The Old Man and Death facts for kids
The Old Man and Death is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 60 in the Perry Index. Because this was one of the comparatively rare fables featuring humans, it was the subject of many paintings, especially in France, where Jean de la Fontaine's adaptation had made it popular.
Love of life
The fable is a simple anecdote demonstrating the theme of love of life (φιλοζωία) in no matter what distressing circumstances. The standard version as it now exists is that of Roger L'Estrange's retelling: 'An old man that had travelled a great way under a huge Burden of Sticks found himself so weary that he cast it down, and called upon Death to deliver him from a more miserable Life. Death came presently at his call, and asked him his business. Pray, good Sir, says he, Do me but the Favour to help me up with my burden again.' Originally, however, the old man's request was for Death to carry the sticks for him.
Because ancient sources were confined to the Greek language, the fable did not have much currency until the Renaissance. Then it was told in the fable collections of the Neo-Latin poets Gabriele Faerno (1545) and Hieronymus Osius. A French version also appeared at this time in Bernard Salomon's Les Fables d'Esope Phrygien, mises en Ryme Francoise (Lyons 1544). In England there was a Latin version in Francis Barlow's 1687 collection, accompanied by an English verse synopsis by Aphra Behn.
The story's appearance in La Fontaine's Fables contributed to the fable's growing popularity in Europe. In fact, La Fontaine wrote two and placed them side by side. La Mort et le malheureux (Death and man in misfortune, I.15) is a rewriting of the story in which the main emphasis is placed on the moral to be drawn from the situation. La Mort et le bûcheron (Death and the woodman, I.16) stays closer to the original and is prefaced by a note in which La Fontaine confesses that he was blamed for the freedom of his first version by a contemporary critic and wrote the second by way of comparison.
See also
In Spanish: El viejo y la muerte para niños
