Aesop is the name attached to a vast body of Greek animal fables, though almost nothing about him is certain — ancient tradition casts him as a slave and storyteller of the 6th century BCE, and scholars agree the surviving corpus accreted over centuries from many hands. The tales circulated orally for generations before being written down and repeatedly re-translated, which is why their pithy English “morals” are usually the work of later editors rather than Aesop himself. The Four Oxen and the Lion (Perry Index 372) is a genuinely ancient fable in that tradition, teaching that a group divided is easily destroyed.