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Perry's Index to the Aesopica

Fables exist in many versions; here is one version in English:

THE MURDERER AND THE MULBERRY TREE

A robber had murdered someone along the road. When the bystanders began to chase him, he dropped the bloody corpse and ran away. Some travellers coming from the opposite direction asked the man how he had stained his hands. The man said that he had just climbed down from a mulberry tree, but as he was speaking, his pursuers caught up with him. They seized the murderer and crucified him on a mulberry tree. The tree said to him, 'It does not trouble me at all to assist in your execution, since you tried to smear me with the murder that you yourself committed!'
If often happens that even honest people do not hesitate to persecute someone who has slandered them.

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.


Perry 152: Gibbs (Oxford) 167 [English]
Perry 152: Chambry 214 [Greek]


You can find a compilation of Perry's index to the Aesopica in the gigantic appendix to his edition of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1965). This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the Aesopic fable tradition. Invaluable.