The Frog and the Mouse
Odo of Cheriton's version does not demonstrate treachery but only foolish association; through trusting to the frog's offer, both lose their lives when the kite swoops upon them.
The mouse is escaping famine and accepts the frog's offer to tow it across the river; the story then continues as Ysoppe dit en son livre et raconte (according to Aesop's account).
Henryson interprets the tale in his concluding ballade, making the point that "Foul mind is hid by words both fair and free" and that it is better to be content with one's lot "Than with companion wicked to be paired".
[11] A similar design reversed appears in Christoph Murer's XL emblemata miscella nova (1622), with moralising lines that ascribe the tale to Aesop "who can be trusted" under the ironical title "Friends in misfortune" (Amici in tempore adverso).
[13] A very similar illustration to those in the emblem books accompanied a story much like La Fontaine's in the Phryx Aesopus (1564) of the Neo-Latin poet Hieronymus Osius.
Behind his behaviour is the situation at the start of the ancient mock epic Batrachomyomachia in which a frog carrying a mouse on its back had submerged from fear of a snake and inadvertently drowned his rider.
In Victorian times, Lysons targets the squabbling between Christian factions who ought instead to unite since "divisions in church and state only render us more open to the attacks of our great and natural enemy – the Devil".
[22] Aesop's fable was current in the Middle East during mediaeval times and is told at great length by Rumi in his Masnavi as an example of the dangers of unequal friendship.
[24] Takeda's study began as an attempt to find the origin of a more recent hybrid tale with elements of both Aesop's fable and the Eastern analogue.
The moral that there is no hope of reform in the basically vicious was common in ancient times and was exemplified, for example, in Aesop's fable of The Farmer and the Viper, but no evidence exists of a link between them.
Claims are sometimes made, also without supporting evidence, that the fable of the frog and the scorpion is of Arab origin, but the authentic West Asian stories in which these two appear are completely different.
A Sufi source from the 6th century illustrates divine providence with the tale of a scorpion that crosses the Nile on a frog's back in order to save a sleeping drunkard from being stung by a snake.
[26] There was also a Jewish variant in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Nedarim 41a in which a rabbi witnessed a scorpion crossing a river in the same way in order to sting a man to death.
