The Crow and the Fox

This is, by almost any honest reckoning, the most famous fable that Aesop ever told. It is the second poem of Jean de La Fontaine’s entire celebrated French Fables (1668) — placed there deliberately, at the very front of his book, because La Fontaine knew exactly what he had — and it has been, for the three hundred and fifty years since, the single most-memorized French poem of all time. Every French child still learns its opening lines by heart at school: Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché, / Tenait en son bec un fromage — “Master Crow, on a tree perched, held in his beak a cheese.” There are perhaps no twenty syllables in any language that more children have learned by rote than these. And the fable behind those twenty syllables comes, of course, from the same anonymous Greek storyteller of the sixth century before Christ to whom the world has owed so many of its small clear teaching-tales.

The fable belongs to Aesop, in whose corpus it is catalogued as Perry 124 under the Greek title Korax kai alopex — “The Raven and the Fox” (in the original Greek the bird is a raven; in the modern English-speaking tradition, descending through La Fontaine, it has become a crow). The principal Greek source-form survives in the Augustana recension of the prose Aesopica (1st-2nd c. CE). It was retold in beautiful Latin verse by Phaedrus as Fable I.13 — De Vulpe et Corvo — in iambic senarii in the first century CE, and in Greek choliambic verse by Babrius as Fable 77 in the second century CE. It came down through Avianus, Walter of England, and the medieval Romulus collections into modern English through William Caxton’s first printed Aesop in 1484, then Roger L’Estrange (1692), Samuel Croxall (1722), Thomas Bewick (1818), and Joseph Jacobs (1894).

The fable is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index as type ATU 57 — Raven with Cheese in His Mouth — and has, remarkably, an almost-identical Indian counterpart preserved in Buddhist literature: the Jambu-khadaka Jataka (Birth-story 294), in which a jackal flatters a crow eating jambu-fruit into singing, with the same disastrous result. Some scholars (notably W. Norman Brown in 1921) have argued that the fable may have travelled both directions between India and Greece in the centuries before Aesop. The teaching is universal. The form is local. And the small clear voice that comes down to us from the mountain villages of ancient Greece is the same small clear voice that has come down to us from the bamboo forests of ancient India: do not trust flatterers.

This is the story.

The Crow’s Lucky Find

It happened, the old tellers said, on a bright sunny morning at the edge of a small Greek mountain village on the slopes of the Pindus mountains. The cicadas had not yet begun to hum. The dew was still on the grass. The smoke of breakfast fires was rising in slow blue curls from the chimneys of the cottages. And along the line of the cottage roofs, with the slow lazy wing-beat of a black crow on a fine summer morning, there came flying — looking idly down at the cottages and gardens below him — a sleek glossy jet-black crow.

The crow was not, on that morning, hungry in any specific way. He had eaten well at dawn. He was simply, in the manner of crows, looking — for the cool slow pleasure that crows take in looking at things — at whatever the village happened to put in front of him.

And what the village happened to put in front of him, on the wooden window-sill of a small whitewashed stone cottage on the outer edge of the row, was a magnificent round wedge of bright orange-yellow cheese, perhaps the size of a small loaf of bread, sitting on a square of clean white cloth, and steaming very gently in the cool morning air. The housewife, who had made the cheese the day before from the milk of her two goats, had set it on the window-sill to cool while she swept the floor of her cottage. She had turned her back for, perhaps, two minutes.

The crow, who could see — with the bright keen eyes of all the corvid kind — the orange-yellow shine of the cheese from twenty paces away, banked sharply in his lazy flight, dropped low over the cottage roof, swooped along the line of the eaves, and in a single smooth practised motion that no human eye in the cottage saw, picked up the entire round wedge of cheese in his sharp grey beak and lifted off again into the bright blue morning sky over the village.

The housewife, when she came back into the kitchen and saw the empty white cloth on the window-sill, did not in her whole long life ever quite work out what had happened. She blamed, in turn, her cat, the village dogs, her son, and finally — on no evidence at all — her elderly neighbour. The crow, by this time, was already a mile away.

