The Frogs Who Desired a King

According to the earliest source, Phaedrus, the story concerns a group of frogs who called on the great god Zeus to send them a king.

The original context of the story, as related by Phaedrus, makes it clear that people feel the need of laws but are impatient of personal restraint.

[7] Jean de la Fontaine's fable of Les grenouilles qui desirent un roi (III.4) follows the Phaedrus version fairly closely and repeats the conclusion there.

There it is a recognisably imperial stork who struts through the water wearing a laurel crown, cheered on one side by sycophantic supporters and causing havoc on the other.

His horrific picture of a gruesome skeletal stork seated on a bank and swallowing his prey appeared in an 1869 edition of Aesop's fables.

In the 1912 edition of Aesop's Fables, Arthur Rackham chose to picture the carefree frogs at play on their King Log, a much rarer subject among illustrators.

[13] But the French artist Benjamin Rabier, having already illustrated a collection of La Fontaine's fables, subverted the whole subject in a later picture, Le Toboggan ('The sleigh-run', 1925).

[15] As well as a later passing reference in the title of Alyse Gregory's feminist novel King Log and Lady Lea (1929),[16] the fable was also reinterpreted in one of Margaret Atwood's four short fictions in a 2005 issue of the magazine Daedalus.

[20] W. H. Auden recreated the fable at some length in verse as part of the three "Moralities" he wrote for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to set for orchestra and children's chorus in 1967.

The first poem of the set follows the creatures' fall, from a state of innocence when In the first age the frogs dwelt at peace, into dissatisfaction, foolishness and disaster.

[21] Two centuries earlier, the German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had given the theme an even darker reinterpretation in his "The Water Snake" (Die Wasserschlange).