The Impertinent Insect

There are no less than six fables concerning an impertinent insect, which is taken in general to refer to the kind of interfering person who makes himself out falsely to share in the enterprise of others or to be of greater importance than he is in reality.

[2] There are also versions by the so-called Syntipas (47) via the Syriac, Ademar of Chabannes (60) in Mediaeval Latin, and in Medieval English by William Caxton (4.16).

Gabriele Faerno included it in his own Centum Fabulae (1563), giving the impression that it was of Aesopic origin, although verbally it is close to the text of Abstemius.

[8] Francis Bacon also took the fable to be Aesopic, observing that "It was prettily devised of Æsop: The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot-wheel, and said, What a dust do I raise!"

[10] A variant story of a boastful insect claiming a share in the labours of others appeared in the Middle Ages among the 'fox fables' (Mishlei Shualim) of the French Jew Berechiah ha-Nakdan.

In Franco Sacchetti's collection of Italian anecdotes, Il Trecentonovelle (1399), a character sums up a series of instances at the end of one story with the remark that "It's like the fly on the ox's neck who, asked what it was doing, replied 'We're ploughing'".

[14] This is echoed in English too at the end of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's early play The Spanish Student (1843): "and so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox".

[24] In French the idiomatic phrase Faire (or jouer) la mouche du coche continues to be applied to self-important do-nothings.

[25] Hitherto, the fables had been pithily told, but La Fontaine's leisurely and circumstantial narration over the length of 32 lines went on to infect those who followed him in other languages with similar prolixity.

William Godwin adapted the gist to a short story of "The Fly in the Mail Coach" in his Fables Ancient and Modern (1805), although otherwise seeming to draw more from L'Estrange than La Fontaine.

[27] Claimed there to be translated from the Dutch, that too mixes Abstemius with La Fontaine and culminates in a horse killing the fly with a switch of its tail.