<< Home Page | Perry Index

Perry's Index to the Aesopica

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

THE WIDOW AND HER HEN

There was a widow who had a hen that laid one egg each and every day. The woman then began to feed the hen more lavishly, thinking that if the hen ate more grain she would lay two eggs. The hen got so fat from eating all the food that she stopped laying eggs entirely.
The fable shows that people who grasp at more than they need lose the little that they held in their hands.

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 58: Gibbs (Oxford) 433 [English]
Perry 58: L'Estrange 87 [English]
Perry 58: Townsend 168 [English]
Perry 58: Chambry 90 [Greek]
Perry 58: Syntipas 42 [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.