The North Wind and the Sun

The North Wind and the Sun is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 46). It is type 298 (Wind and Sun) in the Aarne-Thompson folktale classification. The moral it teaches about the superiority of persuasion over force has made the story widely known. It is also known for being a chosen text for phonetic transcriptions.

The story concerns a competition between the North Wind and the Sun to decide which is the stronger of the two. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his cloak. However hard the North Wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off.

The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus recorded that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his Historical Notes, quotes an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodies the story of Helios and Boreas. It relates how Sophocles had his cloak stolen by a boy to whom he had made love. Euripides joked that he had had that boy too, and it did not cost him anything. Sophocles' reply satirises the adulteries of Euripides: "It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked; as for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else's wife the North Wind screwed you. You are unwise, you who sow in another's field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief."

The Latin version of the fable first appeared centuries later in Avianus, as De Vento et Sole (Of the wind and the sun, Fable 4); early versions in English and Johann Gottfried Herder's poetic version in German (Wind und Sonne) also gave it as such. It was only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" began to be used. In fact the Avianus poem refers to the characters as Boreas and Phoebus, the gods of the north wind and the sun, and it was under the title Phébus et Borée that it appeared in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3).

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