The Goose That Laid Golden Eggs

This is one of the oldest warnings in the world. It is one of the very few fables in any tradition that has given the language in which it is told a permanent figure of speech — for when an English speaker says, of any short-sighted act of greed, that someone has killed the goose that lays the golden eggs, he is quoting, without knowing it, a Greek farmer who lived two and a half thousand years ago, and a fable that was already old when it reached Athens. We say the phrase casually now. We say it about businesses that overcharge their best customers, about governments that tax until industries die, about corporations that strip-mine their own employees. But every time we say it, we are repeating, with our own breath, the same small clear teaching that came down from Aesop himself in the sixth century before Christ.

The fable belongs to Aesop, the Greek storyteller of the sixth century BCE, in whose corpus it is catalogued as Perry 87 under the Greek title Chena ten ta chrysa oa tiktousan — “The Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs.” (In some Greek manuscripts the bird is a hen, *ornis chrysotokos*, “the gold-laying bird,” and in others a goose; the substance of the story is the same in both forms.) The principal Greek source-form survives in the Augustana recension of the prose Aesopica, set down around the second century after Christ. The fable did not appear in the surviving books of Phaedrus, but it entered Latin through the medieval Romulus collections (4th–10th c.) as De Anseribus Aureis Ova Parientibus, and through the verse-Aesop of Walter of England in the twelfth century. It came 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).

Most famously of all, the fable became the thirteenth poem of Book V of Jean de La Fontaine’s celebrated Fables (1668), under the title La Poule aux Œufs d’Or — “The Hen with the Golden Eggs” — in which La Fontaine ended with the line that the French language has remembered ever since: “L’avarice perd tout en voulant tout gagner” — “greed loses everything by wanting to gain everything.” The fable is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index as type ATU 219, with parallels in Persian, Russian, German, and Tibetan story-tradition, and a close cousin in the Indian Pañcatantra (Book 1, Mitra-bheda), which tells of the bird that excretes golden droppings and is killed by its owner in greed.

This is the story.

The Farmer and His Wife

It happened, the old tellers said, on a small stone farm in the rolling green hills of ancient Greece, perhaps a day’s walk from the town of Thespiae, on a piece of dry land that had been in the same family for four generations and never made any of them rich. The farmer who tilled it now was a quiet man, neither old nor young, with sun-browned arms and a thin black beard, and a wife who worked beside him from dawn to dark, and a small thatched cottage of weathered grey stone that leaked in winter and baked in summer and was, for all its trouble, the only home the two of them had ever known. They kept three goats. They kept a small patch of barley. They kept, in a wooden coop behind the cottage, half a dozen brown chickens and one rather plump white goose.

The goose had been there longer than any of the chickens. The wife had hatched her from an egg the year they were married, and the goose had grown up walking after the wife around the yard like a small white shadow, and had laid one ordinary white egg every morning of her life, and had been treated kindly because the wife had a soft heart and could never quite bring herself, when the time came, to have her killed for the pot. So the goose had lived. She was old now — perhaps eight years old, which is old for a goose — and her white feathers were a little less bright than they had been, and her bright orange feet were a little stiffer in the cold mornings. But she was still a steady layer. One ordinary white egg every morning, year in and year out, with no fuss and no holiday.

And on the small stone farm, on a particular bright morning in the early summer, the farmer rose at sunrise as he always did, pulled on his rough brown tunic and tied his red wool sash around his waist, and walked out through the yard to the wooden coop to collect the day’s eggs.

The First Golden Egg

He pushed open the wooden door of the coop. He bent down. The chickens fluttered out around his ankles to peck at the morning grain. He reached into the first nest, found the warm brown chicken-egg, and put it carefully into the wicker basket on his arm. He reached into the second nest, the third, the fourth — five chicken-eggs in all that morning. And then he turned to the corner of the coop where the white goose was sitting in her own larger wooden nest, and he reached in under her warm feathered breast for what he expected to be one ordinary white goose-egg.

His hand closed on something cold. Cold, and surprisingly heavy, and smooth, and round.

The farmer paused. The goose looked at him. He drew his hand back out of the nest, and there in his weathered palm — bright as the sunrise itself, gleaming with a yellow light that seemed almost to glow of its own accord — was a single solid egg of pure gold.

The farmer did not, at first, believe what he was seeing. He turned the egg over slowly in his hand. He weighed it in his palm. He bit it gently with his teeth, the way the old tellers said you could test gold, and it did not give. He held it up to the morning sunlight. It was an egg, a perfectly egg-shaped, egg-sized, egg-coloured egg — except that it was solid yellow gold from one end to the other.

He ran. He ran out of the coop, across the yard, and into the cottage, and he held the egg out to his wife with hands that were trembling so hard the egg almost fell on the floor. The wife took it from him. She turned it over the same way he had. She bit it the same way. She held it up to the morning sunlight that came through the small open window. And she sat down on the wooden bench by the table and looked at her husband, and she said only one thing, very quietly:

“Take it to the goldsmith in the town. Today. Now.”

