<< Home Page | Perry Index

Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE ROOSTER AND THE CATS

There was a rooster who employed cats as his litter bearers. When the fox saw the rooster being proudly carried about in this way, she said to him, 'I advise you to beware of treachery: if you look into the faces of those cats, you will realize that they are not bearing a burden -- they are carting off loot!' Afterwards, when the pack of cats began to grow hungry, they tore their lord to pieces and divided his remains amongst themselves.
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 546: Gibbs (Oxford) 489 [English]
Perry 546: Phaedrus 6.18 [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.