"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.[1] The story is used as a warning against listening to flattery.
Contents |
In the fable a crow has found a piece of cheese and retired to a branch to eat it. A fox, wanting the cheese for himself, flatters the crow, calling it beautiful and wondering whether its voice is as sweet to match. When the crow 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 know 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'.[2] 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.[4] 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.'[5] In Jean de la Fontaine's French version (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,
An alternative discomfiture of the fox was provided in one of the many adaptations of the fable in advertisements for various products on French blotting pads.[8] In the case of Kodavox tapes, the crow is cheered up by the assurance that his performance can now be recorded - with no fear of losing its cheese to flattering foxes in future![9]
A similar story of flattery rewarded exists in the Buddhist scriptures as the Jambhu-Khadaka-Jataka.[10] In this a jackal praises the crow's voice as it is feeding in a rose-apple tree. The crow replies that it requires nobility to discover the same in others and shakes down some fruit for the jackal to share. What seems to be a depiction of the story on a painted vase discovered in excavations at Lothal from the Indus Valley Civilisation suggests that the story may have been known there at least a thousand years earlier than any other source.[11]
Since the fable stands at the beginning of La Fontaine's fables, generations of French children commonly learned it by heart. This will explain the many settings by French composers. They include
There was also a setting of the French words by the Dutch composer Rudolf Koumans in Vijf fabels van La Fontaine (op. 25, 1968) for school chorus and orchestra. In 1995 Xavier Benguerel i Godó set a Catalan translation of the fable for recitation with orchestra in his 7 Fábulas de la Fontaine.[18] And in an English version by Peter Westmore, it was set for children's voices and piano by Edward Hughes as the second of his ten Songs from Aesop's Fables (1965). A purely musical version was composed by Canadian musician Richard Poirier in 2010.[19]
The fable was also given a jazz interpretation by Dynastie Crisis (1970)[20]; there is also a rap version made for children by Don Pedro et ses Dromadaires (1998)[21] and a folk version by Sesame Street.[22] The song group mewithoutYou recorded a slightly updated version of the story in "The Fox, The Crow, and The Cookie".[23] Its main point is to use the framework of the fable to weave a verbally inventive text but in the video made to accompany it[24] the underlying story becomes clearer. A fox tries to snatch a cookie from the vendor's barrow. While the latter is distracted with chasing off the fox, the crow swoops down and steals two. The fox then asks the crow for a share and, when this does not work, resorts to flattery: Your lovely song would grace my ears...Your poems of wisdom, my good crow, what a paradise they bring! And the fox gets his cookie.
The fable is depicted no less than three times in the border of the Bayeux Tapestry and it has been speculated that a political commentary is intended. The picture is that of an ungainly bird sitting in a tree under which an animal is lying. They are looking at each other with their mouths open, and there is some object in the air between them. The reason for pointing to this particular fable is quite clear. Harold's vanity has led him to overreach himself and so lose everything.[25] A later tapestry on which the story is portrayed came from the Gobelins Manufactory and was designed by Jean-Baptiste Oudry.[26]
In later centuries the fable was used on household china,[27] on tiles,[28] on vases,[29] and figured in the series of La Fontaine medals cast in France by Jean Vernon.[30] A less conventional use was the hydraulic statue built for the Versailles Labyrinth that was constructed for Louis XIV, one of thirty nine sets of statues in the maze illustrating Aesop's fables.[31][32] The fox and the crow eventually figured, among many other beasts, on the grandiose monument to La Fontaine designed by Achille Dumilâtre in 1891.[33] This stood at the angle of the Jardins de Ranelagh between the Avenue Ingres and Avenue du Ranelagh in Paris XVI and was melted down during World War 2. It was replaced by Charles Correia's present monument in 1983. This portrays the fabulist standing and looking down at the cheese-bearing crow at his feet, while the fox gazes up at it from the steps to the pedestal.[34]
Given the circumstances of the replacement, it is not surprising that the design is so traditional and, indeed, reminiscent of Pierre Julien's 18th century statue of La Fontaine in the Louvre.[35] But the monuments incorporating the fable in the former Soviet territories have been more inventive and modernist. There it is the Russian adaptation by Ivan Krylov, "The Fox and the Raven" (in this case little different from his master's version), that is being alluded to.[36] It figures among several others on panels around Andrey Drevin's monument beside the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow.[37] There is a similar disjunction between the fox and the raven in the 1965 sculpture by Stefan Horota in Rostock Zoo. Another piece of street sculpture brings them strikingly together in the stylised monument to the famous Soviet processed cheese brand Druzhba (Friendship) on Rustaveli Street in Moscow.[38]
In the United States the fable figured at one time as one of six bronze gate panels commissioned for the William Church Osborne Memorial Playground in Manhattan’s Central Park in 1952.[39] The work of sculptor Paul Manship, it is now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The seated fox looks up at the crow in an attractive piece that makes the most of the decorative possibilities of the reeds and oak-leaves that play a prominent part in the overall design. The challenge with this subject is always to avoid the limitations imposed by a fable that has more dialogue than action. André Deluol also manages to vary the formula in the stone sculpture he created outside the La Fontaine infant school in the Croix-de-Vernailles quarter of Etampes in 1972. There the fox look back over its shoulder at the crow in a design held together by the large leaves of a stylised tree.[40] Possibilities are more restricted in the two dimensional plane of a picture: whether printed or painted, these have presented an almost uniform monotony of design over whole centuries.[41] One of the rare variations is the painted panel by Léon Rousseau (fl.1849-81) which pictures the fox crouching with one paw on the fallen cheese and bending his head directly upwards to taunt the agitated crow.[42]
The fable has been a favourite with stamp designers. Among the countries that have featured it are the following:
