Aesopica
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Aesopica’
When some people talk about compromise, what they mean is that everyone else should compromise for their benefit.
The following Aesop-like fable comes from the trend-setting collection by Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704), who told it with such bracing energy it seems only right to let him tell it again. A cockerel calls for compromise, but it’s all on one side.
A dozy rabbit gets an idea into his head and soon all the animals of India are running for their lives.
The following tale from the fourth-century BC Jataka Tales was told to illustrate how Hindu ascetics blindly copied one another’s eye-catching but useless mortifications; but it might just as well be applied to stock-market rumours or ‘project fear’ politics.
A warlike king sets out to bag another small kingdom for his realms, but a monkey gets him thinking.
The Jataka Tales are a collection of roughly fourth-century BC stories supposedly from the many previous lives of Gautama Buddha. Several tell, Aesop-like, how one may learn wisdom by observing the ways of the natural world around us. In this case, a belligerent monarch draws a timely lesson from the antics of a monkey.
A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.
Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.
A wily predator dons a sheepskin so he can help himself to the whole flock.
The wolf in sheep’s clothing is a metaphor used by Jesus Christ to warn against those who pretend to be Christians so they can prey on them. Nikephoros Basilakes, a twelfth-century teacher of rhetoric at the Patriarchal School in Constantinople, penned this little ‘Aesop’s Fable’ with a twist to the tale.
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.