The North Wind and the Sun

The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus records that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his Historical Notes, quoted an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodied the story of Helios and Boreas.

In fact, the Avianus poem refers to the characters as Boreas and Phoebus, the divinities of the north wind and the Sun, and it was under the title Phébus et Borée that it appeared in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3).

Gilles Corrozet, who had compiled a fable collection in French verse earlier than La Fontaine, twice featured the contest between the sun and the wind in his emblem books.

In Hecatomgraphie (1540), the first of these, the story is told in a quatrain, accompanied by a woodcut in which a man holds close a fur cloak under the wintry blast while on the other side he strips naked beneath the sun's rays.

[4] The same illustration was used to accompany another poem in Corrozet's later Emblemes (1543), which counsels taking enjoyment and being careful as necessity demands, wisely adapting oneself to circumstances in the same way as one dresses differently for winter than for summer.

[7] In the 18th century, Herder came to the theological conclusion that, while superior force leaves us cold, the warmth of Christ's love dispels it,[8] and Walter Crane's limerick version of 1887 gives a psychological interpretation, "True strength is not bluster".

[9] While most examples draw a moral lesson, La Fontaine's "Mildness more than violence achieves" (Fables VI.3) hints at the political application that was present also in Avianus' conclusion: "They cannot win who start with threats".

There is evidence that this reading has had an explicit influence on the diplomacy of modern times: in South Korea's Sunshine Policy, for instance, or Japanese relations with the military regime in Myanmar.

[11] In his print of the same subject, Jean-Baptiste Oudry reversed the perspective to show the god riding a cloud chariot with the horseback traveller merely a small figure below.