Perry's Index to the Aesopica
Fables exist in many versions; here is one version in English:
THE DRIVER AND THE DONKEY ON THE CLIFF
A donkey had turned aside from the main road and was heading for a cliff. The
driver shouted at him, 'Where are you going, you wretched beast?' He grabbed
hold of the donkey's tail and tried to drag him back from the cliff, but the
donkey did not stop and instead kept going forward. So the man pushed the donkey
even harder than he had pulled him back and said, 'Go ahead then! You can take
the worthless victor's crown in this damned contest.'
The fable criticizes people who are destroyed by their own stupidity. |
 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 186: Gibbs (Oxford) 486 [English]
Perry 186: Townsend 309 [English]
Perry 186: Chambry 277 [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.
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