<< Home Page | Perry Index

Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE FARMER AND HIS SONS

A farmer who was about to die wanted his sons to be knowledgeable about the farm, so he summoned them and said, 'My children, there is a treasure buried in one of my vineyards.' After he died, his sons took plows and mattocks and dug up the entire farm. They did not find any treasure, but the vineyard paid them back with a greatly increased harvest.
Thus they learned that man's greatest treasure consists in work.

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 42: Caxton 6.17 [English]
Perry 42: Gibbs (Oxford) 494 [English]
Perry 42: L'Estrange 109 [English]
Perry 42: Townsend 80 [English]
Perry 42: Steinhowel 6.17 [Latin, illustrated] Mannheim University Library
Perry 42: Chambry 83 [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.