Aesop's Fables (Penguin Classics) - Aesop [30]
A lean and hungry mouse had made his way into a basket of corn with some difficulty. He found the fare so good, and he stuffed himself with such a voracious appetite that, when he wanted to get out of the basket, he found the hole too small to allow his bloated body to pass through, push as hard as he might. As he sat at the hole groaning about his fate, a weasel, who had amused himself by watching the vain struggles of the fat little thing, called and offered the following advice: “Listen to me, my plump friend. There is only one way to get out, and that’s to wait until you’re just as lean and hungry as you were when you entered.”
CLVIII
The Farmer and the Lion
One day a lion entered a farmyard, and the farmer shut the gate, intent on catching him. When the lion discovered that he could not get out, he began at once to attack the sheep and then the oxen. So the farmer, now scared about his own life, opened the gate, and the lion made off as fast as he could. His wife, who had observed the entire scene, watched her husband moaning about the loss of his cattle, and she cried out, “You deserve what you got! How could you have been crazy enough to try to catch a lion? Under ordinary circumstances, if you saw him at a distance, you’d wish that he were even further away.”
Better scare a thief than snare him.
CLIX
The Horse and the Loaded Ass
There was once a man who owned a horse and an ass. Whenever he took trips, he tended to spare the horse and put all the burden on the ass’s back. Since the ass had been ailing for some time, he asked the horse one day to relieve him of part of his load while on a trip.
“If you take a fair portion of the load,” he said, “I’ll soon get well again. But if you refuse to help me, this weight will kill me.”
The horse, however, told the ass to get on with it and to stop troubling him with his complaints. The ass jogged on in silence, but he was soon overcome by the weight of his burden and dropped dead in his tracks, just as he had predicted. Consequently, the master came up, untied the load from the dead ass, put it on the horse’s back, and made him carry the ass’s carcass in addition.
“That’s what I get for my bad disposition!” the horse groaned. “By refusing to pull my own weight, I now have to carry all of it along with some dead weight in the bargain.”
Laziness often results in an additional burden for its own back.
CLX
The Wolf and the Lion
One day, after a wolf had killed a sheep and was carrying it home to his den, he met a lion, who immediately grabbed the sheep from the wolf and dragged it away. Standing at a safe distance from the lion, the wolf howled at the lion and told him that he should be ashamed of himself for robbing him. The lion laughed and said, “I suppose, then, that it was your good friend the shepherd who gave you the sheep in the first place.”
One thief is no better than the next.
CLXI
The Farmer and the Dogs
During a severe winter, a farmer was snowed in his farmhouse. When he found that he could not procure any food outside, he began consuming his own sheep. As the hard weather continued, he began to eat his goats. And finally—for there was no break in the weather—he turned to the plow oxen. Thereupon, the dogs said to one another, “We’d better be off! If the master has no pity on the oxen, who carry the burden of the work around here, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll spare us.”
When our neighbor’s house is on fire, it is time to save our own skin.
CLXII
The Eagle and the Crow
A crow watched an eagle swoop down with majestic air from a nearby cliff, descend upon a flock of sheep, and then carry off a lamb in his talons. The whole thing looked so graceful and easy that the crow was eager to imitate it. So, he swept down upon a large, fat ram with all the force he could muster and expected to carry him off as a prize. His claws became entangled in the wool, however, and as he tried to escape, he fluttered and made such a commotion that he drew the shepherd’s attention, enabling the man to seize him and