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Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)

458. THE RUNAWAY SLAVE IN THE MILL
Perry 440 (Plutarch, Advice on Marriage 41.144a)

A man finally caught sight of his runaway slave and started chasing him. The slave ran straight into the mill and his master said, 'Where better could I have hoped to have found you!'

Note: Slaves were regularly punished by being sent to turn the millstones together with the draught animals (compare Plautus, Persa 22, when one of the slaves is boasting about his punishment: 'I've moved up the chain, so to speak, of command: they've made me chief whipping-boy at the mill!').


Source: Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura Gibbs. Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.
NOTE: New cover, with new ISBN, published in 2008; contents of book unchanged.