Cinderella: The Slipper That Fit a Thousand Years

The oldest known telling of the shoe-fitting story is not French but Greek, recorded by the geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and 23 AD. He describes Rhodopis, a Greek courtesan living in the Egyptian colony of Naucratis, whose sandal was snatched from her maid by an eagle while she bathed. The bird dropped the sandal into the lap of the Egyptian king as he sat administering justice. Struck by its beauty and the strangeness of its arrival, he sent men throughout the land searching for the woman who wore it. When she was found in Naucratis, she was brought to Memphis and became his wife.

The Roman writer Aelian, writing in Greek around the second century, repeated this story and even named the pharaoh Psammetichus. Centuries earlier still, Herodotus had already written of a courtesan called Rhodopis — a Thracian slave belonging to Iadmon of Samos, a fellow slave of the storyteller Aesop, brought to Egypt under Pharaoh Amasis and later freed by Charaxus of Mytilene, brother of the poet Sappho. Nineteenth-century scholars Edgar Taylor and Sabine Baring-Gould were the first to point out how closely her shoe-testing echoed Cinderella's own.

Another ancient figure sometimes named as a forerunner is Aspasia of Phocaea, whose tale appears in Aelian's Varia Storia. Orphaned of her mother and raised in poverty by her father, she dreamed of meeting a noble man. In a vision, a dove transformed into a woman who taught her how to erase a physical flaw and restore her beauty. Later, summoned with other courtesans to a feast held by the Persian regent Cyrus the Younger, she alone caught the eye of the Persian king, who ignored every other woman present.

The medieval French poet Marie de France offered her own variation in the twelfth-century lai Le Fresne, 'The Ash-Tree Girl'. A wealthy noblewoman, fearing accusations of infidelity because she had given birth to twins, abandoned one infant daughter at the base of an ash tree outside a nunnery, leaving a ring and a piece of brocade as tokens of identity. The porter who found her named her Fresne, and she was raised by nuns. Grown into a young woman, she became the lover of a nobleman who was later forced to marry someone of noble birth — and Fresne, accepting her fate, served as a handmaiden at the wedding, only for her mother to recognize the brocade covering the bed and reveal that the bride was Fresne's own twin sister. Her true parentage restored, Fresne finally married the man she loved.

Far to the south, the Maltese told of Ċiklemfusa, an orphaned girl whose dying father left her three magical objects — a chestnut, a nut, and an almond. Working unnoticed as a servant in the king's palace, she used a spell to transform herself into a beautiful princess for a grand ball, where the prince fell in love with her.