The location is the Island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, the time approximately 600 BC. At the market, captives from Phryigia are being sold into slavery. The beautiful Rhodopis would prefer to take her own life, but her former slave Asarakos, known as Aesop, reassures her. The army commander Polyphemus is the first to purchase the girl. Next she becomes a slave to the poetess Sappho, who gives her to the Egyptian pharaoh Amasis. The proud Delphic priest Kobon examines Aesop's teeth before buying him and Aesop bites his finger appart, for which he gets a whipping. Aesop is extremely witty and mischievous and comments on each situation in which he finds himself with a fable warning of the dangers of the loss of freedom and democracy. At a festivity organized by Sappho, he secretly eavesdrops on a poetry reading and, enchanted, forgets he is a slave. At night, he gets together with Rhodopis, who openly flirts with the enamoured man. The jealous Amasis takes his mistress and slave Rhodopis away to Egypt. Aesop longs to win his freedom in order to be able to join his beloved, but he finds himself a victim of power games among the emperors of his era. He wins the freedom that he has longed for, but Kobon has not forgotten his revenge. He plants a golden goblet among Aesop's belongings and sentences him to death for theft. Not a single person who has benefited from his native wit, including Rhodopis, pleads in favour of him, and Aesop is hurled down a cliff.

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