The Fox and the Crow (Aesop)

The Fox and the Crow is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 124 in the Perry Index. There are early Latin and Greek versions and the fable may even have been portrayed on an ancient Greek vase. The story is used as a warning against listening to flattery.

In the fable a crow has found a piece of cheese and retired to a branch to eat it. A fox, wanting it for himself, flatters the crow, calling it beautiful and wondering whether its voice is as sweet to match. When it lets out a caw, the cheese falls and is devoured by the fox.

The earliest surviving versions of the fable, in both Greek and Latin, date from the 1st century of the Common Era. Evidence that it was well known before then comes in the poems of the Latin poet Horace, who alludes to it twice. Addressing a maladroit sponger called Scaeva in his Epistles, the poet counsels guarded speech for 'if the crow could have fed in silence, he would have had better fare, and much less of quarreling and of envy'. Then in a Satire on legacy-hunting, we find the lines

The poem has generally been taken as a caution against listening to flatterers. Phaedrus prefaces his Latin poem with the warning that the one 'who takes delight in treacherous flattery usually pays the penalty by repentance and disgrace'. One of the few who gives it a different interpretation is Odo of Cheriton, whose lesson is that virtue is forgotten in the pursuit of ambition.Babrius has the fox end with a joke at the crow's credulity in his Greek version of the story: 'You were not dumb, it seems, you have indeed a voice; you have everything, Sir Crow, except brains.' In La Fontaine's Fables (I.2), the fox delivers the moral by way of recompense for the tidbit. In Norman Shapiro's translation:

As was the case with several others of La Fontaine's fables, there was dissatisfaction in Christian circles, where it was felt that morality was offended by allowing the fox to go unpunished for its theft. Therefore, a sequel was provided in the form of a popular song of which a version is recorded in Saskatchewan. In this the fox’s funeral is dolefully described but ends with the crow cawing from its branch,

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