60 Fun Facts About Aesop's Fables

In the fable of the tortoise and the hare, what does the hare do midway through the race?

In classical times the point was the hare's foolish over-confidence rather than the tortoise's pluck.

What English idiom comes from the fable of the shepherd boy who kept raising false alarms?

Later English poetic versions have the wolf eat the boy as well as the sheep.

The expression 'sour grapes' comes from the fable about which animal?

In Scandinavian tellings the animal complains about rowanberries instead, since grapes are scarce that far north.

In the original Greek version of The Ant and the Grasshopper, the idle singing insect was actually what?

Latin and Romance-language translations kept the cicada; the grasshopper is a later northern substitution.

How does the mouse repay the lion that spared its life?

When Buddhist monks carried the story to China, the rescued animal became a tiger.

Why do the owners kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Some versions, including Townsend's English one, make the bird a hen rather than a goose.

How does the thirsty crow reach the water at the bottom of the pitcher?

A 2009 study in Current Biology found that rooks will do exactly the same thing when given a similar puzzle.

In the fable where the wind and the sun compete over a passing traveller, what must they make him do?

The moral, that persuasion beats force, has made it one of the most-quoted fables of all.

Which fable is the International Phonetic Association's standard sample passage?

The IPA Handbook renders it in the phonetic alphabet for every language it describes.

What interrupts the two mice's feast in The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse?

The 13th-century preacher Odo of Cheriton summed up the moral as 'I'd rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear'.

Which Roman poet worked The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse into one of his Satires?

Marcus Aurelius also alludes to it in his Meditations, telling himself to think of the town mouse's alarm and trepidation.

In Belling the Cat, the mice's plan collapses because of what?

Though often credited to Aesop, the story is not recorded before the Middle Ages and sits at number 613 in the Perry Index, among the medieval additions.

'Bell the Cat' is said to have been the nickname of which 15th-century Scottish nobleman?

He earned it for his part in seizing and hanging James III's favourite Thomas Cochrane, and later led a rebellion against the king.

Which allegorical Middle English poem retells the mice's council as a parliament of rats and mice?

Langland was satirising the 1376 Parliament; Wat Tyler's revolt followed five years later.

How does the fox get the cheese away from the crow?

In Babrius's Greek version the fox signs off: 'you have everything, Sir Crow, except brains'.

The Fox and the Crow opens Book I of whose celebrated 17th-century French verse Fables?

Because it stands at the very start of the collection, generations of French schoolchildren learned it by heart.

A dog carrying meat drops it after seeing what?

The Aberdeen Bestiary of around 1200 repeats the tale as if it were natural history.

The 'dog in the manger' spitefully stops which animal from eating?

An alternative version in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas has oxen instead, and Lope de Vega turned the theme into a comedy, El Perro del Hortelano.

Which fable, though often credited to Aesop, does not appear in the Perry Index at all and was only attached to his name in the 18th century?

Its lesson survives as the proverb 'don't count your chickens before they hatch'.

The phrase 'a wolf in sheep's clothing' actually originates in which text, not in Aesop?

No fable with this precise theme is recorded before the 12th century; it was grafted onto Aesop's name in modern times.

In The Frogs Who Desired a King, what does Zeus first send the frogs as their ruler?

When the frogs complain that it does nothing, they get a water snake that eats them, replaced by a stork or heron in later tellings.

What does the runaway slave Androcles remove from the lion's paw?

The earliest account, in Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights, has him later recognised by the same lion in the arena at Rome.

Which playwright's 1912 comedy turned Androcles into a Christian tailor?

The play as a whole takes a sceptical view of religion despite the saintly hero.

In The Oak and the Reed, why does the reed survive the storm that fells the oak?

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde gives the earliest form of the proverb 'a reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall'.

The Mountain in Labour groans with great expectation and finally gives birth to what?

It was quoted in the Ars Poetica as a warning against opening an epic too grandly.

What 'reward' does the wolf give the crane that pulled a bone from its throat?

The Buddhist Jataka version has a woodpecker doing the same job for a lion, having first propped its jaws open with a stick.

How does the stork get its revenge on the fox that served it soup in a shallow bowl?

Pieter Bruegel worked the pair into his 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs.

In The Two Pots, a clay pot and a pot made of what are swept along a river together?

The clay pot wants to keep its distance since it will be the only casualty in any collision; the moral is that the weak should avoid partnering the powerful.

In the Babrius version of The Ass in the Lion's Skin, what finally gives the donkey away?

A second version has the ass betrayed by its ears while trying to graze undisturbed in the fields.

Aesop is traditionally said to have lived in the 6th century BCE as a slave on which Greek island?

Aristotle and Herodotus name his masters as Xanthus and then Iadmon, and say he must eventually have been freed.

According to Plutarch, how did Aesop die?

He had supposedly insulted the Delphians on a diplomatic mission and was convicted on a trumped-up charge of temple theft.

Which Lydian king supposedly sent Aesop on the diplomatic mission that ended in his death?

