ZEUS AND THE GOOD THINGS

Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

ZEUS AND THE GOOD THINGS

The Good Things were too weak to defend themselves from the Bad Things, so the Bad Things drove them off to heaven. The Good Things then asked Zeus how they could reach mankind. Zeus told them that they should not go together all at once, only one at a time. This is why people are constantly besieged by Bad Things, since they are nearby, while Good Things come more rarely, since they must descend to us from heaven one by one.
The fable shows that good things do not happen very often, while bad things happen to us all the time.

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 274: Gibbs (Oxford) 525 [English]
Perry 274: Townsend 247 [English]
Perry 274: Chambry 1 [Greek]
Perry 274: Avianus 24 [Latin]

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.