The Fox and the Weasel

The Fox and the Weasel is a title used to cover a complex of fables in which a number of other animals figure in a story with the same basic situation involving the unfortunate effects of greed.

[1] In Greek versions of the story, a lean and hungry fox finds food left by shepherds in the hollow of a tree but is unable to get out again because it has eaten so much.

However, it was perpetuated in one of Horace's poetical epistles to Maecenas (I.7, lines 29–35):[3] Once it chanced that a pinched little fox had crept through a narrow chink into a bin of corn and, when well fed, was trying with stuffed stomach to get out again, but in vain.

One of the earliest appearances in English sources was in John Ogilby's editions of Aesop's fables in which a fox becomes trapped in a larder and is advised by a weasel that is also present there.

[5] Samuel Croxall tells his moralised story of 'a little starveling, thin-gutted rogue of a mouse' who, rather more plausibly than Horace's fox, creeps into a corn basket and attracts a weasel with its cries for help when it cannot get out.

[11] Nevertheless, Boursault's version was sufficiently known in England as to figure five years later in Thomas Yalden's pamphlet of political verses, Aesop at Court.