The Boy and the Filberts

[2] The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus briefly mentioned the fable in his Discourses as an analogy of man's getting less as a result of believing he needs more.

[3] The earliest English appearance of the story is in a translation of Antoine Houdar de la Motte's One Hundred New Court Fables (1721), where it is credited to Epictetus and illustrates the proposition that one should 'be contented with the middle state'.

The story was given further currency by appearing in Robert Dodsley's Select fables of Esop and other fabulists (1765) with the moral that 'the surest way to gain our ends is to moderate our desires'.

[5] It was retold in verse in Old Friends in a New Dress, a popular collection written specially for children by Richard Scrafton Sharpe, originally published in 1807.

Idries Shah recounts the fable as a teaching story in his Tales of the Dervishes, where cherries in a jar are used to trap the animal.