The Fox and the Crow (Aesop)

Addressing a maladroit sponger called Scaeva in his Epistles, the poet counsels guarded speech for "if the crow could have fed in silence, he would have had better fare, and much less of quarreling and of envy".

In Norman Shapiro's translation: As was the case with several others of La Fontaine's fables, there was dissatisfaction in Christian circles, where it was felt that morality was offended by allowing the fox to go unpunished for its theft.

What seems to be a depiction of the tale on a painted vase discovered in excavations at Lothal from the Indus Valley civilisation suggests that the story may have been known there at least a thousand years earlier than any other source.

They include: There was also a setting of the French words by the Dutch composer Rudolf Koumans in Vijf fabels van La Fontaine (op.

1934) also exploits its dramatic possibilities in what he describes as his small cantata, La Fontaine en chantant (1999), for children's choir and string quartet.

David Edgar Walther prefers the term 'short operatic drama' for his Aesop's Fables (2009), a 12-minute cycle with libretto by the composer in which "The Fox and The Raven" appears as the first of three pieces.

[27] It was Martin Luther's verse translation that Hans Poser included as the third piece in his Die Fabeln des Äsop for accompanied men's choir (0p.28, 1956).

Ancient Greek is used in Lefteris Kordis' setting for octet and voice (2010)[28] among his Songs for Aesop's Fables, which has now been recorded under the title "Oh Raven, If You Only Had Brains!"

In later centuries the fable was used on household china,[31] on tiles,[32] on vases,[33] and figured in the series of La Fontaine medals cast in France by Jean Vernon.

[38] In Russia, too, there was an adaptation of La Fontaine's fable by Ivan Krylov, "The Crow and the Fox" (in this case little different from the French original),[39] which figures among several others on panels around Andrey Drevin's monument beside the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow.

There a stylised crow stands with its head twisted sideways holding the cheese, while the fox sits looking upward with its snout just below the bird's beak.

In the United States the fable figured at one time as one of six bronze gate panels commissioned for the William Church Osborne Memorial Playground in Manhattan's Central Park in 1952.

The seated fox looks up at the crow in an attractive piece that makes the most of the decorative possibilities of the reeds and oak-leaves that play a prominent part in the overall design.

André Deluol also manages to vary the formula in the stone sculpture he created outside the La Fontaine infant school in the Croix-de-Vernailles quarter of Etampes in 1972.

[45] One of the rare variations is the painted panel by Léon Rousseau (fl.1849-81) which pictures the fox crouching with one paw on the fallen cheese and bending his head directly upwards to taunt the agitated crow.