The Crow’s Branch

He flew up the slope of the green forest behind the village. He flew over the line of cypress trees and into the deep cool green of the oak woods. He chose, with the careful taste of a connoisseur, the highest and broadest branch of the oldest and grandest oak tree in the heart of the wood — a branch perhaps thirty feet above the dry brown leaves of the forest floor, in the dappled golden light that came slanting through the canopy at this hour of the morning — and he settled himself there, in the comfortable balanced way of a crow on a chosen branch, with the round wedge of orange-yellow cheese held carefully in his sharp grey beak.

He was, in his small bright black-eyed crow-mind, almost preposterously happy. He had a magnificent breakfast. He had a beautiful branch. He had no enemies, that he could see, in any direction. The morning was warm. The forest was quiet. The cicadas were just beginning to hum, very far away, in the cypress trees of the village below.

He took, with great satisfaction, a single moment to compose himself before beginning the long slow careful business of pulling the cheese apart with his sharp beak and devouring it bite by orange-yellow bite. The crow had not, perhaps, ever been so well-pleased with his life as he was at that exact moment.

It was at this exact moment that the fox arrived.

The Fox Below

He came along the dirt path that ran through the heart of the oak wood — a sleek red fox of perhaps two years old, with a fluffy white-tipped tail and bright cunning yellow-green eyes and the slow soft padding tread of a creature who never, in his whole life, made any unnecessary sound. He had been out hunting since dawn. He had had no luck. The rabbits had been clever; the field-mice had stayed in their burrows; the partridges in the dry grass had heard him coming and flown. The fox was hungry. The fox was, in fact, very hungry. And the fox was, accordingly, in the precise frame of mind of a creature whose senses are most exquisitely tuned to the possibility of food.

He stopped, halfway along the path, and looked up.

What the fox saw, on the great green oak branch some thirty feet above his head, was a sleek glossy jet-black crow holding in his sharp grey beak a magnificent round wedge of bright orange-yellow cheese.

The fox, the old tellers said, did not for the smallest fraction of a second consider the possibility of leaving the scene. The fox knew, with the small clear cold knowledge of a fox, that there was a wedge of cheese above him on a branch, and that this wedge of cheese was — in some way that he had not yet worked out — already his.

He paused. He thought. He considered the height of the branch. He considered the spring of his own sleek legs. He considered the bare smooth grey trunk of the oak tree that had no low branches a fox could climb. He considered the open beak of the crow that, the moment any threatening movement was made below him, would simply spread its black wings and fly away with the cheese still in its beak to some other branch in some other tree.

Force, the fox concluded, would not work.

So he chose, with the slow easy patient cunning that foxes have always had in every story since the world began, the other tool. The tool that was always available to a creature with the wit to use it. The tool that no door in the world has ever been quite proof against. He chose flattery.

The Flattery

He sat down on his sleek haunches at the base of the great oak tree. He curled his fluffy white-tipped tail neatly around his paws. He tilted his sleek red head up at a flattering angle that made his bright yellow-green eyes seem to look up at the crow with the specific awed attention of one creature who has just noticed, for the first time in his long life, the unmistakable presence of a great being.

And he began to speak. Not loudly. Foxes do not, when they are flattering, ever speak loudly. He spoke in a soft warm courteous voice that was just loud enough to carry up to the branch on which the crow was sitting.

“Good morning, dear sir,” the fox said. “I do not wish to disturb your breakfast. I merely happened to be passing along this path, and I happened to look up, and I saw you on your branch, and I was — I confess — quite simply struck by what I saw.”

The crow on the branch tilted his black head slightly to one side and looked down at the fox with mild curiosity but did not, as yet, drop the cheese.

