An apologue or apolog (from the Greek ἀπόλογος, a "statement" or "account") is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly.
[1] Well-known modern examples of this literary form include George Orwell's Animal Farm and the Br'er Rabbit stories derived from African and Cherokee cultures and recorded and synthesized by Joel Chandler Harris.
Still, in spite of the difference of moral level, Martin Luther thought so highly of apologues as counselors of virtue that he edited and revised Aesop and wrote a characteristic preface to the volume.
As René Wellek observes, Hegel in his Aesthetics (mediated to at least some extent by Hotho's account) consigns the apologue, parable, and proverb, along with the fable, the epigram, the riddle, and all didactic and descriptive poetry as "minor forms" of literature that do not qualify as art at all.
Leading later writers of apologues were Giambattista Basile in Italy; La Fontaine in France; John Gay and Robert Dodsley in England; Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich von Hagedorn in Germany; Tomas de Iriarte in Spain; Ivan Krylov in Russia and Leonid Hlibov in Ukraine.
“You may be a treasure,” quoth Master Cock, “to men that prize you, but for me I would rather have a single barley-corn than a peck of pearls.”[citation needed] On the other hand, in the romances of Reynard the Fox we have medieval apologues arranged in cycles, and attaining epical dimensions.
[1] La Motte, writing at a time when this species of literature was universally admired, attributes its popularity to the fact that it manages and flatters amour-propre by inculcating virtue in an amusing manner without seeming to dictate or insist.