The Satyr and the Traveller

But when the man blows on his soup and tells the satyr that this is to cool it, the honest woodland creature is appalled at such double dealing and drives the traveller from his cave.

The idiom 'to blow hot and cold (with the same breath)' to which the fable alludes was recorded as Ex eodem ore calidum et frigidum efflare by Erasmus in his Adagia (730, 1.8.30).

However, in Francis Barlow's edition of the fables (1687), the Latin text warns against those whose heart and tongue do not accord, while Aphra Behn comments in English verse that "The sycophant with the same breath can praise/ Each faction and what's uppermost obeys",[7] following John Ogilby's slightly earlier example of giving the story a political interpretation.

In the course of his very free version, John Matthews expanded the text to comment on the 1819 election in Westminster and advise the voters to adopt the satyr's view of blowing hot and cold.

[10] In France the satirical cartoonist J.J. Grandville also updated the meaning by showing a group of loungers reading and commenting on the newspapers in a public park next to a statue illustrating the fable (see in Gallery 4 below).

In the article on "Fable" in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), Voltaire remarked that the man was quite right in his method of warming his fingers and cooling his soup, and the satyr was a fool to take exception.

"The Satyr and the Traveller" was set to the tune "I'll tell thee Dick where I have been" and was collected among 470 other songs in the English compilation titled The Lark (London 1740).

[13] But the poem itself, consisting of four six-line stanzas beginning "To his poor Cell a Satyr led/ A Traveller with Cold half dead", was originally written by Tom Brown near the turn of that century and appeared in the posthumous collection of his works.

At the start of the 17th century the poet Joost van den Vondel published his popular collection based on Marcus Gheeraerts' prints, Vorstelijke Warande der Dieren (Princely pleasure-ground of beasts, 1617), in which the poem Satyr en Boer appears.

Although the Italians Faerno and Verdizotti were before them in literary treatments, the subject was applied to large-scale oil paintings by German and Netherlandish artists working in Italy like Johann Liss and Matthias Stom, and later taken up by Sebastiano Ricci and Gaspare Diziani.