The Hawk and the Nightingale

The Hawk and the Nightingale is one of the earliest fables recorded in Greek and there have been many variations on the story since Classical times. The original version is numbered 4 in the Perry Index and the later Aesop version, sometimes going under the title "The Hawk, the Nightingale and the Birdcatcher", is numbered 567. The stories began as a reflection on the arbitrary use of power and eventually shifted to being a lesson in the wise use of resources.

The original fable appeared in Hesiod's poem Works and Days, a work dating from some seven centuries before the Common Era and thus long before Aesop's traditional dates. It is used to illustrate Hesiod's account of man's fall from the Golden Age of innocence to the corrupted Age of Iron. As an example of its violent and arbitrary character, the story is told of a hawk that seizes a nightingale; when the songbird cries in pain, the hawk addresses it: 'Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or else let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.'

The fable later ascribed to Aesop is not recorded in any surviving Classical document but began to appear in the early Middle Ages. Some versions extend the picture of violence by having the bird of prey attack the nightingale's nestlings. It agrees to spare them if the nightingale will sing to it, but since the mother bird is consumed with grief, her song sounds forced and shrill. The disappointed hawk then kills one of the chicks but is in turn captured by a fowler. In Renaissance times a number of Neo-Latin authors record alternative versions of the fable with quite different interpretations. They include Laurentius Abstemius' Accipiter et Luscinia cantum pollicens in the late 15th century,Hieronymus Osius' poem De Accipitre et Luscinia (1574) and three poems by Pantaleon Candidus in his 150 Fabulae (1604).

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