The Dog and Its Reflection

The fable was invariably referred to in Greek sources as "The dog carrying meat" after its opening words (Κύων κρέας φέρουσα), and the moral drawn there was to be contented with what one has.

[9] In his French version of the story, La Fontaine gave it the title Le chien qui lâche sa proie pour l'ombre (The dog who relinquished his prey for its shadow VI.17),[10] where ombre has the same ambiguity of meaning.

He is so represented in the painting by Paul de Vos in the Museo del Prado, dating from 1638/40,[11] and that by Edwin Henry Landseer, which is titled "The Dog and the Shadow" (1822), in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A story close to Aesop's is inserted into the Buddhist scriptures as the Calladhanuggaha Jataka, where a jackal bearing a piece of flesh walks along a river bank and plunges in after the fish it sees swimming there.

In his retelling of the story, Lydgate had drawn the lesson that the one "Who all coveteth, oft he loseth all",[18] He stated as well that this was "an olde proverb"[19] which, indeed, in the form "All covet, all lose", was later to be quoted as the fable's moral by Roger L'Estrange.

[25] One other author, Walter Pope in his Moral and political fables, ancient and modern (1698), suggested that the alternative proverb, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", could be applied to the dog's poor judgment.

So in his Book of Emblemes (1586), the English poet Geoffrey Whitney gives to his illustration of the fable the Latin title Mediocribus utere partis (Make use of moderate possessions) and comments in the course of his accompanying poem, Others also treated the subject of being content with what one already has in an emblematic way.

[30] At a later date the financial implications of "throwing good money after bad" for uncertain gain were to be summed up in the English phrase "It was the story of the dog and the shadow".

[32] In a British context, during the agitation running up to the 1832 Reform Act, a pseudonymous 'Peter Pilpay' wrote a set of Fables from ancient authors, or old saws with modern instances in which appeared a topical retelling of "The Dog and the Shadow".

[33] And in the following decade, a member of parliament who had given up his place in order to stand unsuccessfully for a more prestigious constituency was lampooned in the press as "most appropriately represented as the dog in the fable who, snatching at the shadow, lost the substance".