A sophisticated City Mouse went to see his Country cousin, and pitied his simple fare.
Horace, a former military officer who was given a roving brief in the government of Emperor Augustus, chafed under the anxious bustle and empty chatter of life in Rome, and yearned for a quiet talk over beans, greens and streaky bacon in his rural bolt-hole. A sympathetic neighbour was apt to launch into the following tale to humour him.
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.
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.
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.