Fables Fables give lessons for younger children with small stories involving animal that can talk. A fable is a special kind of story, it is short, usually has animal characters, and teaches a lesson. The World encyclopedia says “Others are short poems. Some fables are the longer than a paragraph. Others are short poems. The characters are animals, but they talk and act like people. In fact, the meaning of these animals wisely says.” (P. 2) Many of the best-known fables are said to be by Aesop, a Greek slave who lived about 600 B.C. About 200 years after Aesop’s death, the fables were collected by Demetrius