Versions of The Fable
Both Martial and Horace are among the Latin satiric writers who made use of the fable of the frog and the ox, although they refer to different versions of it. The story related by Phaedrus has a frog motivated by envy of the ox, illustrating the moral that 'the needy man, while affecting to imitate the powerful, comes to ruin'. It is to this that Martial alludes in a short epigram (X.79) about two citizens trying to outdo each other by building in the suburbs. Horace places a different version of the story towards the end of a long conversation on the demented behaviour of mankind (Satires II.3, lines 314ff) where Damasippus accuses the poet of trying to keep up with his rich patron Maecenas. His telling follows the Babrius version in which an ox has stepped on a brood of young frogs and the father tries equaling the beast in size when told of it.
The folly of trying to keep up with the Jones' is the conclusion drawn by La Fontaine's Fables from the Phaedrus version of the tale, applying it to the artistocratic times in which La Fontaine lived ("The frog that wished to be as big as the ox", Fables I.3):
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- This world of ours is full of foolish creatures too -
- Commoners want to build chateaux;
- Each princeling wants his royal retinue;
- Each count his squires. And so it goes.
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Two similar stories existed in Greek sources but were never adopted in the rest of Europe. There is a quatrain in Babrius concerning an earthworm that envied the length of a snake and burst in two while stretching itself to equal it. This is number 268 in the Perry Index. In the other fable, numbered 371 by Perry, a lizard destroys itself in a similar way. The moral given is that 'This is what happens to someone who competes with his superiors: he destroys himself before he can equal them.'
Read more about this topic: The Frog And The Ox
Famous quotes containing the words versions of, versions and/or fable:
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)