<< Home Page | Perry Index

Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE PARTRIDGE AND THE ROOSTERS

A man who kept roosters also bought himself a partridge and let it loose to live among his other birds. When the roosters pecked at the partridge and chased him away, the partridge became very dejected, thinking that the roosters were attacking him because he was an outsider. After a little while, however, the partridge saw the roosters fighting and attacking one another. The partridge then put aside his grief and said, 'Well, I am certainly not going to grieve over this any longer, now that I see the way they fight with one another.
The story shows that a wise person readily tolerates the insolence of strangers when he sees those same strangers mistreating one another.

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 23: Gibbs (Oxford) 134 [English]
Perry 23: L'Estrange 84 [English]
Perry 23: Townsend 234 [English]
Perry 23: Chambry 21 [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.