Two men find an axe, and then find some trouble, but they aren’t keen on sharing either of them.
A well-known politician once told entrepreneurs to stand back, look at their handiwork and say not ‘I built that!’ but ‘We built that!’, since no one does anything without the help of wider society. On the surface, this little Aesop’s Fable appears to back him up: the reader must be left to judge how deep the similarity goes.
A Wolf finds a series of reasons for making a meal of a little Lamb, but it turns out he did not really need them.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, appealed to this Fable as an illustration of the way that stronger nations bully weaker ones. Like the Wolf, they justify gobbling up their neighbours by saying they are simply defending themselves and their interests, but it is superior military and economic power, not right and wrong, that decides the outcome.
After the Lion cracks down on horns right across his kingdom, a nervous Hare gets to wondering exactly what counts as a horn.
The following fable was applied by Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, to the danger posed by Governments that police what we are allowed to say. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you actually do say: what matters is what those in authority decide you have said.
Following the election of a new leader, the wolves listen with approval to his plans for a fairer pack but there is something they don’t know.
“It’s all these ‘gatherers’ and ‘sharers’, I reckon” Hob Hayward told Merry Brandybuck at the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, when Merry asked why the Shire seemed to be short of food. “They do more gathering than sharing.” Not all collections of Aesop’s Fables include this little tale, but Hob Hayward would have appreciated it.