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Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE NIGHT-OWL, THE CAT AND THE MOUSE

A night-owl asked a cat if the cat would agree to carry him around, so that together they could go look for someone to talk to. The cat took the owl to the house of a mouse. The owl asked the cat to announce him and he did so. When the mouse heard the voice of the cat, he came to the door of his house and said, 'What do you two want from me? What do you have to say?' 'We want to talk with you,' said the owl and the cat. The mouse understood that these two had devised some evil plot against him, so he replied, 'A curse on you, my lord cat, and a curse on the one you are carrying-- and a curse on your house, and on your sons and your daughters, and on all your damn relatives! You did badly to come here, and I hope that bad things will befall you on your way back home!'
For people who do not know how to speak nicely to their enemies, thus creating enmity and getting into trouble.

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 561: Gibbs (Oxford) 98 [English]
Perry 561: Ademar 25 [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.