The Old Man and his Sons

The Old Man and his Sons, sometimes alternatively titled The Bundle of Sticks, is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 53 in the Perry Index. The actions described in it have been attributed to several later rulers and its political moral that there is strength in unity has been consistently commented on over the centuries.

An old man has a number of sons who constantly quarrel with each other. As he nears death he calls them to him and gives them an object lesson in the need for unity. Having bound a bundle of sticks together (or in other accounts either spears or arrows), he asks his sons to break them. When they fail, he undoes the bundle and either breaks each stick singly or gets his sons to do so. In the same way, he teaches them, though each can be overcome alone, they are invincible combined.

The fable was included by Babrius in his collection. Later, Pseudo-Plutarch told the story of King Scilurus of Scythia and his 80 sons and of other barbarian kings by other authors. The story also travelled eastwards. It may appear in mediaeval Turkic manuscript fragments and on a Sogdian mural. Having entered Central Asian folklore, the story was also told of local chieftains and associated with Genghis Khan.

The moral drawn from the fable by Babrius was that "Brotherly love is the greatest good in life and often lifts the humble higher". In his emblem book Hecatomgraphie (1540), Gilles Corrozet reflected on it that if there can be friendship among strangers, it is even more of a necessity among family members. When the Neo-Latin poet Hieronymus Osius included the fable in his 1564 collection, he added consideration of the effects of disunion: "Just as concord supplies potency in human affairs, so a quarrelsome life deprives people of their strength." The French fabulist La Fontaine also stressed this aspect. In this version, the sons had not started quarreling when their father gave them his lesson, but descended into litigiousness over his estate following his death.

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