The Daily Wonder

The farmer took the egg to the goldsmith. The goldsmith — a careful old man with thick spectacles of polished crystal, who had been weighing gold for forty years — weighed it on his small bronze scales, scratched it with his testing-stone, dropped a single drop of acid on its surface, and looked up at the farmer with eyes that had become very wide. He named a price. The farmer — a man who had never seen more than ten silver coins together at once in his whole life — almost fell backward off the wooden stool. He sold the egg. He walked home with a leather purse so heavy he had to carry it in both hands.

That night the farmer and his wife sat in the small stone cottage by the light of a single tallow candle and counted the silver coins three times, just to be sure. They were rich. Not great-merchant rich, perhaps, not yet — but richer than anyone in their family had been for four generations.

And the next morning, when the farmer went to the wooden coop, there was another golden egg.

And the morning after that. And the morning after that. Every morning, without fail, one bright solid egg of pure yellow gold, cold and heavy and gleaming, sitting in the white goose’s nest exactly where the ordinary white egg had once sat. The farmer collected each one. He took them to town one at a time, never selling more than one a week — for he was, for all his luck, not a foolish man, and he understood that to bring a hundred golden eggs to the goldsmith at once would draw the kind of attention that no small farmer ever wished to draw.

And slowly, carefully, week by week, the silver coins piled up in the leather purse, and the leather purse was joined by a second, and the second by a third, and the small stone cottage with the leaky roof became a fine well-built two-storey farmhouse with a tiled roof and painted shutters, and the rough brown tunic became a coat of green velvet trimmed with rabbit-fur, and the wife’s plain woollen dress became a long blue silk robe with a thick gold chain around her neck, and the three thin goats became a flock of forty fine fat ones. They hired servants. They bought new fields. The neighbours, who could not understand how a small stone-farmer could have risen so quickly, began to whisper that the gods themselves had blessed the family.

And every morning, with no fuss and no holiday, the white goose laid one more egg of solid gold.

The Growing Greed

It is here, in this story, that the slow turning happens. The slow turning is the heart of the fable, and to read it without feeling it is to miss the whole thing. For the farmer and his wife, who had lived for forty years on a thin diet of barley and goat’s-milk in a leaky stone cottage, did not, when the gold began to flow, feel that they were finally rich enough. They felt instead that they were finally beginning to be rich. And every new fine thing they bought — every silver candlestick, every imported fig, every hired servant — did not satisfy the hunger of the eye. It made the hunger sharper.

The wife, who had once been so soft-hearted she could not have a goose killed for the supper, began to look at the white goose differently. So did the farmer. They were grateful to the goose, of course. They fed her the best grain. They lined her wooden nest with fresh clean straw every morning. They set a velvet cushion in her corner of the coop. But under the gratitude there grew, very quietly at first and then more loudly, another feeling — an impatience, a hunger, a small dark thought that one egg a day was a beautiful thing, but that if there was one egg a day inside this goose, then surely, surely, there was a great mass of gold somewhere inside the goose, gathered up in some hidden place beneath her white feathered breast, and if one could only get at that mass of gold all at once, in a single stroke, instead of waiting one egg at a time for the rest of the goose’s life —

Why, then, the farmer and his wife thought, half-aloud and half-asleep, lying together in their fine new bed at night, then they would not be merely rich. Then they would be kings.

The Plot

The conversation came one evening, the way these conversations always do. The farmer and his wife were sitting at the polished oak table in the new farmhouse, by the warm light of a tallow candle, and the wife had set on the table between them a single golden egg from the morning’s laying — for they liked, sometimes, to look at the eggs before they sold them, the way other people might look at a beautiful painting. The egg gleamed. The fire on the hearth crackled.

The wife said, very softly, what they had both been thinking. She said: “How many golden eggs do you suppose are inside her, all together?”

The farmer said: “I have wondered the same thing.”

“If we could get them all at once — “

“I have thought it.”

“How long does a goose live? Eight years more? Ten? That is — three thousand more eggs, perhaps. Three thousand. All at once. Tomorrow morning.”

The farmer was silent. He looked at the gold egg on the table. He looked at his wife. Through the doorway of the kitchen, in the small lamp-lit corner of the coop, he could just see the white shape of the goose, asleep with her head folded under her wing, breathing slowly. He said: “And if she lives ten more years and lays ten more years of eggs?”

“Three thousand eggs,” the wife said again, “but perhaps in ten years we will be too old to enjoy them. Why not have them all now, while we are still strong?”

And the farmer, who was, like all of us, a little weaker than he should have been, looked once at his wife and once at the gleaming gold egg on the table, and he reached out for the long polished bronze knife that lay beside the empty bread-board.

The Stroke of the Knife

He did it, the old tellers said, just before sunrise the next morning, while the wife held the small lamp. The white goose, sleepy and trusting, did not understand what was happening when the farmer’s hands closed gently around her warm feathered body and lifted her out of the wooden nest. She did not understand when he carried her over to the long wooden table. She did not understand when he laid her on her side on the smooth wood and stroked her white feathers once, almost tenderly, with the back of his calloused hand.

She understood, perhaps, when she saw the bronze knife.

But by then it was already too late.

The farmer was, even in his greed, not a cruel man. He did the thing as quickly as he could. The knife came down once. The white goose did not even have time to cry out. And then, with hands that were already trembling — for now that the deed was done a strange cold doubt was beginning to grow in his belly — he picked up the bronze knife again, and made a long careful cut down the soft white feathered breast of the goose, and opened her body, and looked inside.

The Empty Goose

There was no gold.

There was no hidden mass of yellow metal sleeping somewhere beneath the white feathered breast. There was no secret treasure-chamber inside the goose. There was only — only — the ordinary, soft, pink-and-red flesh of an ordinary goose. Heart and lungs and liver and gizzard. The kind of inside that any goose, on any farm in any country in the world, has always had. Nothing more.

The farmer stared. He stared for a long time. He turned the goose over. He looked again. He probed with his fingers. He pulled apart the soft pink flesh and looked under it. Nothing.

The miracle, it turned out, had not been in the goose at all. It had been in the daily egg.

And there were no more daily eggs.

The farmer sat down on the floor beside the lifeless white goose with her bright orange feet sticking up uselessly into the air, and he put his head into his hands, and he did not say anything for a very long time. The wife stood in the doorway with her hand to her mouth and the small lamp shaking in her other hand. The first cold light of morning came in through the window and fell on the empty goose on the table, and on the bronze knife on the floor, and on the leather purses of silver coins in the corner, and on the wooden chests of golden eggs that they had already collected and that, the farmer now understood, would be the very last golden eggs they would ever own.

The Last Words

It was the farmer who spoke first. He did not curse. He did not weep, although his eyes were very wet. He looked once at the white goose on the table, once at the bronze knife on the floor, and once at his wife in the doorway, and he said in a voice that was very quiet and very steady:

“We had one good thing. And we had it every day. And we have killed it, the two of us together, because one good thing every day was not enough for us. There will be no more golden eggs.”

And he picked up the white goose, and he carried her out into the yard, and he buried her under the great olive tree where she had liked, in the warm afternoons, to sit in the shade. And the farmer and his wife went on living in the fine new farmhouse, and they had the golden eggs they had already collected, and they were not poor again. But they were not — and they never would be — the kings they had imagined, lying together in their fine bed in the dark.

And every morning for the rest of his life, when the farmer rose at sunrise and walked out through the yard, he glanced once at the empty wooden coop and once at the place under the olive tree where the white goose was buried, and he remembered, again, the small ordinary daily good thing that he had thrown away.

The Moral

The Greek prose Aesopica preserves the moral in this form:

“Ho mythos deloi hoti hoi tais heauton eutuchiais me arkoumenoi, pleon epithymountes, kai ha eichon apolesan.”
“The fable shows that those who, not satisfied with their own good fortune, desire more, lose even what they had.”

And La Fontaine, in his celebrated La Poule aux Œufs d’Or (Book V, Fable 13, of his Fables of 1668), preserves the moral in a single line of French verse that the language has remembered for more than three hundred and fifty years:

“L’avarice perd tout en voulant tout gagner.”
“Greed loses everything by wanting to gain everything.”

The pithy modern English form, descending through Croxall and Jacobs, is simpler still:

“Much wants more, and loses all.”

And the fable also gave English the figure of speech that everyone knows — kill the goose that lays the golden eggs — used a thousand times a day in financial commentary, in political speech, in everyday English, by people who have never read either Aesop or La Fontaine, but who know perfectly well, when they say it, what they mean.

Why This Story Has Lasted

It has lasted because every one of us has, at some moment in our lives, been the farmer with the bronze knife in his hand. Not necessarily over a goose, of course — but over a relationship that was good, a job that was steady, a friendship that paid out small kindnesses every day, a customer who came in every Friday for forty years, a teacher who explained things patiently if you would only listen. We have all stood with the small ordinary daily good thing in front of us, and we have all heard, very faintly, the small dark voice that whispers, but if I could have it all at once — and we have all, at one time or another, swung the bronze knife.

The fable does not tell us we are bad. It does not even say we are stupid. It only tells us, gently, what every farmer has always known and what every wise man has always tried to remember: that the regular daily small good thing — the one egg, the one pay-cheque, the one steady customer, the one quiet friendship — is the goose itself, and that the goose is more precious than any single hoard of gold could ever be, because the goose keeps laying, and the hoard does not.

Two and a half thousand years after Aesop, three hundred and fifty years after La Fontaine, in our own age of get-rich-quick schemes and one-time windfalls and the constant aching wish to have it all at once — the small clear voice of the Greek farmer is still telling us the same thing. The egg today, and the egg tomorrow, and the egg the day after that. Do not be so foolish as to want them all at once. Do not, for the love of every fine thing you have, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

For there is no gold inside the goose.

The gold is in the daily egg.