The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

This is one of the oldest cautionary tales in the world, and one of the very few fables in any tradition that has given the language in which it is told a permanent figure of speech. We say it without thinking — a wolf in sheep’s clothing — and we mean by it any person who hides a cruel heart behind a friendly face. The phrase is everywhere. It is in newspaper columns and political speeches; it is whispered between friends about strangers; it is printed in three thousand novels. We have all said it. Few of us know that it travels into modern English from two of the deepest currents of all Western literature, flowing from two different fountainheads in the ancient world, and meeting in the medieval Christian imagination to become inseparable.

The first source is the Greek storyteller Aesop, of the sixth century before Christ, in whose corpus the fable is catalogued as Perry 451 under the Greek title Lykos endysamenos kodion — “The Wolf Wearing a Fleece.” The principal Greek source-form survives in the Augustana recension of the prose Aesopica, set down around the second century after Christ. The second source is the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 15, in which Jesus warns: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” The two strands — pagan and Christian, Greek-philosophical and Hebrew-prophetic — flowed into the medieval West side by side. By the time of William Caxton’s first printed English Aesop in 1484 they were already inseparable. The fable became one of the very first that English children learned. It is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index as type ATU 123B — the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing — and its cousin tale, The Wolf and the Kids (ATU 123, Grimm KHM 5), holds the same warning in a different shape.

This is the story.

The Green Hillside

It happened, the old tellers said, in the rolling green hills of ancient Macedonia, where olive groves climbed the sun-baked valleys and shepherds in brown tunics tended their flocks under a sky so blue it seemed painted by the hand of Zeus himself. The grass on those hills was emerald in spring, gold in summer, and on this particular afternoon — late summer, the air heavy with the smell of cypress and wild thyme — it was a deep tired green, sun-bleached at the edges, and dotted everywhere with the pure white shapes of a hundred peaceful sheep.

The flock was beautiful. The sheep were plump and clean, their fleeces full and white from a good year of pasture. They moved across the hillside in the slow undulating rhythm that flocks have always moved with — a few steps forward, a pause, a soft munch of grass, a few more steps — and the older ewes lifted their heads now and then to look about while the lambs tumbled and chased one another between their mothers’ legs. It was the picture, exactly, that every painter of pastoral scenes has tried to paint since the world began.

And on the high rock at the edge of the hill, leaning quietly on his long wooden crook, stood the shepherd.

He was a young man of perhaps thirty summers, broad-shouldered and brown-skinned, in a rough brown tunic with a thick red wool cloak thrown back over one shoulder. His face was weathered by sun and wind. His hands were strong. His eyes — and this is important to remember as the story goes on — his eyes were the eyes of a man who had spent his whole life watching sheep, and who had therefore learned to see, at a glance, the difference between an ordinary sheep and one that was not quite ordinary. There is no schooling for that kind of eye. It is bought only with hours, and there is no shortcut.

He stood and watched. The afternoon was peaceful. He had no idea, that day, that anything was wrong.

The Wolf

But something was wrong.

Behind a great grey rock at the edge of the hillside, perhaps a hundred paces from the flock, a lean grey wolf lay flat against the dust with his yellow eyes fixed on the grazing sheep. His belly was empty. It had been empty for two days. The summer had been hard on the wolves of those hills — the deer had moved higher into the mountains where the air was cooler, the rabbits were thin, the smaller game had gone to ground in the long grass — and this wolf, lean even by wolf standards, had not eaten anything more substantial than a single field-mouse since the last new moon.

He was not, as wolves go, a stupid wolf. Indeed he was a thoughtful one — more thoughtful, perhaps, than was good for him. He understood very well that the flock he was looking at was protected. He could see the shepherd on the high rock; he could see the long wooden crook; he could see, sleeping in the shade beside the shepherd, the great brown shape of a sheepdog with a heavy iron-spiked collar around its neck. A direct attack on the flock would mean the dog would be on him before he had taken three sheep, and the shepherd’s stones — the wolf had felt those stones before, on a bad night in winter — were sharp and accurate at thirty paces.