“Your feathers, sir,” the fox went on. “I have lived in this forest for two years now, and I have seen a great many crows in my time, and I do not believe I have ever before seen feathers as perfectly black, as perfectly glossy, as perfectly — if I may say so — luminous as your own. The way the morning sun catches them; the way each individual feather lies in such smooth perfect order; the way the whole shape of you, sir, on that branch, has the noble dignified outline of — well, of a creature who is quite clearly not an ordinary forest crow at all but something rather more elevated. The king of crows, perhaps. Yes — yes — I think that is the right word. The king.”

The crow on the branch puffed his glossy black chest out a little. He did not drop the cheese. But he had, perhaps, slightly loosened his grip on it.

“And your eyes, sir,” the fox continued, the voice growing softer and warmer and more reverent. “What bright sharp clever black eyes. What dignity in the way you carry your head. What proportion — what wonderful proportion — in the very shape of you. And the size of you, dear sir, the noble noble size of you. I have never, in two years of forest-watching, never seen so fine a specimen.”

The crow puffed his black chest out a little more. The cheese was, by now, held in only the very tip of his beak.

The fox waited. The fox understood — with the small clear cold understanding that all great flatterers have always had — that praise alone was not enough; that the trap, in order to spring, required one final small additional element. The fox tilted his red head with a small thoughtful air, as if a small new thought had only this moment occurred to him.

“And surely, dear sir, with feathers as fine as those — with eyes as bright as those — with a noble shape such as yours — surely, surely, you must have a voice to match? It would be too cruel, would it not, for the gods to have given so noble a bird so glorious a body and so plain a song. I have not heard, dear sir, your voice. I do not know what your voice sounds like. But I confess — I confess freely — that I find myself longing, this fine morning, to hear it. If only — if only, dear sir — you would deign to give me, your humble admirer at the foot of your tree, a single small song. Then I would know — then I would know with certainty — that I had met, this morning, the true king of all birds.”

And the fox, having said this, lowered his head respectfully and waited.

The Cheese Falls

The crow on the branch was, by now, in a state that the wise teachers of the East would have called moha — the small bright drugged delusion that comes from love of being praised, the small warm fog inside the chest that makes a creature unable to see clearly that he is being deceived even when he is being deceived in plain language.

He thought, in his small bright drugged crow-mind, that everything the fox had said was true. He thought that he was, in fact, the king of all birds. He thought that he had, in fact, glossier feathers and brighter eyes and a more noble shape than any other crow in the forest. He thought — most fatally of all — that he had, in fact, a glorious voice.

He drew himself up on the high green oak branch.

He composed himself.

He opened his sharp grey beak.

And the round wedge of bright orange-yellow cheese, which had been held in the very tip of that beak, fell.

It fell, the old tellers said, with the small soft tumbling motion of all falling cheeses. It turned once in the dappled golden air. It caught the sunlight on its bright orange-yellow side. And it dropped, in a long slow silent arc, down through the thirty feet of forest air toward the dry brown leaves of the forest floor.

The fox was already moving. The fox had been waiting, for the past long minute of flattery, for exactly this small soft tumbling motion. The fox sprang up on his sleek red legs, took one easy step forward, opened his sharp white-toothed mouth, and caught the falling wedge of cheese cleanly out of the air before it had touched a single dry leaf.

He bit. The cheese broke into two large pieces in his teeth. He chewed. He swallowed.

And the crow, on the high green oak branch above, with his sharp grey beak still open in the first half-formed note of what was to have been a glorious song, looked down with the slow dawning horror of a creature who has only just understood, in the smallest fraction of a second, exactly what has happened to him.

The Last Words

The fox finished his bite. He licked his sharp white teeth with a slow satisfied tongue. He looked up at the crow on the branch.

“Dear sir,” the fox said — and his voice, this time, was no longer soft and warm and reverent but slightly mocking and entirely cool — “I thank you for the cheese. It is excellent cheese. The housewife in the village down the slope makes it, I believe, from the milk of her two white goats; she has a good hand for cheese-making. I shall enjoy it.”

The crow on the branch did not speak. The crow on the branch could not speak. The crow on the branch had nothing left to say.

“And in payment for the cheese,” the fox went on, sitting down again on his sleek haunches and curling his fluffy white-tipped tail around his paws, “I will give you, dear sir, a small piece of advice. It is, I think, worth more than any wedge of cheese has ever been worth to any creature anywhere. It is this. Do not trust flatterers. Every flatterer in the world, dear sir, lives entirely at the expense of him who listens to him. Every honeyed word that is spoken in praise of you is spoken by a creature who wants something that you have. Remember it. The next time, perhaps, you will be wiser. Good morning, sir, and many thanks.”

And the fox, with the rest of the round orange-yellow cheese still in his teeth, trotted off down the dirt path through the green forest in the dappled golden morning light.

The crow stayed on the high green oak branch for a long time. The cicadas in the village below began, very slowly, to hum. The morning warmed. The dappled light moved across the forest floor. And the small bitter taste of his own foolishness — which is the only taste, in this world, that no flatterer ever pays for — sat in the small dry empty mouth of the crow for the rest of the long bright morning.

The Moral

The Greek prose Aesopica preserves the moral in this form:

“Ho mythos deloi hoti pros tous anoetous ho logos houtos harmottei.”
“The fable shows that this teaching applies to fools.”

And Phaedrus, in his celebrated Latin verse Fable I.13 (1st c. CE), preserves it in two lines that have come down through eighteen hundred years of Latin schoolrooms:

“Qui se laudari gaudet verbis subdolis, / Sera dat poenas turpi paenitentia.”
“He who delights in being praised by deceitful words pays the penalty too late, in shameful regret.”

And La Fontaine, in the second poem of his celebrated French Fables (1668), preserves it in two lines that every French schoolchild has known by heart for three hundred and fifty years:

“Apprenez que tout flatteur / Vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute.”
“Learn that every flatterer lives at the expense of him who listens to him.”

The pithy modern English form is the proverb every English-speaking child has heard:

“Do not trust flatterers.”

And the Sanskrit teachers in India, who preserved the same teaching in Birth-story 294 of the Jataka tales (the Jambu-khadaka Jataka, in which a jackal flatters a crow eating jambu-fruit), summed it up in three words: moha-mukta bhava — “be free of the delusion of flattery.” It is the same teaching in a different tongue, on a different continent, in a different millennium.

Why This Story Has Lasted

It has lasted for two and a half thousand years because flattery is, perhaps, the oldest and most reliable trick in the entire repertoire of human and animal trickery, and because every adult who has ever fallen for it — and every adult, somewhere in his life, has fallen for it — already knows the exact taste of the small bitter empty mouth of the crow on the branch after the cheese has gone.

The fable does not tell us we are bad to want praise. It does not even tell us we are stupid to want praise. It only tells us, gently and patiently, what every wise teacher in every tradition has always tried to tell us — that the moment another creature begins to praise us in honeyed words, we should hear, very faintly under the words, the small soft padding tread of the fox circling at the base of our tree. The fox is not praising us because we are wonderful. The fox is praising us because the fox wants something that we have. The cheese in our beak is what the fox wants. The praise is the lever the fox is using to pry open our beak.

Two and a half thousand years after Aesop, eighteen hundred years after Phaedrus, three hundred and fifty years after La Fontaine, in our own age of social media and likes and the constant warm fog of online flattery — the small clear voice of the fox at the base of the oak tree is still telling us the same thing he has always told us. Apprenez que tout flatteur vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute. Learn that every flatterer lives at the expense of him who listens. Hold the cheese. Keep your beak shut. The praise is not for you; it is for what you have.

And the next time — the next time — we hear the slow soft warm honey in the voice of someone who wants something from us, perhaps we will, this once, remember the high green oak branch and the falling wedge of cheese and the dappled golden morning forest, and we will, this once, simply hold the cheese.

For every flatterer in the world lives at the expense of him who listens to him. It was true in the time of Aesop. It was true in the time of Phaedrus. It was true in the time of La Fontaine. And — for whatever it is worth — it is still true today.