The anonymously authored Aesop Romance (usually dated to the 1st or 2nd century AD; see above) begins with a vivid description of Aesop's appearance, saying he was "of loathsome aspect...potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity," or as another translation has it, "a faulty creation of Prometheus when half-asleep."
Planudes, a Byzantine scholar of the 13th century AD who wrote a biography of Aesop based on The Aesop Romance and conjectured that Aesop might have been Ethiopian, given his name. (Ethiopian in Greek means "scorched-face", a "vestige of an archaic view of the world that located the Ethiopians to the east, near the rising sun, which was responsible for their blackened skins." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop
