The Oxen and the Creaking Cart

[1] Originally directed against complainers, it was later linked with the proverb 'the worst wheel always creaks most'[2] and aimed emblematically at babblers of all sorts.

The Greek fabulist Babrius collected two variant fables that told of oxen straining to pull a laden wagon with creaking wheels.

[5] In Samuel Croxall's collection of 1722, the worst wheel of a coach remarks that "it was natural for people who laboured under any affliction or infirmity to complain".

[8] Abstemius often concocted such fables to fit current proverbs and the one he had in mind in this case was recorded a century before him in France as Toujours crie la pire roue du char (It's always the cart's worst wheel that complains).

In this way his work was later ascribed to Aesop himself and the creaking wheel version was mistaken for an additional variant of those recorded by Babrius fifteen centuries previously.