He needed, then, another way.

And as he lay there in the dust behind his rock, watching the slow white movement of the flock, the other way came to him. It came to him as a small bright idea, no bigger than a spark, and it came to him because of something he saw — a single soft pale shape lying at the edge of the trees a little way down the slope, where one of the older ewes had perhaps shed her fleece and the shepherd had not yet collected it.

A fleece. A whole, soft, white, sheep-shaped fleece, lying empty on the grass.

The wolf’s yellow eyes narrowed. His grey ears pricked forward. And the small bright spark in his mind grew very slowly into a plan.

The Disguise

He waited until the shepherd had turned his face to the west, where the sun was beginning to drop behind the cypress trees, and then he crept down the slope on his belly through the long grass, low and silent as wolves know how to be when they truly mean it, until he reached the edge of the trees where the empty fleece lay. He sniffed it. It smelled of sheep — of grass and milk and warm wool. He nosed at it carefully. It was, indeed, a whole hide, soft and clean, the sort of thing a shepherd would have collected at sunset for the wool-merchants in the town.

The wolf glanced once back up the slope. The shepherd was still looking west. The dog was still asleep in the shade.

And the wolf, slowly and deliberately, stepped under the fleece.

It is not easy for a wolf to disguise himself as a sheep. His shape is wrong; his head is the wrong shape; his legs are too long and the wrong angle; his teeth, when he closes his mouth, do not quite hide. But it is not impossible either, especially in the failing light of late afternoon, especially at a distance, especially among a flock of sheep who are themselves not famous for their close attention to detail.

He pulled the fleece up over his back. He arranged it carefully around his shoulders so that the soft empty face of the sheep-skin lay over his own grey muzzle, with the hollow eye-holes lining up roughly with his own yellow eyes. He worked the fleece down over his haunches. He arranged the back legs of the skin so that they hung approximately where his own back legs were. He stood up slowly on four legs and tested his disguise with a small experimental step.

He looked, at the very least, more like a sheep than like a wolf.

And in the long shadows of late afternoon, on a hillside where the shepherd was tired from a long day, that, the wolf judged, would be enough.

Among the Flock

He walked. Slowly, as a sheep walks, with his head a little down and his back a little arched and a small careful sway in his step that he had spent thirty years of his wolf-life learning to imitate, he walked out of the trees and up the slope and into the edge of the flock.

The first sheep he passed was an older ewe with a notch in her left ear. She lifted her head, looked at him, blinked her round dark eyes once, and went back to grazing. The wolf’s heart — and a wolf’s heart is a thing of cold patience — quickened just a little. He took another step. A small lamb, no more than three months old, came tumbling past on his right with a little white tail flicking, and the lamb did not even look at him. The wolf moved deeper into the flock.

And now, with his yellow eyes hidden in the hollow eye-holes of the white fleece, he began to make his choice. There was a plump young ewe just ahead of him, perhaps a year old, fat from the summer’s grass, slow because she was the slowest. She would be tonight’s dinner. She would also, the wolf thought, be tomorrow’s dinner, and the day after’s. He would take her by the throat in the dusk when the shepherd was leading the flock down to the fold, and he would drag her away into the trees, and the shepherd, looking back, would see only a missing sheep where the wolves had perhaps come and gone — and the wolf in his disguise could simply walk back into the flock the next morning and choose another.

It was, you have to admit, a very good plan.

It was the kind of plan, indeed, that has been the plan of false friends and hidden enemies in every generation since the world began.

The Shepherd’s Eye

But the shepherd, on his high rock, had begun to come down the slope toward the flock.

It was not, as it happened, that he had seen anything wrong. He had not. The wolf’s disguise, in the failing light, was holding up. The shepherd was simply doing what shepherds in those Macedonian hills had done for a thousand years at the end of every long summer day — he had decided, before the flock went down to the fold for the night, to choose one sheep for the evening’s mutton. The shepherd’s wife was waiting at the cottage with the fire built up and the iron pot on the hook over the coals. She had asked him that morning to bring back a fat young sheep for the supper, and now, walking slowly into the edge of the flock with his long bronze knife in one hand and his crook in the other, he was looking for the fattest one.

