The Fox and the Sick Lion

[2] There Socrates tries to dissuade a young man from following a political career and, in describing the Spartan economy, says: The fable is also one among several to which the Latin poet Horace alluded in his work, seeing in it the moral lesson that once tainted with vice there is no returning.

Condemning the get-rich-quick culture of the Roman bankers in his first Epistle, he comments: There is a similar Indian incident in the Buddhist Nalapana Jataka, in which a monkey king saved his troop from destruction by a water-ogre by reconnoitering a jungle pool from which they wished to drink and reporting that "all the footprints led down into the water, but none came back.

"[5][6] The moral drawn in Mediaeval Latin retellings of the fable such as those of Adémar de Chabannes and Romulus Anglicus[7] was that one should learn from the misfortunes of others, but it was also given a political slant by the additional comment that "it is easier to enter the house of a great lord than to get out of it", as William Caxton expressed it in his English version.

[14] Roger L'Estrange's 1692 narration follows La Fontaine in making communication between fox and lion an exchange of diplomatic notes but ends on the more pointed moral that "the kindness of ill-natur'd and designing People should be throughly consider'd and examin'd, before we give credit to them".

Whoever, therefore, takes up his creed upon trust, and grounds his principles on no better reason than his being a native or inhabitant of the regions wherein they prevail, becomes a disciple of Mahomet in Turkey, and of Confucius in China; a Jew, or a Pagan, as the accident of birth decides.