The Miser and his Gold

[2] In England it was included in collections of Aesop's fables by Roger L'Estrange as "A miser burying his gold"[3] and by Samuel Croxall as "The covetous man".

In turn, he starts boasting of his own pots, which he has filled with pebbles, asking when found out, "Since the jars were covered and idle, what difference in the least does it make what might be inside them?".

[11] Meanwhile, a parallel fable had entered European literature based upon a symmetrical two-line epigram in the Greek Anthology, once ascribed to Plato but more plausibly to Statillius Flaccus.

[15] Early in the 17th century, John Donne alluded to the story and reduced it to a couplet again: The longest telling and interpretation of the episode was in the 76 lines of Guillaume Guéroult's First Book of Emblems (1550) under the title "Man proposes but God disposes".

[17] In the following century, La Fontaine added this story too to his Fables as the lengthy "The treasure and the two men" (IX.15) in which the miser finds comfort in the thought that at least he is hanging himself at another's expense.