Syntipas ( el, Συντίπας) is the Greek form of a name also rendered Sindibad ( ar, سندباد), Sandbad ( fa, سندباد), Sendabar ( he, סנדבר), Çendubete (

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...

) and Siddhapati ( sa, सिद्धपति) in other versions of the popular Arabic romance in which he appears as a leading character. Because of its popularity, he was also credited with a collection of Greek-derived fables in mediaeval times.

Origins and development

The framework story in which Syntipas plays a leading part accompanies the immensely popular cluster of tales, reminiscent of the '' 1001 Nights'', known generally in Europe as the ''History of the

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'' (''Historia Septem Sapientium'') or ''Dolopathos''. It is conjectured to have been of Indian or Persian origin and was eventually transmitted into many Oriental and Western languages. A

Syriac Syriac may refer to: *Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic *Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region * Syriac alphabet ** Syriac (Unicode block) ** Syriac Supplement * Neo-Aramaic languages a ...

version was translated into Greek by the Byzantine author Michael Andreopoulos at the end of the 11th century under the title of ''The Book of the Philosopher Syntipas''. In his introduction, Andreopoulos describes it as a story which “derides evildoers and, towards its end, praises righteous deeds,” thus excusing a work otherwise characterised by “exoticism and eroticism”. Another version was translated from Arabic into Spanish in the thirteenth century as '' The Book of the Wiles of Women'' (Spanish: ''El Libro de los Enganos e los Asayamientos de las Mugeres''). In the Greek version, Syntipas is counsellor to King Cyrus and tutor to his son who, having taken a vow of silence for seven days, is accused by his stepmother of trying to seduce her. Over successive days there follows a competition of stories and counter-stories told by the king’s advisory philosophers and the stepmother whose advances he has rejected, thus putting off the prince’s execution until he is at liberty to tell the truth. This denouement is followed by a few other tales illustrative of the situation. Although a few of the 27 stories that appear there concern animals, the main protagonists of the majority are humans. This proportion was reversed in ''The Fables of Syntipas'', a Syriac fable collection also translated by Andreopoulos which accompanied the Syntipas romance in some manuscripts. A Latin version of these was published in 1781 by

Christian Frederick Matthaei Christian Frederick Matthaei (4 March 1744, in Mücheln – 26 September 1811), a Thuringian, palaeographer, classical philologist Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally r ...

, drawing the attention of scholars interested in the transmission of

Aesop’s Fables Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to m ...

. Eventually it was demonstrated that most had been translated into Syriac from an old Greek source as recently as the 9th century or later. Nearly a quarter of the 62 appearing there are not Aesopic, but otherwise it includes such well known examples as

The Ant and the Grasshopper The Ant and the Grasshopper, alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 373 in the Perry Index. The fable describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is ...

The North Wind and the Sun The North Wind and the Sun is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 46). It is type 298 (Wind and Sun) in the Aarne–Thompson folktale classification. The moral it teaches about the superiority of persuasion over force has made the story widely know ...

and The Farmer and the Viper.Gibbs
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References

Bibliography

* Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez: ''History of the Graeco-Latin Fable'' Vol.1, Brill NL 1999
pp.132-5
*Gibbs, Laura: “Syntipas” i
''Aesopus''
2009 *Perry, Ben Edward: ”The origin and date of the fables ascribed to Syntipas” in ''Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association'' Vol. 64 (1933), pp.xliv-xlv *Toth, Ida: “Authorship and authority in ''The Book of the Philosopher Syntipas''”, in ''The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature'', Walter de Gruyter 2014
pp.87-102

Origins and development

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading