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Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE MAN AND THE OLD WOMAN

A young man was walking along on a blazing hot day when he met an old woman who was going the same way. Seeing that she was dreadfully exhausted from the heat of the day and the demands of the journey, he felt sorry for her weakness and when the woman simply didn't have the strength to go any further, he picked her up off the ground and carried her on his shoulders. While he was carrying her this way, the young man was so strongly aroused by shameful thoughts that he had an erection. Spurred by wanton lust and hot desire, he immediately put the old woman down on the ground and had sex with her. Being simple-minded, the woman asked him, 'What are you doing to me?' He answered, 'You are too heavy to carry, so I've decided to carve off some of your flesh.' The man satisfied himself and then picked the woman up off the ground again and set her on his shoulders. After he had gone some way down the road, the old woman said to him, 'If I am still too heavy a burden for you, you can put me down again and carve off some more of me!'
This fable shows that some people, when satisfying their own personal desires, pretend as if the thing was done without their knowledge, giving the impression that it is not actually a matter of desire, but rather some practical necessity.

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 410: Gibbs (Oxford) 576 [English]
Perry 410: Syntipas 54 [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.