His eye, trained by twenty years on the hills, moved across the flock.

It passed over the older ewes — too tough. It passed over the lambs — too small. And it stopped, as the wolf had known it would stop, on the plump young ewe just at the edge of the flock — except that, just behind that plump young ewe, partly hidden by her flank, there was another sheep, slightly larger, slightly fatter, slightly lower to the ground, that the shepherd had somehow not noticed before that moment.

He looked at it. He thought, that one is even better.

And he walked, with his bronze knife in his hand, straight toward the wolf.

The Stroke of the Knife

The wolf, when he saw the shepherd coming, did not at first understand. He had spent the last hour preparing himself to deceive sheep, not men. He stood very still and tried to remember how a sheep stood when a man approached it — calmly, he thought, with the head a little down. He stood with his head a little down. The shepherd came on, his red cloak swinging, his boots crunching softly on the dry summer grass. The wolf began to wonder, with a small cold tightness opening in his belly, whether the shepherd had perhaps seen through the disguise after all.

He had not.

The shepherd reached him, looked down once at what he believed to be a particularly fine fat young sheep, took the bronze knife in his right hand, and — without a word, without a flourish, in the calm practised way of a man who has done this same small thing on the same hillside ten thousand evenings of his life — he laid one hand on the back of the white fleece and brought the knife down.

One stroke. That was all.

The white fleece parted; and the grey body that lay underneath it was revealed, in the last orange light of the setting sun, as the body of a wolf.

The Last Words

The shepherd stepped back. He looked down at the long lean grey carcass at his feet, at the yellow eyes already glazing over, at the white fleece lying empty beside it on the grass. The flock of sheep, suddenly aware that something had happened in their midst, lifted their heads and stared. The brown sheepdog, woken by the movement, came running down from the rock with his hackles up.

And the shepherd — a quiet man, a man who did not waste words — looked once around the silent hillside, once at his dog, once at the fading sun, and said, in a voice no louder than the wind in the cypress trees:

“I came tonight for a sheep. I have found a wolf instead.”

And he picked up the bronze knife, and the long grey body, and he carried it back up the hill and down the other side toward the cottage, where the iron pot was boiling on the fire — for he was a thrifty man, and a wolf’s pelt, in those days, fetched a good price at the market, and there is no use letting any meat go to waste, even the meat of one who came to take yours.

The Moral

The Greek prose Aesopica preserves the moral in this form:

“Ho mythos deloi hoti homoios kai ton anthropon hoi kakourgoi hypokrisei schematos pleista kakourgousin.”
“The fable shows that, in the same way, evildoers among men accomplish their greatest wickedness by the disguise of pretence.”

And the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 7 verse 15 — which the medieval Christian world heard as the same teaching in a holier voice — preserves the moral in this form:

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.”

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

“Appearances are deceptive.”

And the fable also gave English the figure of speech that everyone knows — a wolf in sheep’s clothing — used a thousand times a day by people who have never read either Aesop or the Gospel of Matthew, and who could not tell you which one the phrase came from, 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 met, somewhere in our lives, a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a friend who was not a friend, a colleague who was not a colleague, a leader who was not a leader, a love who was not a love. It has lasted because the disguise — the fleece, the warm voice, the kind smile — works on us exactly as it worked on the flock: we are creatures of appearances, and our eyes are easily fooled. And it has lasted because, in the end, the story offers us a small hard hope. The shepherd did see the wolf. The disguise did fail. The bronze knife did come down. The fable does not promise that we ourselves will always have the shepherd’s eye — but it tells us that the shepherd’s eye exists, in the world, and that it is bought, slowly, by paying attention.

Two and a half thousand years after Aesop, two thousand years after Matthew, in our own hillside of an age — full of bright fleeces and hidden teeth — the story is still telling us, in its small clear voice, the same thing. Look twice. Look closely. Look long.

The wolf will sometimes wear the fleece.

But the shepherd, with patience, will see.