Modern scholars have dismissed the whole Croesus connection as literary fiction, though later scholars think the dates can be made to fit.

The highly fictional Aesop Romance says the fabulist was at first unable to do what?

A priestess of Isis rewards his kindness with both a voice and a gift for storytelling.

Which 13th-century Byzantine scholar first suggested Aesop was Ethiopian, based on a false etymology?

Modern scholars call the derivation of 'Aesop' from 'Aethiop' etymologically incorrect.

Which Spanish painter's portrait of Aesop, dated 1639-40, hangs in the Prado paired with a portrait of Menippus?

Jusepe de Ribera painted a rival pair, including 'Aesop in beggar's rags'.

According to Plato's Phaedo, who passed his time in prison turning Aesop's fables into verse?

Aristophanes' comedy The Wasps also has a character who picked up Aesop's 'absurdities' at banquets.

Which 4th-century BCE Athenian compiled the earliest known, now lost, collection of Aesop's fables?

It was cited as the official Aesop for twelve centuries, yet no copy survives.

Who made the first extensive Latin verse version of Aesop's fables in the 1st century CE?

He describes himself as a freedman of Augustus and says he was put on trial by Sejanus, who acted as accuser, witness and judge.

A manuscript of the Greek fabulist Babrius was rediscovered in 1842 on which holy mountain?

Richard Bentley had earlier detected traces of Babrius's verse hidden inside prose collections of the fables.

The standard numbering system for Aesop's fables is named after which classics professor?

He arranged them by language, then chronologically by source, rather than the old alphabetical order.

Who published the first printed English version of Aesop's Fables, on 26 March 1484?

It followed a German edition of about 1476 that was the first attempt at an exhaustive collection.

Which 12th-century woman poet adapted the fables into Old French couplets under the title Ysopet?

Around 1200 the Cistercian preacher Odo of Cheriton produced a parable collection with a strong clerical tinge.

Which Russian fabulist reworked many of the fables, usually via La Fontaine, in the early 19th century?

Two separate Russian expressions derive from his rendering of the sour-grapes fable alone.

Whose 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education first argued the fables should be aimed at children?

Originally the fables addressed adults on religious, social and political themes.

Louis XIV's 1670s Versailles fable labyrinth was built to teach whom?

The Fox and the Stork was among the fables represented, with both dinner parties shown.

Walt Disney's 1934 cartoon The Grasshopper and the Ants viewed the fable through the lens of which programme?

Somerset Maugham had already reversed the moral order in his 1924 short story about a feckless brother who wins a fortune.

Jerry Pinkney won the 2010 Caldecott Medal for a wordless picture-book telling of which fable?

Robert Henryson had expanded the same story into 43 seven-line stanzas in the 1480s.

Zeno of Elea's famous head-start race paradox pairs the tortoise with which hero?

Zeno argued the hero could never catch up, since the tortoise always moves on a little; the resolution is that an infinite series can sum to a finite length.

Modern scholars note that a dozen or so of the fables are shared with which Indian story tradition?

Fables of Aesopic shape have also been found in Sumerian and Akkadian texts from the third millennium BCE.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf only spread through Europe after appearing in whose 15th-century collection?

Because it existed only in Greek until then, there was no agreed title; Caxton called it 'Of the child whiche kepte the sheep'.

In the first printed English version of The Frogs Who Desired a King (1484), what creature replaces the water snake as the frogs' second king?

Caxton drew the lesson that 'he that hath liberty ought to kepe it wel'.

Which 5th-century BCE philosopher already alluded to 'the dog in Aesop's fable' when discussing people who foolishly want more than they have?

It is one of the earliest signs of how old and well known the story of the dog and its reflection was.

In which Aristophanes comedy does Philocleon claim to have learnt Aesop's 'absurdities' at banquets?

Herodotus, earlier still, called Aesop 'the fable writer' and described him as a slave.

In the early 5th century, Avianus put 42 of the fables into which Latin verse form?

Aphthonius of Antioch had already turned some forty fables into Latin prose in 315.

The largest and most influential prose version of Phaedrus bears the name of which unknown fabulist?

An elegiac verse Romulus, ascribed to Gualterus Anglicus, became a standard Latin teaching text into the Renaissance.

Which Cistercian preacher compiled a clerical-tinged prose collection of fable-parables around 1200?

His Parabolae were later adapted into 14th-century Welsh as Chwedlau Odo, 'Odo's Tales'.

Who wrote The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian in Middle Scots around 1480?

Its thirteen fables in iambic pentameter include seven expanded from the Latin Romulus manuscripts.

Sir Roger L'Estrange's 1692 translation rendered the fables into what kind of English?

He also slipped in many subversive Latin fables by Laurentius Abstemius.

Which cartoonist launched the animated series Aesop's Film Fables in 1921?

By the time Van Beuren Studios took it over in 1928, the plots had little to do with Aesop.

Jay Ward's 1960s cartoon shorts Aesop and Son first aired within which programme?

Ward's studio was also behind Fractured Fairy Tales in the same programme.