and Summaries:

http://www.literaturesummary.com/

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/

http://www.studylit.com/

http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/works.htm

http://www.antistudy.com/

http://www.freebooknotes.com/

http://www.free-booknotes.com/