Aesop of Samos

A pretty young milkmaid plans just a little bit too far ahead.

‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched’ is a proverbial warning not to plan too far ahead. In this little fable, our daydreaming country milkmaid goes some way beyond counting unhatched chicks.

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The Wind and the Sun compete to see which of them can make an unsuspecting traveller shed his cloak.

The following Aesop’s Fable dramatises a lesson which would seem particularly relevant to the time in which we live. Blessings and persuasion will win hearts, whereas threats and force will win at most resentful compliance, and more likely angry rebellion.

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A Wolf and a Fox go to court over a petty theft, but they have a hard time getting the Judge to believe them.

Phaedrus was a Roman fabulist, roughly a contemporary of St Paul, who turned large numbers of Aesop’s Fables into Latin verse. He admits that many of the Fables are actually his own, but says that this one, in which a Wolf and a Fox struggle to overcome their reputations for dishonesty, is an Aesop original.

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A shepherd boy has fun teasing the local farmers, but comes to regret it.

Floods! Food shortages! Spies! Invasion! Such cries we read daily in British newspapers. If they fall on deaf ears, Aesop of Samos would have said that the newspapers had only themselves to blame.

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A vain fir is stopped short in her boasting by a clear-thinking bush.

In this Aesop’s Fable, a gloating fir tree and a prickly (in every sense) bramble bush get themselves into a silly argument, which ends with a sobering reminder for the fir.

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The leader of a wolf-pack makes some sheep an offer they’d better refuse.

This little Aesop’s Fable comes from the collection of Babrius, a poet from Syria in the second century AD. It is, sadly, a story as relevant today as it ever was. The cunning wolves manage to persuade the sheep that their true enemies are the sheepdogs.

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