Perry's Index to the Aesopica
Fables exist in many versions; here is one version in English:
THE BOY AND THE SCORPION
A young boy had gone far off into the desert where he was catching crickets
to put them in cages. When he noticed a scorpion in their midst, he mistook
it for another cricket. The boy reached down to pick the scorpion up off the
ground, whereupon the scorpion pointed his sting at the boy, ready to stab him,
and said, 'If you had gone so far as to touch me, I would have set both you
and your crickets free!'
This fable shows that you should not treat bad people the same way that
you treat good people; rather, you should deal with each of them in the way
that suits their character. |
 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 199: Gibbs (Oxford) 302 [English]
Perry 199: L'Estrange 131 [English]
Perry 199: Townsend 7 [English]
Perry 199: Chambry 293 [Greek]
Perry 199: Syntipas 39 [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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