Misadventures in the Land of Fables, #10
Fables are simple narratives, often rendered in simple language, and as such easily dismissed as being ‘for children.’ Unfairly so. The Victorians may have put them to use in the nursery, but they were never intended for the younger reader.
These sometimes harsh lessons on pride and vanity, on the exercise of power, tactics and strategy, informed statecraft and political debate in the Ancient World. Socrates transposed them into verse while awaiting judgement and execution.
As an ethical system, Aesop’s fables are incoherent and contradictory, best treated as elements of folk wisdom, appealed to case by case. Each fable is an example, and thus a point of reference, of comparison or contradiction.
For me, they are a starting point. A proposition that prompts a reply. Or even another idea, another discussion.
‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’
Consider Aesop’s ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’ (aka ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’). A simple tale of a naughty boy who gets his comeuppance. In later versions, that comeuppance is extreme: the boy loses his life; in earlier versions—the original Greek?—he loses only his sheep. In this, the villagers suffer almost as much as the boy. It is the community that sustains the economic damage. It needn’t have happened.
I have long felt the villager’s were remiss in not responding to the boy’s last cry for help. They chose to ignore him when the better course of action would have been to respond and then sack the boy for his third offence. They didn’t and are therefore partly responsible for. There is a lesson there. See my version: ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’
The moral of Aesop’s original has remained consistent across translations: there is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth [Townsend]. It’s curious then that the fable came to be used as a denunciation not of dishonesty, but alarmism.
‘To Cry Wolf’
I suppose the phrase was popularised by newspaper journalists and politicians censuring those making exaggerated claims of dire consequences, disaster, defeat. You risk losing your credibility, they warned.
But accusations of crying wolf can be disingenuous, a tactic to play down reasonable claims, to delay or derail calls for action that certain parties might find restrictive. It really depends on how plausible these claims are and whether it is possible to mitigate the consequences after they have transpired. (See climate change and fascism for examples of calamities which are best tackled in advance.)
This tension between sounding the alarm and claims of alarmism informs a version of ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’ that I uncovered in my research. It’s a kind of sequel; a variation or reverberation of the original, and its moral might be summarised thus: an alarm system you decline to use is also no alarm system at all.
You can read it here: ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Cry Wolf’